AUBURN – A downtown bus station planned for Great Falls Plaza may move to a new location.

“The most important thing is to have the bus station centrally located,” said Assistant City Manager Laurie Smith. That doesn’t mean it must be in Great Falls Plaza.

The city has planned to build a downtown bus station since 2004. The original plan called for making it part of a Great Falls parking garage. Councilors approved $5 million in bonds in 2004 to build a 400-space parking garage on city-owned land on the northern part of the plaza, between the Esplanade and the Tom Platz-owned surface parking lot.

The city got a $247,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2004 to pay for that work.

Smith said Thursday that the bus station never fit well with the garage.

“Traffic on the Great Falls Plaza is really driving this,” she said. “It’s already congested and the last thing we want to do is make things worse.”

City officials are using a downtown business study, released last month, to look at other sites.

“We’re looking at streets, at traffic patterns and at available land,” Smith said.

The station would be used by people who work downtown, residents of the Esplanade senior housing complex and people who live along Main Street in the Roak Block.

It’s part of the two-hub route system adopted in 2004 for the Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee’s Citylink bus system. All bus routes in Auburn meet at the Great Falls bus stop. The stop also connects to the Lewiston bus station in the Oak Street Parking garage via a free downtown shuttle.