National Archives at Seattle to move facilities within city
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Archives at Seattle will begin moving some records out of its Sand Point center this year as the agency inches toward erecting a new facility within the city, the agency said this week, marking the first step in a yearslong transition.
The center offers the public a dive into Pacific Northwest history and culture, from the Forest Service teletypes sent when Mount St. Helens exploded in May 1980 to 1890s hand-drawn sketches of the Aleutian Islands. Some families have traced their own histories among the 14-foot-high shelves. The repository spans military, land, court, tax and census records, and significant treaty documents relating to the 272 federally recognized tribes in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
The center was the subject of intense controversy in 2020 when the federal government said it would shutter the National Archives at Seattle - citing maintenance issues - and planned to relocate its vast collection of Pacific Northwest records to elsewhere in the nation. Northwest tribes, lawmakers, academics and residents pushed back. In 2021, the Biden administration halted its closure.
Now the National Archives and Records Administration is working to consolidate the center's contents and prepare for an eventual move to a new facility within Seattle.
Temporary records at the Seattle Federal Records Center - a faction of the National Archives at Seattle, which holds records for federal agencies in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Hawaii - will be shipped to other locations, and the Seattle Federal Records Center operations will cease, the records administration said in a statement. The agency said it is still finalizing the move's details, but expects to begin relocating the temporary records this year. The process may take two to three years, the agency said.
The closure of the Seattle Federal Records Center is a result of a shift toward electronic recordkeeping. This action also addresses under utilized space and the deteriorating condition of the facility, which requires substantial infrastructure improvements," the National Archives and Records Administration said.
Archival holdings - the wealth of documents available for the public - will remain in Seattle at the Sand Point facility and move to a replacement facility in the future, the federal agency said. It's unclear when a new National Archives at Seattle facility will open.
The National Archives at Seattle was constructed in 1946 in Seattle's Sand Point neighborhood. It's since been deemed to no longer suit the agency's needs, due to age and longstanding maintenance issues. The General Services Administration, a federal agency tasked with managing the government's real estate, is coordinating with the records agency to secure a new facility.
"The future home of the National Archives in the Pacific Northwest is being designed to meet the needs of the agency's digital future while providing a space for the community to engage with the records in the permanent collection, the General Services Administration said on its website.
That agency estimated that it would award a contract for the design of the new facility in June 2026. After a Seattle Times inquiry, the agency amended that estimate to summer 2026; the agency did not return a request for comment about a more specific award timeline.
The General Services Administration estimated it would award a construction contract in December 2028, and that the new facility will be complete in spring 2032.
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This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 4:50 PM.