Parking should not be a priority for Capitol modernization plan

Our state legislators and their staff get riled up about many important things — budgets, climate change, criminal justice reform come to mind — but sometimes their passions run nearly as high on the subject of their parking places. Legislators have been known to brag about the number of steps they take to get from their car to their office. The lower the number, the higher their status.

Ordinary citizens who come to the Capitol Campus, in contrast, compete for public spots available only to those who come very early or get very lucky, or parking lots and street parking further away.

However, since the pandemic upended everyone’s lives and forced last year’s legislative lesson into remote sessions and hearings, there have been empty parking places.

Now the state Department of Enterprise Services is working on a Legislative Campus Modernization project that includes demolition and replacement of the Newhouse Building, and demolition of the two nearby press houses.

The first renderings of the proposed Newhouse Building re-do show more than 60 percent of the site will be taken up by parking.

This is dismaying to advocates from the South Capitol Neighborhood, to the city of Olympia, and to people who advocate for less driving and less greenhouse gas emissions. They point out that a 2009 West Campus Historic Landscape Preservation Plan said that “The goal is to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the majority of dedicated surface parking, so that this valuable landscape may be enlisted toward higher use.”

That’s a noble sentiment, but its next sentence is a big caveat: “The caution is to avoid inadvertently displacing the impact of vehicular parking to adjacent areas, such as the South Capitol Neighborhood Historic District.”

The initial plan for the Newhouse Building is a better response to that last sentence than it is to the first.

Right now, no one knows what post-pandemic parking needs will be. Many of the state agencies located in the East Capitol Campus (on the other side of Capitol Way) have embraced having employees work from home. Some have employees all show up on one or two days a week; others are having staff work exclusively from home. We don’t know if those arrangements will be permanent. In the meantime, a huge East Campus parking garage is now mostly empty, most of the time.

We also don’t know whether remote legislative hearings will be permanent, and what the long-term consequences of the pandemic will be for the way the Governor’s Office, the State Supreme Court and other West Campus offices operate.

Even more perplexing, we are unsure of just what transportation goals the planners of this next round of West Campus modernization hope to achieve. Is it to provide maximum parking convenience for those who have traditionally been assigned on-campus parking spots just a few steps from their offices? If so, this is a goal from the last century, not the one we’re in now.

At this time in our history, creating incentives to reduce emissions from cars should take precedence. So should social equity, and prioritizing citizen access. Transit and shuttle services should be integral to solving the parking dilemma.

We hope planners also will consider the Capitol’s role as our premier local tourist destination. One nightmare scenario would be even more surface parking where the soon-to-be demolished press houses and the Visitors Center are. Tourists do not come to see parking lots. And since tourism mostly happens in the summer, when the legislature is not in session, they don’t need more parking lots.

The South Capitol Neighborhood Association has proposed a small state budget proviso that would pay for a study of parking trends and needs. The city of Olympia is also supportive of this. We hope the budget proviso includes a clear statement of what goals a parking study and plan should aim to achieve.