EVERETT — City officials have deemed Snohomish County’s plans for a new courthouse inadequate and sent a rejection letter to that effect last week.
Parking worries threaten to put the $162 million project on hold and blow through its budget. The city is pushing for hundreds of additional spaces.
Until county staff can answer the city’s questions, there’s little to talk about, Mayor Ray Stephanson said Thursday.
“Once that work is done, then we can take that discussion to the elected officials,” Stephanson said.
The mayor’s office this week canceled an upcoming meeting with counterparts in county government.
Everett’s planning department issued a notice of incomplete application Jan. 16 in response to environmental impact documents the county submitted a month earlier.
The letter is the most recent signal of the city’s dissatisfaction with the new building’s parking provisions.
The City Council passed an emergency ordinance Dec. 24 that blocked the project unless the county provides at least 300 parking stalls. The requirement is based on one parking stall per 800 square feet of interior space and applies to all future government buildings in the downtown area.
The county designed the building with 30 secure parking spaces for judges and other officials, reasoning that the employees in the current courthouse already have the ability to park in the county’s underground garage nearby. From their point of view, it simply replaces 1967 building that would later be demolished.
The new building’s footprint, however, would take out about 130 existing spaces in a county-owned parking lot and adjacent parcels condemned for the project. That leaves a net loss of about 100 spaces.
That’s not the only parking issue.
Everett officials say the county has failed to hold up its end of a 2002 agreement for the redevelopment of county administration buildings completed a decade ago.
The agreement required 1,200 spaces in the county garage, plus another 185 off-street parking spaces.
“That requirement was nearly met, maybe not totally,” Stephanson said.
Subtracting another 100 or more spaces would push the county further out of compliance, the mayor said.
The county has floated rough estimates for building a new parking garage. They estimates range from $20 million to $45 million.
From the county’s perspective, the city’s parking requirements threaten to break the bank.
Increased labor and materials costs have reduced the project’s financial cushion to a bare minimum, county officials have said. County Council Chairman Dave Somers and others have been adamant about not going over the budget, which was funded through a property-tax increase.
Courthouse construction was expected to start during the middle of this year.
It’s unclear whether that’s still possible.
“At this point, we’re proceeding on the same course, at least in our office,” Deputy County Executive Mark Ericks said. “We’ve been given no instructions to pause.”
Ericks and his boss, county Executive John Lovick, became involved with the courthouse project after taking over in mid-2013 after the resignation of former Executive Aaron Reardon. They soon determined that plans developed under Reardon’s administration wouldn’t serve the county’s needs — and were based on wildly unrealistic cost estimates.
The project’s price tag doubled. The council, with Lovick’s support, opted to put the building on a different site, the one where it’s proposed now on Wall Street, between Rockefeller and Oakes avenues.
Miscommunication has fed the current crisis. Stephanson says he was led to believe the county’s plans would include substantially more parking. County Council members say they were unaware of the city’s expectations. Until late last year, Ericks had been the main go-between between the two sides.
Beyond parking, the city is pressing county officials for a timetable when the old courthouse building would be demolished and specifics on staffing in the new building.
Plans describe the new structure as 143 feet, 2 inches tall — a mere 6 inches shorter than the county’s Robert Drewel building across the street. It would rank among the 10 tallest buildings in the county. Specs list interior space at 242,320 square feet.
The mayor said the city isn’t trying to block the project. His concern, rather, is to ensure the future government building imposes no burden on nearby businesses by soaking up available parking.
The city also has embarked on its first detailed study of downtown parking in eight years. Results are expected late this year.
“I suspect that the whole issue of parking will continue to be in front of us for several years as our central business district grows,” Stephanson said.
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465; nhaglund@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @NWhaglund.
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