SEQUIM — When you try to think outside that pesky box, parked cars get in the way.
So said architect Mark Spitzer when discussing a new central City Hall during Monday night’s Sequim City Council meeting.
“We support having the City Hall downtown,” Spitzer said.
“It’s difficult to fit everything in . . . primarily because of the parking.”
Spitzer is a member of the Seattle architecture firm Arai Jackson Ellison Murakami, hired years ago to help Sequim solve its municipal-complex puzzle.
The City Council had asked the firm to explore the possibility of putting a new, $8 million City Hall on Cedar Street, where the old, poorly insulated, cramped one now sits.
Councilman Ken Hays, also an architect, wanted to look into closing one side of the street and creating a civic plaza.
Nice idea, Spitzer said, but “the latest scary numbers” for parking-lot construction start at about $10,000 for surface parking, and go up to $20,000 for an above-ground garage and $30,000 for underground parking.
And that’s per parking space.
An average of 980 people visit city offices each month, said Frank Needham, the capital projects manager in charge of the City Hall site search.
Spitzer added that those customers and the city’s staff will need about 80 places to park.
He suggested solutions to the Cedar Street problem: Put a staff parking lot off-site and have city employees walk a block or so; set up public-private partnerships and share parking lots with nearby businesses.
The council members said little in response to Spitzer’s presentation, and turned next to Needham, who presented four other potential sites:
