Happy cutoff.
To all who celebrate.
To all who celebrate, yes.
And to those who don't, well, you're missing out.
You're probably happier right now anyway.
Yeah, that's true.
I used to look forward to Christmas.
Now I think I look forward to cutoff more.
Ha ha ha ha.
Welcome to County Connection,
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Washington State Association of Counties,
where we dive into the legislative issues
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we'll break down what's happening in Olympia
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Welcome back everybody to episode four
of the County Connection podcast.
I am back in the studio,
but this time we've tossed Brad to the side
and Kelsey Hulse is hanging out with me for a few minutes.
Kelsey, how are things going?
Happy cutoff day.
Thank you, happy cutoff day to you too.
I have lost the ability to speak at this point.
I think that probably is an ailment
that is plaguing many of us.
I'm just trying to get through a couple more podcasts
before I go home, so.
You know, Brad and I finished the podcast
just a second ago, for those who maybe heard it,
where he admitted he was a closet Trekkie,
like from a very young age.
You do know what a Trekkie is, right?
Of course I know what a Trekkie is.
Of course, you know, I'm just checking.
Is that 100% surprising?
I was a little surprised, I had no idea.
He had, I mean, he had never done, you know,
he'd never given me like the Vulcan, you know, handshake
or whatever that is.
He'd never like said anything about
live long and prosper before.
He'd never talked about going
where no man has ever gone before.
None of the telltale signs.
He had never talked about being at Comic-Con
or anything like that, so I was a little surprised.
I can't get past the fact that you think Vulcans shake hands.
Have you ever watched Star Trek?
Oh my goodness, wow.
So you're calling my Trekkie knowledge to the carpet here.
So it sounds to me like maybe you are
a little bit of a Trekkie.
I'm not, but I have lived with a Trekkie
for most of my life.
My father was one, my partner is one.
My dad was a big Trekkie too.
My dad was like the OG Trekkie, like Captain Kirk, Spock.
I can't remember what the doctor's name was,
but I remember we used to watch him in black and white
on our little like 19 inch square TV.
My partner, who's also named Paul,
just rewatched the whole OG Star Trek.
I had no idea his name was, I like him
and I've never even met him.
What a guy.
I'm sure he's a great guy.
They all are, aren't they?
I've heard that everybody with that name
is pretty amazing.
Obviously.
Well, that's not what we're here to talk about,
but we are here to talk about something
kind of related to it, right?
Sort of, no?
Related to Star Trek or Paul's or?
No, Star Trek.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
No.
No, we're not?
What are we gonna talk about today?
Isn't space parking infinite?
It is.
Yeah.
I don't think there's many regulations
about parking in space,
but we are gonna talk about parking regulations
down here on earth.
Yes, we are.
All right.
What's going on with parking?
So we've been following,
well, there's a number of things happening around parking,
but in particular, we've been paying attention
to a pair of bills, Senate Bill 5184 and House Bill 1299.
It appears that the House Bill is not moving,
the Senate Bill is,
but both restricted the ability for counties
to have required parking minimums for development.
So regardless of what your code or regulations may say now,
this would mean that you couldn't require
more than a half a parking space per residential unit,
one parking space per thousand square feet of commercial,
and could not require any minimum parking
for a change of use,
change of use development with a variety of categories
involved.
So this has been a thing recently in the legislature,
and I wanna unpack a little bit of it with you.
Brian and I talked about this
when we were talking about housing.
He and I cut a podcast, I think last week,
and we went into this a little bit
because it's come up with some of our housing bills as well
around ADUs and middle housing
and whether or not we should be addressing
parking concerns there.
I noticed an article in the Seattle Times today,
as a matter of fact,
that talked about this bill,
I think it was the Senate one
that came off the floor yesterday that you mentioned,
Senate Bill 5184,
and I know we're gonna get into some more details on that
and some of the amendments around it,
but there was an article in the Seattle Times
and the headline was,
something about the legislature makes another step
towards improving housing
by eliminating parking regulations.
That is such an interesting headline to me.
And the discussion around this is so interesting to me
because there really does seem to be a belief
in the legislature that if you don't require parking,
we will have more housing in Washington State.
Why?
Why do they think that?
Well, for a couple of reasons.
One is because there have been a number of studies
that have identified that as a limiting factor
for housing availability based largely on the cost
to deliver parking.
So the working assumption is that if you have a building
and you have to, if you wanna build a building
and you have to include a parking garage
or a parking lot or something,
that's a lot of space that costs money.
You have to acquire the land for it
or you have to build the structure,
whatever your chosen parking solution looks like,
but that it costs money.
And that by eliminating that piece of the project cost,
you are lowering the overall cost of the project,
therefore enabling more housing units to be built
for the same dollars on that same site.
But we're a car culture.
Even statistics that look at renters,
people who rent homes, rent their residences,
whether they're renting a house or renting a duplex
or renting an apartment show that more than 70%,
even in really urban areas like the city of Seattle,
own at least one vehicle.
Where are they gonna put their cars
if parking isn't part of the development itself?
That's the challenge, right?
Is that I think some of these conversations
focus on the world that we would like to live in
versus the world that we are currently in.
I think one of the parts of the conversation
that is often underplayed is that context matters, right?
It's one thing in the middle of a big city
that has a lot of transit availability
and or you can walk most places
and or you can grab a lime scooter or whatever to get around,
then sure, you eliminate a lot of the parking there
and it's not gonna have a severe impact
on the way people live their daily lives,
probably asterisk.
But once you get outside those urban areas
or those areas that are well served by transit
or do have a lot of options for getting around,
then to your point, most of the-
Which by the way is the majority of Washington state, right?
I mean, the majority of Washington state
does not have transit, does not have, is not urban
for the most part.
The majority of Washington state
would be considered rural by most standards.
I mean, the majority of everywhere is not a city, right?
In terms of land mass.
So it's often lost in the conversation
that like I said, context does matter.
If you're talking about a rural area,
then eliminating parking in that location
is oftentimes gonna cause more problems
than it is going to create solutions.
So let's talk about that, why?
What problems would be created in say a rural area
if you're not allowed to regulate parking?
Well, I think the folks that are advocating
for eliminating parking minimums are correct
in so far as the parking costs money.
Costs money to acquire and develop a parking lot
or a parking garage. Right, you gotta pave it,
you gotta put in drainage.
Oftentimes a city will require you to put in landscaping
and things like that to beautify the space.
Yeah, it costs money, it's part of the project.
It costs money.
So if you don't have to do that, right?
If you can eliminate that as part of your project,
there's always gonna be an incentive to do that,
a financial incentive to do so.
Yeah, because if you're a business,
don't you wanna have parking?
Probably, I would assume.
Again, context matters, so it depends on where you are.
There will always be a financial incentive.
Leave something that isn't necessary out of a project.
Assuming it doesn't negatively impact health, safety,
that type of thing.
But if there's something that you can just cleave off
of your project, in many cases,
you could make that more profitable, theoretically.
But in the rural area, which is what we're talking about,
that could cause some big problems.
Yes, well, and what I was gonna say is that
there's always an incentive not to do it.
I shouldn't say incentive.
There's always pressure not to do it.
In a housing environment, in a housing market
that is operating normally, people will make choices
about where to live based on the amenities that they need,
based on the distance that it is from their work
or their home. Sure.
Like that's how you pick where you live.
But also what they can afford.
You keep getting ahead of me.
Oh, sorry.
You just, next step, boop, boop, boop.
He's just jumping ahead.
It's a talent that I have.
It's all, everyone I interviews loves it.
Everyone I interview. Super fun.
Oh my goodness, everyone I interview loves it.
We're both just A game, A game.
You can tell it's late on a Friday.
Yeah, it very much is.
Problem is that we have a housing market
that is not behaving normally.
Okay. Right?
We know that.
That's something that we spend a lot of time here
talking about and trying to find ways to fix.
We don't have enough supply to meet demand.
Okay.
A situation where demand exceeds supply.
Which is what we have now.
People are not making decisions based on amenities,
based on distance, based on the things that they like
in terms of where they're gonna live.
They're gonna buy or rent what they can afford.
And what maybe they can find.
And whatever they can find.
Right, because choices are limited.
People are pushed into situations
that they might not otherwise be
because the market is already warped.
Okay. That was the part I was getting a little ahead of you
on, I apologize for that.
So we have this interesting situation
where we've got this philosophy maybe around parking
and how it affects housing.
We've got this housing market that's not acting normally.
We've got a big difference between certain environments
of a more urban nature versus a more rural nature, right?
I mean, when we're talking about rural roads, they're narrow.
They don't have shoulders.
They don't have sidewalks in many cases.
Saying that, no, you don't have to put a parking space
next to your house.
Leads people to believe that they could just park
along the roadway.
And that could potentially be a pretty bad situation
in rural roads.
One of the arguments that I've heard is,
look, you don't have to necessarily regulate this.
The market will respond.
If people want parking, the builders will build parking.
Now, if I'm a custom builder, right?
Or I'm building a custom house for myself
because I can afford to in a rural environment
or even in an urban environment,
I can tell you that, yeah,
I'm gonna choose to put in parking for myself.
I'll probably even build a garage if I can.
But if I'm a builder who's putting in spec homes
or is putting in multifamily housing
and I'm trying to maximize my return on investment,
it's pretty attractive to say, hmm,
I can save a lot of money on this project
and put in a lot more residential housing units
that I can either rent or sell
to get a pretty good return if I don't put in parking
or I put in less parking that I need.
Isn't that gonna be a problem?
Most likely, and my understanding of Washington state law
is that most places you are allowed to park
unless it is explicitly prohibited for some reason, right?
Unless it's signed, unless something.
So to your previous point,
the fact that most people have cars, drive cars,
use them to get around still
means they're gonna put them somewhere.
And if there isn't a parking lot,
and we should pause to mention that all of this
is related to off-street parking, right?
The requirement for off-street parking.
So if you develop, whether it's a restaurant
or a residential building or a mixed-use building
or childcare facility or whatever it is,
if you don't have off-street parking,
people are gonna park wherever they can
and that's most likely to be alongside the nearest road,
right, because that's where people park.
The trouble is, roads are designed and built
for all kinds of different purposes and uses
and if they weren't designed and built
to accommodate shoulder parking,
then they may be too narrow.
You may not be able to see around a corner
if a car is parked there.
You're probably putting any bicyclists
or pedestrians in danger if you don't have a sidewalk there
or a bike lane, right?
We're talking narrow roads, often narrow county roads
that just don't have the infrastructure
to support that type of use.
Once you've made that decision and allowed that to happen,
coming in afterward to add parking
is almost an absurd proposition, right,
after the development has happened.
Oh, because you're talking major site improvements
on a bunch of lots that people have already gotten
using as their own and there are neighborhoods now
that are within cities, older portions of neighborhoods
where they didn't require wider streets,
they didn't require proper drainage,
they didn't require sidewalks.
They're going back in and putting those in now
and sometimes the neighbors complain, right?
They actually don't want those amenities
because they are afraid it's gonna increase traffic,
it'll increase speeds, it'll increase parking
of other people right in front of their homes and whatnot
and change the character of their neighborhood.
So it can be a real problem trying to do it after the fact.
Yeah, absolutely.
So this bill that you were talking about
that I also saw the article on,
you were kind of going over some of the requirements
of the bill.
How does the bill actually affect counties versus cities?
Is it exactly the same?
You mentioned kind of those requirements that say
you can't regulate parking past these kind of limitations.
Are all counties kind of thrown in there
and no matter the situation or does the bill affect counties
differently based on maybe different situations
or different types of counties?
The initial bill as it was drafted and introduced
one of the interesting things about it
is that in the intent section it noted
that a one size fits all approach
does not work for all places.
And then went on to prescribe a one size fits all approach
for cities and code cities and counties.
That's a little ironic.
Well, a little bit.
A little bit.
However, the bill was made it through policy committee,
made it through fiscal committee,
was voted on on the floor of the Senate successfully,
made it out of the Senate.
But in that process was amended on the floor of the Senate
to include some what I would consider,
what we would consider improvements
to limit the impact to counties specifically.
And those two key improvements are one,
the ability to do a study to identify places where,
the ability for a county to do a study to identify places
where not having parking minimums would cause
those kinds of traffic safety problems
that we talked about before.
And number two, that in order for counties to be held
to the stipulations in the bill,
they would have to have their roads built
to the standards of the city,
biggest city in that county or the cities in the county,
which eliminates most of those more rural roads,
roads that may have gravel shoulders or drainage ditches,
or be gravel roads, or be particularly narrow,
those kinds of situations should be eliminated.
So we're actually a lot happier with the look of the bill
coming out of the Senate than we were initially.
So with these amendments,
it almost seems like it just pretty narrowly focuses
those restrictions on regulating off street parking minimums
to the more urban areas of unincorporated land.
So either these islands that are pretty incorporated
or maybe the areas that are really most close to the cities
where the roads have been built to a more urban standard.
And there's a big difference between a rural road
and an urban road, just even in the shape of the road
and the way that they're designed to drain, right?
I mean, a rural road drains into a ditch,
but there's no ditches in a city, right?
They've got drainage and shoulders and curbs and gutters,
and sidewalks and all that sort of stuff.
So in order for the county to be held to the same standard,
basically it's that city type road construction
that has to be in place in that particular location.
Well, that seems like a big improvement in the bill.
Yeah, absolutely, we would say that.
So you mentioned this other bill,
House Bill 1299, not moving.
Are there other parking regulations out there
that we're also concerned about,
or is that the primary driver this year?
The other bill that members should be aware of
is House Bill 1183, which was sponsored
by House Local Government Chair, Davina Doerr.
And title is Concerning Building Code
and Development Regulation Reform,
but also has some parking language in there.
Similar to the bills we just discussed,
it included some restrictions
on what types of parking minimums you could regulate
or impose in your jurisdiction.
That bill also had amended onto it the language
stating that roads had to be built to an urban standard
in order for those parking minimums
or prohibitions on parking minimums to apply.
Okay, so even though that bill originally
was probably concerning to us,
it's also been amended a lot like that Senate version
we were just talking about.
So it's much better for counties than it was before.
Correct.
Okay, so that's the majority of the parking conversation,
I guess, this year.
It's really been kind of ongoing now
for several years.
I doubt this is the last time we're gonna see
what I kind of call the war on parking continue,
especially in the urban environments,
but maybe we finally got to the point
where the legislature understands the difference
between urban roads and rural roadways.
You think that the-
Maybe.
Yeah.
But for those of you who couldn't see,
she was shaking her head exactly the other direction.
You're a little more pessimistic about it than I was.
I was trying to show some optimism there on a Friday.
In truth, I think there is a lot of frustration
and concern and fear
built into the conversation around housing, right?
Almost everybody can look around them
and think whatever we're doing is not working.
Right.
And therefore you wanna fix it,
especially if you're a legislator
or a local elected official, right?
You wanna do something about it.
You wanna help the problem.
Right.
And the truth is that it is a very complex problem.
It took us a long time to get here
and it's probably going to take us a while to fix it.
That is not an acceptable scenario to a lot of people,
which I think is good, right?
We want folks that are really motivated
to solve the problems they see in their communities.
I think eliminating parking minimums,
differently regulating parking
is seen as a piece of the answer.
And so that's why I think we see so much attention on it
because absent a better solution,
it's the one that folks, you know,
what is the saying that you have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail or something?
Yeah, there's definitely that saying for sure.
Something like that.
If the only tool you have is a hammer,
then every problem looks like a nail.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, I was trying to make a connection,
but it was too hard.
So.
Well, it will be interesting to see as time goes by
whether or not all of this focus on parking
as it relates to housing actually makes a difference
if it really moves the needle at all.
I have to be honest with you, I'm skeptical.
I think in some cases where you've got regulations in place
that, you know, the parking minimums are so big
that it is driving the costs at a high level
and that there's no way that really that much parking
is actually going to be needed.
I think that in those instances, they make a very good case.
But in most other instances where the parking requirements
are, you know, pretty common sense, you know,
like two parking spaces for every house, that sort of thing.
I just feel like this is one of those issues
that gets caught up and is interesting to talk about,
but really isn't going to have a significant impact.
But maybe I'm wrong.
You know, the legislature clearly thinks that I am
and they're, you know, making some decisions
and moving in a direction.
So we'll just have to see how things play out long-term.
Well, Paul, as I noted, this is one piece
of a proposed solution.
Yeah.
There are others, including planning and permitting reform,
which I've also been a major focus of the work up here.
So parking, planning, and permitting are pieces
of the puzzle.
Of the puzzle.
I think we should end it right there.
You're welcome.
Well, happy Friday.
Have a good weekend.
Happy cutoff.
And I was going to end it with a Star Trek reference
and I blew it.
I just, I completely blanked.
Live long and prosper.
There you go.
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