Kevin Walthall

Columnist

Bremerton has far too many surface parking lots, yet not enough parking. It’s weird, but the paradoxes don’t stop there.

Bremerton municipal code would require a new bowling alley to build five parking stalls for every bowling lane. A church has to build one parking stall for every 80 inches of pew, plus a stall for every 50 square feet of assembly area. A studio apartment must have at least 1.5 off-street parking spots. The burden on “the little guy” is heavy: area builders spend on average $10,000 per dwelling on parking, with the amount ballooning to over $25,000 per space for garages. Our parking minimums are rigorous, assuming a constant worst-case scenario of parking demand.

The only type of entity conspicuously absent from Bremerton’s off-street parking minimums? Kitsap’s largest traffic destination, Naval Base Kitsap and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard/Intermediate Maintenance Facility.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the depressing asphalt abyss between Warren Avenue and Park Avenue in the blocks just north of PSNS. You know, the wasteland of surface lots in the heart of our otherwise beautiful and resurgent town, where chain link fences and weeds are locked in a perpetual duel? Whatever you love about Bremerton, this is its opposite. It’s the decaying graveyard where leafy neighborhoods and the active city center meet. The only thing its owners seem to maintain are the various apparatuses for collecting payment. It’s so depressing even the cars look bored, waiting for humans to return to them as litter tumbles by. With a tinge of the post-apocalyptic, it doesn’t paint a pretty (or accurate) picture of Bremerton for visitors. This single inconsistency is the lynchpin for many of Bremerton’s (and Kitsap’s) most pressing issues, from housing affordability to taxes to traffic. It’s a status quo we can no longer afford, and the city's 2017 parking study was fairly explicit in its assessment: the shipyard needs to build a parking garage.

To drive home the insane proportion of our surface area devoted to parking, I took the time to highlight all of downtown’s parking in red on a map, seen above, including private and public lots and garages. In the six blocks closest to Burwell Gate, nearly five acres are devoted to shipyard parking, plus other private surface lots. The problem isn’t a lack of parking; we have more parking downtown than we have downtown downtown. Our problem is providing the right parking for the right drivers in the right place — and the right place for shipyard workers isn’t all over downtown.

To be clear, every town thinks they have a parking problem. That’s normal. If you have to circle a block twice to find parking, that’s a good problem to have: it means downtown is a place people want to be. I’m fine with that; I’ll plan an extra 180 seconds into my anticipated travel time without complaint.

Not every town has a sea of lots and a parking shortage, though. Surely this conundrum isn’t news to Kitsap residents, but an opportunity for change is approaching. Mayor Greg Wheeler is going to Washington, D.C. this month, in coordination with other military cities facing similar problems, his second such visit since December. As with anything involving the Department of Defense, nothing is guaranteed, and any change that does happen will certainly take time — but we have to wake up to the abnormality and the damage this paradox is doing. It’s time to write to your elected representatives (Congressman Derek Kilmer, state Sen. Emily Randall, and state Reps. Jesse Young and Michelle Caldier). Here’s some inspiration to write in, should you need it.

PSNS is about 7,000 spaces short on parking, and privately owned lots are picking up the slack for a profit — but so are the streets in residential areas. Bremerton’s 2017 parking study suggested two long-term solutions: Get PSNS to take care of its own parking needs, and make alternative commutes like taking the bus, biking, walking, or vanpooling more attractive. Some steps like Park-and-Rides and vanpools are already in place, but aren’t enough to solve the problem on their own. Even still, for every commuter riding a bus or van to PSNS, a vehicle is taken off the road, easing the Kitsap rush hour.

Through inaction, the shipyard is essentially denying both solutions: They aren’t building parking, and the demanded lots are blocking potential development that could take shipyard commuters off the roads.

The traffic impact of PSNS is the equivalent of a Mariners game happening every day. What if there were a way to mitigate that impact? Traffic is fundamentally a problem of people not living near their most important destinations. Obviously, many people don’t want to live in central Bremerton. That’s fine; I can certainly appreciate the appeal of Kitsap’s forest. But the recent downtown building boom has revealed an interesting fact: many Kitsap locals (not just Seattleites) want to live downtown. There’s a pent-up local demand for quality housing within walking distance to major attractions that offers freedom from rush-hour commuting. Sitting in traffic is one of the most aggravating wastes of time I can conceive of, but recent development reveals that people are so sick of rush hour, they value downtown walkability over a rustic idyll reached through daily road rage.

Because so much prime space is occupied by parking, however, many settle for apartments on the other side of traffic bottlenecks like Wheaton/Warren Avenue Bridge, Charleston Boulevard, Kitsap Way, Gorst, and others. If people are wanting to live within the limits of those natural bottlenecks and remove their cars from the milieu, we should be doing everything in our power to support them. Building residential units on these lots would breathe fresh air into the housing shortage, but more shipyard workers commuting by foot, bike, or bus also means fewer tail lights in front of you at 4:30 on Kitsap Way.

Swapping stalls for homes would be a win-win. Unfortunately, that solution is blocked by the surface lot logjam. Parking is needed, and those lots aren’t going away until the demand for parking is met a different way. The sheer surface area covered in parking lots creates an artificial scarcity of downtown real estate, inflating the cost to build housing.

These lots are cash cows, yet pay practically nothing in taxes. On Fifth and Park is a small strip of older buildings housing Sweet and Smokey Diner, the coming Kitsap Food Co-Op, Ameriforce and Allstate. According to county tax records, this parcel totals .14 of an acre, yet pays more taxes than the .50 acre of parking behind it. A lot more, in fact. Those small businesses pay 4.76 times more per acre than the parking lots behind them. This valuable portion of land should be one of the most productive contributors to our schools, roads, police, fire, and other services. It isn’t, and you and I are left picking up the slack.

Those small businesses give people jobs that parking lots don’t. Downtown businesses have the unpleasant distinction of being surrounded by lots — yet the lots and many on-street spaces are occupied by shipyard workers. Downtown is a designated “Opportunity Zone” with tax benefits, poised to feed off the synergy of downtown and become a self-sustaining center of housing and employment. Instead, it’s being suffocated. The era of Bremerton having real estate to spare is over; we need our city center back. It’s being held hostage, and no one really benefits — not even the shipyard.

PSNS needs to provide parking for its employees, and that’s something we can all agree on. The shipyard worker should be able to park at work just like anyone else. Annoyed by the lack of parking downtown? Liberate on-street parking from shipyard workers. Not excited about gentrification? Gentrify blacktop. Frustrated by traffic? Put people in our most pedestrian-friendly neighborhood so they can drive less. If you don’t want a bunch of new homes built next to yours, put those units downtown instead. If you want to preserve the forests, harvest the parking meters. Interested in historical preservation? Tear up a this historic eyesore.

Downtown businesses shouldn’t have to overcome both an uninviting environment of pavement and inaccessibility. If you’re concerned about crime, replace the empty hotspots of illegal activity with hotspots for legal activity. Replace it with parks, condos, stores, community gardens, townhomes, offices, apartments, plazas, restaurants, schools, grocery stores, workshops — anything. Just allow it to develop into a productive part of the community.

Kevin Walthall is a Bremerton resident who writes a regular column for the Kitsap Sun about city living. Contact him at kswalthall@gmail.com.

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