I have delivered UPS on the Fourth Plain corridor for 23 years. Never encountered such a difficult parking lot as the Center for Community Health, 1601 E. Fourth Plain Blvd. The county made no provisions for deliveries to the four-story building. There is no loading dock, no area marked for the drivers to safely park.
Prior practice has been to double park along the front, put on the flashers, fold in the mirrors, load up the hand truck and go through the front double doors. But now, we delivery drivers have been informed … that citations will be issued for parking in front of the building to make timely deliveries and pickups. (An average delivery day on that route is 125-130 stops, 15-20 pickups and a total of 300-plus packages.) It has been nearly impossible and very time consuming to circle around hoping to get a legal spot. I don’t know what the county had in mind when this building was built with no regards to how freight shipments were going to get into the building.
—Lisa Strand, UPS
In a world of tough, tight parking lots, Lisa, it sounds like you’ve got a gig in one of the very toughest.
“I’m not sure I’d argue with her,” said Mark McCauley, Clark County’s general services director — that is, the guy who manages the county’s physical facilities. “We sometimes have people who can’t find any parking space at all and they park along the curbs.”
As far as delivery trucks parking in front of the building, McCauley said: “We recently had a friendly visit from the Vancouver Fire Department and we were told that’s a fire lane and we have to enforce it. You can’t drive your big brown truck up to the doors and park in the fire lane anymore.”
Why no loading dock? McCauley pointed out that the building is on the campus of the Veterans Administration — it’s federal government property, and the federal government called the shots when allocating land for the county to build its health building.
“The footprint we were given by the V.A. limited the size of the structure,” he said, and then the county had a choice to make: more building space, or more exterior infrastructure? “We focused on getting the most treatment space for our dollar because that’s the purpose of the building,” McCauley said.
When the fire marshal lowered the boom, the county did transform two regular parking spaces into a signed, striped loading zone on the east side of the building — south of a smoking shelter — so drivers such as Strand have partial refuge from traffic as they stop and make deliveries. “It’s not as convenient as many people would like,” McCauley acknowledged. But there are no plans for more changes.
We ran that answer by Strand, who wasn’t satisfied. She’s stuck breathing second-hand smoke, enjoying no protection from the weather and struggling with the lack of a curb cut for her hand truck, she said. Her supervisors have examined the new situation and called it inappropriate, she said.
“The whole scenario’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s a Band-Aid fix. The county should do something different to give people who’re trying to do their job access to that building.”
Send “What’s up with that?” questions to neighbors@columbian.com.
