o 10-minute parking: Torres said that was designated to hopefully make things easier for people to drop off books or pick up books on reserve.
o Plan your visit: Torres said a regular patron of both facilities suggests people avoid arriving at the library on the hour and half-hour. Classes are more likely to be starting or ending and can leave the lot full or congested. Arriving between those times can make it easier to find a space, according to the patron.
Yay for the new, bigger, better Cascade Park library. The only problem: who designed the parking and driveways? It is a pain to get out of the parking lot, if you happen to be lucky enough to find a spot near the library. The 10-minute slots up front are good for quick drops and pickups, but if you want to spend any time in the library, you need to plan for additional time to walk over from the other side of the Firstenburg Community Center lot. Why is the library parking shared with the community center? Why aren’t the patrons who use the community center being asked to park in those slightly further away spaces to further their exercise regimen? Why isn’t there more than one exit? It’s really annoying to finally have this long-awaited area library and very little access to it.
—Gail Greisz, Proebstel
If it’s any consolation, the less-than-ideal parking situation at the Firstenburg Center and Cascade Park Community Library isn’t lost on city officials. A few phone calls revealed that folks at both centers and the city are already working on solutions.
Tim Haldeman, director of facilities, risk and property management for the city, said library patrons will soon be able to take advantage of 40 additional parking spaces. The parking addition, which he is supervising, was planned when the library was built in case more parking was needed.
The city has already received bids and construction should being in a few weeks, he said. But don’t get your hopes up for an additional driveway.
“We’ve been told if we look at additional capacity or adding additional driveways it could trigger the need for a traffic signal,” Haldeman said. “Right now, we don’t meet that capacity.”
Adding a light would cost around $250,000, and that kind of funding isn’t available, he said.
When asked why the two buildings share one parking lot, Haldeman gave a simple answer: “They’re built on the same property.”
The Firstenburg site was originally designed to host the community center and the library, he said. Sixty-five spaces were added to the existing Firstenburg lot when the library was built to make sure the facility met city parking standards for number of spaces for users.
As you said, the number of spaces isn’t the only issue at hand.
It’s more complex than suggesting Firstenburg users park on one side of the lot and reserve the other for the library, said Teresa Torres, librarian at the Cascade Park Community Library. She believes some Firstenburg users are accustomed to parking on the library side of the building, are attending programs that are located on that library side of the Firstenburg building or have disabilities that make it difficult to walk a long distance.
She does acknowledge parking is an issue and regularly hears from patrons who say the parking situation at her library is less than ideal.
“I feel bad,” she said. “It’s a wonderful building.”
Torres has been working with the director at the Firstenburg Center to make sure large events aren’t booked at both locations at the same time. They’ve also made a few changes, such as using the community room to host blood drives instead of parking the bloodmobile outside.
Things do get busy, but Torres said there usually are spots available, just not where people want them.
“We did a survey on the week of spring break and had our staff count available parking in entire lot,” Torres said. “The lowest availability was around noon … most of the time there’s an average of 100 spots available.”
Another reader wrote in with similar questions but also noted a problem with car prowlers and theft.
“It (car prowling) happens quite often at health clubs in general,” said Angela Brosius, director of the Firstenburg Center.
According to a Columbian story from March, police noticed car break-ins at health club parking lots were becoming more common and can result in the loss of valuables, damage to vehicles and the threat of fraud and identity theft.
“There are a lot of eyes on the parking lot,” Brosius said.
Got a question about your neighborhood? We’ll get it answered. Send “What’s up with that?” questions to neighbors@columbian.com.
