When you think of an archive, you don’t usually conjure a pristine, hermetically sealed and spacious edifice featuring thoroughly modern accoutrements for handling delicate papers. No, the archetypal depiction is of a building squirreled away somewhere remote and underground — old and musty, cluttered and cramped.
Well, the Washington state archives certainly lives up (down?) to that portrayal. In fact, it’s worse — dangerously worse.
The main storage facility for Washington’s historic documents and public records that date to our territorial days is a former underground Cold War bomb shelter, built in 1962, featuring exposed water and sewage pipes, cracked foundations, seepage stains like Rorschach blots and narrow, overstuffed passageways that just scream “fire hazard” or “water damage.”
And what about climate control in the building to protect such precious and aged documents as the original copy of the state constitution in 1889, state Supreme Court rulings, and an 1847 pre-territorial document that includes all of Washington and part of British Columbia and the Oregon Territory?
No worries. They’ve got that covered with — we kid you not — a thermometer and barometer dangling by a string from an exposed pipe.
Is this any way for the state to house its history and official records from Gov. Elisha Peyre Ferry to Gov. Jay Inslee? Of course not. And, in fact, the state of affairs is worse than that.
The archive has long outgrown its storage capacity in the original bomb-shelter space close on the east Capitol campus, all 49,500 square feet of it. So, too, has the Washington State Library in Tumwater run out of archival space. Thus, officials in the Secretary of State’s office have been forced to lease space in other buildings throughout the greater Olympia area — stopping just short (at least for now) of renting U-store-it spaces.
Such an untenable situation cannot continue, and Secretary of State Kim Wyman is pushing hard to rectify the situation. The original archive building is, frankly, beyond repair of even the deftest restoration experts, so Wyman is promoting HB2015, which would dedicate $108 million to construction of a new library/archives in Tumwater, a modern, presumably water-seepage-free facility with all the modern bells and whistles to ensure historical records are kept safe.
It is a reasonable ask. Funding would come from sources already held by Wyman’s office, as well as a $2 increase in fees that counties charge people for filing documents — and obtaining copies — ranging from marriage certificates to real estate transactions. (For instance, all “recording papers” from county auditors would cost $5 for the first page and $3 for each additional page.)
The House has already approved the bill, 92-5 (Rep. Jeremie Dufault, R-Selah, was one of the five naysayers), and it now sits before the Senate Ways & Means Committee.
This isn’t the first time a secretary of state has alerted lawmakers that the archive and library is in dire straits. There have been three floods in the main archive since 1997, including a 2014 water main break that prompted workers to scramble to cover shelves and shelves in plastic. Before retiring in 2013, Sam Reed, Wyman’s predecessor, pushed for a “Heritage Center” at the Capitol that would have housed all records in a state-of-the-art edifice that also would have included a museum and conference spaces. It was rejected by lawmakers in the recessionary 2011 biennial budget.
What Wyman proposes seems somewhat modest — and doable — by comparison. She has selected an off-site location in neighboring Tumwater (presumably cheaper real estate) and, unlike Reed’s bid, isn’t asking for money to be siphoned from the general capital budgets.
Anyone who values history — and there are troves of photos from decades of notable events in the state, maps charting the ever-evolving shaping of boundaries, tribal documents — will want to keep these records safe and protected.
More than that, it’s the state’s duty to do so. It is legally required to retain original copies of all state agency and legislative records.
We need to safeguard these records so that a future generation of Washingtonians will be able to peruse and write dissertations on, say, the Legislature’s landmark “McCleary fix” or Inslee’s veto of lawmakers’ skulduggerous 2018 attempt to circumvent public records responsibilities.
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Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic Editorial Board are Bob Crider and Sam McManis.
