Harborview Expansion Plan Hits Trouble, with Parking Costs Front and Center

The campus expansion plan approved by voters in 2020 has ballooned from $1.74 billion to at least $2.25 billion, with the new tower at the heart of the plan pushed back from 2028 to at least 2031. (King County)

In November of 2020, in the darkest depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, King County went to voters asking for approval on a new bond that would enable Harborview hospital's biggest expansion in decades. As the only Level I trauma center across a four-state region that includes Washington, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana, Harborview is a medical facility with oversized importance, and overcrowding on the existing campus had been a mounting crisis for years.

Voters signed onto the plan, to the tune of more than 76% approval, giving the green light to $1.74 billion in new funding for some of the aging campus's most urgent upgrades. At the heart of the expansion is a new, 10-story hospital tower, set to be perched over I-5 where a parking garage now stands. But six years later, cost increases are threatening that plan, with the timeline to open that new tower now pushed from 2028 to late 2031 at the earliest.


The centerpiece of the 2020 Harborview bond package is a new hospital tower along I-5 on the west edge of the campus. (King County)

As costs increase with inflation, unexpected issues have also added costs as the expansion advances through planning and into design. A briefing at the King County Council in late May spelled out where things currently stand: County officials now expecting the project to cost at least $2.25 billion. King County's hired contractors, Mortenson and Perkins&Will, are giving an even higher amount to complete the work – $2.43 billion.

"We're in step two, which is schematic design, but it's a modified step two because the contractor and the county are not aligned as to what we believe the cost of the various components of this hospital are," Tony Wright, director of King County's Harborview Construction Infrastructure Division, told councilmembers.

https://www.theurbanist.org/harborview-expansion-plan-hits-trouble-with-parking-costs/