Olympia Time

There’s a version of Olympia where you step off the commuter train at 7th Avenue and walk up into daylight at what was an old Greyhound station. You’re already downtown. You wait four minutes for a streetcar, and then 20 minutes later, you’re home. That city was closer to real than you’d think. What killed it wasn’t destiny. It was a series of small, ordinary choices that added up. These are the same choices that killed streetcars and rail mass transit in a lot of places, but we can pull at the threads here and think about what might have been.

The First Hinge: Who Owns the Wire

By the 1920s, the Stevens family had built Olympia’s streetcar system. When they sold their stake to what would eventually become Puget Sound Energy, they handed the city’s transit future to a company that had no real reason to care about it.

A utility company runs streetcars as a side hustle of selling electricity, treating ridership as an afterthought, and when the automobile started pulling riders away in the early 1930s, non-local owners had no particular reason to fight. In September 1933, the company ended the system, and local government stepped in with a motor bus network. The tracks were pulled up or paved over.

Now imagine the Stevens family sells instead to the City of Olympia, or to a proto-PUD, more than a decade before the Thurston PUD was actually formed. A city-owned system doesn’t need to sell electricity. It needs to move people. When ridership falls, it looks to updgrade the noisy, slow and bumpy cars with something new.

With a few more years to hold on, the solution in our real history was the PCC car, introduced in 1936. A consortium of transit operators, facing the same threat from the automobile, had commissioned the most advanced streetcar yet built: rubber-cushioned wheels, streamlined body, a cellular construction that made the ride smoother than anything that had run on rails before. Cities that were still operating when the PCC arrived had a genuine fighting chance. In this version of Olympia, the city’s system is still running and it gets PCC cars.

Building Out: The 1930s Through the 1950s

The original Olympia streetcar network was T-shaped, running east to Central Street and west to Rogers. In the years after the system upgrades to PCC cars, the city keeps building it out.

Puget Street gets a spur north to San Francisco Street in 1939, a short southwest line runs down Decatur to 9th Avenue. Eastside Street also gets a spur, and Division is now the terminus of a westside extension.

This stable era, the 1940s and 1960s, is when the system becomes something people actually count on. But it also ends as the PCC cars age and car-driven growth starts pushing the edges of Olympia. Interstate 5 does come through, but we need something else to save our rail network.

The Second Hinge: Forward Thrust

In the 1960s, Seattle-area voters were asked to approve Forward Thrust, a package of transit bonds that would have funded a regional rail system running on its own dedicated tracks, built with federal matching funds covering roughly 75 cents of every dollar. In real history, voters said no. The money went to Atlanta, which built MARTA. The Pacific Northwest spent the next several decades building highways instead.

In this history, Forward Thrust passes, and the effects pile up.

A regional rail authority forms decades earlier than Sound Transit did in reality, pulling in federal funds at a scale that was simply gone by the time the real Sound Transit came along.

And Boeing-Vertol, which in real history made a troubled attempt at light rail vehicles for Boston and San Francisco, struggling with chronic problems that plagued the cars for years, now has a well-funded local partner involved from the start. The collaboration produces something that works: a vehicle with smooth propulsion, a lightweight aluminum alloy frame, and a modular design that’s actually easy to maintain. The “Seattle-Spec” LRV succeeds in the field tests by early adopters in Olympia and Seattle. By the mid-1970s, transit authorities in Boston, San Francisco, and eventually London and Melbourne are buying American, and the Pacific Northwest has become an unexpected exporter of rail technology.

For Olympia, the immediate consequence is more modest: the city now has access to modern vehicles and a regional system extending south.

The Great Expansion: 1960s Through the 1980s

The 1960s and 1970s are when the system finally grows to match where the city has spread, the eastside line pushing out past Boulevard Road to St. Martin’s University, a new line dropping south down Capitol Way into Tumwater, and two loops filling in what the old spurs couldn’t reach: one connecting Boulevard Road with North Street on the outer eastside, another using 22nd Avenue on the interior southeast side. The Division Street line reaches Evergreen State College. South Puget Sound Community College gets connected via the old Black Lake Road grade.

The most consequential development isn’t a new route, though. It’s political. Lacey, which in real history incorporated as its own city in 1966, instead holds an election to re-annex into Olympia. The streetcar is the promise, and service to Lacey is the condition. Lacey becomes a neighborhood rather than a separate city, and because it never fully separates, it never builds up the political pressure for the kind of sprawl that real-history Lacey ended up with. Growth does occur east of Carpenter Road, clustering around Tanglewilde and Thompson Place, but it stays modest

The 1990s Regional Connection

Just as the regional rail system reaches Fort Lewis, extending south from the original Forward Thrust network through Tacoma and Lakewood, Burlington Northern announces plans to abandon the Fones Road line, nine miles of track cutting through what is now Lacey. In real history, that corridor becomes the Woodland Trail. Here, Thurston County holds a public vote to join the regional transit system and grabs the corridor for rail before it’s gone.

The new commuter line is built similar to regional rail around Chicago or Philadelphia. The new expansion connects to the regional system at Dupont and runs into downtown Olympia, with a station in Lacey placed at roughly where Depot Park sits today. The St. Martin’s streetcar line is extended south to meet the regional line. Downtown, the old 7th Avenue subway tunnel gets converted into an underground station, and you rise from it into daylight at the old Greyhound terminal.

The City

The story is about choices: the Stevens family selling to a utility, Seattle voters rejecting Forward Thrust, Burlington Northern abandoning the line, each one narrowing what the next choice could be.

The Olympia in this history isn’t utopian. I-5 still runs where it runs. Where the streetcar system meets the freeway, expensive bridging projects span the road. The car is still present. But the city has a different shape, denser along the lines, more walkable around the stations, more continuous across what in real history became the Olympia-Lacey seam. You can get from Evergreen to downtown without a car. You can get from downtown to Tacoma without one either.

That city was close. History hinges on small choices that expand with time. That’s what makes it worth imagining, not to mourn a future that didn’t happen, but to understand exactly what was given up, and when, and why.

Somewhere in Thurston County right now, someone’s staring at their Puget Sound Energy bill and doing the math. It’s not adding up. In January 2026, PSE raised residential electric rates somewhere between 9.3 and 13.1 percent, depending on how much power you use. For most households that’s more than eleven extra dollars a month. Not the end of the world on its own, but it’s been going up like this since 2012, and that adds up. Vonny Turner put it plainly on Nextdoor: his bill was running close to $600 a month, and he wanted to know if anyone else was thinking what he was thinking. Richard Ney was. So was Jeff Devlin, a mortgage guy who founded the Best of Olympia Facebook page. He’s not exactly a radical. Nextdoor isn’t exactly a hotbed of anti-corporate politics. On most days, the platform’s better known for people calling the cops on our houseless neighbors. But Devlin and his fellow posters have become the unlikely center of a real conversation about whether Thurston County should finally, after nearly a hundred years of trying, take its electricity away from a private company and give it to a public utility.

The conversation feels urgent and new. It isn’t. This is one of the longest-running political fights in Thurston County’s history, a conflict that’s outlasted its participants and its platforms, moving from union halls to legislative hearings to Facebook without changing its basic shape. Private utilities don’t give up territory. They create doubt, back the right candidates, outspend the opposition, and wait. It’s worked for nearly a hundred years.

The legal foundation for public power in Washington goes back to 1930, when voters passed an Initiative that let communities form nonprofit, locally governed Public Utility Districts. It was a Depression-era idea, and it made sense at the time. Private utilities were squeezing people, and the idea that electricity, like roads and schools, should be owned by the public had real political momentum. Thurston County voted to establish PUD No. 1 in 1938. But the vote created a legal entity with nothing behind it. No wires. No substations. No staff. The PUD existed on paper while Puget Sound Power and Light, the company that would eventually become PSE, kept running the actual electricity.

In the early 1950s, Thurston PUD joined a coalition of six districts and tried to buy Puget Power outright. It was a bold move. Puget’s board actually agreed to the sale in October 1952, then reversed course in 1953 after public power advocates blocked a separate merger deal and spooked the company’s leadership. The whole thing fell apart. With no path to electricity, the PUD changed course. In the late 1950s it acquired the Tanglewilde water system near what is now Lacey and quietly became a water utility instead. The argument against letting the PUD handle electricity had always been that a bigger, established provider was simply better suited for the job. It’s a convenient argument if you’re already the established provider, and it would keep getting used for the next seventy years.

By 1960, a new set of PUD commissioners was ready to fight again. They moved toward legally condemning Puget Power’s properties, which would’ve forced a sale. Puget Power did what it knew how to do: it backed a candidate. Vic Francis won a commission seat, joining pro-public-power commissioners Harvey Thompson and John McGuire. Then McGuire died in the spring of 1961 and everything stalled. The commission deadlocked one to one. At the same time, the legislature got into a four-day brawl over HB-197, the “right-to-vote” bill, which would’ve required a public referendum before any utility property could be condemned. It was a procedural wall designed to make condemnation nearly impossible. Francis resigned in early 1962. The special election that followed was won with money. The pro-private-power candidates were better funded, ran on a “no acquisition without a public vote” platform, and won. That was effectively it for the next fifty years.

The new commissioners, having won, tried to unload what was left. They proposed selling the Tanglewilde water system to the City of Olympia and sent out an informal ballot. Only 147 came back. The slim majority who responded said yes to the sale. Harvey Thompson, the only old-guard commissioner still on the board, wasn’t buying it. He argued that 50 percent participation wasn’t a mandate for anything. The sale stalled, the whole thing dragged into September 1962, and ultimately nothing happened. The PUD kept the water system. The institution survived almost by default.

That near-miss opens up an interesting question. If Olympia had taken over the water utility serving those eastern suburbs before Lacey existed as its own city, before it had incorporated and built its own political identity, would Lacey have ever become Lacey?

Instead, the PUD grew. With its electrical ambitions gone, it turned all its attention to water and got very good at it. As of 2026, it’s operating 272 separate water systems serving roughly 10,416 connections across five or six counties, with systems in Pierce, Lewis, King, and Grays Harbor in addition to Thurston. It’s not really one utility so much as a patchwork. At one end you’ve got Tanglewilde-Thompson Place in Lacey, the original acquisition, now serving close to 2,000 residential and commercial units. At the other end you’ve got Group B systems, three to fourteen connections, tucked into cul-de-sacs, often the last remnant of some old private well arrangement that the PUD took on because no one else would.

There’s something almost poignant about it. The PUD was built to democratize electricity and ended up as a decentralized custodian of other people’s water, managing hundreds of small, scattered systems that bigger utilities never wanted. It’s genuinely good at this. But when people now point at the Thurston PUD and say that’s the organization that should take over our electricity, they’re pointing at an institution whose entire working knowledge is wells and pipes. Not wires.

In January 2012, I stopped thinking about public power as an abstract policy question and started thinking about it as something that had actually happened to me. A historic snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest and knocked the power out. We had young kids at home, including an infant. The first couple of days we told ourselves it would come back soon. It didn’t. When it became clear the outage was going to last days and not hours, we packed up the kids and drove south to Oregon to find a warm room with family. The thing I remember most is a gas station in Lewis County, the first one we found that was still running. The noise. The lines. People’s faces. Everyone trying to get gas so they could get out. That’s my reference point when I try to picture what a Cascadia earthquake might actually feel like to live through.

I didn’t fully understand at the time why the outage had been so bad and so slow to fix. The answer is structural. Private utilities like PSE are accountable to shareholders first. Overhead transmission lines are cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain than buried lines, and that cost advantage is real until a major storm hits and takes down the whole region at once. When that happens, you find out there’s no full-time repair crew standing by, because keeping a full-time crew on standby costs money that cuts into margins. So you bring in contract crews, and so does every other utility in the region dealing with the same storm, and it takes time. Public utilities work differently. They put any surplus back into the grid and they answer to elected commissioners who live in the service area and hear about it directly when the power goes out. In the counties served by public utilities during the January 2012 storm, 95 percent of customers had their power back within 24 hours.

That number became an argument, if not the central argument for the public power campaign that launched in the fall of 2011 and hit the ground a few months after the snow storm. The storm had given advocates something specific and local to point to: we sat in the dark for days and our neighbors didn’t. The Thurston Public Power Initiative built its case around three things. Reliability, local control, and lower rates through access to federal hydropower from the Bonneville Power Administration, which private utilities can’t tap. The argument was solid. The campaign, by the organizers’ own later account, wasn’t well run.

Proposition 1 went on the November 2012 ballot and lost badly. 59 percent voted no. 41 percent voted yes. The Alliance to Protect Thurston Power, the opposition PAC backed primarily by PSE, spent well into the six figures. The pro-initiative side raised around $37,000. PSE’s campaign hit the county with mailers, push-poll calls, and billboards, while separately running community goodwill advertising that presented the company as a generous local partner. The core scare message was about taxes. Independent analysts said the tax claim was misleading, that legal caps made the kind of increase PSE was implying essentially impossible without additional votes. It didn’t matter. The message landed. Voters were also stuck between two wildly different cost estimates: PSE put the acquisition cost close to $1 billion, while the PUD’s own analysis put it at $41 to $153 million depending on which parts of the service area you were talking about. That gap was enough to create real doubt. The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce came out against it. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro said the PUD was taking on too much too fast.

The debate about ideas moved to costs and the better spending campaign was able to muddy the waters. And the pro-campaing could not or would not return to the cold houses and abandoned town in January.

The pattern across a hundred years is pretty consistent. In 1938, Thurston County votes to create a public utility and gets a legal shell. In 1952, a coalition tries to buy out the private utility and the deal collapses. In 1962, a private company backs its preferred candidates, wins the commission, and shuts down the acquisition effort for fifty years. In 2012, a corporation outspends a grassroots campaign sixteen to one and wins the county. In 2026, people are angry about their bills and the conversation is happening on Nextdoor instead of in union halls. The basic dynamic hasn’t changed. The opposition doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to make the alternative scary enough that people stick with what they know.

Jeff Devlin’s change.org petition is just another possible start. So was the 2012 campaign, at the beginning. The question Thurston County has never managed to answer is what it would actually take to break this pattern. What does a movement big enough to overcome a corporate spending campaign look like? This time, is anyone willing to build it?

The General Administration Building is being torn down. This is despite it being perhaps the most important building in Olympia’s history. And this is exactly as it should be.

We should know our history, know where we came from, know why we do the things we do. But preserving a structure that no longer serves our needs ties our hands at precisely the moment we need both arms free. There’s a difference between honoring the past and being imprisoned by it. A community that can’t tell the difference will eventually find itself curating ruins while its living members go unhoused and unserved.

Like much of Puget Sound history, Olympia’s story divides into distinct chapters: the territorial age, post-statehood through the Second World War, and the postwar decades that carried us to today. The great shift, from a community shaped by resource extraction to one shaped by the machinery of governance, happened in the years after the war. The GA Building is the hinge on which that transformation turned. And still, it should go. That age is over, the building costs too much, and we need the land more than we need the structure. The unque mosiac was moved, and I’m glad of that.

The legal conflict that produced the GA Building began in March 1954, when Thurston County Superior Court Judge Charles T. Wright ordered thirteen state agencies to move their headquarters from Seattle back to Olympia. His ruling rested on a constitutional requirement that the executive branch reside at the seat of government. Wright worried that allowing agencies to drift toward the larger city would reduce Olympia to little more than a name on a map. Governor Langlie and Attorney General Eastvold pushed back, arguing for a more flexible reading of the law. The local victory held anyway.

In August 1954, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the lower court in a five-to-four ruling, with Justice Donworth holding for the majority that the framers of the State Constitution intended the entire executive department to be physically located at the seat of government. The court rejected the state’s argument for a modern, logistically convenient interpretation. Thirteen agencies, from the Department of Health to the Horse Racing Commission, were ordered to relocate to Olympia.

The people who drove this weren’t state officials. They were a small group of Olympia residents and business owners, determined to make their city the capital in fact and not just in name, represented by attorneys Smith Troy and John Spiller. Gerry Lemon and the Mottman family led the effort. They won, and it stuck.

The ruling triggered an immediate and massive expansion of Olympia’s built landscape. The GA Building, completed in 1956 at a cost of $4.3 million, was bulging at the seams almost from the day it opened, the first major structure built to house the returning agencies, already overwhelmed by the surge it was meant to contain. Decades of campus planning followed: the State Library, parking facilities, and more office blocks over on the East Campus. It was a major economic victory for Olympia, but it permanently changed the city’s character. The dense, monumental government core we have today is a direct result.

It was decided by a single vote. Think about that.

If Justice Hill’s dissent had carried, Washington’s agencies might have spread across the state, their headquarters placed in Seattle, Spokane, and Vancouver, closer to the populations they actually served. Olympia might have remained a smaller, seasonal hub, shaped by the rhythms of the legislative session rather than the weight of a permanent government campus. Historic neighborhoods that were later demolished for office blocks and parking garages might still be standing. The city might feel more like a town. But that’s not what happened. The GA Building is what happened, and it deserves to be remembered. It does not need to be kept.

The same argument is playing out right now in Seattle, though the stakes there involve catwalks and ladder cages rather than office buildings. Gas Works Park, on the north shore of Lake Union, started in 1906 as a coal gasification plant, supplying synthetic gas to the city for fifty years before closing in 1956. When Seattle began purchasing the land in 1962, the site was heavily contaminated with coal tar and heavy metals. Landscape architect Richard Haag had a different idea than demolition: he preserved the industrial ruins as sculpture, using bioremediation to treat the soil and incorporating the old machinery into the life of the park. It was a genuinely imaginative act, seeing the past as something to be lived with rather than erased.

The park is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s also become a serious problem. People have died after climbing and falling from the old structures, and deferred maintenance costs have grown untenable. Seattle Parks and Recreation sought approval to remove catwalks and ladder cages that couldn’t be made safe, while preservation groups and the Landmarks Preservation Board pushed back, accusing the city of demolition by neglect. As of early 2026, the city is moving to address the safety issues, but the Landmarks Board has repeatedly denied demolition proposals, insisting instead on a comprehensive preservation plan.

There’s an irony worth sitting with. What began as a public health hazard, a gasification plant poisoning land and air, was preserved in place and has continued to be a hazard in a different form. The commitment to honoring the past extended even to its dangers.

The Gas Works debate illustrates something that’s gone wrong in the preservation movement more broadly, a tendency to become transfixed like Narcissus by a fixed image of the past, unable to look away from the reflection long enough to notice the living world around it. Landmarking, which started as a reasonable tool for protecting genuinely significant places, has increasingly been turned to other purposes. In cities across Washington, it’s been used to block housing density and freeze neighborhoods in forms that suit current residents at the expense of those who need to live there. The practical effect, often though not always intentional, was exclusion, preserving the character of a neighborhood in ways that served the comfortable while denying shelter to those who needed it most.

The consequences aren’t abstractions. Washington has significant and persistent racial homeownership gaps. Black residents are substantially overrepresented among the homeless relative to their share of the general population. A large portion of renters statewide pay more than a third of their income toward housing. When we talk about protecting neighborhood character, it’s worth asking plainly whose character we mean, and at whose expense we’re protecting it.

History isn’t a museum. It’s a conversation between the dead and the living, and the living carry obligations too, not only to remember, but to act, to build, to provide for those who come after. Neighborhoods changed organically for generations, large homes subdivided to house more families, commercial buildings adapted to new uses, waterfronts reimagined as economies shifted. That’s not the destruction of history. That is history. When we use preservation law to stop that process, we’re not saving anything. We’re embalming it.

Gerry Lemon understood this. The same man who led the legal fight to make Olympia a real capital also gave the city something else entirely, donating the land and mosaic viewpoint overlooking the harbor from Fourth Avenue near Water Street, the gift that became the seed of Percival Landing. Where the 1954 legal victory filled Olympia with government buildings, Lemon’s waterfront gift pointed somewhere different, toward a place of public life, a boardwalk, a gathering place, a shoreline returned to the people who live near it.

It’s hard now to imagine downtown Olympia without Percival Landing. It seems inevitable. But it was a choice, and the alternative is visible in places like Coos Bay or Aberdeen, cities that held onto the industrial character of their waterfronts and found that character had little use for the people who remained. That’s what Olympia replaced.

Lemon was a boating enthusiast and former commodore of the Olympia Yacht Club, a man who understood that the health of a place depended on its usefulness to the people living in it. He also knew his contributions would outlast him not because they’d be preserved unchanged, but because they made possible something that could continue to grow. The GA Building was probably the great civic achievement of his public life. We can honor what it represents without keeping it standing.

We need to know our history, need to understand what brought us here and why. But history isn’t given to us so we can carry it around like a millstone, growing heavier with each year while the people around us go without shelter. It’s given to us so we can learn what it actually means to build something that lasts. And what lasts isn’t the building. What lasts is the act of making a place where people can live well, now and after we’re gone. We should remember. And then we should get back to work.