The Olympia City Council voted Tuesday to continue reworking its outdated Parking and Business Area Improvement (PBIA) program.
Established in 2005, Olympia’s PBIA uses funds from an assessment fee paid by downtown businesses to the city to pay for a variety of services and activities, including cleaning, public safety, marketing, streetscape beautification and administration.
The program failed to keep up with rising costs and changes to downtown Olympia, however, and the Olympia City Council voted in 2024 to suspend the program and conduct an independent evaluation into its structure and effectiveness.
The City of Olympia contracted with Uncommon Bridges, formerly BDS Planning, in October 2025 to conduct the evaluation.
Uncommon Bridges founding partner Brian Scott presented the results of that evaluation to the Olympia City Council during its regular meeting on Tuesday, April 14.
“We envision vibrant, just and thriving communities. Our work is in consensus, leadership, inclusive process, impactful organizations and meaningful places,” Scott said of Uncommon Bridges on Tuesday.
Uncommon Bridges’ evaluation of Olympia’s PBIA program found that, as the city expected, Olympia’s existing PBIA structure does not align with best practices for place management districts in cities across the country.
At the time the program was suspended in 2024, Olympia PBIA’s rates hadn't changed since 2005 and weren’t keeping up with inflation.
The evaluation also found that the PBIA’s practice of charging the assessment fee to property tenants rather than property owners was “problematic” because there’s no publicly available data to base the assessments on.
“With a tenant-based assessment, the work of developing and maintaining an accurate list of ratepayers is an ongoing and time-consuming process that consumes considerable district resources,” Uncommon Bridges states in its final report.
Uncommon Bridges also noted a largely negative view of the PBIA by business participants, in part due to a failed effort by the Olympia Downtown Alliance to create a Downtown Improvement District (DID) in 2024, shortly before the city opted to suspend the PBIA entirely.
The DID would have been a separate private sector taxing district to fund improvements and services for downtown properties.
A petition to establish the DID received support by a simple majority of downtown Olympia business owners, but failed to meet the needed 60% threshold.
“We were not successful by single digit percentages,” Olympia Downtown Alliance Executive Director Desiree Freeland told the Olympia City Council on Tuesday. “The appetite for property owners was nearly there. Nearly doesn’t make it happen, but we were really close.”
The failure of a DID effort over five years in the making did demoralize its supporters, however, Uncommon Bridges found.
“When asked about making another effort to replace the existing tenant-based PBIA with a property-based assessment, downtown opinion leaders expressed considerable burnout from the earlier effort and showed little enthusiasm for trying again,” Uncommon Bridges states in its final report.
The PBIA Advisory Board heard Uncommon Bridge’s report presentation on March 5, and recommended moving forward with phase two of reworking the program.
While phase one focused on identifying problems with Olympia’s PBIA in relation to best-practices, phase two involves the City of Olympia, the Olympia Downtown Alliance and the PBIA Advisory Board working together to determine what changes to Olympia’s PBIA would best benefit the program and downtown Olympia.
That phase would end with the Olympia Downtown Association and PBIA Advisory Board approving recommended PBIA program updates to the Olympia City Council, which would then go through a public hearings process.
Several Olympia City Council members said they had unanswered questions about reworking the PBIA, but that they anticipate their questions will be answered in phase two and were willing to support going forward.
“We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. We need to either move on to figure out what the next phase of this looks like, or we need to decide that having a PBIA is not a priority for us,” Council member Dani Madrone, who serves on the city’s Community Livability and Public Safety Committee, said Tuesday.
Olympia Mayor Dontae Payne agreed.
“I do think it's important to invest in a business improvement area, especially now, for our downtown,” Payne said. “There's many competing priorities, not enough funding to go around, but I appreciate the efforts to attempt to get us to a better place where we're better positioned to address some of our critical needs that we have in downtown.”
Phase two of the PBIA revamp is estimated to cost $50,000, with costs shared between the PBIA Advisory Board and the City of Olympia.
The City of Olympia has identified dollars in its economic development reserve fund for the project, according to Assistant City Manager Debbie Sullivan.
