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Closing Data Gaps Will Help Promote Efficient Use of Office Space

Published December 10, 2024 

King County has begun planning for a Civic Campus Initiative that will determine significant investments in county facilities for the next 25 years. However, the County still lacks accurate and comprehensive information about its office spaces, employee work locations, and space utilization. Without better information, King County may overstate future office space needs, resulting in unnecessary capital and operating costs. We make recommendations to help ensure King County decision makers have the information and processes needed to accurately forecast space needs and optimize the use of space.

Highlights

We analyzed utilization of workspaces in the Chinook and King Street Center buildings and found that employees are using less than half of the available workstations, a lower rate than what the CCI strategic plan consultant used to forecast future space needs. Executive staff reported that the CCI strategic plan is a vision document and that forecasts will change. However, unless the County improves its data tracking now, it will not have the systems in place to ensure accurate numbers are used in the next phase of planning.

In this letter, we recommend the County begin tracking the information necessary to both optimize the use of existing office space and to make informed decisions about a future civic campus.

Without better information, King County may overstate office space needs, resulting in unnecessary capital and operating costs. Since 2015, our office has been recommending that the County improve the information it uses to determine space needs. However, the County still lacks accurate and comprehensive information about its office spaces, employee work locations, and space utilization. As a result, the CCI strategic plan relies largely on agency-reported data to forecast future office space needs.

Audit Team

Audit Team

Cindy Drake and Zainab Nejati conducted analysis for this letter. If you have any questions or would like more information, please call the King County Auditor's Office at 206-477-1033 or contact us by email at KCAO@kingcounty.gov.

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