Closing local offices would be real loss

Regarding your Sept. 26 editorial, “Preserve our state’s history for all to see”:

As a researcher, I spent a fair amount of time at the Washington State Archive locations, which are excellent. It is a tad inconvenient to drive to Bellingham to see Snohomish County documents, but King County’s are quite accessible. While I am certainly not opposed to a Heritage Center, it sounds as though the proposal is to close the local offices. That would be a shame. Then people in Whatcom County would have to drive to Olympia and the folks in Eastern Washington would have good reason to complain.

Why not leave the local offices as they are and move just the cramped Olympia archives office into the new facility? And please don’t move the Washington State History Museum. Sam Reed has done a lot toward digitizing and making documents more accessible, but the local documents should remain locally.

Tracy Tallman

Edmonds

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