LEWISTON - The parking woes are over at Regence BlueShield’s campus in Lewiston. After 11 months, the new parking structure is open.

"We've been open for three weeks or so now and things are going real well," said spokesperson Mike Tatko Friday.

Employees had been shuttling from a parking lot near Shopko for almost a year.

"We think that it was a good problem to have, is that we continued to grow the economy of the Valley by adding more employees and we outgrew our external outdoor parking lot and so we needed to find a place for our employees to park on campus, because we wanted everybody to be able to park on campus," said Tatko.

The new parking garage will allow Regence's 720 employees to park on campus and free up streets in the neighborhood.
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"We have five levels of parking inside, 445 spaces, and then we still have 297 spaces outside, so a total of 750 some spaces and people really have their pick of whether they want to park inside and keep their cars cool on hot days like today, or if they want to park outside next tot the entrance to their building,” Tatko said.

In addition to parking spots the new structure houses a state of the art wellness center, called Club Blue.

"There is a fitness center upstairs which is open to our employees and then later this fall we are hoping to open it to our employee's family members,” Tatko said. “So we at Regence have always believed in wellness and we preach to our members, the people who buy our insurance about being well and taking car of yourself and living healthy lifestyles. “We've always wanted to practice what we preach and so we thought it was a very appropriate time and a very convenient time that, since we were building this parking structure, that we use this space for a wellness center."