I disagree with your inpector. You don't have "wall space," unless you first have a wall. You don't measure kitchen cabinets along the floor line, because a kitchen cabinet is not a wall. If there were a staircase leading up from the center of a room to an attic space above it, and if the bottom of the staircase were 2 feet wide, you would not have to put a receptacle at the bottom of the stairs, because a staircase is not a wall. Don't start getting out your measuring tape, until you can point to something and say, "That thing is a wall."
The NEC does have some clarifications regarding wall space. It does treat "fixed room dividers" as though they were walls, in that they are counted in the wall space. But there is no way you would consider a "column" to be a "fixed room divider." It is a structural support member that does not perform the function of dividing a room into separate spaces.