Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
We’re doing a six month trial without standing committees, instead doing a monthly committee of the whole. Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar here. 🙂
Project VE
About once a year I write an article about the Marina Redevelopment. I included it in last week’s Weekly Update, but here it is free-standing called Project VE. I encourage you to read it and look at my ongoing Marina Timeline. I moved here for sailing and fishing and the beach park. The marina floor is the biggest deal this city will ever have, and it breaks my heart how little most people understand how the thing works — what it costs, what it’s economic potential really is, what it takes to keep all of it going into the future.
UW AAA study for kids with asthma – free indoor air filters!
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
Again, no recipe. But again, an important alert: Paid Parking is coming to Redondo, starting next week.. As with the Marina, there will be a free period to work out the bugs, so don’t stress. But it’s happening.
City Manager Caffrey conducted a one hour City Council Candidate Orientation, which I transcribed and added some screen shots to. I urge you to watch! It contains a summary of faqs about the city and the government I think everyone will find interesting.
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
News Flash! After five years of being only ‘98198’, TakeOutDM is expanding its list to include establishments people think are in Des Moines, but (due to the insane border) are actually in Kent, WA! 🙂
Modera Woodmont Development – This is the empty area on Pac Highway just south of 272nd that the previous administration talked about having a hotel at forevehhhhhr. This will be interesting. 🙂
Draft 2026-2045 Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). Quick review, the TIP is the aspirational plan for road projects. Projects are not ‘real’ until they make it into the CIP (capital improvements plan). This is one topic that makes me regret dumping committees. Roads really deserve more than 20 minutes – but otoh, given budget challenges, there may not be more than 20 minutes to discuss. 😀
Sound Transit Federal Way Link Extension Update. I’m always interested in the wiiiiide variety of opinions on this project. It will likely play a big role in the Federal Way races this fall.
Study Session
Updating Resolution 1118 Concerning the Process of Public Contracting
Comprehensive Plan Update
City Council Protocol Manual Review. We’re going through each Cm’s ideas for changing the ways we run meetings. We haven’t gotten to mine, but the ones we’ve gone through, the conversation was ‘spicy’. 😀
Here are some I will propose. They may take a few more years to accomplish, but they are the right things to do. As I’ve said many times, this is a very long game. You may not win, but you should put the right policies on the table. The push back will always be “we don’t need a rule for that, we can just ‘do it’. No. As we’ve seen so often in recent decades, if you depend on ‘social norms’ to obtain good government, you will live to regret it.
Minutes shall be kept of every City Council committee meeting as well as all Advisory Committees, listing discussion topics, a summary of key points made, with attribution to individuals, and any final decisions and/or recommendations to the Council.
“No employee of the City of Des Moines may serve as a member of an organisation that has a contractual relationship with the City.
New Agenda Items for Consideration (amend) “A presenter should come to the dais prepared with research, be afforded time for a brief presentation, and then offer a specific, concise request. No final decision will be taken on the proposal. If there is support from three members of the Council, the City will prepare an agenda item for a future meeting.”
At the first meeting of each year, Councilmembers will choose a presiding officer from their number who will have the title of Mayor and another member who will serve as Deputy Mayor. Neither the current mayor or current deputy mayor will be eligible for either the offices of mayor or deputy mayor.
Executive Session
Performance of a Public Employee RCW 42.30.110(1)(g) – 20 Minutes. ESes are supposed to be top secret, but they have to be legally justified. And this law specifically applies to the City Manager, ergo, one does not have to be Sherlock to deduce that… it’s the Katherine Caffrey’s six month review.
Members of the American Legion, Des Moines Memorial Drive Preservation Association, and City of Des Moines Director of Public Works Michael Slevin (Retired, US Army) raise the flag for the first time on the new pole at the Memorial Flag Triangle Ribbon Cutting.And I hope you note, in particular the Des Moines Memorial Drive Perservation Association‘s plaque – with brick work from the original road.
Port Commission Meeting (Agenda) The Commissioners heard all about StART. What should matter to you is the chronic information desert. The Commissioners are usually in the dark about basically everything to do with the airport community issues. But one could say the same about the Burien Airport Committee (see below). What they finally seem to have keyed in on is the fact that StART was never a ‘community’ round table. It was organised by the former airport director in concert with City Administrators. Good, bad, or indifferent, that policy has led to much of the frustration concerning what StART is and what it can do. The fact is, former airport director Lyttle sold the idea in 2018, it sounded great, and the Commission let him run with it. If it takes the Commission seven years to respond to even this basic community concern, that does not bode well for the entire model.
Wednesday
2:30PM Highline Forum (Agenda) Burien City Hall. Surprisingly, there as another annual report on StART. 😀 But there was also a fascinating economic update from the Port on all the economic grants it provides to our six cities, and updates from other cities – including SeaTac discussing its intent to purchase over 95% of North SeaTac Park (213 acres). Complete transcript and presentations here, totally worth reading.
The City did a real solid in civics lessons by recording this presentation and Q&A. For those who prefer reading to watching long videos (me, Me, ME! 😀 ) took the liberty of adding a machine-generated transcript. It’s pretty good, but as with all such things: caveat lector.
Obviously, Des Moines has about 32,000 people. We were founded in 1959. I thought this was interesting—some of the demographic information about the community, just sort of who is the population here.
One of the data points on there was that about 80% of the population leaves the city during the day for work, so we are definitely more of a bedroom residential-heavy community. That parlays into this information I want to share with you—primarily we are a residential community. This is our zoning map, which can sometimes not always tell the most accurate or best picture, but really what I would encourage you to take away from it is the red and some of that purple around downtown are really business areas. Everything else is primarily residential.
How heavily residential we are really impacts the city’s finances and really tells the story about a lot of things going on in the community. As you all know, our primary commercial corridors are Pacific Highway and Marine View Drive. Future growth here will be definitely driven by redevelopment and increased density.
What’s also important to share is we have a very large percentage of tax-exempt property in the community, meaning development that does not pay any property taxes. That’s obviously all public things like churches and schools, government-owned buildings like the FAA building, Judson, Wesley—all of those developments are property tax exempt, and again those really influence the overall city’s finances.
Many of you are aware of this, but later this year we will be forming a planning commission, which I think will be a great way for citizens to get involved in a lot of these types of land use issues as they come up.
City Infrastructure and Facilities
A couple facts here about our public infrastructure, parks and public spaces, our marina—I’m not going to read all of this because you guys know this, but I wanted to make sure you had some good data at your fingertips should you need it. These are our city facilities and locations. These are the areas that the city owns and operates. I’m sure a lot of them you’re fully aware of. The Redondo boardwalk is actually considered a park, and so that is why that’s on there as well.
Major Institutions and Employers
A couple of our major institutions and employers—I’m sure you all are aware we have the Northwest headquarters for the FAA over on 216th. It’s a pretty large employer. We have not seen much of an impact of some of the federal things when it comes to employment at that space, meaning we have not heard that there have been huge reductions in their employment or anything. I don’t know if staff feel differently, but I have found though they pretty much fly under the radar—I guess pun intended. They do not—you know, I’ve reached out to them numerous times wanting to meet, have not received any response, so they kind of stick to themselves. They are not really active in the community.
We also have Riot Games, which is right near in that area as well. Sort of an interesting business here. Obviously want to highlight Highline College and of course Judson Park and Wesley. Of course, these are not indicative of everything in the community, but they’re a couple of our major institutions we wanted to highlight.
Form of Government
This is an area that I think sometimes because so many communities in this area are a little different—like they’re strong mayor forms of government—this form of government can sometimes not be really intuitive to people. So the city runs under a council-manager form of government. This sort of shows you how it works. Obviously voters elect the city council. The city council in January—who’s sitting up there—will choose amongst themselves who will serve as the mayor. Really the council hires, fires, reviews the city manager, and then the city manager is responsible for all of the city staff. It is pretty similar to sort of the city council acting like a board of directors and the city manager acting kind of like a CEO is the structure that we have.
This is the council’s mission, vision and values that the council worked on in November and then adopted in January. This is some preliminary work that the council did that we will then be using as sort of a jumping off point for the strategic planning process, which should be beginning later this year. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
Legal Requirements and Meetings
These are a couple things we just wanted to make you aware of. We do follow the Open Meetings Act, Public Records Act, which means all emails and correspondence to city staff and to city council members is public. Non-open meetings—both our kind of regular council meetings and study sessions as well as executive sessions—those all must be noticed like any other meeting. They don’t ever happen impromptu. There is a notice requirement. We’re happy to answer any questions about those if you guys have any later.
Role of City Council
This is a little bit about the role of the city council. I’ll let you all take a look at this, but really at a broad brush, the role of the city council is really to set the policy direction, and then it’s staff’s job to execute upon it. So there’s a lot of goal setting, high-level objectives. Really, what is the vision of the community that the council wants to create is really the space where the council primarily operates.
You are responsible for adopting the budget. Staff will prepare the budget and then take feedback from the council, but really the preparation of it and implementation was with staff. Obviously lots of community engagement—you all are familiar with the role of council with that—and then of course supervising the city manager.
The other thing I’d say as a staff person, not as somebody who has sat in your shoes, is that really sometimes I think when people are looking at council, they don’t always fully appreciate how much of it is being a team. You’re kind of only as effective as you can get three other people to agree with you on something, and so it really is a collective body that works best when you’re kind of marching as a whole. So just something to keep in mind.
Council Meetings and Procedures
This is a little bit about how the city council conducts its business. You all are pretty familiar with these study sessions, which are the first Thursday of the month. They are intended to be in-depth quality policy discussions, information sharing. Maybe presentations are made of things that are still sort of in the works. I would say since I’ve gotten here, we’re maybe doing that 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time they function a lot like a regular council meeting just because of issues that have been going on or time-sensitive matters, but that’s really the goal of them.
We have regular council meetings on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 6 PM. I think many of you have been in this room. Those are obviously our more formal meetings for voting and things like that. We talked a little about meeting procedures. You are guided by Robert’s Rules of Order. I’m definitely not the expert on that, so if you are elected, I encourage you—get a copy of that little book and watch some videos for cheat sheets. It can definitely get a little intimidating when you first start.
Then obviously your role beyond meetings—there are different committees and advisory boards that all of the councils sit on that are sort of will be figured out once the new body is sat in January. And then of course participating in all sorts of community events, town halls, ribbon cuttings—you know, the ribbon cutting that was on Monday for the memorial, things like that. There’s a lot of that that also sort of goes with the job.
City Organization and Staff
Now I want to talk a little bit about the city as an organization. So a little bit about me—I came to the city in November, so it’s been approximately seven months. I jokingly tell people it’s been both five minutes and I feel like I’ve been here 400 years at this point with how much we’ve had going on.
I came here from a suburb of Austin in Texas. It’s about 90,000 people called Cedar Park. I was there for about 17 years, sort of rose through the ranks. Prior to that I was with the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, and then before even that I was briefly with the city of Lawrence, Kansas, while I was working on my masters. I’m involved in all sorts of professional organizations that go with the city management field, and then here in the community I’ve joined Rotary and I’m on the Highline College Foundation board. But I’m at a lot of things, and so you’ll probably see me out and about.
This is our org chart. We’ll talk a little bit about the number of FTEs and staff we have in a second, but before I have sort of the key staff introduce themselves, I want to explain kind of the dotted line. So the city also has a municipal court that happens in this room, and we’re usually fighting out with them on getting space—like they just left a few minutes ago. The city council appoints the judge, and really, you know, she runs independently and the city manager really does not have any influence over the decisions she makes. So I’ll get emails from people upset about a certain ruling or decision, and that is an area, you know, I don’t weigh into. I am responsible though for her staff and her budget like any other department. So that’s why we use the dashed line on that.
Staff Introductions
AJ (Assistant City Manager): So I’m going to pause here and ask you and her staff to go around and just sort of like 45 to 60 seconds talk about your background and kind of your role. AJ—Adrian Johnson-Newton, our assistant city manager. You can see the departments she has underneath her.
My name is—I go by AJ, but my name is Adrian Johnson. I’ve been at the city since 2018. I started as the HR director and then I was promoted to assistant manager. I’ve been in public service forever, so about 22 years. I started in finance and decided that I wasn’t cool enough for finance, so I moved over into human resources, which has served me well. So I have a good balance between finance and human resources. One of the things I’m really proud about is I’m set to graduate next month actually from UW with my certification in public management. So really love the city. It’s been a great experience. I started first in transit, did brief county, and now…
So under me is finance—there is a dotted line from me and the finance director to the manager. I have obviously human resources. I have very recently—if you’re familiar with our Parks, Rec and Senior Services—we just recently changed the name to Community Enrichment Services, so we’re undergoing sort of a rebrand and refresh of that area. And then we just hired a grants management analyst, so we’re going to be looking at centralizing our grants. And then I have IT.
Bonnie (Director of Administrative Services): All right, Bonnie, you’re up next. You want to talk about your background or role?
Sure. I’m Bonnie Wilkins. I’m the director of administrative services. I’m born and raised in Des Moines, went through my whole entire life living in the house I grew up in. Go Rams! I have been at the city since 1998, so a thousand years ago. I started in doing payroll and then went over a couple years later to Parks and Recreation, where I worked my way up to office manager. And then the city clerk job came open and I thought, well, maybe now’s the time to change something and do something fun and different. And I did, and I loved every minute of it. Kind of my passion. But from there, I think with longevity you get a lot of knowledge of what’s going on. I think this kind of naturally moved up to my current role today. I have the city clerk under me in communications, and I support everybody. I have some knowledge, and I think they love to hear it. Sometimes I’m bossy and she doesn’t have a box, but it’s there called special projects, which is really kind of Bonnie’s bailiwick.
Mike (Public Works Director): Mike, do you want to talk about your background and the three kind of sections under your department?
I’m Mike. I’m a public works director. Prior to this, I graduated from WSU. I was there for 29 years. I retired from there about this place. I’m also a military officer—28 years, retired 2012. I did eight years active, 20 years. We have about 38 people. We have an engineering section that really manages our utility side and then also our roads and transportation side. We have operations and maintenance, and those are people you see every day. They’re here on standby or anything like that, or there’s a weather event—snow, ice, trees, whatever it may be. And then we have our capital project section—small section—that works on projects like playground replacements. Right now we have solar panels.
Jeff (Finance Director): All right, Jeff, do you want to talk about your role and your divisions? Sure, even though you are a square on there, I didn’t mean to skip you over.
So yeah, I’m Jeff. I’m the finance director. I’ve been working in government finance about 21 years ago. I’m a licensed CPA. We have about six people. We handle all the licenses, taxes…
Police Chief: All right. Oh my gosh, under University Sheriff’s Office investigate, sheriff’s office, my second career. So it’s cool. There’s two divisions—one is patrol, uniform police officers side of the house. The other half is everything else. That function includes animal control. It is literally duty for everything that across the department. One of the things really cool together, we’re all staff assistant. You’ll see a former relation.
City Manager: Great. I don’t want to skip Marina—Scott Wilkins, our harbor master, isn’t here right now. Bonnie can talk a little bit about him, but I’ll cover the marina.
Bonnie: I’ll give it a try. We do have kind of the only publicly accessible marina between Tacoma and Seattle. As you know, about 850 slips. Scott’s been with the city since 1996, so whatever that math would be—29 years. They have a staff of I want to say like 10 or 11 people, yeah, maybe 12. They also work seven days a week, so a few of the departments are really present seven days a week, like police. The marina is as well. And so he’s got a couple big capital projects going on right now, primarily the replacement of the L, M and N docks, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Rebecca (Community Development Director): All right, Rebecca, you want to talk about community building?
I have tons of seniority over me. I came from my previous—I have about 20 years in community development. I’ve got a bachelor’s in urban planning and public administration. I’ve got 12 full-time staff in my department. We do building planning, so we do both—you know, both projects go through both departments for permits. You’re also our SEPA official—yes, SEPA official. That’s the planning department, so got lots of projects dealing with SEPA and everything that goes through. I think we were just looking at a report—you know, we get about over 2,000 permits that go through each year.
George (City Attorney): Great. All right, last but not least, our former interim city manager, George, city attorney with the city for 17 years to practice law obviously here in Washington. What we do is we have a civil side, so we represent the city council as a whole and we do all the city department on the criminal side. We have two attorneys that do both arrested for misdemeanors. Also help…
And then something that I think sometimes will happen is the legal department represents the city’s legal affairs. So every once in a while we will get a citizen calling thinking maybe it’s like an attorney that will just help them. That is not really legal’s role. They also don’t really advise council members on things that are your own kind of legal things. It’s really about representing the city.
Tara: So Tara, do you want to introduce yourself real quick since you are just here early ahead of your six o’clock meeting?
I’ve been practicing for 12 years.
City Manager: And Sarah Lee in the background is our deputy court clerk—deputy city clerk, excuse me. They like to fly under the radar, but there she is. So she is at lots of meetings doing recordings, minutes, all of those types of things.
Organization Overview
So about the actual organization as a whole, we have about 140 full-time employees. Additionally, we have two limited-term employees, which are just what they sound like—you know, they’re employees but they have a kind of fixed term that they’re working for us. And then we have about 20 extra hires, which are sort of like seasonal employees. A lot of them are in like Parks and Rec programming things like that.
We do have a good chunk of union employees, both between public works and the police department, and I think some of the marina folks as well, right? But you can see the split between union and non-represented. And then our average years of service is a little over seven, so we’re actually a pretty new workforce, but we’ve got a lot of tenure you’ll find at the senior staff level, which is great for people like Chief [Name], myself, Mike, Rebecca who are new. There’s a lot of other people here who have been here a long time.
This is the breakdown of how kind of staff are divided. I always get sort of like—I don’t like how you show administrative services because it sounds like it’s the city manager’s office. It is not. There’s two people in the city manager’s office, but that includes things like finance, city clerk, communications, a lot of those types of things. That’s what’s included in administrative.
Organizational Culture and Initiatives
So when I got here—actually when I was even here during the interview process in August—I heard a lot from both employees and community members, a lot of concerns about the city’s ongoing communications issues, some trust and transparency concerns, and a lot about customer service. So I’m sure any of these folks can tell you that I like preach this a lot, but this is some of the work we’ve done internally. We’re trying to really kind of build upon the great things in this organizational culture but also sort of strengthen some areas that we have some room for improvement.
So these are sort of the four tenets of what are really important to us as employees, and these are things that if you are ever in the building you will sort of see them in every conference room. We are trying to really weave them into the kind of employee experience here. But really the four areas are:
Customer service first and foremost—and I’ll talk a little bit about what we’re doing on that front in a second
Better communication—so more timely, clearer, easier to access employees and city staff to get information and answers
A lot of work obviously on our fiscal situation—so really taking ownership for, you know, your role as an employee and whatever budget or revenue source you may or may not interact with
Finally, it’s important to us to make sure that employees like working here—we are extremely lean. I have worked at other organizations before that were lean. This is like leaner. We do not have enough people in any single department. So what that means then is if we’re asking employees to really have heavy workloads and meet a high bar, we need to make sure their experience being here is a positive one, that they find this a place that fosters their professional development, that they feel fairly compensated, things like that. So that made the list because it’s really important when you’re asking people to do a lot.
Communications Improvements
Some things that we’re doing on the communications front that I just want to share with you all so you’re aware of some of the things we do:
Tim started this when he was interim, but there’s a weekly city manager report. We’ve improved that. We’re looking at ways to even improve it a little bit more. That comes out every Friday. We’ve really started building an email subscription list. If you aren’t on there already, please feel free to scan the QR code and add yourself. We’re trying to get this out everywhere. We have about 7,000 people that receive our weekly emails, which is great.
I’m sure you all are familiar with City Currents. We are working to redo our city’s website—it’s terrible, I know. Bonnie is working on that project. We’ve received proposals. Staff are reviewing those and hope to bring that to council soon so we can really get that process started.
We are in the process right now of improving our financial reports and how they go to the public so that they’re clearer and a little easier for people to understand. So that’s something that you’ll be seeing more of in June.
And then we are really as city staff working to engage more with the community. So I and a lot of these people in the room attend a lot of community meetings and neighborhood groups. When I first got here, we did some coffees with the city manager where I met Pierre actually. We’ll start doing some more of those. And then this summer at every single farmers market on that Saturday, there will be representatives from city staff in that city booth every single Saturday. And so that is a lot to ask of staff that are already working during the week, but we’ve divvied it up. And then we’re also going to be doing a series of neighborhood popups. So a couple different areas in the community over the summer, we’re going to be doing a casual, you know, 5 to 6:30 type of popup in a neighborhood where people can come ask questions or, you know, just grab a popsicle, whatever.
I think it’s just important for both the community to know who we are and how they can access us and ask us questions, and most importantly, it’s good for us to hear from the community directly what’s on their mind.
Also, when I got here, there was no way for the public to really come into city hall. I think this was a holdover from COVID. So even though we share a building with court, so it’s a, you know, it’s kind of strange—like there’s the public entrance for court—but we also have opened up that door to the right when you were walking in. That’s sort of our city hall lobby, and that’s open Monday through Friday as well.
Major Initiatives
So there’s lots of major initiatives going on right now in the city, and I’m not going to go through all of these, but I do want to highlight a couple of the ones that are in bold.
The first one is that the city council received a presentation from me in March about doing a strategic plan. A strategic plan is really a long-term document that talks about high-level goals and priorities. As a new employee here, something that has been very challenging for me is that everything’s a priority because nothing is a priority. And so it’s really important that we go through this process of the strategic plan because we do have limited resources, and if we want to make real progress in some of these ambitious goals, we need to pick a few and really be marching in that direction.
That is a process that we will be kicking off with the community later this year. The council has definitely expressed a desire to have a lot of community engagement. That is something also that the new candidates who are elected in November will absolutely be playing a role in come January. So, you know, the outcome of however things go in November, there will definitely be opportunities for the council that is seated in January to have a big role in sort of what is in that plan.
You guys know about probably many of these if you’ve watched meetings where Rebecca goes through the comp plan. We have another one next week.
Another one I want to highlight though is our long-range financial plan and development impact analysis. We’re kicking off—we’re just starting that process right now. But we are doing a long-range financial plan to really look at what the forecasting sort of what the city’s outcome looks like. This plan is also going to be taking a look at maybe revenue sources we aren’t hitting or we could be leveraging more.
Candidly, and I say this to anybody, I don’t think it’s going to be everybody’s favorite presentation. It’s going to be pretty sobering, but I think it’s going to be really important for that transparency and just sort of set a good foundation.
We’re also doing a part of it called the development impact analysis, where it’s a tool that will allow staff to run a tool but provide information to the council when land use decisions come up. So if a land use is coming in and let’s say they want to put houses there, that is a very different financial impact to the city than if it’s commercial. So this is a tool that will help us kind of high-level get a sense of what is the revenue impact from a certain land use and what are the costs of that land use. Like it costs us money to serve a neighborhood, whereas, you know, the business parks on 216th candidly don’t really cost us much to serve.
So land use decisions are obviously made looking at community needs, vision, all of those things. This is simply sort of like one data point for those decisions. By no means will it drive it, but it is a way to sort of look at those through a fiscal lens, which I don’t think we’ve had that tool before.
The sustainable airport master plan—I’m sure all of you are very aware of this. This is an ongoing massive project that Rebecca, again, is our SEPA official overseeing. We expect some more to come out on that in the summer. That is obviously a process being led by the Port of Seattle, so we’re sort of like along for the ride. But as you all know, as an airport-impacted community, when things—and it impacts us pretty tremendously.
I am sure many of you are aware of a lot of these infrastructure and capital projects. Last week the council received an update on the Marina Steps. I encourage you to watch that if you haven’t already. Redondo Pier improvements—very positive. After a lot of, you know, Redondo making clear their desire for that project to really be happening, we are very happy to say engineering design is done, the project is fully funded, we have received the permits we need, and so we’re going out to bid. So that’s really positive. Yeah, so Mike was able to announce that last Thursday.
And then financial sustainability—it feels unfair to only put three bullet points under here because really this is the core of everything we’re doing these days around here. But again, I could go on and on and on about the number of cost-cutting and revenue-generating meetings and initiatives and ideas and programs and plans we are putting into effect right now on that. So please know that is an ongoing daily effort and things that this group of people talk about very every week.
City Finances
A little bit about our finances. As you all know, I’m sure many of you have gotten copies of our budget. It is on the website. Our fiscal year is January 1 through December 31. We do biennial budgeting, which means the budget that the council approved last December is for 2025 and 2026. So the council that is seated in January will primarily be hearing reports and updates on what’s going on with the budget, but really that budget creation process won’t really kick in until midway through the year, really when we start talking about 2027-28.
These are some of the key functions of the budget. I would say if people ask me what do I get out of the budget, the budget should tell you what’s important to the city. If you really look at that document, where the city is putting limited resources tells you what the priorities are.
This is your role in the budget: Again, you make sure that how we’re spending resources reflects those citywide goals and priorities. It’s one more reason why that strategic plan is going to be really important. You do review and amend the budget—like staff brings you things for consideration. We do have public hearings. We are looking at ways to improve our engagement with the public in the budget process. I know staff did a town hall last October right before I got here. I think we’re looking at sort of building upon that, especially when we talk about ’27 and ’28. And then of course you adopt the final budget. And then of course you will monitor implementation. So in June, Jeff will be bringing forward the 2024 year-end report and then also the first quarter of 2025, and then after that we’ll pick up the pace a little more so it’s not—it won’t lag quite as much.
General Fund Overview
This is just a snapshot of ’25 and ’26. I want to talk about the general fund because there’s a lot of funds, but really the bulk of our focus is really on the general fund because that’s the one that is just most challenging to really stretch every dollar and penny.
The general fund is our primary operating fund. It’s really all of our day-to-day services, but it’s—so you can see it’s public safety, it’s, you know, recreation and community, a lot of public works functions. It is not the marina staff. It is not kind of surface water management stuff—like there’s certain areas that sort of live in different funds.
Our major revenue sources are property tax and sales tax. I’m going to highlight those in a minute, just how tight those really are that come into the city. You can see our revenues and expenditures. It’s definitely a question to look at of sort of, you know, how balanced are we. We also really try to have a fund balance, which we talked a lot about to the council. I’d really like to see our fund balance grow. We are meeting our policy, we are in compliance, but it is, you know, much lower than what I think it should be. So that’s something I’d like to see us raise, but also right now we’re simply trying to sort of function, which is very tight.
Property Tax Reality
So something that I think a lot of people maybe don’t fully appreciate is how little of your property taxes go to the city. So this is sort of a, you know, average tax bill, but you can see all these different entities. About 8.3% of your property tax comes to the city. I am obviously very biased and partial, but the fact that the fire district, which is one department and one service, gets a larger percentage of your property tax than the city, which provides you all of these services, is pretty staggering and also really goes to show how frustrating it is because I see that residents feel like, “Oh my god, I pay so much in taxes, yet the city’s always telling me they don’t have any money,” and really we’re getting a very small sliver of what comes in.
So for example, if your home was worth $730,000—which if you remember from a few slides ago, our median home value is like 684 or something—only $623 come to the city. That is extremely tough to run a community with this many services on that. And I’m sure as you all are aware, the legislature puts some real caps on obviously how much that can go up every year, which as a taxpayer I totally get. As a city manager, very hard to run a city on that.
For sales tax, which as you know the sales tax rate here is about 10 cents on every dollar, we get a little less than a penny. So again, very small amount coming back to the city, which really then what you see as a result is a lot of desire for growth, economic development, fees, things like that as ways to sort of generate revenue because your traditional sources of sales tax and property tax are very limited in the state.
This really shows sort of the past few years. If we showed you the future projections, the lines don’t look great, but this is sort of a really high-level snapshot showing you revenue and expenditures. With inflation, demands for service, and sort of a lot of varying factors, it is very challenging for our revenues to keep up, even if we keep expenditures the exact same but simply going up, you know, to pay people for cost of living and things like that. It’s challenging. So revenue generation is really a key focus we have to have in order to really sustain ourselves as a community.
Other Fund Types
We also have a lot of special revenue funds. These are really funds that are more earmarked for like—it’s a certain type of revenue that can be used for a certain type of thing. I’m not going to go through all of these right now, but if you go through a budget document and you’re like, “What are all these funds?”—they’re kind of like funds that can be only used for certain things.
We also have several enterprise funds, which really means it’s a fund that works like a business, meaning that the money that is brought in for that service should be covering and must cover the cost to operate it. It’s very challenging and in many cases illegal to use enterprise funds for general fund expenses. So, you know, surface water management—that those fees that come in cover just that operation. Same thing with the marina.
Financial Transparency
This is an area we’re really improving. Before I got here, there had been a ton of improvement done, but there’s still sort of room for us to improve, you know, making those quarterly financial reports I think a little easier for like laypeople to understand. The budget is posted online. We comply with a lot of kind of state best practices. We do go through an audit annually. We actually just went through that and had a really positive audit. So if you want to listen to like a super exciting presentation from auditors, you can go back a few meetings. I mean, Jeff and I were really excited about it, but anyway, so there’s work to do there, but these are some of the things we already do.
Communication Guidelines During Election Season
And I’m wrapping up, and then we’ll get to your questions. So in this period where there are candidates and it is active election season, kind of this is sort of common in every city, but definitely what we’re going to do here is I would ask that you send all questions to me. You do not go to staff, and even when council is seated, really the role of the city manager is to be that point of contact for the council, elected officials, and staff.
So my email address is up there. I think each of you got an email from me, so my phone number is on there too. Please feel free to reach out to me with your questions if you have questions. We will be sharing them with all of the candidates. It is also sort of in like city manager school 101 that you share information equally. So if somebody says, “I want to sit down and understand, you know, everything about the history of the Marina Steps project”—although that’s a really big ask, so maybe narrow it down—we will provide that information to all of you. So just something to keep in mind.
And then several of you have already asked to meet with staff. I’m going to ask that those requests go through me, and I will be present in those meetings because again, that’s just sort of best practices and also lets us make sure that we’re sharing all that information with everybody.
These are some things that I’m sure all of you are already aware of, but we wanted to put them on here as good resources for you to check out.
Q&A Session
So this concludes sort of my presentation. I think we wanted to give you all an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s actual questions about, you know, campaign signs and rules like that, or if you have questions about city things that are going on. This is a great time for us to sort of share the information with all of you.
Question about zoning districts: Yeah, the different… Yeah, so if you go online and go into community development, you’ll find the zoning map. And then on the side of the zoning map are all the different zoning districts. And if you go to the code—so like you can’t read it here, but if you were to blow it up anymore… Yeah, so where you would find that is in the city code. So if you just even—again, I hate saying it because the website is truly so atrocious—but if you find your way to the code, the search function on the code is pretty good. So you could put in, you know, “What is downtown commercial district?” and what’ll pull up is the city code with kind of what those are. Another good place to look at that—I mean, you could look at the comp plan, but really the actual municipal code is the better place to get a sense of what those zoning districts are.
Robin: Yeah, Robin, I did have a question… Oh, special revenue fund. That’s okay, that’s okay. I’m sorry. They’re not percentages—that’s a great question. They’re not really percentages. They are more so, as I’m looking at them, like fees we get for certain things that then have to go in that pot of money, and how those can be used is usually prescribed by some type of like state law or city code and kind of like how we use this source of money. Anything I’m missing, Jeff?
Jeff: Yes, oh yeah, that is one of our sources as well. Do you want to talk about that? Tax… That all goes to the city, right? Yeah, that’s the only source that 100% comes to us, I think so—business and operations occupations.
Robin: Okay, yes. Robin is very familiar… But I was watching and I saw sales tax.
City Manager: Sorry, yeah. I just chose the ones with the saddest story really to show. Correct, we also just implemented a square footage tax. So those kind of warehouses off of 216th that don’t pay property tax because they’re owned by the port and maybe aren’t the type of business that generates any sales tax—those were really in the city bringing in virtually nothing. And so the square footage tax, thanks to finance and legal, is a great way for us to sort of capture some revenue from them because they are in the city, they are occupying land that could be a different use. You know, their employees drive on our roads and things like that. It’s important that they contribute, but it’s still pretty minimal overall what they pay.
Question about legal department: And you’re separate? Yeah, we’re separate. So we answer to the city manager. There’s the direct line to us, right? But yeah, so we represent essentially the citizens of Des Moines in that aspect. We represent the city. So every—generally everyone charged with a crime will either have their own attorney or they get appointed one by the court, and so there’s public defenders, and then we’re the prosecutors. And so we work with the police department, and we essentially have to prove the crime. And it’s in this room, right? But we’re not a part of the court.
Well, generally we don’t have attorneys because those are infractions, so that’s like a ticket. So we handle the criminal cases—criminal being the key there where, you know, defendant’s entitled to an attorney, and so then the city needs an attorney to represent the city. Every—we do appear every now and again on the infractions, the red light cameras, speed zones, if there is an attorney for the other side, just if there’s legal arguments, then we can respond on behalf of the city.
Closing Remarks
City Manager: Any other questions?
Well, thanks for giving us an hour of your time. And then after the election in November, we will do a much more in-depth, like probably day-long orientation—get excited—where we’ll be looking at things, going far more in-depth on projects and things like that. But this was just sort of to give everybody kind of a snapshot of the city and let you know how best to communicate with us over the next few months. So we really appreciate your time, and I was going to say let us know if you have questions—let me know if you have questions per the last slide. But thank you for being here, and we will again post this on the website and I’ll send it out to you all afterwards with like a link to it. All right, thanks.
The Marina Steps project we voted on last year came in way over budget and has been scaled back by a process called Value Engineering. To avoid confusion, from here on out, I’m calling the Marina Steps, ‘Project VE’. There are four options for Project VE – A, B, C, D. Option A is basically ‘Project VE’ so let’s just call that Project VE. Options B, C, D each cut something else out to save even more money.
Assuming all the funding sources come in, and neither Redondo or the Docks run into unexpected costs, the Council will likely choose Project VE. If those projects run into higher costs, we may be forced to select B, C, D.
Still with me? 😀
Funding
One of the funding sources, besides our bonds, is a $1M King County parks grant we applied for, but we will not know if we’re getting it until 2mid-June.
The other two funding sources are from our future budget:
Sound Transit payment – originally set aside for roads
REET – which is usually set aside for capital projects
Read again: we’re taking money from other potential uses in order to fund Project VE. We’re doing everything possible to ‘move money around’ from other needs in order to do the Steps now.
For example, let’s say we do get that King County Parks grant. $1,000,000 is enough to build a completely new park in a part of the City that has none. Same thing with the Sound Transit and REET money.
So, next time anyone from the City tells you how each fund is somehow sacred? Raising an eyebrow is perfectly appropriate.
That was my tantrum. What is the point of having a ‘two year budget’ when we move money around like this just to ‘make it happen’?
We truly cannot afford this. And what is so chronically frustrating is that the public assumes that because we are doing its we can afford it. In other words, as individuals, we all know that people send what they cannot afford all the time. And most of us are capable of saying ‘no’Â – even if it’s something we really want. But since it’s ‘the City’, people seem more than happy to go nuts.
The Enterprise Fund Tantrum
The Marina is an Enterprise Fund – that means a self-sustaining business. By ordinance it is supposed to cover all its own costs. It has not done that in many years. If it did, we would not have had to borrow $10,000,000 to replace the docks. At one time, the entire Marina floor was a part of that Enterprise Fund. In other words, the entire Marina Floor was expected to pay for itself. Over time, we’ve subdivided it into separate ‘zones’ – basically converted more and more of it into park space – so that it was not subject to that requirement; so that we could borrow more and more from the General Fund – so that we did not have to maintain the fiscal discipline of the Enterprise Fund.
We run another Enterprise Fund – the storm water utility. That does work like an Enterprise Fund. You pay storm water rates and in exchange the business covers all the costs, not only to run the thing today, but also to replace pipes and equipment off into the future. To set the proper rates and policies, we hire an expert every few years to do an analysis. We last did that in 2020 and by all reports it works well. We do not have to borrow money to cover costs or do other budget tricks to keep it running.
Twenty five years ago, the Council started hearing that the Marina was not paying for itself. The City needed to set aside reserves for dock replacement. At the time, they could have decided to install Dry Stack (on land boat storage) which was (and remains) the only way to expand Marina revenue. If done then, it would have provided the annual revenue necessary to fund the Marina’s replacement costs and much of the other Marina floor redevelopment without borrowing. In other words, that would have made the Marina actually work like an Enterprise Fund.
Instead, we kept kicking the can down the road.
When we build Project VE, the only other possible revenue source the Marina Floor will ever have (the center area known as Parcel A) goes away. That is the ‘switchbacks’.
But, just between you and me, I was never against a Marina Steps. I never cared if Parcel A was set aside for retail. I just didn’t want a less than spectacular Marina Steps. I felt then (and now) that if we were gonna do a ‘steps’, it should be amazing. I do not think Project VE will be amazing. It may be good. But by definition – by scaling it back – it was never going to be the best we could do. And if we’re going to go to these extremes to do a literally once-in-a-lifetime project? It damned well should be the best we could ever do.
But aside from that, the reason I never cared about the financial loss of that area is because of three cents.
1Three Cents
The City only retains three cents of every sales tax dollar. Read that again: when you spend $100 at a local restaurant, you may be charge $10 in sales tax, but the City only gets (at best) $3.
It would take over $8,000,000 in new retail every year to equal the same revenue as a dry stack. $8,000,000 is about half the entire retail sales of the entire City of Des Moines. Even if a ginormous electric ferry pulls up to our dock four times a day. Even if, someday, we build a hotel. We will struggle to generate the kind of reliable revenue a dry stack could have been providing for decades.
A dry stack (boat storage) could generate as much as $250,000 a year in pure profit. NET revenue. Bottom line revenue. After every cost is accounted for. Don’t start. That’s what it is.
Project VE, on the other hand, is a park. It has no more predictable economic value than any other park. And neither does the Redondo Fishing Pier. They’re not meant to. You wouldn’t want that kind of activity. They’re parks; not Cancun.
What I found absolutely astonishing at this meeting – and over the past nine years of this debate has been the cognitive dissonance. Everyone is concerned about now. There is literally no one speaking for the future.
We’ve lived paycheck to paycheck for so long, we can’t imagine what it might be like to actually generate money. We honestly do not believe in the concept.
1Miss Information returns! I’ve been saying ‘three cents’ for a while now, but that was wrong. The reality is that the City keeps far less because the ‘local’ portion of the sales tax (the three cents) is actually shared with other special districts. In fact, we keep about a penny. I’ve avoided going further in the past because, frankly, this is already more ‘into the weeds’ than most people ever want to dive. But to her credit, our new City Manager has begun speaking openly about it.
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
We’re doing a six month trial without standing committees, instead doing a monthly committee of the whole. Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar here. 🙂
UW AAA study for kids with asthma – free indoor air filters!
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
Me…
I used to be out in public a lot more. That has scaled back a bit – partly because honestly, we don’t need seven people at every event. There’s simply too much ‘stuff’ going on. But, every once in a while, I want to mention two things:
I’m not a big ‘selfie’ kinda guy. But I walk the City almost every day – sort of this rotation where I try to hit everywhere once every 3-4 months. I can’t say it’s made me an more ‘fit’ but if you ask me about something in your neighbourhood, you can expect me to be vaguely aware of it.
I serve on these three County advisory committees: emergency management, regional transit, and flood control.
City Manager Stuff
City Manager’s Report May 23, 2025 No recipe! However, perhaps something better. Late Breaking News! 😀 According to the report, the last permit needed to move forward with Redondo Fishing Pier has been approved. This means we can start getting bids – which improves the chances of getting things moving this year!
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
News Flash! After five years of being only ‘98198’, TakeOutDM is expanding its list to include establishments people think are in Des Moines, but (due to the insane border) are actually in Kent, WA! 🙂
This Week
Monday
Members of the American Legion, Des Moines Memorial Drive Preservation Association, and City of Des Moines Director of Public Works Michael Slevin (Retired, US Army) raise the flag for the first time on the new pole at the Memorial Flag Triangle Ribbon Cutting.And I hope you note, in particular the Des Moines Memorial Drive Perservation Association‘s plaque – with brick work from the original road.
Port Commission Meeting (Agenda) The Commissioners heard all about StART. What should matter to you is the chronic information desert. The Commissioners are usually in the dark about basically everything to do with the airport community issues. But one could say the same about the Burien Airport Committee (see below). What they finally seem to have keyed in on is the fact that StART was never a ‘community’ round table. It was organised by the former airport director in concert with City Administrators. Good, bad, or indifferent, that policy has led to much of the frustration concerning what StART is and what it can do. The fact is, former airport director Lyttle sold the idea in 2018, it sounded great, and the Commission let him run with it. If it takes the Commission seven years to respond to even this basic community concern, that does not bode well for the entire model.
Wednesday
2:30PM Highline Forum (Agenda) Burien City Hall. Surprisingly, there will be another annual report on StART. 😀
Last Week
Tuesday
I attended the Burien Airport Committee meeting – which is kinda/sorta to be the model for our upcoming airport committee. It is hard to say this, but frankly, this was slightly painful to watch because there are simply too many errors of fact. There is such a massive gap in even the most basic public information, it’s only natural that the Port always gets their way. I know I’m being vague but this is a topic for another day.
Wednesday
Regional Transit Committee (Agenda) It seems like 300 years ago now, but Metro is still restoring routes from COVID. The south recovery plan is scheduled for implementation in Fall 2026 – unfortunately, after FIFA. There was also a presentation on the free transit program available to everyone under eighteen. What I keep nagging about is getting cards in people’s hands. As I said at the dais, Metro does its best, but it has very limited funding for outreach. We are absolutely blessed to have two libraries, right next to two excellent bus stops. This is a prime opportunity to connect our residents with the City and the library.
There were several comments – all on the Marina Steps with a wide-range of points of view. All known voices. I’m not sure if all, or any, stuck around for the actual discussion – I wish they had. That was a subset of the conversation the community should have had years ago. This is complicated. See below.
City Manager’s Reports
There were two significant City Manager Presentationsdard should be: “Unless it’s a real emergency, all presentations will be in the agenda packet.”
Pet licensing program
We will be outsourcing animal licensing to a firm called. DocuPet – something Chief Boe talked about at the May 1, Committee of the Whole. I’ve been talking about the shortfall in animal control revenue since last April. The problem has always been that, frankly, we hadn’t been billing people. If you don’t bill them, if you don’t make them aware, they don’t pay. Duuuuuhhh. 😀
On the plus side, the DocuPet product seems pretty good. Here is an example in Whatcom, WA. On the down side – nothing is ever perfect – is that the way the thing links to city web sites is klunky.
On the other hand, it’s so much better than doing nothing, my guess is that it will bring in enough revenue to get us within striking distance of bringing back the Animal Control we had with Burien Cares.
On the third hand, let’s remember that the previous Animal Control program we had with Burien Cares was no panacea. We had many service complaints about the facility – including a lawsuit over its governance.
What I don’t want to happen is to get back 80% of what we had in 2024, which was 80% of what we had in 2018 — and declare victory. But this is a good first step. 🙂
Capital projects update
We received an update from DPW Slevin on four Bond projects.
Memorial Flag Triangle done.
Redondo Fishing Pier. We have the funds. We’re just waiting on one last permit. The DPW seems confident.
Docks L,M,N. Still on schedule. Nothing to report.
Marina Steps. That is the (x) factor.
I call this ‘the plausible deniability’ trap. The packet we received explicitly mentioned ‘council direction’. But then it also said, we don’t need direction. So if I try to alert people to show up? My colleagues (and the city) can say (here’s my Ronald Reagan impression) “There you go again…” 😀
But the fact is, after hearing the oral description from DPW Slevin, there is simply not enough information to decide on anything. But I did have a tantrum! 🙂
Overview
The Marina Steps project we voted on last year came in way over budget and has been scaled back by a process called Value Engineering. To avoid confusion, from here on out, I’m calling the Marina Steps, ‘Project VE’. There are four options for Project VE – A, B, C, D. Option A is basically ‘Project VE’ so let’s just call that Project VE. Options B, C, D each cut something else out to save even more money.
Assuming all the funding sources come in, and neither Redondo or the Docks run into unexpected costs, the Council will likely choose Project VE. If those projects run into higher costs, we may be forced to select B, C, D.
Still with me? 😀
Funding
One of the funding sources, besides our bonds, is a $1M King County parks grant we applied for, but we will not know if we’re getting it until mid-June.
The other two funding sources are from our future budget:
Sound Transit payment – originally set aside for roads
REET – which is usually set aside for capital projects
Read again: we’re taking money from other potential uses in order to fund Project VE. We’re doing everything possible to ‘move money around’ from other needs in order to do the Steps now.
For example, let’s say we do get that King County Parks grant. $1,000,000 is enough to build a completely new park in a part of the City that has none. Same thing with the Sound Transit and REET money.
So, next time anyone from the City tells you how each fund is somehow sacred? Raising an eyebrow is perfectly appropriate.
That was my tantrum. What is the point of having a ‘two year budget’ when we move money around like this just to ‘make it happen’?
We truly cannot afford this. And what is so chronically frustrating is that the public assumes that because we are doing its we can afford it. In other words, as individuals, we all know that people send what they cannot afford all the time. And most of us are capable of saying ‘no’Â – even if it’s something we really want. But since it’s ‘the City’, people seem more than happy to go nuts.
The Enterprise Fund Tantrum
The Marina is an Enterprise Fund – that means a self-sustaining business. By ordinance it is supposed to cover all its own costs. It has not done that in many years. If it did, we would not have had to borrow $10,000,000 to replace the docks. At one time, the entire Marina floor was a part of that Enterprise Fund. In other words, the entire Marina Floor was expected to pay for itself. Over time, we’ve subdivided it into separate ‘zones’ – basically converted more and more of it into park space – so that it was not subject to that requirement; so that we could borrow more and more from the General Fund – so that we did not have to maintain the fiscal discipline of the Enterprise Fund.
We run another Enterprise Fund – the storm water utility. That does work like an Enterprise Fund. You pay storm water rates and in exchange the business covers all the costs, not only to run the thing today, but also to replace pipes and equipment off into the future. To set the proper rates and policies, we hire an expert every few years to do an analysis. We last did that in 2020 and by all reports it works well. We do not have to borrow money to cover costs or do other budget tricks to keep it running.
Twenty five years ago, the Council started hearing that the Marina was not paying for itself. The City needed to set aside reserves for dock replacement. At the time, they could have decided to install Dry Stack (on land boat storage) which was (and remains) the only way to expand Marina revenue. If done then, it would have provided the annual revenue necessary to fund the Marina’s replacement costs and much of the other Marina floor redevelopment without borrowing. In other words, that would have made the Marina actually work like an Enterprise Fund.
Instead, we kept kicking the can down the road.
When we build Project VE, the only other possible revenue source the Marina Floor will ever have (the center area known as Parcel A) goes away. That is the ‘switchbacks’.
But, just between you and me, I was never against a Marina Steps. I never cared if Parcel A was set aside for retail. I just didn’t want a less than spectacular Marina Steps. I felt then (and now) that if we were gonna do a ‘steps’, it should be amazing. I do not think Project VE will be amazing. By definition it is not the best we could do.
But aside from that, the reason I never cared about the financial loss of that area is because of three cents.
Three Cents
The City only retains three cents of every sales tax dollar. Which means: it would take over $8,000,000 in new retail every year to equal the same revenue as a dry stack. $8,000,000 is about half the entire retail sales of the entire City of Des Moines. Even if a ginormous electric ferry pulls up to our dock four times a day. Even if, someday, we build a hotel. We will never generate the kind of reliable revenue a dry stack will provide.
Dry Stack: $250,000 a year in revenue.
Project VE is a park. It has no more predictable economic value than any other park. And neither does the Redondo Fishing Pier. They’re parks. ; not Cancun.
What I found absolutely astonishing at this meeting – and over the past nine years of this debate has been the cognitive dissonance. Everyone is concerned about now. There is literally no one speaking for the future.
We’ve lived paycheck to paycheck for so long, we can’t imagine what it might be like to actually generate money. We honestly do not believe in the concept.
Proclamations
Although Mayor Buxton initially said she wanted to limit proclamations (which I heartily agree with), sooner or later, everyone caves. 😀 We could probably have very important proclamations at every meeting. That said, we had two worth ones
Public Service Workers: accepted by DPW Michael Slevin. My comment was that the public does not get how much work they do which no one sees. If you looked at all the work we do, and not just us, our contractors as well, before anything looks like its happening, you’d be surprised.
LGBTQIA Proclamation: presented by Councilmember Grace-Matsui. Not to toot my own horn, but I proposed that during my first term. 🙂 Actually, we’d had such a proclamation back in the day, but it had fallen by the wayside. Not to get all ‘history’ here, but since I’ve lived here there has always been a persistent, albeit quiet, LGBTQIA presence. It just hasn’t manifested itself with splashy events.
Consent Agenda
Lakehaven Water District Franchise Agreement. Passed (4-3) This was the second reading on an agreement to lock in a six percent franchise fee for rate payers until 2041. I voted ‘no’ because I have no idea whether or not any of these agreements make sense. The only thing I know is that they go on for ten years, so when you approve them, you’re basically locking in that system forever.
Councilmember Grace-Matsui spoke against because utility taxes are regressive.
Or rather, Councilmember Nutting called them taxes and she corrected him that they are franchise fees.
But franchise fees are quite different. For one thing, they are supposed to be about cost recovery. Utility taxes are more honest — we want the money. 🙂 Again, potayto, potahto. They’re sources of revenue we’ve become dependent upon.
Why do I care? Well for one thing, it may not be the right number. But for another, if you want to ‘move the city forward’ you’d want more flexibility. That might be flexibility in helping homeowners get off septic. Flexibility to negotiate for water quality mitigations with the airport.
At some point, it would be nice to have a discussion as to how these SPDs impact our future planning. I’ve been watching since 2008 and I’ve never seen that kind of discussion. It probably sounds like ‘Star Trek’ to people.
Mayor Buxton said that she trusts that our staff determined the best deal. That puts me in an awkward position. My job is to say: prove it.
Going back to Pet Licensing – until I started grousing, no one was talking about that lost revenue. There was no need for defensiveness. It’s just something we weren’t doing. I pointed it out. It’s getting addressed. That’s how all of this is supposed to work.
Unfinished Business
Citizens Advisory Committee Reorg
I abstained, for the simple reason I think the whole deal is weird. It consolidates the previous 18 person CAC and the three person Human Services Advisory Committee and the five person Arts Commission and the five person Senior Services Advisory Committee into a single 18 person CAC with three subcommittees, which are… Human Services, Arts, and Seniors. If this sounds like musical chairs, well… music is probably in there somewhere too. 🙂
What made me abstain is the fact that the Council voted to give every existing member of all those groups ‘pride of place’ — even for people whose terms had long since expired. So, the expectation is that there will be no openings for truly new members. That is completely contrary to the notion of expanding the group to encompass a broader range of residents.
Executive Session
POTENTIAL LITIGATION RCW 42.30.110 (1)(i) – 20 Minutes. I could tell ya what happened. But then I’d have to kill ya! Or I’d go to jail. I forget which. Nevertheless, aside from one snippy remark, it was good news. So good in fact, that we moved back to the dais early.
Said it before, say it again, you miss a lot when you aren’t in the room. And what kills me is that people always leave before the good parts. The video only resumes when the meeting officially reconvenes. So no one saw me perform tech support on Gene’s PC. Then the camera goes back on and everyone magically transforms back into Councilmember Achziger. Booooooring. 😀
More unfinished business…
Council Protocol Manual Update
Since we re-convened with seven minutes before our 9:00PM hard stop, once again this got put off — until the June 5 Study Session. So the meeting ended.
And yes, ending that hard stop – which no one else near by has – is on my list of proposed amendments. 🙂 Said it before, say it again: in a normal government, you don’t have a ‘play clock’ like in the old NCAA basketball. Maybe it’s better now, but when I first got to America, some teams would win the championship simply by learning how to run out the clock. Boooooooring. 😀
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
We’re doing a six month trial without standing committees, instead doing a monthly committee of the whole. Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar here. 🙂
UW AAA study for kids with asthma – free indoor air filters!
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. I keep posting this because it’s only taken 50 years, so you can be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. But as you drive down 24th Ave you’ll notice that the exit onto I-5 is nearing completion. This is happening. Learn more here:
City Manager Report 05.16.2025 In addition to a recipe for Baked Crab Dip, there is an announcement that Redondo Paid Parking is finally on the way.
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant 3changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
This Week
Thursday
City Council Meeting Regular Meeting – 22 May 2025 – Agenda – Pdf. If you have a sense of deja vu all over again, you’re not wrong. 🙂 We will once again be re-visiting several items discussed at the May 8, 2022 meeting I previously went over.
There will be two significant City Manager Presentations.
I can’t stand wasting word count with ‘nice’ disclaimers. 😀 But fair is fair: Ms. Caffrey has been so much better about keeping the Council informed than her predecessor, there’s no comparison. It used to be the case that the Council would routinely get new information for an immediate decision at our desks. No notice.
However, these City Manager Presentations with no background, are much the same. One can say that it doesn’t matter unless there is a Council decision to be made. But a lot of the time, these presentations do provoke a discussion, and often some form of Council direction. Not having that information ahead of time tends to lead to the same kinds of snap decisions that were not a great feature of previous Councils. Staff will always prefer the flexibility to work on their PPTs until 5:55pm (I know I did! 😀 ) But the gold standard should be: “Unless it’s a real emergency, all presentations will be in the agenda packet.”
Pet licensing program. This was something Chief Boe talked about at the May 1, Committee of the Whole deal. The money will be useful for improving Animal Control. No, it’s not all the money we will need, but it’s money we’ve been leaving on the table for a long time. My concern is more that the software work smoothly with whatever new web site we get later in the year. This has been a chronic problem. Either we get the wrong software, or we get the right software and it’s a ton of work, or the various pieces don’t talk to one another. When people go to our phone app (fingers crossed!) it should be a one-button affair to pay for basically everything the City charges for. 🙂
Capital projects update. This is a biggee. We’ll hear about Marina Steps, Redondo pier and Flag Triangle. And there will be decisions! I don’t think any decisions on projects this big should be made without the public seeing the options ahead of time.
Some other highlights…
Citizens Advisory Committee Re-Org. If you read last week, the City offered two big options for consolidating all our various ‘citizen’ committees. The Council voted (4-3) for Option A – what I called the Soviet Option. 😀
At least partly in response to my concerns over participation, the packet reads:
At the May 8 City Council meeting, the Council emphasized the importance of broadening outreach efforts to encourage new applicants and ensure diverse community representation on the committee.
In response, staff plan to take the following steps:
Promote the application process on the City’s website and social media platforms
Share information through local Facebook community groups
Send an email blast to the email addresses on the City’s subscription list (almost 7,000 email addresses)
Provide application materials in both English and Spanish
Streamline the online application to make it easy and accessible
Distribute flyers with a QR code linking to the application at the Activity Center, Field House, and Beach Park
Install temporary yard signs with QR codes at City parks
Reach out to local organizations—including the Rotary Club, Marina District Association, Redondo Community Association, North Hill, and others—to help share the application through their mailing lists
Here is my “I am choosing to believe that this will work” emoji —-> 🙂
Lakehaven Water District Franchise Agreement. This is the second reading on an agreement to lock in a six percent franchise fee for rate payers until 2041. I will probably vote ‘no’. Not to be difficult, but because the City is proposing a six percent fee and I have no idea what the proper franchise fee should be.
If memory serves, the City originally got into the ‘SPD franchise’ business years ago because it actually wanted to enact a utility tax – in order to raise revenue during a previous fiscal crisis – and the State courts had not yet ruled if that was constitutional or not. So, we enacted franchise fees. Potayto, potahto. Regardless, legal-wise, franchise fees are supposed to have something to do with cost recovery. And thus far, I’ve never seen us discuss why we charge (x) fee for any of our franchisees – Comcast, Centurylink, SPDs. And I believe we should. The only discussion I’ve ever heard is that “it’s what everyone else does.” I don’t think that’s good enough anymore.
One could go down the road of a franchise agreement and no fees. Although we do need some form of legal agreement to work with SPDs, there’s nothing that states that any fee should be charged. Again, not saying that’s the right thing, not even close. But the goal should be to understand the real financial impacts (plus and minus) of all these relationships.
Council Protocol Manual Update. We’re plowing through a long list of changes to our Council meeting rules. We got through a few on May 1st and now we’re moving down the list. These are rules that govern how meetings work. They aren’t exactly ‘laws’ but they matter a lot because, to paraphrase Michael Matthias, “He who controls the agenda, controls the meeting.” They cover everything from the Mayor’s authority, to what kinds of information the City is required to provide to councilmembers, to how long meetings last, to whether or not it takes one or two readings to pass an ordinance. Back in the day, they were mostly governed by social norms.
The biggest change in Des Moines government since I’ve lived here has been a gradual change in the office of ‘mayor’. It used to be ceremonial and as the Council has changed its rules, over time it has morphed towards something more like an ‘executive’. It wasn’t supposed to be like that in Council-Manager Government. It’s basically supposed to be ‘seven equals’. In Des Moines, the City Manager performs the functions of ‘mayor’ in cities like Kent and Federal Way – which have an elected mayor form of government. I know we both have ‘mayors’ but it’s very different. But when you call someone ‘mayor’, the public assumes that whoever is mayor here has the same authority as Dana Ralph in Kent or Jim Ferrell in Federal Way. It’s hard to fix — like that rule in the US Senate where it takes sixty votes to pass any bill now. It totally sucks, but electeds like it too much to seriously consider doing anything about it.
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission (Agenda). Their staff discussed their accomplishments in environmental sustainability, including sound insulation and other airport mitigations. To give you a sense of how well we’re doing, here’s a summary of sound insulation for 2024:
“Completed or made progress in insulating three single-family homes, 9 apartment buildings, and 3 places of worship.”
All of those were first-time installs – mandated as part of the Third Runway agreement from 1996. Zero progress on anything new. Full coverage at STNI
Friday
6:00pm Mt. Rainier High School Art Fest! 6pm – 9pm. Big Band Jazz! Mariachis! Art! This was the third year band director Ashley La has been doing this and it was the biggest crowd so far. I also saw the Mayor and Cm Achziger there, so the woid is spreading!
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
Update, update: Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. You’ll see a lot of ‘catch-up’ this year – more meetings, lots of ‘stuff’. Which is great. But until we have a long-term calendar, it will be too easy to have things slip through the cracks.
UW AAA study for kids with asthma – free indoor air filters!
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. I keep posting this because it’s only taken 50 years, so you can be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. But as you drive down 24th Ave you’ll notice that the exit onto I-5 is nearing completion. This is happening. Learn more here:
Speaking of information: I try to maintain a library of all City Currents Magazines in PDF format. I started doing this because I’m visually disabled and PDFs are easier for me to read than the on-line version. Since then, I’ve found them to be an interesting way to learn the history of Des Moines going back to 1990.
Four seats up for election on our Council Here are the candidates who filed. Note that Traci Buxton (Position #5) and Matt Mahoney (Position #7) chose not to run for re-election.
In Highline Schools, our recently appointed District #5 Director Blaine Holien is running unopposed.
In all our neighbouring cities, every race has at least two, and often three and four candidates. But for some reason, we are unique in having so many unopposed elections.
Meanwhile, the race for our County Council seat #5 has six candidates – befitting the fact that our district also contains the much larger cities of Renton and Kent.
And in a slightly troubling sign – at the Port of Seattle – all three seats go unopposed. It’s a bit difficult to improve the quality of government if people don’t bother to run.
Airport Committee
Sign up for the Airport Advisory Committee. Despite being posted for two months now, unfortunately, only three people have applied for the position. This is bad as the clock is ticking on important aspects of airport expansion. Let’s get on it!
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant 3changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
This Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commissions (Agenda) Highlights:
$4,000,000 to renew contract for the 24 noise monitors. This brings the grand total to $19,000,000 of advertising. I don’t know what else to call it because the program has no regulatory value. This is one of those deals the public does not understand. The truth is so absurd people don’t believe me when I tell them this: the monitors have absolutely part in establishing noise boundaries, or holding flights to account for excessive noise. Nothing. It is monitoring, just for the sake of monitoring. Your tax dollars at work. 🙂
The Port will purchase $950,000,000 in bonds – mostly to help finance the SAMP. That ability to borrow should give you a clue as to how well they are doing.
They will provide their 2024 Environmental Sustainability presentation. This will give you a sense of how well they think they are doing. When it comes to the airport? Here is the sum total of their work last year:
Completed or made progress in insulating three single-family homes, 9 apartment buildings, and 3 places of worship.
And what makes those stats even less amazing? The three places of worship are left over from the Third Runway agreement – 1996. I’ve run out of jokes to deflect from how pathetic the Port’s approach to sound insulation has become over time.
Friday
6:00pm Mt. Rainier High School Art Fest! 6pm – 9pm. Big Band Jazz! Mariachis! Art! High school food for dinner! jk. 😀 If it’s as good as last year, it’s gonna be great. See you there. 22450 19th Ave S, Des Moines, WA 98198
I took a test drive on the 12 Seat version of the Artemis Electric Ferry along with Mayor Buxton and Cms Achziger and Mahoney.
Note that this is soooo not the 65 seat ‘pilot ferry’ boat we tried in 2022.
Hydrofoil tech really is impressive. If it can be made practical (a big if – keep reading) it will make ferry service much more pleasant for people who don’t enjoy all the ‘motion’ of a typical ferry. It was a very weak current, which is great for going north and south. But the pilot did a couple of 360s heading east/west – and the ride was just as smooth. The moment any ‘normal’ boat starts heading east/west across the Sound, there would have been major bobbing and rolling.
That said, these things are not cheap. The 24 seat version, which is a real product, has a 12 month wait list and costs $3,000,000. The 150 seater, the one that is supposed to be the real ‘transit’ for King County is $16,000,000 will not go to sea-trials until November. And you need at least two to run a route.
So all the talk of getting any of this going ‘for FIFA 2026’? I dunno, man. 😀
Another factlet. Last year, the City got a grant to put in a $1,000,000 charging station. But Artemis brought along a $20,000 portable charger. The difference? For $1,000,000 you get a 60 minute charge. For $20k, it’s overnight. That’s a pretty high cost premium for convenience.
On the plus side, despite the eyepopping prices, these things should be viewed like any ‘bus’ or commercial aircraft. Their lifecycle should be 30-40 years and they use a lot less energy than a diesel boat, which makes them much cheaper to run. So for a transit agency that can borrow massive amounts of money they probably make a lot of sense.
The question is: where is the use case? It’s 39 nautical miles to Olympia. It’s 16 to Tacoma and another 16 to Seattle. Where are the stops? How many per day? Is the main reason to have a stop in Des Moines for the fast charger? To get people to the airport? What happens in two years when the batteries get better and they don’t need to stop in Des Moines, but can go directly from Tacoma to Seattle and back?
The point I made in my closing comments on Thursday was this: before transportation planners build, they do traffic forecasts, and they usually nail those forecasts. For example, the 1996 forecast for Sea-Tac Airport in 2020 was ‘440,000 operations’. The actual was about 450,000. Not even Warren Buffet’s predictions go that well. And yet, Des Moines has put at least $1,700,000 into a ferry – money we certainly could have used for lots of other stuff. And yet, the economic benefit study the Council approved last year will not be released until late summer. And at the risk of sounding unfair, I will have a tough time trusting that study. Why? How many consultants will tell you that the project you’ve spent five years and all that money on is not a fantastic idea? Very few. That would be like asking your best friend for his ‘totally honest’ opinion of your girlfriend — after you gave her the ring. 😀
I pulled this item. But only because I’m paranoid about 1sludge. After diving through a ton of paperwork, it looked to me like there was an increase in engineering fees, which doesn’t bug me, but a delay in billing or something which I was worried might slow delay the contractor from showing up and getting in-water projects done. If you read along long enough, you’ll hear references to ‘the fish window’, a period during the year when any in-water work can be done. If you ‘miss the fish window’ you have to either wait for next year to start, or you have to shut down in the middle.
Farmers Market
I did not pull this item. But it will continue to irk me – not because I don’t like Farmers Markets. They’re great. But because we have all these separate, but interlocking ‘things’ that are beloved by the community. People assume they all work together and create a ‘destination’. They don’t. They should. But they don’t. And I sure hope the new City Manager takes a lot of notes this year so we can make progress on that next year.
I yammer about it now because I never expected Ms. Caffrey to address this kind of thing in her first year. But I do expect the City to take notes.
Citizens Advisory Committee Re-Org
If you read last week, the City offered two big options for consolidating all our various ‘citizen’ committees. The Council voted (4-3) for Option A – what I called the Soviet Option. 😀
What troubles me, as with the election above, the Farmers Market, and everything is participation. We don’t have it.
I had hoped the City would simply defer this discussion until after we get a new web site (hopefully more mobile app-based).
There is this fib we keep telling ourselves that, “people who care enough will find a way to get engaged!” If that were true, it woulda happened by now. I also don’t buy the idea I hear that these are “the farm team for future leaders”. Really? No candidate for City Council in the past decade has had anything to do with these groups. Two members of the City Council were engaged on citizen committees (Jeremy Nutting 2013, Luisa Bangs 2015) – but they joined the Council as appointees, not people who campaigned for office.
There is an existential problem in civic life – a lack of participation, which is most acute in the areas and demographics of the City that are chronically under-represented.
ADUs Middle Housing
This was a win for our City. It might be one of the things I will look back on as a real accomplishment. Of course, since the proposal turned out exactly as I’d hoped (when does that happen? 😀 ) I would say that.
We voted to expand the number of dwelling units to 24 per acre – with a max of four ADUs (the remainder being middle housing – such as cottages.) We also voted to reduce parking requirements in these new projects. (But to be clear, not throughout Des Moines.)
A lot of the ‘parking’ discussion was about general concerns about on-street parking – again not part of this discussion. Parking throughout the City will be an issue for the Council to address, but not here.
3,696 properties between 3,000 – 10,000 sq ft.
2,392 properties > 10,000 sq ft.
As I said last week: this entire deal is a beta test. There is simply no way to know ahead of time what the effects of this will be because there are simply too many variables – including how many residents will take advantage of this. But to all the people who say “there’s no place to put more people!”, that was never true.
You can say whatever you want about ‘Destination Des Moines’. But the biggest driver of local business will always be our residents. The more easily developable new spaces we can provide for families, the more customers we provide for our businesses. Middle Housing and ADUs are the low hanging fruit.
Lakehaven Water District Franchise Agreement
This was the first reading on an agreement to lock in a six percent franchise fee for rate payers until 2041. In a rare moment of speechlessness, I literally could not put a sentence together on this. But I realised in the moment that I had not done my job. I was just ready to move it forward to the second reading without a second thought – as just one of those things that has to happen.
Perhaps like how we have a bajillion ‘committees’, the City has five special purpose districts. Which is a lot for a City of only six square miles. Each of these services require City participation and thus some form of compensation. The City can either charge a utility tax – which makes us look bad, I suppose, or charge a franchise fee to the SPD – and they tack it onto their rate.
Rate payers (you and I) are told that this state of affairs keeps rates low and preserves ‘local control’. They fight like badgers to maintain independence and franchises and avoid utility taxes. So, because nothing here is simple, we now have five separate, very long, franchise agreements.
However, IMO, any red-blooded city councilmember should prefer a (low) and standard utility tax. This gives the City the option to adjust rates as needed. I have no idea if 6% will be the right number ten years from now – especially with inflation.
Then there’s this: at Water District #54, there have been two Boil Water notices in ten years. Highline Water recently negotiated an agreement with the Port of Seattle over PFAS in the water. In SPDs with lots of old septic systems (North Hill), we have no way of offering better options for connecting to the grid.
All these staggered agreements prevent us from considering if there are better long-term approaches for the City to promote growth. The notion that it is automatically better for residents (and the City) having so many agreements (and so many agencies) in a geography as dinky as Des Moines seems harder for me to justify as the years go by.
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
Update, update: Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. This does not make me happy. You’ll see a lot of ‘catch-up’ this year – more meetings, lots of ‘stuff’. Which is great. But until we have a long-term calendar, it will be too easy to have things slip through the cracks.
Field House admin moving to Activity Center
Effective Monday, May 5, the Field House will no longer be available for walk-in public access. The building will remain open for scheduled programs and activities only. Community members who need in-person support such as program registration or facility rental inquiries should visit the Activity Center at 2045 S 216th St during regular business hours of 8:00 am – 4:00 pm. The City is working to consolidate Parks, Recreation, Senior Services, Events, and Facility Rentals into a single, more unified department over at the Activity Center. More info here: https://www.desmoineswa.gov/news/what_s_new/field_house_access___organizational_transition
Traffic Calming Web Site Launched
As part of his update, DPW Slevin announced that the City’ Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program web site was now on line. Not to oversell this, we already have five projects booked this year and there are limits to capacity. But you should definitely put your street on the list and get your concern evaluated. Making this process more transparent is a very good step forward.
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. I keep posting this because it’s only taken 50 years, so you can be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. But as you drive down 24th Ave you’ll notice that the exit onto I-5 is nearing completion. This is happening. Learn more here:
Since we no longer have a regular Finance Committee, here is the monthly Sales Tax Report. The news is good in 1construction – but it may be people simply pre-buying stuff. 2025.04 Sales Tax Rpt CDM
The City also produced a Cost Reductions Report. There is some very real progress and the report is much appreciated.
The City is now offering an e-mail sign up for City Manager Reports – which I strongly encourage.
It’s also giving the Mayor her own separate e-mail sign up – which I do not support. That is no reflection on any mayor. There should be only one communication channel for the City and it should be the City Manager’s Weekly Updates — which continue to be great. Anything else is just politics and should not be supported by the City.
There have been more restaurant 3changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
This Week
Wednesday
6:00pm. Artemis Ferry demo. Yes, the Artemis Electric Ferry rep. will be at the Des Moines Marina and (I guess) I’ll be taking a test drive. Will it be the 150 seat version in this AI-generated image or will it be the for realz 24 seat version everyone else has seen? And when will the 150 seat version be available at a dock near you? I guess you’ll just have to show up at the Marina and find out. 🙂
This is a $74k increase in design work for the L,M,N dock replacement. $60k was already set aside as a contingency so it’s not the dough I’m concerned about. It’s that the fish window is getting near and I thought this was all done and dusted. It’s a lot of reading so I may be over-reacting. 🙂
Protocol Manual
We’re plowing through a long list of changes to our Council meeting rules. We got through a few last time – proposed by Councilmember Grace-Matsui and the discussion was spicy. I think we’re moving towards mine. I should have a review here, but I’m going over-long as it is. Frankly, our ‘rules’ are a reflection of our Council. You want better rules? Elect a Council this November that wants better rules. That sounds even snippier than usual, but note that we’ve always had rules about decorum to address all the complaints residents have about ‘being nice’ at the dais. As Dr. Phil used to say, “How’s that been workin’ for ya?”
You’re about to read about one of the reforms I think we need to codify: recording, publicising, and providing minutes for, every meeting the city sponsors: council, citizen, whatever. We should also offer remote access to the community. All standard equipment in other cities. Everything I’ve ever proposed is what we used to have, or standard equipment in other cities.
Discussion of Appointive Committees
Des Moines currently has seven appointive committees:
– Arts Commission
– Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC)
– Civil Service Commission
– Human Services Advisory Board
– Lodging Tax Advisory Committee
– Police Advisory Committee
– Senior Services Advisory Committee
Additionally, Council has directed the future creation of two more, both of which to be monitored by our Planning Director:
– An Airport Committee
– A Planning Commission
The three committees the City has recommended go untouched must be self-reporting on efficacy because they haven’t reported to the City Council or to the public in so long, I cannot recall. Those are the good ones. The remainder all suffer from very low participation. Hmmm… I wonder? 😀
At a minimum, every committee should be transparent – recordings, public schedules, minutes. The bare minimum of open government. Many of these are not.
Regardless, if you look at the other comparison cities, pound for pound, we have 2-3x more committees. I’m pretty sure that would hold with comparisons across WA, and given that, it is wise to question their value.
The two options the City proposes are:
Expand the CAC, which currently has 20-ish members and…
– Add 7 at-large membersÂ
– Create subcommittees for Arts, Human Services, and Senior Services
Or…
– Maintain current CAC and  – Create a new Community Events and Services Committee (CESC)
Neither of these proposals kill me. Ya know who used to have 27 member committees with at large members and subcommittees in a town of 33,000 people? The 3CCCP, Comrade. 😀 Creating a mega-committee for interests and expertise as diverse as ‘arts’, ‘human services’, and ‘senior services’ sounds like a recipe for regressing to a particular mean. Fun fact: the average resident of Des Moines is under 40. 🙂
Frankly, many of these committees do not represent Des Moines across any main demographic. For some that is irrelevant. But for some it is. The Citizens Advisory Committee has been highly supportive of a body that more accurately represents the residents. However, in all these cases it’s exactly like our City Council. If people don’t apply, you get what you get.
And that is a dirty little secret of almost all community organisations – and why I perpetually sound so cranky about outreach.
My job involved a lot of behavioural economics. Our city, all our committees, local groups, everything, recruit passively. By doing so we incentivise for the same people doing the same ‘stuff’ year after year. We thank the few people who do participate, bemoan the fact that so few others do, and do basically nothing to help change this state of affairs.
If nobody applies, you either pretend everything’s cool or strip back. If you want to bring in new people, you can; but not without a very different approach.
And let’s be real girlfriend, if you’re on a committee, or whatever, at least part of the reason you’re there is because you want to be, what the kids now call ‘an influencer’. But at some point, if you really want others to join in on the fun, a different mechanism has to happen that encourages others to pile in.
To get there, the recruitment process has to fit how people live today. If you just recruit the way we always have, you get the same types ofpeople you’ve always had. The status quo. Usually, the same few people year in and year out – and also the same moaning about “Why don’t more people get involvvvvvvved?” 😀
The irony of our current system? So many people have not applied in recent years, it kinda forced something to happen. That ‘something’ may or may not be the right approach. As you can tell, I don’t think we’re actually addressing the core problem (getting more people into civic life). But perhaps daylighting the issue – and trying something different — are useful steps. 🙂
Farmers Market Agreement
On an adjacent note, we will approve the Farmers Market Agreement and wave the $50k rental fees. The City now says that this is in exchange for a sponsorship. That’s fine. But it’s no change. I only mention this because there has never been proper coordination between the Farmers Market and local business and events planning.
That is no reflection on the Farmers Market board. Wonderful group. Great service to the community.
But every year, the community aspires for more. We currently have no way to even measure the data we would need to expand participation throughout the summer – let alone get to the “profitable year-round model” that was part of the built environment in the 2017 Marina Redevelopment Plan (which nobody seems to remember now. My how time flies. 😀 )
I know this stings, but I get complaints from Food Truck owners and restaurant people every year – people who will never ‘complain’ openly. They just go somewhere else where they feel more welcome.
At some point, after spending all this effort on mission statements and logos and steps and t-shirts, someone will have to start acknowledging all this – if we’re actually interested in ‘Destination Des Moines’, that is.
This was our second Committee of the Whole/Study Session combo-platter. Any concerns I had about too-long meetings? Nahh. We were out in a crisp 2:35.
City Council Committee of the Whole
Alarm Fees
(15 min) We have not been recovering our full costs when officers have to make a call. In addition to adjusting our rates to achieve better cost recovery, we’re also switching to a new 3rd party. The City provided me with a copy of the report we’ve been getting. Their collection rate was not very good and neither was the data. This was one of those boring process wins that make my heart sing.
Middle Housing
(45 min) The was looking like another win. The City recommended a simplified model for everything from 1,200 sq ft. ADUs up to a quadplex – and, And, AND suggested following a model adopted by Kent which allows for as many units as the land will allow based on geometry. That word was actually used. Wooah, I started gettin’ giddy, there. 😀
But so long as the connections to grid are OK, it’s really true. This aerial graphic illustrated it really well, I thought.
My only concern – which is suggested on one of the diagrams – was maybe to limit the number of ADUs on very large parcels, in order to encourage cottage housing.
I want to note something the Planning Director mentioned that really matters about Land Use. According to King County 2021 “there is very little undeveloped land in Des Moines.” Well, yes and no. The stat reads
3,696 properties between 3,000 – 10,000 sq ft.
2,392 properties > 10,000 sq ft.
No matter how ya slice it, there are several thousand properties that can comfortably provide another living space. If we maintain our spacing/setback requirements, this should present no problem for neighbourhoods.
We will conclude the item next week, by deciding on Parking, because the State has a deadline. The City favours adopting the 2027 State mandate now, and I agree. My only teeny, tiny concern has to do with the conflict between reduced parking requirements and on-street parking and possible environmental impacts. The City has an interest in making sure there are no unintended consequences as to loss of tree canopy, or perhaps cars moving on the street (or on people’s lawns.)
From the dais, I complimented staff on the presentation, which was outstanding, and the default options, feel right. These are always good signs. It is the will of the State to not only add options, but to streamline the process. So why not make our process as simple as possible? 🙂
But here’s the thing: this entire deal is a beta test. There is simply no way to know ahead of time what the effects of this will be because there are simply too many variables – including how many residents will take advantage of this. I have the easy part – voting for a very noble purpose. 😀 It is our staff and residents who will have to figure out what all that means.
City Council Study Session
City Logo
(40 min) I did not care. I do not care. But this was our third discussion on this and still we were not done?
Comprehensive Plan Chapters
(60 min) Discussions for Economic Development and three neighbourhoods:
North Central
Marina District
Pacific Ridge
Most of my comments were rhetorical.
I asked about this thing called the Innovation District – which is currently the row of homes on the south side of 216th from the Activity Center east to 24th. As these buildings are sold, they use case will change, which was, until last year, Business Park. But in one of his last proposals, our last City Manager talked up an Innovation District. I had no idea what it means either.
I also asked about some language in the Marina District which has never been clear as to a bike path. If you recall, the City used to make much of having bike paths through the center of the City from Highline College north and ultimately connecting to the Des Moines Creek Trail – which would ultimately give one access all the way out to Woodinville.
We used to take weekend trips from Shilshole to Woodinville and a trail bike ride – especially along Lake Washington – it is one of the great family/couples trips imaginable.
Given the recent decision to give up the WSDOT Surplus along Barnes Creek, the only (sorry) path forward connecting the trail near Des Moines Elementary to the DMCT will need to go through the Marina – which was part of the original Marina Redevelopment plan. I do not want to take that for granted again.
In Pacific Ridge, I made a rhetorical comment about wanting another play space. Midway Park has made huge leaps from its humble beginnings as a Community Garden. But 30th Avenue is looooong –Â far too long to serve the needs of all the apartment buildings south. Councilmember Mahoney mentioned that the area is zoned for the tallest, highest density in Des Moines. True. And seemed to feel that every foot of available space should be allocated to accommodate more housing. That sounds very noble, except for this… Ya know what ya call tall, high density apartment buildings near transit without high quality parks?
The Projects.
Every parent with a child deserves to be within convenient stroller distance of a high quality play space.
You never notice what isn’t on an agenda, but it should be striking to people that we did not include a discussion of Highline College. Given the upcoming Light Rail Station and all the energy in the area this seems like a huge miss. That area could/should become the real hub of activity in Des Moines. Hopefully the next Council (there will be at least two new members) will start looking there for opportunities.
Logo (Coda)
(5 min) Since we were wrapping up so early, the Mayor suggested we go back to the logo. Behind the scenes, a staff member had been twiddling away to generate new previews based on the discussion. Which yielded four new possibilities.
Remember where I said that I do not care? At the first opportunity, I cast the deciding vote and end the suffer… er…. make the one at top left our new official logo.
I have two points to make here.
Here is the original recommendation from the designer. (If these look skewed differently they’re the same. That’s a problem with web/print.) If you compare that with the logo we decided upon, you may need to blink to notice the differences. We had three meetings on this, hours of time, not to mention the designer’s time. I also want to mention that we spent an equal amount of time last November arriving at essentially the same Mission Statement we already had from 2018.
There should be more than one lesson there.
The time and money we’ve wasted on these are Animal Control Money.
Road money. Technician money. It’s not just those wacky Councilmembers goofing around on Channel 21. The reason it’s so easy to waste this money is because we do not think about as real.
Here’s the sign as youenter the Marina. I assume it was paid out of some Marina fund.
Here’s the jib, flaggy thing that forms the ‘gateway’ to the City at 216th and KDM. Back in 2010ish that version of the City Council spent ages deciding on it.
Now look at the new Redondo restroom. Which says Redondo. Not Des Moines. We paid $2.6 million dollars for that thing and nowhere is there an indication that you are using a toilet in Des Moines. Waterland City.
Then there’s the new logo – which came out of a Communications budget – left over from when we had a Communications Director. I think that fits broadly under the City Manager Budget.
And it hit me – that is why there is no consistency. ACCOUNTING! 😀
Separate bags o’ money from different departments. Each department brought forward its own decision, or that version of the Council saw it as a fresh opportunity to ‘get creative’. There was never any review for consistency because it’s not a built-in process.
Look at an agenda item. Any item will do. The opening has a section with Clearances. Each relevant department initials that they’ve reviewed and cleared the item.
Know what option is missing? Brand Governance. In a for realz company, everything, and I do mean everything, requires a sign-off from some person we used to jokingly refer to as the 2Style Council. If you want to maintain consistency, your organisation has to make sure that you have a Brand Officer who must sign-off, like legal, finance, engineering, etc. before it can get voted on.
You can develop a new logo, t-shirts, etc. You can hire a web guy and try to wrangle digital and print. But until the City makes this a discipline, it’s impossible.
And that leads me to my last point. The other reason people waste money on this is because there is no serious interest in value. I guess you can sell t-shirts. Cool. But until you can quantify how much money we spend on this stuff, it will never strike people as real money. It will simply be a sign we paid somebody at the Marina, a sign we paid another guy in Redondo, a sign we paid another guy on 216th, and a guy we paid to design a new logo. There’s no actual value.
1For noobs, we bundle construction taxes in with ‘sales tax’ which I know implies the (relatively) steady stream of taxes one expects from retail. As we’ve learned, construction is extremely variable.
2We had an employee that really liked 80’s Brit soul. ABC, Human League, Boy George, Wham, you get the idea.
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
I want to acknowledge the passing of Pope Francis, not just as a practicing Roman Catholic and a member of St. Philomena since before the 1Reformation. Since you are statistically not Catholic, my observation is the church is extremely misunderstood. It is 1.4 billion (with a ‘b’) people and a massive bureaucracy that does not respond to ‘executive orders’. He was routinely referred to as a ‘heretic’ and ‘apostate’ – by his own Cardinals. In short, the church is like American politics, except many times larger – a super-tanker that changes direction on a time scale measured in generations. That’s not a cop out.
However, there are also large factions – millions of people in fact – that argue and protest and take risks for positive change with a courage unthinkable in modern American politics. Whenever I lose patience, which happens, oh… every couple of hours or so… I try to bear in mind the level of commitment it takes to effect real change in a system so massive and ancient.
And I believe Pope Francis worked very hard to move that super-tanker, a bit faster, towards a better direction.
Traffic Calming Web Site Launched
As part of his update, DPW Slevin announced that the City’ Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program web site was now on line. Not to oversell this, we already have five projects booked this year and there are limits to capacity. But you should definitely put your street on the list and get your concern evaluated. Making this process more transparent is a very good step forward.
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. I keep posting this because it’s only taken 50 years, so you can be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. But as you drive down 24th Ave you’ll notice that the exit onto I-5 is nearing completion. This is happening. Learn more here:
No recipe? Scandoloso! But a good essay on the challenges we’re facing with Animal Control. Also a Des Moines Youth Summit at Why Not You Academy on Saturday May 3rd, I need to get more details on. But if you have a middle or high school student, hope you can attend.
The City is now offering an e-mail sign up for City Manager Reports – which I strongly encourage.
It’s also giving the Mayor her own separate e-mail sign up – which I do not support. That is no reflection on any mayor. There should be only one communication channel for the City and it should be the City Manager’s Weekly Updates — which continue to be great. Anything else is just politics and should not be supported by the City.
Regardless, you should run. Don’t be the person who only runs when a seat seems uncontested. All four seats are totally winnable. And frankly, with a few notable exceptions, seats that are unopposed tend to yield poor outcomes.
A campaign is part of the practice that helps candidates be good at the job.
But first, you should find out what yer getting yerself into. Start by going to King County Elections and look at the Candidate Manual. Above all? Do. Not. Be. Intimidated. But please do study. 🙂 And let me know if you have questions.
I have to hand it to the new Governor, apparently new property tax increases are off the table this year. However, a couple of other bills are in play – including one to raise the sales tax by .01 in order to fund public safety.
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant 3changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
This is our second Committee of the Whole/Study Session combo-platter. I’m starting to have a tiny twinge about doing too much decision making during too-long meetings – without real votes (only ‘head nods’.
City Council Committee of the Whole
False Alarm costs. This is a necessary adjustment as we have not been recovering our full costs when officers have to make a call.
Middle Housing. The City seems to be recommending a simplified model for everything from 1,200 sq ft. ADUs up to a quadplex.
If I had to re-do my original choice, I would’ve probably gone for up to 1,500 sq ft. Why authorise an ADU as big as many single-family homes? Not sure. I want to check on the viability of splits. As I wrote, I took a SFH to duplex and then, years later, back to SFH. My guess is that, in the future, owners will want flexibility in subdividing their ADUs. So many questions. 🙂
We will likely greatly reduce parking requirements now in advance of a state law that will take effect in 2027 and do it for us anyhoo. I generally support this, however, the risk of moving more cars on-street is very real.
I’m also interested that we maintain or even improve environmental standards (eg. trees).
City Council Study Session
City Logo. I. Do. Not. Care. 😀
Comprehensive Plan Chapter. Discussions for Economic Development and three neighbourhoods:
North Central
Marina District
Pacific Ridge
Yes, it sounds callous, but I’m not sure how much I care about this either. Keep saying it, but comp plans are soooooooooo much work. And I am never sure what difference they make. Not being snippy. But this is one of those (cough) 2‘DOGE’ things. The process should be much easier for cities.
Port of Seattle Meeting (Agenda) As expected, the Port is now generating more than $1B a year in revenue. The numbers were a bit softer than they would like – but this is very temporary. I attended to protest the closure of the StART meeting to the public. Full coverage from Sea-Tac Noise.Info here.
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When people ask me why I follow the airport so assiduously? Beyond all the various negative impacts, another important answer is the same as Willie Sutton – because that’s where the money is.
Since I’ve lived here, the City has always needed more money, girlfriend. Like a lot of money. What has been frustrating to me as a member of the City Council is how not seriously we’ve taken issues like the airport; and also that lack of moolah.
I am glad the City has recently engaged in some belt-tightening (typical) and is now moving ahead with a better financial analysis (atypical). But it’s just not going to be enough. My fear in doing the Steps, Redondo Fishing Pier and the Ferry Pilot jazz was, as always, it created a false set of expectations. People always assumed we could afford this stuff. ‘Dress for success’ is the phrase, I believe.
The challenge has always been to get the City to look to our very large neighbour to the north – which is actually much easier than hoping and praying for real help from the State of WA. It’s also more just. The Port can well afford to help fix at least some of the problems they caused.
Wednesday
StART Meeting: As I said, this was the first meeting that was closed to the public. And that should not make you happy if you care about all the noise, pollution, etc., etc., etc… The City Manager gave a council summary, however, it did not include the most important answer: Why? Why was the meeting closed.
Spring – when a city’s fancy turns to meetings under 1:30. 😀 City Manager Caffrey was AWOL. Again! Apparently some ‘parenting’ thing involving guitar. In my day kids weren’t allowed to touch a guitar until they became sullen teenagers. Harumph. Fortunately, there were no decisions to be made, and once again Assistant City Manager Johnson-Newton sat in our version of the big chair.
One note: this is the first time in my tenure (or anyone’s recent tenure) where the City delivered some of the ‘last minute’ presentations in advance of the meeting. That alone was worth a hall pass.
Annual State of the Court Address
This was an excellent presentation. The Judge mentioned a lack of interpreters in uncommon languages and I asked her for some examples. I (naively) expected something I had actually heard of. 😀 I thought she might be kidding, so I looked up Marshallese on my computer. Go do that right now. Wow.
My only grouse is that I wish the pie charts came with numbers rather than slices because they are a bit misleading. The 2024 pie is totally overwhelmed by activity with the new parking zone – making it hard to notice that certain issues – like criminal cases are actually up. That doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘crime’ is up. But it does mean that her team’s workload is up.
This is also well worth looking at. Director Slevin’s group does much of the nuts and bolts stuff I think of when I think ‘city’. Roads, water, park maintenance, vehicles. I made a joke about it reminded me of a 4clown car. If you walk by the engineering building it always looks super-tiny relative to all the staff and services it provides.
Nominally, we’ve always had an ‘environment committee’ – it’s the one committee that has persisted over the decades. But ‘park maintenance’ ‘trees’ ‘storm water’ were all handled by separate workgroups. This always bugged me because I think of them as one ‘environment‘ thing. I bet you do, too. Slevin was previously Director of Environmental Services in Tacoma. It’s obvious that this is a direction the City wants to head and one I am very excited to see.
Sexual Assault Awareness MonthSouth Sound Boating Season Opening Day
Laborers LiUNA Local 242 Day Proclamation
I went to trade school; not high school. Back then it was an almost 2totally ‘guy’ thing. By a circuitous route, I ended up going to university. But the hands on learning approach worked for me. Over the decades, many jobs I’ve worked in have achieved gender parity. But it’s been super-lumpy. Some careers have barely moved the needle.
Skilled trades pay. They offer tremendous satisfaction. There are very few I can think of that only ‘a guy’ can do. And I always wonder what we, at the City, in the school districts should be doing to help move that needle.
Saturday, April 26
SR3 Open House. This generally happens only once a year so you should do it. But maybe get there early.
3I call these changes more than new because, for the most part, when a ‘new’ restaurant opens, it’s taking over from an existing place.
4OK, old people. Back when there were actual circuses, an old VW Beetle would drive across the ring and an impossibly large number of clowns would emerge. What can I say? We didn’t have the MCU.
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
There have been more restaurant changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
10:00am Waterfront Farmers Market seasoning opening at the Des Moines Marina. Of course. 🙂
Members of the American Legion, Des Moines Memorial Drive Preservation Association, and City of Des Moines Director of Public Works Michael Slevin (Retired, US Army) raise the flag for the first time on the new pole at the Memorial Flag Triangle Ribbon Cutting.And I hope you note, in particular the Des Moines Memorial Drive Perservation Association‘s plaque – with brick work from the original road.
Port Commission Meeting (Agenda) The Commissioners heard all about StART. What should matter to you is the chronic information desert. The Commissioners are usually in the dark about basically everything to do with the airport community issues. But one could say the same about the Burien Airport Committee (see below). What they finally seem to have keyed in on is the fact that StART was never a ‘community’ round table. It was organised by the former airport director in concert with City Administrators. Good, bad, or indifferent, that policy has led to much of the frustration concerning what StART is and what it can do. The fact is, former airport director Lyttle sold the idea in 2018, it sounded great, and the Commission let him run with it. If it takes the Commission seven years to respond to even this basic community concern, that does not bode well for the entire model.
2:30PM Highline Forum (Agenda) Burien City Hall. Surprisingly, there as another annual report on StART. 😀 But there was also a fascinating economic update from the Port on all the economic grants it provides to our six cities, and updates from other cities – including SeaTac discussing its intent to purchase over 95% of North SeaTac Park (213 acres). Complete transcript and presentations here, totally worth reading.
1Miss Information returns! I’ve been saying ‘three cents’ for a while now, but that was wrong. The reality is that the City keeps far less because the ‘local’ portion of the sales tax (the three cents) is actually shared with other special districts. In fact, we keep about a penny. I’ve avoided going further in the past because, frankly, this is already more ‘into the weeds’ than most people ever want to dive. But to her credit, our new City Manager has begun speaking openly about it.
Overview
