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.
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.
Most of you are familiar with the South King Media news sites, Waterland Blog, Seatac Blog, B-Town Blog. However, if you are interested in Highline Schools, the place to go is Burien.News. They provide the only regular coverage of Highline Schools, with deep dive articles on academic performance, budgets, and all the things parents (and taxpayers) should care about.
Highline School Board, April 2025: Stephanie Tidholm, Angelica Alvarez, Joe Van, Damarys Espinoza, Blaine Holien (c) Burien.News
This is not an endorsement. Every local news source has pluses and minuses – including some serious biases. And you can’t expect any micro-blog to cover everything.
The Governor’s proposed budget cuts the $1 million in funding that was secured last for fixing failed port packages, which were meant to insulate homes from airport noise but have deteriorated over time. Please mail key these legislators and let them know how important this funding is for our communities.
The City Manager’s Report April 18, 2025 is back. It features a lasagna cupcake recipe and an update on construction projects at the Fieldhouse and 24th Ave.
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. The worst outcome would be, as has often be the case, that any seat does not have a vigorous campaign. Why? Because, whether you like the candidate or not, running a campaign is how candidates gain experience. That’s the dirty little secret of City Council. Regardless of how much time they’ve spent in other aspects of civic life, new electeds usually have no idea what they’re doing for the first few years.
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.
216th/Barnes Creek Staging Area
There’s been this container sitting at the back of the 216th/Barnes Creek Trail parking lot for over a year. And then suddenly, other trucks and equipment began showing up. Given the concerns over Des Moines Creek West and the recent sale of the adjoining WSDOT surplus property, this causes concerns. Allay your concerns. 😀
The spot is currently being used as a staging area for several current projects this summer, including the Des Moines Memorial Drive storm water replacement and SR-509. Nothing you don’t know about. The silt fence is actually a good thing – part of making sure it meets environmental code. 🙂
Do I wish we had put up a sign explaining this? Yes. Yes, I do. Because I get asked a lot. Like – a lot, a lot. 😀 If you have questions, please contact Public Works Director Mike Slevin.
As I’ve written before, the State is moving ahead with several proposals to raise taxes – including property taxes. The one most likely to pass will allow city councils to raise the property tax cap from 1% to 3% – every year, not just one year – without you getting a vote. Unfortunately, as usual, all the appetite people seem to have for politics at the moment is at the Federal level. I get it.
Port of Seattle Meeting (Agenda) The Port will receive it’s Q4 Financial Reports. They are showing slight amounts of red ink. Don’t believe it. This is due entirely to an almost $1B legal settlement over the International Arrivals Facility, which they are budgeting in time payments (must be nice 😀 ). Short explanation: they made the gates too small to accommodate newer (larger) aircraft and tried to blame the mistake on the contractor. Oopsies.
Wednesday
StART Meeting: As I said, this is the first meeting that is closed to the public. And that should not make you happy if you care about all the noise, pollution, etc., etc., etc…
Annual State of the Court Address, covers court operations, performance metrics, and key initiatives undertaken over the past year.
The Public Works department will provide an overview of current projects, maintenance activities, and service delivery updates.
And, there will be not one, not two, but three proclamations: South Sound Boating Season Opening Day Proclamation, Sexual Assault Awareness Month Proclamation, Laborers LiUNA Local 242 Day Proclamation
The zero dollar logo I’d hoped we’d choose. 🙂
Whenever we have a ‘light load’ like this, some of my colleagues consider it a breather. I do not. We’ve just gone through a flurry of meetings with ultra-packed agenda. It begs the question: do you prefer having a series of meetings with gale force winds, punctuated by the occasional dead air, or would you prefer to have important issues spread evenly across each meeting, like a calm, steady 6-8 knots of wind?Kinda like this little guy – Sailin’ with pride, baby. 😀 That’s what I mean by ‘load balancing’. People make better decisions with more balanced work loads.
Saturday, April 26
SR3 Open House. This generally happens only once a year so you should do it. But maybe get there early.
Not Des Moines, but I attended one of the best ‘student’ concerts I can recall at the Key To Change Studios main campus in Renton. Key To Change offers string education for kids and recently opened a branch in Des Moines across from Mt. Rainier High School. The recital featured one of their success stories – a former student now working towards her PhD at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory. I’m not saying your kid will learn how to get to 1Carnegie Hall, but parents always appreciate knowing that the programs they enroll in have a track record of success. I look forward to Key To Change concerts here in the near future. 🙂
Wednesday
King County Regional Transit Committee (Agenda). We received briefings on two big issues: Public safety, and ADA.
Broadly speaking, incidents have increased slightly on the A-Line. However, each main line, including the A-Line, cover a whole lotta territory. Several of us asked for more granular stats.
WRT accessibility, Metro will be conducting a community outreach campaign to find out how to make it easier for people with accessibility issues to use the buses. Residents from Adriana, Wesley, Judson, et. al. will need to weigh in on this given that you represent our largest share of ridership with special needs. As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. 🙂
Thursday – Sunday
The remainder of the week, I also attended several Easter-adjacent events – including playing organ for one Mass. I haven’t done this in a couple of years, and it was good to know that I could still find the on/off switch. What makes this type of performance so unique is not the sacral nature of the event. It’s that, no matter how you do? No walkouts. 😀
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.
The Governor’s proposed budget cuts the $1 million in funding that was secured last for fixing failed port packages, which were meant to insulate homes from airport noise but have deteriorated over time. Please mail key these legislators and let them know how important this funding is for our communities.
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.
City Manager Caffrey is away on holidays this week. As of press time there is no new recipe… er… City Manager’s Report. 🙂
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.
Airport Committee
Sign up for the Airport Advisory Committee. We keep putting this off and the clock is ticking on important aspects of airport expansion.
Dueling Taxes
As I wrote, the State is moving ahead with several proposals to raise taxes. As always: I’m not ‘anti-tax’. But there are so many, it becomes a blur. And the ones that affect Des Moines (specifically property and sales tax) are not getting much attention. At the March 31, 2025 state hearing on SB5798 (concerning raising the 1% property tax cap to 3% or more) 43,153 people signed in against – about 95%. This was a record. Watch Senate Ways & Means – TVW SB798
Last week Mayor Buxton, along with many local governments, testified on behalf of the (slightly different) House companion bill HB2049 – which is billed as ‘education funding’ but which is really, the same type of property tax increase.
At our last meeting, my colleagues spent several minutes bemoaning possible King County tax increases. Finger prints! Parks! Waste water! Solid waste! Where will it all end!?!?!? And yet, the Council has had no problem supporting multiple pieces of state legislation to raise your property taxes by a lot more.
Most of these county proposals are not new taxes, but rather renewing worthy existing programs (like the automated fingerprint system you are voting on this week.) The ballots make it clear what they are proposing and they give us all a public vote.
Voters expect to (wait for it) have a vote on issues that affect their property taxes. And more than that, I am concerned that the Council took the wrong lessons from the Prop #1 vote. It is not, Not, NOT that the public has ‘tax fatigue’. It’s that the public did not trust our Council at that moment in time.
I’m homping on this because I have never known Des Moines voters to be anything but generous when it comes to tax votes – so long as they feel they are receiving value for money. Even today, we routinely approve fire levies, school levies, county levies. So long as the public perceives the value, we tend to vote ‘yes’. In my experience a ‘no’ is simply voters telling you to make a better case.
This Week
There is no City Council meeting this week. I am taking a few days off in conjunction with my fave time of the year – Passover (which began on Saturday) and Easter (next Sunday). But – if you wanna share your thoughts on finding the Afikomen, what’s so ‘good’ about Good Friday, or even something to do with ADUs and potholes? I’m there for ya… (206) 878-0578.
Last Week
Tuesday
Port of Seattle Commission (Agenda) The highlight for us was a presentation on the various Economic Development Grants the Port dishes out every year. Those grants are funded through our property taxes and Des Moines only gets about $30k. In the past, three of those grants went for previous versions of Marina Redevelopment that went nowhere. My interest is in understanding how this new grant will be used in the three areas specified.
These economic development grants have been a terrible deal for most airport communities. Our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info wrote a really good article on this which is a must-read.
Wednesday
King County Emergency Management Advisory Committee: We did a tabletop exercise where there was a big street protest during a FIFA game.
Look, who doesn’t enjoy major disaster cosplay? 😀 That’s the attitude I have when I walk into some of these. I usually think they will have no applicability for Des Moines. And I am always wrong.
If yer a soccer fan, at an international event, you won’t necessarily see ‘people from all over the world!’ You’re likely to see hundreds of rabid supporters from one place, supporting one team. Wherever you have hundreds of rabid football fans from out of town, ‘stuff’ can happen. And the stadium is right next to Light Rail. So, the consensus seemed to be that it would be a good idea to have flyers at each match in the language of the teams. And also try to have at least a few people in Des Moines available who speaka zeee langweeedge.
Every meeting seems to have a theme and for me this one was “we’re not serious.” Recap below.
Friday
I had the honour of touring the new Puget Sound Clean Air Agency Air Quality Monitoring Site at North Sea-Tac Park. This is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge deal. Read about it at Sea-Tac Noise.Info.
Fingers crossed, we might have our own version of this in a few months! Having proper air quality monitoring – something we’ve been trying to get to for almost a decade – is a key step towards regulating aviation emissions!
There was a public comment from Christina Blocker of Elevate Black Wellness in Tacoma, who received the Black Wellness Week Proclamation.
My interest in the issue comes from the concept of weathering. A ton of studies have documented the prevalence of any number of chronic health conditions among African Americans – especially women. When people wonder what ‘structural racism’ means in daily life, this is it. My in-laws warned me years ago about a cumulative stress that Black people experience, that I never will. It’s the extra bit of stress in any number of contexts. You slough it off, but as the years go by, it takes a toll.
Consent Agenda
Long Range Financial Planning study. The company we chose, FCS has worked with the City for years. I reviewed their work in doing a rate study for our Surface Water Management fund. Although I have no objection in this case, I always think it’s worth noting that service contracts are not subject to competitive bids. And in the past, not doing so has yielded (cough) ‘mixed results’.
Drone Show. Speaking of competitive bids, even knowing it was a lost cause I pulled this for a separate vote. Why? Because the product has been mediocre. Sorry. You know it. I know it. It may have been OK to use one vendor at first. But there is a lot of competition now.We did not even seek out alternatives. Instead, we accepted a $10k discount in exchange for a further two year commitment. We could also save $40,000 by going back to pyro – which is (sorry) still a superior value.
This goes beyond sloppiness. The Lodging Tax Advisory Committee, which is supposed to provide a plan for spending this money does not bother to record minutes, or even provide documentation of the spending. Which came in handy because in 2024 the Council never approved the contract – as required by law. Because the City never brought it to the dais. Not. Cool. Approved 6-1.
Regardless of where a Fund’s comes from it is all your money and should all be spent well. City funding is kept in separate cookie jars called Funds – usually indicated by where the money comes from. But whenever anyone tells you that each fund is so separate that it cannot be moved around as needed, you should walk away and then spit in their eye. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Your call.
For example, the Sixgill Shark thingee below will be funded from the Storm Water Management Fund – which is a tax you pay for to maintain your drains. The rationale is that it is also appropriate to spend a few bucks every year educating the public on the importance of not polluting the storm water – and 1ultimately harming Sixgill Sharks.
In the case of a drone show, the money does come from our Lodging Tax – a small tax paid for by hotel guests. No, we cannot use that directly for something like ‘Animal Control’ as one of my colleagues scoffed. However, one can also take that same Lodging Tax money and use it to fund any number of other City items we currently pay for out of the General Fund. Which frees up $80,000 for… animal control. Get it?
This is not some complex ‘financial instrument’ requiring a 2math degree from MIT to understand. Paying money from one account to free up money in another is called Normal. Corporate. Accounting.
And anyone who uses arguments like 3“It’s impossible” or “Hey, it didn’t come out of your property taxes, so quit yapping!” either don’t know what they are talking about, or they want you to believe it’s OK to make bad purchases.
City Presentations
Since Katherine Caffrey was away, the City was represented by Assistant City Manager (ACM) Adrienne Newton-Johnson. ‘A.J.’ has been ACM for several years. She informed me this was not her first time in the big chair – as I had suggested last week. Mea culpa.
The State of the Court presentation from Judge Leone was postponed without explanation.
There was a 30 second presentation on the as yet unformed Airport Committee. We were not offered a chance to ask questions and if I had it would have been to check that the application on the web site matches what the Council approved. (It has been updated. Apply here.)
We concluded the discussion of ADUs (see below).
Accessory Dwelling Units
All this is driven by one of those danged state laws: HB1337-2023. The state is forcing us make it easier to build ADUs. Bastahds! 😀
But every resident I know with sufficient land, has considered this and often we’ve made it too hard. Many are aging out, so the most obvious use case is a multi-generational ‘compound’ to allow families to age in place. We should encourage this.
I’ve been through both sides of this: converting a house into a duplex, and then a duplex into a house. Oi. It has always been complicated. IÂ thought a big problem would be engineering (water handling, electricity) and connections to utilities. Apparently, not.
But the entire discussion mentioned ‘developers’. As horrifying as it may sound to some, a major use case has to be less experienced people. If the process isn’t made easier, it will be less successful than it should be. Or to put it as a neighbour told me: “If it costs me as much to build an ADU as it does to build a full-size house, no way I’m doing that.” Exactly. The building has to be less expensive and the building process has to be less expensive.
During the discussion I kept using the word ‘geometry’ because as time goes by I’m seeing ‘zoning’ as less relevant than simply providing adequate space ( ‘set backs’) and making it as simple as possible to obtain connectivity. In other words, the plan itself should determine what is appropriate.
Parking also came up. Some of us want to maintain parking requirements (a parking space for each unit.) I don’t. If we’re sincere about ‘getting people out of their cars’ we have to provide those options. But at the same time, we also have to be willing to discuss what that really means. For me, exploring parking permits on certain streets makes sense, but again, I know that horrifies some. Not me. I have personal experience and when it’s well-managed, it generates local revenue and helps reduce crime.
I keep asking dumb questions about manufactured housing. The build quality is often superior, but apparently, there isn’t some ‘seal of approval’ to make it easy for the City to know that a particular vendor’s products will work well here.
Anyhoo, I think the City will be bringing back some draft proposals to offer up to four units, a 1,200 sq ft. max for an ADU, and more flexible parking options.
Sixgill Sharks
A Sixgill Shark proposal passed 6-1. I was the ‘one’. 😀 However the decorative signage – which was the original idea we approved – was removed. That’s fine with me because, as I’ve written before, these signs have not exactly been game changers. That leaves the thing as some vague $10,000 ‘education event’, funded from the SWM Fund, to be held on July 6, 2025.
Why I voted no? At about 3pm the day of the meeting, new DPW Mike Slevin sent an email describing an education program he had worked on in Tacoma. Check this video. Can this guy sell water quality or what? 😀
I made a motion (which went straight to nowheresville) to approve the entire proposal but to postpone it. Why? Because this concept deserves better.
Frankly, the Mayor spoke for the Council saying that the idea was essentially checking a box. We are required to do education events – like Stormfest. These are fine, but they rarely bring in as many people as they should! The Council was being asked to spend up to $10,000 on an event that could (should) be a big deal. This video provides a great model – on a platter. But by scheduling it on the same weekend as two other big events – and not offering nearly enough time for planning – we’re betraying how little we really care about becoming a ‘Destination’. Currently we can afford to do very few events, and, as with the drone show, everything we spend money on should be done well. There are cities in the region, with fewer natural wonders than us, which do draw people throughout the year – and we should start noticing how much more seriously they take this stuff.
1It’s a real stretch, I know. But the State of Washington says it’s perfectly appropriate to spend SWM dollars on education programs. They don’t have to actually make sense. 🙂
2I have a gift card for the person who tells me what’s wrong with this GIF.
3I hate being ‘that guy’, but we have to stop hiding behind this kind of fol de rol. If the Council wants a drone show? Just say so.
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.
King County Metro is re-instating fare inspection on buses. There will be teams of two individuals who will (gently) help people make payments. If you recall, this was put on hold during COVID.
The Governor’s proposed budget cuts the $1 million in funding that was secured last for fixing failed port packages, which were meant to insulate homes from airport noise but have deteriorated over time. Please mail key these legislators and let them know how important this funding is for our communities.
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.
City Manager’s Report April 4, 2025 In addition to the usual, excellent information, this week’s report features a highly promising Vegetable Lasagna. I also want you to notice the current city logo, since the Council voted on something new (below.)
Run for City Council
The City Manager’s report also notes that this is election season. These four seats up for election on our Council. You should run. But first, you should find out what yer getting yerself into.
Monday, April 7 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Register for the April 7 session
You should also go 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.
Special Requirements in accordance with RCW 41.12.030:
Must be a U.S. citizen, a resident of the City of Des Moines for at least three (3) years immediately preceding the appointment, and a registered voter. Commission members are appointed by the City Manager and serve for a six (6) year term.
Dueling Taxes
As I wrote, the State is moving ahead with several proposals to raise taxes. As always: I’m not ‘anti-tax’. But there are so many, it becomes a blue, and the ones that affect Des Moines (specifically property and sales tax) are not getting much attention.
At the March 31, 2025 state hearing on SB5798 (concerning raising the 1% property tax cap to 3% or more) 43,153 people signed in against – about 95%. This was a record.
And last Thursday, Mayor Buxton, along with many local governments, testified on behalf of the (slightly different) House companion bill HB2049 – which is billed as ‘education funding’ but which is really, a property tax increase. The blizzard of new taxes is quite something given the record spending of just last year.
This Week
Tuesday
Port of Seattle Commission (Agenda) The highlight for us is a presentation on the various Economic Development Grants the Port dishes out every year. These grants are funded through our property taxes. Des Moines typically gets only about $30k — and there is a 50% match. In the past, three of those grants went for previous versions of Marina Redevelopment that went nowhere. My interest is in understanding how this new grant will be used in the three areas specified.
City Manager Caffrey will be away on holidays. The City will be represented by Assistant City Manager Adrienne Newton-Johnson. ‘A.J.’ has been ACM for several years, but this may be her first time in the big chair? High time. 🙂
Highlights:
There will be a State of the Court presentation from Judge Leone that is always very informative.
There will be a presentation on the as yet unformed Airport Committee.
We will continue the discussion of ADUs (see below).
We’ll vote to approve the Long Range Financial Planning Study thingee (see below).
The Sixgill Shark proposal is formalised. Unfortunately, the price tag is $10,000. At the first meeting we were told something much smaller and I’m not feeling great. (But to be clear: whenever anyone mentions a street sign? Start thinking $10k. It’s amazing how much everything – including a street sign, can cost. See below on traffic calming.)
We will vote to approve a Drone Show. I always vote ‘no’ and why stop now? The drone count is listed as 200 – which has not exactly gotten rave reviews the past two years. And the packet contains no pre-design, so I have no idea if this year’s presentation could be any better. I had hoped to get the City to look at some other area shows before re-upping with this company, but there just hasn’t been enough time.
When residents voted down Prop #1 twice it was more of a trust thing than a tax thing. I do not think the City, or the Council, have internalised that. We did some painful cuts to essential services. But I have yet to see sincere efforts to dial back on the ‘fluff’. Drones are 2x the cost of conventional fireworks. Promoting Sixgill Sharks is a lot easier for me at $2,000 than $10,000. We spent $75k on a communication study in 2023, thousands of dollars revamping our Mission Statement, and now our Logo, only to circle back to where we were years ago. I see this as a variant of that old saw …a billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
I am totally on board with all worthy marketing efforts that are part of a strategic plan. But we approve many things we cannot afford, essentially on impulse, because they’re fun and they’re ‘only’ (x) thousand dollars. And if you question it? Surely, you aren’t against saving endangered sharks, councilmember! (You mean the sharks that are super-cool for divers to experience, but which exist in basically every ocean of the world, and are in no way endangered? 🙂 )
Look, would you rather have a drone show or animal control? That’s the kind of choice we are making that people do not seem willing to accept.
And the really frustrating thing, is that by making these frivolous choices, we make it even harder to get to where we actually can afford these things.
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Last Week
Every week seems to have a ‘theme’. And last week’s was ‘not enough time’.
I hate reviewing these things but they hold a lot of the odd fascination that got me attemdomg meetings in 2008. 😀
Communication IÂ – there continues to be a ton of interest in ‘communication’. Here’s one irony: The City does not promote the Citizens Advisory Committee meetings. Like at all. I practically have beg to find out when they’ll occur or if they’ll be live-streamed or recorded. How on earth do we expect to get more people involved in civic life if we don’t show them what it’s like?
Communication IIÂ – Check This Out!It’s my attempt to automate grabbing the video of the meeting, creating a transcript I can skim through, and a summary (ie. ‘minutes’.) I keep fooling around with AIs – not like some ‘coder’, but like any retiree fooling around with the remote control. I’ve got the process down to 15 minutes. My goal is to get to 3 minutes very soon.
Why this matters? People are always grousing about ‘misinformation’. Very few people spend two hours watching anything. When the Waterland Blog or a resident – or even our new City Manager – watches any meeting they’re only seeing a portion of what is really going on – a lot of which requires context. Which almost no one has. This is extremely awkward. It sounds totally condescending to tell someone that, because they moved here in 2018 they don’t know that ‘we already tried that!’ 😀
One person at the meeting suggested created some form of catalog of information. That is exactly what I’ve been trying to get the Council to create since my election – a database of information that electeds and city officials can search through to find the context.
People don’t seem to get it. This entire web site isn’t so much my opinions. It’s mainly my ‘catalogue’. It’s how I research all the ‘junk’ I’ve studied up on since 2008.
Use us! A common theme at these meetings is that people feel under-utilised. The challenge for me is that members seem to have very different ideas of the purposes of the CAC.
The CAC was originally created to advise the Council – as representatives of each neighbourhood. The City has provided staff to help members reach out to their neighbourhoods. My question is: how well are members communicating back? I rarely hear that sort of talk anymore and I wish I did.
Some members also want to contribute, ie. perform services. Cool. What specific tasks can this committee accomplish as a group? Staff members don’t like to say it, but they already have their hands full dealing with seven Cms! 😀
Subcommittees – the deal seems to be to have an umbrella committee with several ‘subcommittees’ performing the same functions as before (human services, arts). I thought the idea was to consolidate work? 😀 Look, if the City is not doing a great outreach, we run the risk of simply re-creating the same ‘bubbles’.
Thursday
Thursday was a big day. 🙂
Thursday: SKHHP Dashboard
This is the new Microsoft Teams Speakers Gallery. Apparently, we’re all watching a movie in the forest 😀
Councilmember Achziger joined me for a presentation by South King County Housing & Homelessness Partners on their affordable housing inventory dashboard. The group has studied the affordable housing stock in Des Moines. But the results are not public because the dashboard shows property addresses. The challenge I have is in building urgency on this. Without numbers it is hard to get people to understand that we have very few affordable places to live. And it is entirely likely that the number will decrease in the next five years.
Good news. We’re ahead on sales tax! Basically due to some construction. Construction is good, but it’s also not consistent. Still…
We won a GFOA award for budgeting, scoring 3 out of 4. This is tricky. I wanna acknowledge this, because (see next item) much of the information the Council is now getting is a lot better than it was in recent years. However, getting to a ‘4’ means improving our main documents – and there is a long way to go. And like so many things these discussions get awkward.
We discussed a draft investment policy. Which is a step up from having no investment policy. 😀 OK, that was mean. We have an investment policy. It’s decades out of date. Our finance director has been providing a lot better information on this.
We also signed off on something other committees have already discussed: a Long-Range Financial Plan and Development Impact Analysis. Ideally, I’d have preferred this be done before anything else.
Despite some initial skepticism (mainly over length), I have to admit: our first ‘Committee of the Whole’ went surprisingly well! One sample does not make a trend – and I do not think these are substitutes for committee work (see above), but this was encouraging. 🙂
Why it went well. Ahead of the meeting Ms. Caffrey did something smart – sending a memo allocating (x) minutes to each presentation. This should be standard practice at every meeting. In fact, that is standard practice in other cities. The presiding officer uses that to keep the meeting on track.
If things run out of time, they are automatically rescheduled to a future meeting. This avoids the tension of members feeling ‘cut off’ by a quick vote.
5:00pm Committee of the Whole (Inaugural)
Neighborhood Traffic Calming Procedures
Traffic Calming initial pilot program
Obviously, we’ve always done studies and performed traffic calming, but the public was unsure how to get the City’s attention. This formalises the process. There will be a sign up form at the end of the month. My comments were to provide as much information as possible and to set expectations. Just doing these speed tests take time and they are not cheap. And also this, when people are upset about traffic, the City may suggest intervention (x) but you want A ROAD BLOCK! 😀 And even after the intervention is installed, it takes a long time for people to feel the improvement. In addition to the sign-up form, I’m hoping we follow through with data, so that residents feel more confident that these interventions really work. Which they do. 🙂
Contracting Alarm Management
Chief Boe has proposed outsourcing traffic alarm fees to a contractor for a 27% fee. Since we don’t seem to be capturing a lot of fees very well, that sounds like a fine idea.
What surprised me, was the number and expense of false alarms. Apparently the City gets over 1,000 false alarm calls every year. And I guess we bill $45,000, but only collected 50-70%? I’m not sure these numbers entirely add up, but it’s worth trying. Although – what is up with all these false alarms? 😀
Accessory Dwelling Units
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, until recently, many cities, especially ours, generally found the concept of increased density about as appealing as (insert your fave dental surgery here.) Like most 1970-ish suburbs we’ve been NIMBYs – and proud of it. So, it has been hard for me to not walk into these meetings without a tiny chip on my shoulder.
However, we have a new Planning Director, a new City Manager, and most importantly, a couple of new State laws that are leaning on us to provide more housing options – including ADUs.
A lot of my questions probably seemed confusing. Essentially, we always could have allowed much more density than we do currently. In the past, the answer tended to be ‘no’. Now the answer is leaning more towards ‘yes’. How far can we extend that without creating problems? Eg. I don’t think we need to continue to offer parking spaces for each unit. But I also don’t want to push that to on-street clutter or ten vehicles on a lawn. I do want to allow for more than two units, but not if it means we can’t capture our impact fees, or create a nightmare of code requirements for builders – or our building dept.
I keep asking the City to investigate pre-permitted ADUs – which look great. I don’t know how well they are going in practice. I also have not seen much manufactured housing here. It’s totally allowable, and the build quality is often superior, so I honestly don’t get why it hasn’t gained more traction.
6:00pm Study Session
City Logo Discussion
We had four options. And of course, we were presented with a fifth option, on the fly, which the Council chose. Of course they did. Unfortunately, Choice #5 uses the same font as 2Normandy Park. Except that the Council also chose to remove ‘City of’ and ‘Washington’. And maybe the outlines (called the stroke) around the boat? So I think it’s more like this?
I tried to make the point that with the City Manager’s reports (among other things) the City has moved towards sort of a ‘theme’, which is looking a lot better (I mean a lot better). So let’s try to make whatever we do fit into that, rather than starting over. But let’s not use the same font as our next door neighbour. 🙂
I know I sound cynical. Branding does matter. I just don’t think the payback has been worth it. Every 5-10 years another Council insists on re-visiting this sort of thing because people really think the new look will do something. If you’ve lived here a while, you’ve probably stopped noticing how many different ‘themes’ we’ve had.
What should our logo be? Well, (cough) ‘obviously’ it should always have been this. Looks nice with new City Manager’s report (see example at right). Zero dollars. 🙂
Protocol manual update
We started down a long list of tweaks, primarily provided by Councilmember Grace-Matsui, Mayor Buxton, and moi. We began in that order and worked on about six of their concerns. Here are the highlights…
Second Reading. Prior to 2023, all ordinances required two readings, ie. two discussions before a final vote to become law. That changed to a single ‘touch’. Grace-Matsui proposed restoring the second reading, which I support.
End time. Currently meetings have a hard stop @ 9:00pm This is not how other governments do it. Grace-Matsui proposed ending @ 10:00pm. Buxton proposed no end time (my preference). Cm Nutting was strenuously opposed. For me it comes down to a game clock. Human beings start off every interaction ‘loose’. Unfortunately, the way our meetings work, the most important issues are often put off to the end. This creates unnecessary stress. I’d prefer no end time, but I see 10:00pm as a reasonable compromise because statistically, we’d almost never get there. Most of the time, all people need is a few extra minutes, without worrying about ‘penalty time’. It’s having to vote (beg) every damned time for ‘five more minutes, Ma!’ that seems so petty.
I have real empathy for Nutting’s position. He has a 3job, and we need to encourage more people to run for Council with careers and families. He feels strongly that meetings can finish on time with better time management. I addressed that above by scheduling each item.
However, Buxton gave a sort of ‘explanation/defense’ as to why our meeting agenda are so packed. Frankly, we’re playing catch-up on a ton of things from years ago. I’ve been saying it til I’m blue in the face – Des Moines has the same complexity as cities several times our size. The job of councilmember is no longer some ‘volunteer’ job. We’ve put off any number of issues over the years in order to reduce the ‘workload’.
If you really read this, you’ll see at least four items of business where our code is grievously out of date. We simply did not take it seriously and that is why I don’t take any of our planning documents seriously.
We’ve deferred a ton of work to City staff that should have been given a regular once-overs by the Council. We’ve developed partnerships with community organisations in an attempt to outsource tasks that should be handled by the City – and by doing so not served the entire City as equitably as we might. Basically, we’ve done everything humanly possible to make the job easier (or dumb it down depending on your POV). And in my opinion it hasn’t worked. It’s pushed a lot of stuff off into the future and it certainly hasn’t encouraged more people to run for office. It’s made people think the job doesn’t matter.
One can automate certain things – like certain rate reviews. But even that, one has to (occasionally) make sure that the ‘automation’ is working! There is simply no way to get round the fact that the gig does take and will continue to take more time and more education to do well. The era of people running for Council armed with ‘common sense’ is over.
Disclaimer. We currently require Cms to provide a series of disclaimers and disclosures concerning public communications, which Mayor Buxton suggested is kinda impractical. I agree. Although, I do have that disclaimer at the bottom of every page on this site. 🙂 One reason I do so is because I want you to know that, when you contact me, or anyone at the City (or any public agency), communications are not ‘confidential’.
Comprehensive Plan Update
We covered four chapters, which seems like a lot except that these were the easy ones. I had several fiddly comments, mainly to do with the airport policy, trees, and parks. Almost all were graciously accepted by my colleagues.
One that got unexpected push back, from Councilmember Mahoney, concerned the artificial tire reefs along our shoreline. I proposed a new line in our comp plan to support removal and restoration of these toxic tires. There are tens of thousands of them along our shores. I think we came to some agreement. The State made us create these in the 1970’s under the now discredited idea that they would create more sport fishing opportunities.Given that it was their idea, and it will cost many millions to correct, this should be an important legislative policy.
The disagreement comes over what to do. Ideally, one would not only remove the tires, one would also restore the area to what DNR calls an ‘edenic state’ – the salmon-friendly habitat that was there before all the tires. If you hoik out thousands of tire and leave giant gashes in the seabed, you’d likely make the ecosystem much worse. So the cleanup is not only a) spending an absolute fortune removing all the tires and sending them to a toxic dump site. It’s also b) spending another fortune to re-landscape the area. Underwater.
I am, by training, skeptical of planning documents or mission statements. Ideally, they’d be like a constitution. Like in that movie 12 Angry Men. When grappling with a seemingly unsolvable problem, one member of the group would pause and say solemnly,
“Edna. Hank. Norma. Let’s take a step back. Does this ordinance really reflect Goal 3.1.6 of our Plan? Frankly, I’m beginning to have doubts.”
And then Stan would stand up and say,
“You’re absolutely right Gail! We haven’t been following our own vision. Thank you for reminding us to use those principles to help us get where we need to go!”
I can’t seem to recall that kind of deep reflection.
On the other hand, the State makes us spend hundreds and hundreds of hours on this stuff – not just giving us rules to follow, but also trying to encourage better policies. So, perhaps planning documents are more like Sunday School. Even if you aren’t guided by them moment to moment, just going through the process makes some kind of overall ‘impact’ on all of us. I sure hope so. 🙂
Saturday
On Saturday, as I was looking at the Memorial Flag Triangle construction, I stumbled across the ‘Hands Off’ protest at the Fish Plaza Place. 😀
Regardless of politics, the following are worth noting.
Despite not a lot of promotion (at least in Des Moines), there were a lot of people. I mean a lot.
The demographic was at least 90% seniors. And despite what you might think, not everyone was from Wesley. From what I could tell, many were also from nearby cities. But they were almost entirely seniors.
Despite non-stop honking and whooping – and some of the most 1creatively profane signs I’ve ever seen, the entire deal was completely peaceful.
I only noted this to make a point. Regardless of your politics, age, or whatever you can be passionate, very well-informed, extremely nice… and swear like a sailor. Be yourself. 🙂
1As something of a student of the art, I thought I’d heard it all by now. I am not worthy. 😀
2Achziger suggested ‘Futura’, which looks right, but I’m half blind.
3Sucker. 😀 jk. Being retired gives me a unique freedom to bone up on the material. But I can (vividly) recall working 25 hours a day, kids, marriage, and something vaguely referred to as a ‘life’. People deeply resent being told they can’t do it all. But the more I do this, the more I’ve come to realise that to do the job well requires a ton more work than most people think when they sign up. But unlike a for realz job, no one can ever tell you you’re not putting in enough time.
I updated this article slightly to coincide with a mailing list update to highlight the two Committee of the Whole items on ADUs and Traffic Calming. (See Thursday meeting @ 5:00pm.)
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.
King County Metro is re-instating fare inspection on buses. There will be teams of two individuals who will (gently) help people make payments. If you recall, this was put on hold during COVID.
Speaking of transit, I heard about this shortly before I learned that Angle Lake Station was shut down ( because of the huge storm that did not happen. 😀 ) I was asked a few times this week why they chose that ‘insider’. And the real answer is that we tried several ‘outsiders’ and the results have not been exactly tip top. 😀
I whinge because I use transit and I love trains. But when people talk about ‘rail’ as the alternative to Sea-Tac Airport? I struggle to not roll my eyes. Everywhere I go – from Mukilteo to Angle Lake, the results are nowhere near as reliable as (gasp) an airplane. People on all sides of ‘transit’ should be fed up. If we’re serious about transit we have to stop giving it unconditional love. You’ll know that trains are for real when it isn’t just the haters who are sick of paying 2-3x what trains cost elsewhere.
Call To Action: Port Packages!
The Governor’s proposed budget cuts the $1 million in funding that was secured last for fixing failed port packages, which were meant to insulate homes from airport noise but have deteriorated over time. Please mail key these legislators and let them know how important this funding is for our communities.
Last week, I offered an exceedingly fun-filled prize for the answer to “Why is it spelled ‘Camp Khaos'”? Gift card on the way for the correct answer. 4Which is…
Kids. Having. An. Outrageous. Summer!
In years past, I remember that being plastered on signs and banners. Haven’t seen it in a while. But it has been an award-winning program and I would love to see that slogan displayed more prominently. Because the program is outrageously good. I also wish we had trademarked it. 😀
City Manager Stuff
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.
City Manager’s Report March 28, 2025 The recipe this week involves Turkey Burgers. I am skeptical. However, as an elected official, it is important to keep an open mind. 🙂
Ms. Caffrey also noted the retirement of long-time Marina employee Pat Wolfrom. If you spend any time at the docks you’d see Pat doing more jobs than a farmer. And I mean that as a high compliment – ‘jack of all trades’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Pat has been such a fixture for so long it will be hard to imagine the place without him. I mean that literally. Whenever a long time employee leaves my first thought is the immense amount of knowledge he takes with him.
Run for City Council
The City Manager’s report also beat me to the punch in noting that this is election season. These four seats up for election on our Council. You should run. But first, you should find out what yer getting yerself into.
Tuesday, April 1 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Register for the April 1 session
Monday, April 7 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Register for the April 7 session
You should also go 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.
Dueling Taxes
And if you need an issue to run on? Taxes! 😀
Every year, there is at least one bill at the State hoping to give city councils like Des Moines the ability to raise property taxes automatically up to the rate of inflation – without giving you a vote. This year, there has been a particularly strong push including a letter by our Mayor in the Seattle Times. The idea, of course, is to obtain support from the large populations of wealthier, more tax-friendly communities like Seattle.
I believe it is a terrible look for our city to promote this so aggressively — only a few months after Des Moines voters decisively said ‘No’, twice, to more property taxes.
I am not anti-tax. But property tax is the one tax people expect to have a say on. Taking that sense of choice from voters is wrong.
Long-Range Financial Plan and Development Impact Analysis. I’ve grown so cynical about ‘studies’ I can’t afford to gush. But this is something I’ve been talking about since I ran for office. If the results are what’s on the tin, this would be (I can’t believe I’m writing this) a game changer. 😀 Sorry, couldn’t help it. But these are some great looking bullet points and City Manager Caffrey deserves big ups for proposing this.
This feels weird. We’re having the first ‘Committee of the Whole’ deal at 5:00pm, followed by a ‘Study Session’ at 6:00pm. Is it just me, or is this basically two Study Sessions in one? Like those two-sided breath mints. However, I promised our City Manager to give this a sincere try. But speaking broadly? This is a lot of ‘stuff’ for one evening.
Traffic Calming initial pilot program
5:00pm Committee of the Whole
Neighborhood Traffic Calming Procedures: this looks really interesting!
Contracting Alarm Management
Accessory Dwelling Units
Proposed ADU summary
6:00pm Study Session
City Logo Discussion (see header image) All this fluff – which people cannot help but care about, could be a time-waster. My main comments:
1Look familiar? 😀
People love to stress about ‘how to pronounce Des Moines’. Wanna know something else people obsess about? Making sure everyone knows we’re not in Iowa! 😀 If you’ve traveled around the US a bit, you’ll see the same city name in a dozen states. I honestly don’t see why we need ‘Washington’ on our logo. But, as my kids used to say, what-evehhhhr. 🙂
Comprehensive Plan Update: This should be a big deal. I honestly don’t know if it will be. Frankly, it has been presented over the past two years as (mostly) a huge PITA compliance procedure. I’m probably being unkind; it is a ton of work. But my concern is: what can we do with it? What tools will it give us to build more places for people to live? To encourage more productive business formation?
City Council Protocol Manual Review
The City Council follows two ‘books’, the Municipal Code – which has all the ordinances (laws) that govern the City, and then a separate Council Protocol Manual (CPM) which, as the name implies, concerns the City Council. It’s based on something you may have heard of called Robert’s Rules of Order. The CPM doesn’t have the force of ‘law’, but it’s important because, in the immortal words of Michael Matthias “He who controls the agenda, controls the meeting”. Where it goes outside the ‘standard’, it’s generally to do with extending the authority of the Mayor. In other words, in RROO, the person swinging the gavel has very limited authority. They run the meeting in a fair manner and that’s basically it. In fact, you don’t need a ‘mayor’. You could have basically anyone do it.
When the City was incorporated in 1959, we created a bog standard rule document, according to the State’s recommendation. We tweaked it every so often, but it was basically the same. The tweaks were often to do with extending the mayor’s authority in certain ways we now take for granted.
In 2023 three members of the Council (Buxton, Mahoney, Steinmetz) formed an Ad Hoc Rules Committee and decided that it didn’t just need a few tweaks, it needed to be completely re-written as a Protocol Manual, based on the one from Bothell. It was a terrible experience. It unnecessarily wasted enormous amounts of time, City Resources, and actually made the Council process worse than before. To give you a sense of the political ugliness…
Meetings were held with 24 hour notice (the bare legal minimum) at the Police Station – not at City Hall – and unlike any other Council committee – were not recorded.
Draft versions had language like “…public expression of dissent and protest outside the open public meeting is inappropriate unethical behavior.”; which is unconstitutional.
Required attire specifically excluded ‘hats’.
To prepare for this item, I simply need to bring my list of (common sense) failed amendments from that debate.
A big part of City Council is ‘process’ – which no one cares about. That’s what makes it so tough to improve local government. My metaphor is manufacturing. People don’t care about ‘the assembly line’, they just want their car to work. If they get what they want, they think the process was great. If they get a lemon, they just want that product fixed. Either way? People generally don’t give a hoot about the assembly line that made the product. I do. Because if it isn’t working right, not only is the quality hit or miss, everything is a lot more expensive than it needs to be.
That has been my ‘thing’ since running for office.
Better process = better decisions.
Last Week
Every week seems to have a theme. And last week’s was virtue signaling.
There was a briefing on the SIRRPP (ie. Port Packages) which was covered by Sea-Tac Noise.Info Their Port Package Update program is terrible. Total virtue signaling – the Port wanted to look like it was doing something, without actually doing something. I had hoped that Councilmember Mahoney (our official rep) would speak to this during his end comments at the City Council meeting, but he chose not to.
Des Moines currently has no active sound code after repealing its 2007 ordinance in 2012. Over a year ago, Council agreed to have the EDC revisit the issue. The staff memo (which was excellent) discussed hiring a sound engineering consultant to draft a more modern version of that code – and put us back on par with Burien and SeaTac – the two other cities with Port Packages.
But the entire discussion ended up being through the lens of a builder. Not one word as to public health or what it means for the community. After more than a year of dithering, the Committee was still divided – asking staff to come back with maybe a scaled back proposal? We had absolutely no business dropping sound code. As STNI said in its scathing coverage:
“Budgets are moral documents… Why should the Port, or the State or the FAA invest in any programs if Des Moines shows no willingness to spend anything?”
Harsh. But fair. At the moment Des Moines does not care about airport issues. Just more virtue signaling.
Short Term Rentals
The City presented a draft ordinance regulating short-term and “amenities” rentals (e.g., pools or sports courts). The City Attorney made it clear that we were new to this. I’ve said previously that I support this (in general), which I do. However, in reading that draft, I was struck by all the ‘detail’. My initial reaction was “Why do we need all these rules? Can’t we simply rely on some existing code and the common sense of our code enforcement?” In software, the more rules (if/then/else statements) you need to make a thing work, the more things there are to worry about.
I think the word to describe this section of the meeting was ‘awkward’.
The meeting opened with a presentation from King County Councilmember De’Sean Quinn. Quinn was on the Tukwila City Council for a long time and was appointed to the seat left open when Dave Upthegrove went off to pursue his 2dream job as Commissioner of Public Lands. However, the seat is up for election in November so there may well be someone different in the seat next year. It was awkward for me because, while I very much appreciate him showing up, he was presenting new information verbally, which is still in flux. And then he split and the Council discussion, which was based on different information, happened 2.5 hours later.
We then heard one comment from a resident who wants to utilise the Short Term Rental Ordinance discussed at the EDC.
We then we heard a passionate ‘No’ from the next door neighbours. And as I’m listening, I was thinking about Jurassic Park. “Oh. That’s why the ordinance is about two million lines of code.” 😀
Sorry. It’s no joke. I’ve been a landlord for a good while. It’s a two-way street with neighbours. You have to live together. As an engineer, if you need a lot of ‘code’ it probably means you’re expecting errors – in this case people not being able to work things out amicably. I’m not sure the specific conflict the Council heard can be resolved by any ‘code’. Regardless, we do need code and it was important to hear both sides of the story. In fact, I’m sure there aren’t two sides. I’m pretty sure there will be a many ‘sides’ – and if you are interested in the topic, please reach out to me with your perspective.
Consent Agenda
Item of note:
SKHHP Funding Allocation South King County Housing/Homelessness Partnership pools resources from 12 cities to fund affordable housing across South King County. Des Moines has already contributed the funds; this resolution formalizes how they’ll be spent. We’ve been at this since before I joined the Council. And it has yielded no new construction in Des Moines and only a few remodels. As with the airport, it is simply more virtue signaling. We pay a (relatively) modest amount every year into this fund, to look like we’re doing something – rather than actually building housing here.
New Business
2025 Poverty Bay Blues and Brews Festival Proposal
My colleagues voted 5-1 to accept Rotary’s three year proposal to put on their Blues and Brews event. The event was not the reason for my ‘no’. And I want to be clear that the event is fantastic and 3their proposal had some very good aspects which are much better for the City than in previous years.
However, I encourage you to watch this portion of the meeting. Any notion of parliamentary procedure broke down – with members of Rotary literally joining in on the discussion – something I have literally never seen in any other local government. That’s a ‘process’ problem in Des Moines. It tends to happen here because we’ve normalised councilmembers having such personal interests in various issues. Get it? We simply cannot be objective about these kinds of decisions.
Why does this matter? Last November the Council spent thousands of dollars to decide (this time) to really, really, really, really, really, really, really commit the City to becoming “the Premiere Waterfront Destination in the Pacific Northwest”. Other than the Fourth of July, and the Waterland Parade, Blues and Brews is the only reasonably well marketed event we do. And we don’t do it – they do.
So I didn’t call it a ‘partnership’. I called it a leveraged donation. Basically, we are donating $10,000 – and that helps Rotary do $40,000 in fund raising towards good organisations we also support in our Human Services Budget. One of our dollars yields four. Great.
But the argument seems to be that this event drives repeat business – helping to make the City a ‘destination’. I have absolutely zero doubt that it drives repeat business to this event. People who like various niche musics show up year after year. Blues here. String Quartets in Kitsap. Ukuleles in Astoria. Fantastic. But that is not the same thing as leveraging the City.
Long-established groups are great. But they receive preferential treatment that would be unavailable to any potential new group. It’s already hard enough to stand up a new organisation. This sort of thing ends up discouraging the formation of new initiatives that might broaden possibilities for Des Moines.
Fact: since I’ve lived here we never had a marketing plan that increased our reach. It’s completely unrealistic to ask the City Manager to develop one this year. So instead of doing a one year agreement – and letting the City, have time to at least start figuring a better system – one that encourages other groups to engage in various events – we’re now locked into the same approach we’ve tried for decades. “Premiere Waterfront Destination” is more virtue signaling. We want to look like we’re doing something new and improved, while actually doubling down on exactly the same things we’ve always done.
All that said, I have absolutely no doubt the event will be a success.
Executive Session
POTENTIAL LITIGATION RCW 42.30.110(1)(a)(i) – All I can tell ya is that this was 20 minutes of my life I wish I could get back. It’s only worth mentioning because it came in the middle of the meeting, which meant we emerged from the Cone of Silence to an empty room. A lonely feeling, my friend. 😀
King County Parks Levy
As I wrote, the meeting opened with County Councilmember De’Sean Quinn making a presentation about this item. This discussion, 2.5 hours later was the reason for his appearance.
Your property tax bill includes a bajillion slices. One of the smaller ones is the City of Des Moines – which you vote for. However, there are several levies which are automatic. The Port gets one. County Parks is another. The Deputy Mayor had expressed concern as to a possible rate increase and whether or not Des Moines was getting a fair share of that slice and wanted the Council to do something. But it was hard not to feel like the discussion was premature because we don’t yet have a clear idea of what the County’s proposal is.
My comments were
To ‘automate’ the process. That’s shorthand for developing a simple annual formula for cities like Des Moines rather than having a project-based grant system. Grants are great. But they lack certainty. If we knew every year that we were getting (x) dollars for parks, it would make it a lot easier to plan for park space improvements.
I’d like the City to have a more defined ‘wish list’. Yes, we have a Parks and Rec Master Plan. And a Comprehensive Plan (see above). But realistically, we focus almost all our energy on grants (what seems doable in the moment) rather than acting like ‘plans’ actually make a difference.
New Items For Consideration
I asked the Council to direct the City to prepare a letter in support of the Municipal Research and Services Center. MRSC is a non-profit organisation that provides educational resources to all cities and their electeds in WA. Much of the information is available to the public.
One proposal in the State budget is to gut their funding. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be… hang… er… lose their employee parking spot. 😀 What makes it so annoying is that the legislature threatens this every few years. But cutting access to educational resources for lawmakers? Seriously?
1A NP friend calls this ‘the sailing trees’.
2That’s Dave’s quote. I actually agree. The job completely aligns with his personal interest in the environment going back decades.
3In previous years, the event would be allowed two days for set up and break down. So the City will have one more available day of rental. It will be a mighty long day for Rotary to set up and break down in one day.
4Who says I don’t put in the work on graphic design?
You probably have not heard this. There is a big push in Olympia this year to give city councils the ability to raise property taxes not by 1%, but up to the limit of inflation – and without giving you a vote. There has been a LOT of promotion to make it happen, including a letter by Des Moines Mayor Traci Buxton in the Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/mayors-to-wa-lawmakers-lift-the-local-property-tax-cap/
Speaking only for myself, I do not support this. I believe it is a terrible look to promote this — only a few months after voters decisively said ‘No’ to new property taxes in not one, but -two- elections!
I am not against property tax increases so long as voters get to choose. And I believe voters will feel betrayed if they find out in a few months that the City Council can take that choice away — increase their property taxes — in spite of not one but TWO elections in Des Moines last year!
If you haven’t done this before, here are some instructions.
1. Select the bill 5798 (Property Tax)
2. Select ‘I would like my position noted for the legislative record’
3. Fill out the form. (Be sure to choose ‘Con’!)
Let me know if you have questions!
Trust
One last thing. These groups take pains to say that this is not ‘automatic’; that the bill only gives cities a choice. That is completely disingenuous. The key element of SB5798 is to allow property taxes to rise automatically based on inflation. If inflation rises, the ability to tax you, without a vote, also rises.
Currently, cities also have a ‘choice’ to take the 1% allowed by State law. How many cities say ‘no thank you!’? Basically, none. If this bill passes, it is a certainty that most cities will take advantage of the extra taxes. It’s easier to blame inflation than ask voters for help. If not, why would they be pushing so hard? That lack of sincerity is almost as bad as a new tax you don’t get to decide on.
To me, the strategy is clear: people in wealthier, more tax-friendly parts of King County are far more numerous so lobby them for votes they cannot get in their own cities. State lawmakers, with their huge deficits, cynically can see this as a way to ‘help’ small cities get more money – without actually giving it to them. If we do not push back, this may pass.
The other side
To be fair, here are links to some of the groups in support of this new taxing authority, including that letter from Mayor Traci Buxton in the Seattle Times.
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.
While I’m at it, this Federal Funding Data Display is worth a gander. Note that both HSD and FedWay obtain some of the highest levels of Federal (and State) funding in the State of WA. I mention that for two reasons:
Any disruption to that funding stream (as keeps getting talked about in the news) would not be good for us.
School quality rankings, however you define them, tend to run opposite to those funds. The schools that rely least external funding (ie. more on local taxes) tend to be higher quality. Many are in wealthier cities – but not all.
It’s something we paper over, but both HSD and FedWay are struggling. Said it before, say it again: you cannot have a healthy Des Moines without better education opportunities.
With all that cheer, I really want to do everything possible to help Dr. Espinoza (and both school districts) succeed. 🙂
It’s Spring. Time For Critter Guilt Trip!
I’m preaching to the choir here, but… it’s Spring. Critters are running around having baby critters. And that means a high number of unnecessarily smushed varmints. Not sure what to do about it, except to employ my Ninja-Like Jewish Grandmother Guilt Superpower.
“So, you were texting and driving. Again. You heard a small thump? Don’t worry so much. Probably it wasn’t a totally defenseless opossum. Trying to feed her children.”
Call To Action: Port Packages!
The Governor’s proposed budget cuts the $1 million in funding that was secured last for fixing failed port packages, which were meant to insulate homes from airport noise but have deteriorated over time. Please mail key these legislators and let them know how important this funding is for our communities.
The City is now offering an e-mail sign up for City Manager Reports. Other than that, two highlights are Camp Khaos and a note that the Des Moines Activity Center is available to study, work, have lunch, and basically just chill Monday through Friday.
New Contest: Camp Khaos!
Speaking of which: there is an exceedingly fun-filled prize for a non-random answer to this burning question: Why is it spelled ‘Camp Khaos’?
Des Moines currently has no active sound code after repealing its 2007 ordinance in 2012. The staff recommends creating a modern sound transmission code to address aircraft noise and align with evolving building standards. Key recommendations include:
Hiring a sound engineering consultant to draft the code, advise on cost-effective solutions, and define noise zones.
Developing both prescriptive and performance-based compliance options using pre-tested wall and window assemblies.
Focusing on major remodels for existing buildings, especially where external walls or systems are altered.
Incorporating lessons from Burien and SeaTac, such as multi-zone frameworks and modern ventilation standards.
Anticipating future impacts from Sea-Tac’s expansion under the SAMP (Sustainable Airport Master Plan).
The goal is a balanced, cost-feasible code to protect residents from airport noise while not hindering development.
Short Term Rentals
A draft ordinance regulating short-term and “amenities” rentals (e.g., pools or sports courts). The ordinance includes Permit requirements, annual renewal, business license, and designation of a 24/7 local property representative. Neighbor notification and a posted Good Neighbor Agreement to promote accountability and reduce complaints. Occupancy limits based on number of bedrooms and a ban on overnight amenities rentals. Strict parking and garbage rules to reduce neighborhood disruption. Noise restrictions with escalation: after three verified complaints, owners must install noise monitoring systems.
I support this, however I will note that this does not apply to long-term rentals – historically, a much bigger problem. Since ending its mandatory landlord partnership with King County in 2011, Des Moines has had a history of problems with absentee landlords and these same standards should apply to all landlords.
We’ll vote on an ordinance to create a new parking infraction for unattended vehicles left on the ramp, allowing officers to ticket and potentially tow them without locating the driver. The ordinance aims to protect recreational access and improve operational clarity.
SKHHP Funding Allocation South King County Housing/Homelessness Partnership pools resources from 12 cities to fund affordable housing across South King County. Des Moines has already contributed the funds; this resolution formalizes how they’ll be spent.
The key financial points:
Des Moines has already contributed the $39,811 — this vote doesn’t approve new spending. It just permits SKHHP to spend it on specific regional projects.
The only Des Moines project ever funded in 2023. And that was restoration, not new construction.
Funds are pooled with other cities to support regional affordable housing — meaning Des Moines is subsidizing housing development elsewhere with no guarantee of future return. The SKHHP structure allows wealthier or better-organized cities to pull in more funds than they contribute, depending on project readiness and advocacy. While Des Moines retains the right to vote on how its funds are used, there is no prioritization mechanism ensuring proportional geographic return over time.
For me, this has gotten perilously close to virtue signaling. We pay a (relatively) modest amount every year into a regional fund, to look like we’re doing something rather than building housing here.
2025 Poverty Bay Blues and Brews Festival Proposal
Des Moines is being asked to partner with Destination Des Moines for the 2025 Poverty Bay Blues and Brews Festival, held at Des Moines Beach Park. The goal is to raise money to support their non-profits.
Some key points:
A $10,000 discount of rental fees, plus in-kind support (police, parks?) Rotary also wants a three year agreement.
In exchange we get to be corporate sponsors.
Tourism value: organizers expect the event to draw 31500-1800 people, anecdotally boosting local business visibility.
While Rotary emphasizes the event’s tourism benefits and charitable goals, the City forgoes rental income for this event during prime summer weekend use.
Frankly, girlfriend, this one is giving me the blues. And I don’t mean like Albert, Freddie or B.B. I’ve worked with many organisations that do sponsorship deals and they were all structured very differently. For one thing there was a lot more accountability, ie. a corporate sponsorship implies imparting obvious value – one that would not otherwise pertain.
Think of it like this: Alaska Air sponsors an event at the Marina. They plaster their logo on everything. Their VP of Marketing gives a little speech. But that logo means something because you’re not on their corporate campus. Get it? What is the value add of having a Des Moines logo on an event at the Des Moines Marina where the 2City is already 100% guaranteed to give a speech? 😀
Why three years? Where is the prior evidence to merit three years instead of a trial period of one. There is no requirement for tracking that event benefit going forward. And no accounting to compensate the waterfront zone for the loss of revenue. It’s not a ‘sponsorship’. We’re just giving the same off-the-books discount we’ve always done. Which is not like any corporate sponsorship I’ve seen.
Also, we just implemented a two year budget system; in part as a response to concerns over fiscal responsibility. There’s no accommodation for this in that budget. We deep-sixed our finance committee – which would have been the logical vehicle to start a policy revision like this. As a professional musician, I understand better than most that ‘the show must go on’ 😀 But what is the point of implementing a new budget system if we end up doing exactly the same things we did before?
Bottom Line: I would much prefer we offer a standard, competitive grant budget every year; no more ad hoc anything. And frankly, it might be better evaluated by an independent body (and by that I mean like the way we hire an independent hearings examiner to evaluate property decisions.) It’s really hard for any Council to look at decisions like these objectively. They’re just too personal.
As a City we can’t call doing exactly the same thing ‘new and improved’ if we hope to actually achieve the goals we’ve laid out for ourselves. As Little Milton liked to testify… sometimes you need to have the blues for a while in order to get to a better place. 🙂
Executive Session
POTENTIAL LITIGATION RCW 42.30.110(1)(a)(i) – 20 minutes “To discuss with legal counsel representing the agency matters relating to agency enforcement actions, or to discuss with legal counsel representing the agency litigation or potential litigation to which the agency, the governing body, or a member acting in an official capacity is, or is likely to become, a party, when public knowledge regarding the discussion is likely to result in an adverse legal or financial consequence to the agency.”
Wednesday: Regional Transit Committee. Essentially, this group advises the County Council on bus services. 20250319-RTC-packet. The Council gets occasional letters on transit safety and I want to assure everyone that not a meeting goes by that ‘safety’ is not number one with a bullet. I ride the bus and take the Light Rail several times a week and I definitely do.
At this meeting, we also got a presentation on a new Fare Inspection program. Since COVID, Metro has not been enforcing fares. This has been controversial as the service does really need the money. For some, it also created a perception of lawlessness. The irony, of course, is that adding back fare enforcement leads to concerns over unnecessary friction – which no one wants. The 2-person teams are not police – they are more like drivers (although they will have emergency training like CPR 🙂 ). To my mind, this is a good experiment. When you see them, I hope you will show your appreciation and support. Personally, I love Metro, because where I live, it’s super-easy. For me, the biggest problem is that there is not enough of it for the rest of Des Moines.
Some bills passing through Olympia
As I’ve written, this is lawmakin’ season in Olympia and there were/are a ton of bills that will affect us. The problem is that, although the hearings are transparent, the actual process is super-convoluted and sometimes the furthest thing from it.
Over-Simplication Alert: there are rules that allow certain bills considered ‘important’ to basically bypass the hearing process entirely and get worked out in truly backroom deals.
One rationale being that if an item has broad funding concerns it cannot easily be worked in a single committee.
Property Taxes will likely rise, whether you like it or not. But the main thing I’m beating around the bush on is: property taxes, which voters want capped and almost all cities desperately want increased are coming. So I’m punting to the Seattle Times which has a pretty good summary of the situation. Read it.
We will likely have more property taxes and more business taxes. Which should assuage whatever guilt you may have had in voting against Prop #1 last year. 🙂
The population of Washington State has been declining for many years now. I used to be one of those who joked, “Great! Move to Oklahoma!” or like that movie Mars Needs Women! 😀
I was being facetious. And entitled. I used to travel to OK, AR and KS a lot for work and noticed that Walmart spent a millions of dollars on community amenities to attract workers – the kinds of parks and community centers we could never afford here. Still, what I noticed was this: all things being equal, people seemed to prefer Puget Sound to the reclaimed 1swamps of Rogers, AR. 😀 Maybe that’s just me.
But this also has to do with taxes and it is a real problem for Des Moines. People are getting priced out of Seattle, which may be OK for ‘Seattle’ since they have the wealth to keep chugging. It’s also largely irrelevant to lucky geezers like me – retired and sitting on that absolutely bitchin’ 3% mortgage.
But if families don’t just require two incomes, but perhaps two six figure incomes to raise a family here, what does that mean for the ongoing value proposition of Des Moines? Said it before, say it again, 30 years ago, that was easy: low cost of ownership, decent schools, waterfront, easy access to the airport, downtown, and basically everywhere. Today, the incentives appeal to a much different demographic and we need to confront that. Because, just between you, me and the wall? Us AARP types are not exactly big spenders. 🙂
HB1923 the Mosquito Fleet bill, ie. Passenger Ferries will likely pass. As it stands, I support it – as does basically everyone in the region. However, like the tax bills, it has also undergone a few ‘backroom’ changes outside the strictly public process. After removing the following provision in the House, the Senate re-added this: the possibility of dinky cities (like Des Moines) of creating their own ferry district. That is a completely sensible idea for some small island communities — and also as completely insane for Des Moines as our previous pilot program.
1Rogers, AR is Where Possible Lives. All joshing aside – in addition to ‘possible’ over 70,000 people also live there – and it’s growing fast. I think most people in Des Moines would absolutely kill to have their main street, low property taxes, and various services.
2Just tryin’ to lighten the mood. 🙂
3Semi-fake news. The packet actually says 1,200 – 1,500. I think the absolute max for such an event could be 1,800 so I’m being extra-generous. If ticket prices are in the $50 range that’s $90,000, which would be great. But that still not does answer the question the City should press on if it’s a true ‘sponsorship’. What would those 1,800 people do for the City? It’s not just semantics. If it’s a grant, that takes away any false pressure.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Not Des Moines, but I attended one of the best ‘student’ concerts I can recall at the 
1Look familiar? 😀
