This Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle: (Agenda)
Wednesday: The Coho Pen is coming baaaack! If you want to help 30,000 Coho Salmon grow up to be big and strong, show up at the Marina Boat Hoist at 10:00AM and help Trout Unlimited assemble the Trout Pen. There will also be opportunities to feed the critters daily over the next two months before they are released into the wild!
Thursday: 4:00PM Economic Development Meeting (Agenda)
Thursday: 6:00PM City Council Study Session (Agenda) If you are interested in showing up, I would suggest you read this.
Last Week
Monday: Northwest African American Museum for MLK Day celebrations
Wednesday: Congressman Adam Smith’s office to discuss his priorities for Aviation Legislation in 2023–including the upcoming FAA Reauthorisation (every five years Congress requires a re-write of FAA regulations.) Courtesy of SeaTacNoise.Info, here is the Federal Legislative Agenda I support. As you will read, it is quite different from that of the City of Des Moines, which has been, for decades now, “If it’s good for the Port of Seattle, I’m in” for a very long time now.
Wednesday: Reach Out Des Moines. RODM actually reached its goals a while back: reduce teen violent crime dramatically in Pacific Ridge? Done. Reduce missed days of school? Done. OK, now what? Does the group expand to cover all of Des Moines? Does its mission statement change? There certainly is no shortage of need, but, just as with our City, getting more people involved has been a key challenge. In other words: there are any number of programs where the struggle is not the opportunity, it’s “How do we make people aware of the program?”
Thursday: Port of Seattle ‘State Of The Port’. The state of the Port is strong. Basically, they’ve fully recovered from the pandemic. Which means we should start pushing back on them now.
Thursday: Meeting with Westside Seattle Publisher Tim Robinson. Mr. Robinson’s family published basically all the local papers here for almost fifty decades–including the Des Moines News and Highline Times. He is the go to guy on local history, especially when it comes to politics.
Hey there NIMBY!
First off. You should definitely show up for the January 26 Study Session. We have what can be a sense of futility here regarding City business. The idea is, “The fix is in, so why bother schlepping over to 21630 11th Ave S. at 6:00PM.” (See what I did there? 😀 )
Because that is why bad things (like the hotel proposal) tend to happen, as well as about 100 other things you don’t know about. 😀
The fact is, the Council has received at least 100 comments about the hotel proposal and all 100 are opposed.
They’re all the same problem…
I keep writing about that Ferry thing and though I shouldn’t be, I’m surprised at how many people will tell me “The Ferry is worth a shot! Stick to fighting the hotel!” Or, they may say “Stop tilting at windmills about the airport, JC! Just focus on that hotel.” And that’s where I start to get annoyed.
We’ve already spent or budgeted over $1.8 million dollars on that insane ferry. And the revenue last year was $89,000. Again: $1.8 million against $89,000. And frankly, I have no interest in working so hard to help residents on issues like this hotel to have anyone suggest we should support an equally appalling waste of public money.
This is all money we will never get back. It is the public safety people scream for; the roads that never get fixed; the programs for kids and seniors that we never have; the community center, the storm water, the internet, the everything that can never happen if we spend it just so a few thousand people can have a $5 ride to Seattle.
That’s as nice as I can be about that.
The truth is out there…
I’m beating on this because my colleagues have said repeatedly that there is a lot of information out there about the Marina. In a funny way that is completely true. Just as there is a lot of information about a ferry. And a lot of information about how we keep getting screwed by the airport.
The problem is, it is extremely unlikely that you have access to it.
The fact is, both we, the County and the State have studied the Marina and a Ferry and come to similar conclusions since at least 2007. You don’t know about the big 2008 study, or the fact that the City agreed a ferry was not a good idea in 2012, or that the County did another big passenger ferry study in 2015, or that the entire region did another study in 2020. And the one thing that every one of those studies has agreed on is that a Des Moines Passenger Ferry, regardless of route, is a total loser. Everyone except our current City Manager and City Council–who paid private firms to get the results they wanted.
Same thing with the Marina. We knew in 2007 that we needed $29.1 million to fix the docks (about $50 million in ‘now dollars’.) The Council also had a committee which was all nutty about a ’boutique hotel’ as early as 2010. The only reason it didn’t happen is that no developer wanted to do it! It was then (as now) nuts. Just like a passenger ferry. But it was always in ‘the vision’.
What this town needs is a big poster!
There was never, not even to this day, a big 4′ x 8′ wall poster in City Hall that showed the public ‘the vision’–where we hoped the Marina or Downtown might be going. The various Skylab posters would be kept in the North Conference Room and schlepped out every few years for some ‘special presentation’. You would think that, if we were so proud of all those ideas, we would advertise the living crap out of it.
Here is what we actually do. This is from Mayor Mahoney’s November presentation to the Des Moines Marina Association to discuss Marina Redevelopment. See that first piccie of the Masonic Home? Its other name is not ‘Landmark by the Sound’ it’s Landmark on the Sound. But grammar aside, using that as a marketing tool is pretty audacious considering the fact that a private developer currently has a permit to demolish the place. That is what passes for ‘communication’ at the moment.
To be fair…
There have been presentations and two or three ‘community meetings’. They’ve just been spread out over many years. 😀 And they were all pretty terrible.
So, if you’ve only lived here a few years you can be forgiven for having no idea what is going on. There was never a reasonably easy way to perform any kind of due diligence on this–unless you are the kind of person who meets with a City planner before buying a condo.
Can we talk?
So, I have some unasked for advice, which you may not enjoy. Just between you and me, girlfriend, many of you are total NIMBYs. 😀 You can say what you want about ‘shorelines’ and ‘community’ but your obvious concern is the view!!!!!! The City (and the City Council) already know this and as such that those arguments likely will not carry much weight.
If somebody built [in front of my view] I would fight like hell too, right? But I have to think of it as, as the mayor or council member. We’re challenged to think of things holistically. And candidly, a lot of times a vocal minority, sways the mood, and takes it, and moves our city backward.
–Mayor Matt Mahoney, speaking to the Des Moines Marina Association in November, 2022
Now here’s the funny part…
In isolation, I actually agree with that sentiment. I was not elected to protect anyone’s view. View Protection is something that is in some municipal codes (and usually comes with a hefty cost), but it is not in the DMMC. And those who advocate for it, do not engender a great deal of empathy from the vast majority of residents not fortunate enough to have said view.
What I am is anti-wasting money. And I suggest you consider that argument seriously. What I want is for the City to have as much money as possible because, in the words of my deeply conservative father-in-law
You cannot help anyone if you do not have money.
I push back against anything that does not prove that it will pay. Which, based on all those presentations you haven’t seen going back to 2007, means the entire current Marina Development program.
The ferry, the hotel, the Marina Steps, the ‘urban creek’ are based on the notion that somehow they will draw gobs and gobs of tourism and ‘economic development’ to Des Moines. Not only do none of those things promise to make significant amounts of money for the City, there is also absolutely no evidence that they will ever perform any of that ‘economic development’ magic.
And none of those ideas do anything to address financing the docks.
Financing the docks must always be the primary and immediate concern of the City Council when it comes to that space. Currently the Marina Enterprise cannot pay its own way. And it must find a way to do so.
All this other jazz is just a very expensive side show.
The good news…
My colleagues have told a story of a sort of ‘dark ages’ before 2016, where there was all this ‘mismanagement’. A lot of that is simply un-true and it is kind of insulting to all our predecessors, both elected and staff who worked hard on many issues–well except for that communication thing. 😀
The good news, however, is that all those past presentations do discuss viable financial alternatives for financing the Marina and maintaining a public space in the North Parking Lot
…though not the entire Marina floor. But we have to be able to have that discussion.
My advice…
…has been and remains: Stop everything until we have:
- A Public Planning Commission
- A Marina Committee
- A Finance Committee
- A decent web site and proper communication policies
These are all things we once had, and they are the path to what I know many of you want. I believe that with the right mix of residents, and the right people on these Committees, we can make good choices on both the Marina floor and in the downtown.
I will keep pressing communication and financials because those are issues that the entire City should (and will) care about most.
It may be somewhat cold comfort, but at the very least, people interested in buying a condo near the Marina now will have a sense of what they may be getting themselves into.) It may not be a legal requirement, but it is (and always was) the right thing to do.
One final note…
As I said, back in those ‘dark ages’, prior Councils and staff did some great work on the Marina planning. (And some not so great. 😀 ) Technically, the information was out there, but we never developed that strong ethos of community outreach. That is why these poor ideas keep coming back, and that is what needs to change first.
Because no matter what happens at this next meeting, or a month or six months, remember that this is a long game and there will be many decision points.
That does not mean be complacent. You must demonstrate that if we have these new methods of communication, the community is willing to take full advantage of them.
This is a long game. You can get what you want. But we’ll all have to keep working at it.
Oh… and seriously, read that timeline of key Marina Development events. I keep scrubbing it a little every day and I think it’s getting pretty good. 🙂
Thanks Kaylene