Some bits of business…
1Where’s that confounded bridge?
The Pedestrian Bridge at the beach park has a very nice (but temporary) fix, whilst a permanent repair is readied. Kudos to staff.
City Manager Stuff
City Manager Report February 2, 2024
This is the twelfth weekly report from Interim City Manager Tim George. Which is prox. twelve more than I’m used to. 😀 They ‘re no Weekly Update buddy, but they are a useful resource. Fair warning, though: the guy does tend to editorialise at some length. On pro football.
This Week
In addition to the various constituent schmoozing I do every week (I only mention this because I want to encourage you to be the next schmoozee 🙂 206-78-0578) Here are some other notable things I’ll be doing:
Wednesday: State Of The Port Breakfast in Bellevue. I don’t really have to sample the buffet, but if one can, one does like to schmooze with various aviationary big wigs. 🙂
Wednesday/Thursday: Association Of Washington Cities Action Days! (I do like saying “Action Days!”) in Olympia. The ‘action’ will be if I can miraculously teleport from Bellevue to Olympia in one morning–especially after a hearty breakfast.
Thursday 4:00 Transportation Committee Meeting (Agenda) First meeting of the year. Choosing a chair. Reviewing work plan.
Thursday 5:00 Environment Committee Meeting (Agenda) First meeting of the year. Choosing a chair. Reviewing work plan.
Thursday 6:00 City Council Meeting (Agenda) Key items… Psych! There are no key items. 😀 The only scheduled business are two Co
nsent Agenda items. But both are very relevant to meetings from last week discussed below. And since I want to continue saying nice things about how our meetings have been going I will assume there will continue to be no last minute surprises. 🙂
Last Week
Tuesday 8:00AM The Senate Local Government Committee met in Executive Session to vote to move SB5955 (the Port Package Update bill) forward. Watch the meeting here. And, spoiler alert, it passed.
Wednesday 6:00PM: There was a Zoom community meeting with the engineering team preparing the report on the demolition permit. You can still comment until March 8, 2024 at 4:30 PM here: ESA Comment Tracker (esassoc.com) and I suggest you do because your comments are what the team studies. Not. Kidding. The law says that they will study what you ask for. So, not to be bossy, but just saying “I love the Masonic Home” or “tear it down!” are not useful. Sorry, I know that may sound insensitive. But if you have some specific issue you’d like studied (either pro or con)? That would be extremely helpful.
Thursday 4:00PM: Finance Committee Meeting. Recap below.
Thursday 5:00PM: Public Safety/Emergency Management Committee Meeting. Recap below.
Saturday: I was back in Olympia in support of SB5955 (the Port Package Update bill!)Â Coverage from our friends at Sea-TacNoise.Info: SB5955 moves to a vote in Ways and Means Committee!
Finance Committee Recap
(Agenda) We did not select a chair, due to the unusual absence of Cm Nutting. But we did move ahead with the meeting, which kinda speaks to the notion I’ve had for a very long time which is this: we (mostly) don’t need a mayor or a chair of anything. We mainly just need a meeting facilitator. But that’s neither here nor there. 🙂
We did look at the Draft Work Program.
I went over some notable things about this last week, but here are two more after that meeting:
- Policy: Staff is proposing to shift the City to biennial (two-year) budgeting, something I have long wanted us to consider since most of our neighbours already do it that way. Having a Finance Committee should allow for better financial reporting while easing the pressure on staff every summer to produce budget documents. In other words, if done right, it should improve transparency and management. And I have to assume we’ll do it right, because the way we’ve been doing it has been as ‘not great’ for the way we do business as the ‘planning’ process I’ll get to in a minute.
- Vision: There is some obvious disagreement (shocking) as to the purpose of the committee and I hope it can be solved. Compromise must become the rule for the committee to be worth adding to the current list of standing committees.
- Cm Mahoney focused his comments on the goal of maintaining a strong General Fund Balance. Good point.
- I focused my comments on getting more detailed information (and faster) as to the inner workings. The two examples I made were Marina income and Police Equipment (which coincidentally then shows up on this week’s meeting agenda.) My question was/is: “Can we make the various computers ‘talk’ to one another–so we can get more insight into the patterns of expenses and revenues? And at least at that meeting, I did not hear much interest from my colleague. But in my opinion, an existential problem this Council has always had is a lack of good information.
Public Safety/Emergency Management Committee Meeting Recap
Thursday: Public Safety/Emergency Management Committee Meeting (Agenda) First meeting of the year. They selected Traci Buxton as chair and Yoshiko Grace Matsui as vice-chair. Congrats to both. Then briefly discussed their 2024 work plan with Chief Tim Gately.
February 1, 2024 City Council Meeting Recap
This was a Study Session, so the format is a bit different. It’s a modestly silly format, but it is different. 😀 A Study Session is meant to be a less formal venue for the Council to have a real deep dive on one or two issues. The ’round table’ is supposed to facilitate a more free-form ‘discussion’ rather than the usual “I call on you next” deal. At one time, it actually did that. I call it ‘silly’ because it stopped being that years ago.
For me, it just means that I can’t see public commenters behind me because my neck doesn’t work. 😀 So if the format doesn’t yield real back and forth, I honestly don’t see the point of all the furniture moving.
Public Comment
And that is a shame because the public comment was even more outstanding than usual! Each of the four commenters made extremely relevant points I wish we could have drilled into at this discussion:
- The importance of not only expanding ADU opportunities but also to make them easier to permit!
- The absolute necessity of a sound code (that actually came up in Olympia regarding SB5955!)
- Multi-family upzoning. The South King County Housing/Homelessness Partnership (SKHHP) item on Consent is only to rehab an existing building. That’s all very well, but we’ve been paying into this thing for over four years and not built a single new unit!
- Expanding tree canopy, which has only continued to decline (largely due to various partnerships with the Port of Seattle.)
The one sector of the community I did not see at the meeting? Business! That is criminal, and will be relevant in a moment. But for now? Business people? What happened to you? When I first started attending these meetings back in the 1300’s you were usually the only people who showed up. 😀 Where’d you go? When it’s a planning meeting, business has gotsta start showing up!
Intro
In honour of Black History Month there was a very nice video . On #327 on the list of ‘no good deed goes unpunished’, if you tried to watch this meeting later, it was (temporarily) blocked on Youtube. Ironically, because we chose to run that video, which is copyright protected. Get it? Making a video of a group event, which plays a copyrighted video is a no-no. I reported it and the staff cut that bit out and Ta Da! We’re back in business. Here’s an extended version of that song…
Community Development Plan
Part of the reason people don’t show for this meeting even though it is one of the more important meetings of the year, is because it’s also one of the most confusing. What is ‘community development’ anyhoo?
Well it’s the Building Division. And it’s also the Planning Department (ie. zoning and what is known as the Comprehensive Plan.) And there is also that piece we often refer to as ‘Economic Development’, but which we’ve traditionally limited to meaning ‘business-related land use’. They are all heavily intertwined.
So this meeting could (and did) cover everything from multi-family zoning, to sound code, to ADUs, to building needs to attract and retain business, to public works projects like the Marina Steps.
- But wait! It could also have included Public Safety if you believe that buildings and homes should be governed by code enforcement.
- Wait, wait, I forgot. It also includes transportation if you care about issues like parking in the downtown, or the upcoming Light Rail Station.
- If you act now, you will also receive public art with any public project! That’s also part of Community Development.
- And as a bonus, we’ll throw in this special discussion on tree canopy!
- And low-income housing! And services for the homeless!
Get it? It’s easier to ask “What isn’t ‘community development’?”
But the practical effect of these meetings is for the staff to provide a timeline and explain that a significant portion of their year will be spent just complying with various mandates, before there are any ‘planning’ (ie. policy choices) to discuss.
This state of affairs does not thrill me. And I know it does not thrill many of my colleagues. And, given the fact that this week is Action Days! I raised a couple of questions about this process which revealed a crack in the pleasant facade on the Council this year. I was openly mocked, (which was fine, I knew I was walking into it)
- How can this timeline be improved?
- How can we quantify the cost of each of these tasks?
- How can we show the intensity of effort (‘man hours’) for each task?
- What policies should we be pursuing legislatively to make this process less onerous for staff?
The fact that everyone can just giggle, indicates we have a problem. It means we think the status quo is so inevitable that any discussion of improvement is impossible. In fact, it’s worse than other issues (like Public Safety or Aviation Impacts) where we blame the State or the FAA, but at least go to Olympia (2Action Days!) or D.C. to lobby for solutions. In this case? The Mayor appeared to offer this as an olive branch…
It’s not a ridiculous thought but municipal government isn’t the place.
She is simply incorrect. It is exactly the place to discuss this. As with every process this consequential it is our duty to do whatever we can to improve these processes–especially at the legislative level. And after so many years of stagnation in terms of real ‘economic development’, I think it’s time for Des Moines to decide to at least try.
By the way, I mentioned how often I’d heard from local businesses on the need for improved signage. Cm Nutting, chair of the Economic Development Committee said that he was unaware of any of that. OK, business… I know you want it. So, as with so many things, you’re gonna have to start showing up and saying so publicly. 🙂
Hearts and Minds Fund
Dead. Dissolved on a 4-3 vote. This was one of the most painful hours of my tenure on the Council. When I saw that the video of the meeting was broken, I was almost going to not report it so it could be completely forgotten–just like the paperwork creating the fund 30 some years ago. 😀
The Hearts and Minds Fund was created decades ago (literally no one can remember–there really is no paperwork) as a $25 monthly deduction for each Cm. It is not public money. I provided the backstory last week but, long story short, at times the balance had grown to over $7,000. Which is an awful lot of hearts and flowers. 😀 So the Council had come to use it for large ($500-$1,000) ad hoc donations from the dais.
A majority of my colleagues seemed to agree that something needed to be done. But not on what should be done. There seemed to be no willingness to compromise. At all. So, Cm Nutting, one of those who liked the program exactly as is, simply moved to dissolve the thing, rather than make any changes. I proposed a last ditch effort to simply dial back contributions to $100 per meeting. And… got no support.
Frankly, this seemed nuts (…er… ‘unwise’ 😀 ) to me.
So… it’s gone. The irony being that, since it had no formal policy in the first place, there’s no language needed to make it go away. It entered the world without paper… and it will leave the world without paper. How often does that happen in government? 😀
I walked home from that Hearts and Minds thing absolutely discouraged with everyone–including moi. If there’s no willingness to compromise on even that? Something so small in the grand scheme of Council business? What does that say about our willingness to flex on the really important stuff?
I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. But I felt awful about it.
1Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Led Zeppelin V?
2I really do enjoy saying Action Days! A lot more than I actually enjoy attending Action Days.
This was a GOOD report with real information Thanks for being a human being on our council.
OK, so you asked for comment about Hearts & Minds. I left when you moved the $100 max because the whole discussion had devolved into something that was just too painful to watch. What I hope happens now is that everyone has a chance to reconsider all the motions and discussion. For example, CM Grace Matsui’s motion to give the council 24 hrs. notice about a donation request was logical and valid. Almost every real emergency need could be handled that way and still give CMs Mahoney and Nutting what they want in terms of keeping the process “organic” while not ambushing the rest of you or making it seem like only those who approach the mayor with hat in hand get money. A REAL emergency would be an obvioius exception that I’m sure you would all recognize. So then, promote the fund at meetings and social media so organizations know the fund exists. Puts the ball in their court. Someone can still bring this back to the table and put the fund back in place before all the money is disbursed.
And I’m really glad interim CM George is permitting meetings with you. You’re a lot calmer these days!