Some bits of business…
City Manager Stuff
City Manager Report March 1, 2024, 2024
Back to sports. I suspect Mr. George is one of those guys who has strong opinions wrt ‘brackets’. 😀 He is also carrying on from the last City Manager as our City’s SCORE Jail representative–a job that used to be handled by a member of the City Council. I hope to hear a report soon.
This Week
Monday: Meeting with Emergency Management Dept. to go over some questions I had regarding the County’s Emergency Management committee I’m on.
Thursday 4:00pm: Finance Committee meeting (Agenda) There are three big issues, at least two of which will give many of you agita. But if you’ve supported me over the years, this is where we find out if I’ve obtained any trust because I will be selling them hard.
- As I just wrote, we will discuss a Public Safety Property Tax Lid Lift. My pitch has always been this: Which would you rather spend $200 a year on? A security system or more cops. This is more cops.
- We will decide on moving to a biennial budget, which I conditionally support. As I’ve written before, our current accounting procedures are simply too inefficient. The softwares don’t communicate, the reporting takes for-evehhhr. We have a new team in place and I want to give them a chance to get us faster and better numbers. The risk? Between you and me, girlfriend, the risk is that once an ordinance is in place for any length of time, it’s harder to get rid of than unwanted houseguests. If it doesn’t work well, the very real fear is that a future council won’t act quickly to unwind it.
- We will choose a committee chair.
For those of you who don’t read the packet and who (like moi) start developing a strange twitch at the word ‘taxes’, here’s an example. If your home is assessed at $600,000, your tax increase would be about $238. In return, the City gets $2.4 MILLION dollars.
To give you a sense of what we can do to keep you safer with $2.4M every year: A police officer is $100k. A vehicle is $75k. This takes care of a lot of issues, permanently. No more coming to the City Council every year to stress about replacing worn out vehicles. No more cringing over funds for even one police officer. I hate wasting money (see below), but this is one check you want to write.
Thursday 5:00pm: Public Safety Committee meeting (Agenda) The big item is a possible new Fireworks Enforcement ordinance. Again, something I’ve been lobbying about for years and years. We currently have a massive fine for setting off illegal fireworks, but the officer literally has to catch the person in the act. Which is ridiculous. This change will attempt to hold the property owner accountable. In other words, if it can be shown that someone was blowin’ off M-80’s on your property? You get the ticket. One of those times I wish I could (temporarily) grow another arm just to vote twice. 😀
Thursday 6:00pm: City Council Study Session (Agenda) As you know by now, a Study Session is a special meeting designed to dive into one or two issues in depth. And this meeting has two doozies:
- The first is the long-awaited Communications Consultant thing.
- The second is that we’ll select a recruiting firm for a new City Manager. The good news? We got six applicants. The bad news? It’s a lot of reading this weekend for moi.
Last Week
Monday: Meeting with Finance Director and Police Chief. For five years, I’ve been pre-selling the concept of a Public Safety Property Tax Lid Lift. And this is it. We. Need. More. Police.
Tuesday 12:00pm: Port of Seattle Commission. An Order to implement a Port Package Update program, was voted on 5-0! See coverage here:
Port Commission passes Port Package update pilot program 24-04
Wednesday 5:00pm: Sea-Tac Airport Roundtable (StART) (Agenda) New year, two new members. And for the first time in a long time, both actually live in Des Moines. 🙂 I attended to make a simple comment: This is a community committee. It was created for the community. Don’t let the Port drive the agenda.
Friday: State Bill SB5955 (the Port Package Update bill) passed the House and now goes to the Governor’s desk for signature. Woo hoo! Full coverage here. If you have a problem Port Package, please contact Sea-Tac Noise.Info here.
About that Communications Study…
I’m going to get it out of my system now. This is the classic example of my father-in-law’s adage:
“When you waste a dollar, you’re really wasting two. The dollar you lost, and the dollar you don’t have to do something useful.
We just spent $75,000 studying something we already knew the answers to. So in addition to wasting the money, we don’t have $75,000.
Because a Communications Consultant isn’t just a six figure job. It’s nothing without a budget. It’s equipment and support staff to do all the social-medialising and documenterification and presentorial ‘stuff’ that communications people do. We just blew through that person’s start-up capital.
Actually, 2Big FIN was wrong. This is a three-fer. We also wasted an entire year. I would argue that the Marina Steps Community Meeting we just had was about as bad as the one in September, 2022. And the worst part? The Council budget $20k in 2021 to make sure we had good Marina Redevelopment meetings. That money is still unspent. The biggest capital project in decades and the public played almost zero useful role in the decision making.
The study is unscientific. The comment cards consist of a dozen or so LiUNA people and four residents who seem already engaged in civic life. So it’s a communications study that doesn’t follow the outreach precepts we’d want from a good communications director. How meta. 😀
The study provides a comparison with Edmonds, which I find problematic. People always make the comparison because, frankly, people like Edmonds. And so do I! I moored my boat there many years ago. 🙂 But scratch the surface and we are very different cities. For one thing, they have a different form of government (a strong mayor system.) For another they do not own their Marina–it’s governed independently Also, let’s just say they have very different demographics. And also a complete absence of airport. We are not the same. Most of all, they have very different needs because they are already a well-known brand. I’m not saying their web site (and fix-it app and marketing site Explore Edmonds) do not have some great ideas. They certainly do. But they are in a very different place. I would not be so stroppy about it except for the fact that they only provided the one comparison city.Residents are not digital media experts, so almost everyone simply asks for ‘more’ of what the City is already doing, whether that is useful or not to the broader public. They don’t know what they don’t know.
And many of the complaints are not ‘communications’ issues; they concern various services like permitting and animal control, for example. QoS sounds like a management issue, not something to put on a comms person’s plate.
Worst of all, in my opinion, the conclusions of the report are largely not actionable. It’s a laundry list of complaints the City has been talking about since I’ve been watching. The report seems to be leading the reader to “Hire a comms director and let them deal with it.”
I don’t want to be lead anywhere. A Communications Director is not, not, NOT ‘the solution’. It’s part of a solution, but it’s not the solution.
Because ‘communications’ is not one thing. It’s not just providing better information to the small number of people who are already engaged, but frustrated, it’s outreach to the order of magnitude larger number of people we’re not talking to–the people who don’t know what they don’t know. It’s improving IT systems. Fixing various processes. Establishing organisational guidelines. Fostering a culture of outreach. And then giving the organisation the bandwidth to deal with all that. It’s a lot.
Case Study
The Marina Steps meeting was attended by about 70 people. That was an all hands on deck effort by our staff. And even though we have our own Cable TV channel, it had no audio/video (other than Mayor Buxton’s amateur cell phone video). There was no capability to take audience questions. There was inadequate parking. There were no handouts, only four big posters. There was no virtual attendance (Zoom.) It’s basically what you’d find in a community meeting from 1985.
To make an event that reached a greater representation of Des Moines, and provided better information would require something different. You’d want virtual attendance. Live streaming. Equipment to take questions from the audience. Digital presentations. Handouts. You’d provide transportation for people to get to the meeting. Wow. That sounds like waaaaaaay too much for a small town like ours!
Funny thing, though. Ya know who already can (and does) do all that on a regular basis? Wesley. They do all or most of those things whenever they host meetings, like the Candidate Forum I happened to attend a few months ago.
At least some of the people I polled at that Marina Steps meeting seemed thrilled with the thing. Or at least, they shrugged and called it ‘real progress’. Progress? We’re getting crushed on comms by a senior living community! (A very special senior community, btw. 😀 See what I did there? )
And I haven’t even gotten to ‘apps’, which we should’ve started working on years ago for outreach, public safety, payments, calendaring and on and on… Because if people are wowed by some poster boards, using a cell phone to communicate with the public must seem like ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’
What is so frustrating is that mobile app tech has been available for a decade now. At the last King County Emergency Management meeting I attended, every was bemoaning the fact that residents now have a cell phone. You’re all over social media. But the City is the one entity that can’t reach you!
More than anything, this has always required a cultural shift in our government. It’s not about throwing money at the problem–money we are particularly hard pressed to find at the moment. That is why I always campaigned for simple changes,things we can do without spending a fortune. (Things Wesley already does for example.) But at bottom, we have to start expecting more. We can project a ‘small town vibe’ but we have to stop with the small town meeting attitude, which is really just a screen for not bringing more residents into the game.
1Big Father-In-Law. It’s apparently an Alabama thing. You have no idea how much I enjoy saying he was wrong about something–when he’s not in the room, of course 😀 )
2No joke, I’ve watched meetings from 2006 where residents complain about a lot of the same things on those comment sheets.)
JC . . . people are getting sick and tired of tax increases. Property taxes went up and then you want a Levy Lid Lift on the ballot for MORE taxes. You say no security systems and more police! Really?? We all need security systems in this day and age. Currently our Police Department is having problems getting anyone to apply for the job. The City needs to look at ways to cut costs within the City and stop with the idea that salvation is keep taxing us.
Residents always get the last word. However, I’ll just say that the Council has -not- raised taxes beyond 1% since I’ve been in office. Our property tax revenue was actually -flat- last year due to decreasing property values.
We have fewer police now than when you were on the Council, despite having a larger population, higher crime rates, and much higher costs. The 2006 Council unanimously chose to put a similar lid lift on the ballot. And the voters wisely said ‘yes’. That is what gave us more police for six years. I support giving 2024 voters that same choice. Seniors and low income residents would still be able to get a break from King County.
But unlike my colleagues in the majority, I’m willing to give people a choice.
Thanks for commenting. 🙂