Weekly Update 10/13/2024

Last Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda) Highlights:

• The Port reviewed its aviation budget, which is booming. The Aviation Budget correlates strongly with flight operations, meaning noise and pollution. The airport will blow past the SAMP numbers far ahead of schedule. More below.
• The Port Commission voted on an order concerning ‘saving’ North Sea-Tac Park. Actually, they voted on a plan to be brought forward to the Commission sometime in Q3 2025.  Coverage from our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info
• There was also a completely new South King County Fund. This was originally called the Airport Communities Ecology Fund (ACE). It was a response to the Flight Corridor Safety Program (‘tree cutting’). Frankly, almost no one applied for the grants. So, over time the program morphed into broader programs and now the vast majority of monies go to… wait for it… economic development. I mention this because this points out a key flaw in our relationship with the Port. Cities know what to do with these funds. But by making them tiny ‘grants’, which sound so ‘equitable’, we end up actually not improving environmental issues. Look, if your local group gets some money? So cool. But this is greenwashing, pure and simple, and an absolute pittance compared to the negative impacts of the airport and the Port’s development projects.

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Wednesday: At my urging, the City invited a co-founder of Artemis Ferry to visit City Hall. This is the firm our ferry consultant Peter Philips has been pitching to the County to create a passenger ferry stop in Des Moines. Given that the Artemis guy was already in town from Belfast for the Ferry Conference organised by Mr. Philips this seemed easy enough. We were joined by Rep. Tina Orwall and Mayor Buxton. Apparently there is some talk about setting up some sort of ferry factory space in Des Moines. 😮 😀

There was no actual product to talk about until mid-2025, though he did have a very nice brochure. There was so much exuberance in the room (I use that term intentionally), and he also had so much jet lag I did not have the heart to be as skeptical as I should be. 😀

But Artemis has walked into a terrible trust situation. Mr. Philips, the last City Manager, and our last Council, needlessly misrepresented this ‘ferry’ thing—wasting hundreds of thousands of City dollars in the process. But I know from other, deeply flawed, past projects (like Des Moines Creek Business Park) that when a portion of the Council develops a passion for something, facts be damned.

Thursday 5:00pm Environment Committee.

I invited members of the Burien Airport Committee and StART to discuss the upcoming SAMP and what the Port has proposed for their StART Agenda. I presented the following outline of how we got to this point. I always stammer at this stuff because condensing twelve years into twelve minutes is challenging. 😀 Handout

In addition to simply saying ‘hello’, I hoped the Burien would take back to their City Council interest in supporting a letter to extend the SAMP Comment period closing date (see below.)

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Thursday 6:00pm City Council Meeting. (Regular Meeting Agenda)

October 10 Meeting Recap

(Regular Meeting Agenda)

City Manager’s Report

Assistant City Manager AJ stood in for Interim City Manager Tim George. She introduced presentations from Sound Transit on the Link Light Rail. Not much ‘new’. It’s still on track (see what I did there? 😀 ) to open in Spring 2026.

She also introduced our new Planning Director Rebecca Deming, previously with North Bend. Until now my knowledge of North Bend has been limited to hiking beautiful spots like Rattlesnake Ledge and so on. So, I started doing some research. And the one thing I know about North Bend? They have a Public Planning Commission. 🙂

New Business

We discussed having a Study Session on November 14 to discuss ‘vision, mission, goals’. There was no actual discussion. And that’s basically because, well, just between us gals, some of us were not exactly wild about paying a consultant $2,000 to facilitate a Council Retreat less than two weeks after the City Manager starts. Actually, it’s over $4,000, if you add in the fees the seven of us get.  I hope to be proven wrong and that it blazes a trail towards a bright and shining 2025. Dawn. Morning. You get the idea. 🙂

New Items For Consideration

• I asked the Council to approve a letter to the FAA in support of delaying the close of the SAMP comment period, currently set for December 5. I also asked the City to reach out to the other airport cities to obtain their signatures as well. That was approved.
  • However, Councilmember Mahoney added on the notion of re-creating our Aviation Advisory Committee–a proposal I am deeply skeptical about. A full discussion is scheduled for a future meeting. More below.

• Councilmember Mahoney also proposed having either the economic development committee or the municipal facilities committee hire an outside consultant to assess the capacity of Water District 54. I honestly had no idea what he was referring to by capacity and did not support it. We have absolutely zero control over special purpose districts like WD54! Municipal Facilities Committee covers city-owned property. We don’t own WD54. Economic Development has only to do with land we can regulate. Again, we don’t own it! Why we would jump to spending even more money on consultants and taking the Council’s time? The Mayor intervened to have staff report to the Council first.

Councilmember Comments

Both Councilmember Mahoney and Deputy Mayor Steinmetz used their time to speak in support of the tax levy lid lift. I wish they could dial down on the rhetoric a bit. The sky will not fall if the tax increase does not pass. But perhaps we’ve reached a point where the only thing that will get people to reconsider their approach is an election result.

My comments on airport issues

My comments were concerning Tuesday’s Port Commission meeting. The Port’s record profit forecasts are about record flight operations. And that means record noise and pollution and other negative impacts for us.

As I said, I’d be happy to consider an Aviation Advisory Committee but not now. There are several reasons to hold off, but mainly because we’ve run out of time.

The reason I asked the Burien group to attend is because we have a SAMP public comment period that begins in ten days and closes December 5 and we are all totally unprepared.

We’ll be lucky if the FAA allows us that extension.  Then we have only a few months to get a professional team in place to file an appeal on the most likely outcome–a finding of no significance. I believe our staff needs to be 100% focused on that.

The next citizen committee we should re-instate should certainly be the public planning commission. This is a group that has the broadest interest from the community and can make the broadest immediate impact for residents. Said it before, say it again: every truly controversial decision in Des Moines is a land use decision. By the way, the Council has received dozens of requests to do this, and zero concerning an aviation committee. As the Council’s resident expert on aviation issues, we should listen to the public on this one.