Some bits of business…
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: We just deep-sixed our standing committees. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar here. 🙂
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. Learn more here:
Fare Inspection
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.
One-week countdown: King County Metro restarts fare enforcement
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.
Call To Action: Save State Funding for Port Package Updates! – Sea-Tac Noise.Info
City Manager Stuff
The City is now offering an e-mail sign up for City Manager Reports – which I strongly encourage.
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.
Airport Committee
Airport Advisory Committee – Des Moines, WA – City of Des Moines Washington Jobs
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.
Watch Senate Ways & Means – TVW SB798
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.
Thursday
City Council Meeting
Regular Meeting – 10 Apr 2025 – Agenda – Pdf
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.
.
Last Week
Every week seems to have a ‘theme’. And last week’s was ‘not enough time’.
Wednesday
Citizen’s Advisory Committee (Agenda)
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.
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.
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
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.
Finance Committee
Thursday Finance Committee
(Agenda) Highlights:
- 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.
City Council Meeting Recap
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
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.
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.