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:
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 Caffrey is away on holidays this week. As of press time there is no new recipe… er… City Manager’s Report. 🙂
Run for City Council
These four seats up for election on our Council. And at least one incumbent has already decided not to run again.
You should run.
But first, you should find out what yer getting yerself into. Start by going 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
Sign up for the 
Airport Advisory Committee. We keep putting this off and the clock is ticking on important aspects of airport expansion.
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 blur. 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
Last week 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, the same type of property tax increase.
At our last meeting, my colleagues spent several minutes bemoaning possible King County tax increases. Finger prints! Parks! Waste water! Solid waste! Where will it all end!?!?!? And yet, the Council has had no problem supporting multiple pieces of state legislation to raise your property taxes by a lot more.
Most of these county proposals are not new taxes, but rather renewing worthy existing programs (like the automated fingerprint system you are voting on this week.) The ballots make it clear what they are proposing and they give us all a public vote.
Voters expect to (wait for it) have a vote on issues that affect their property taxes. And more than that, I am concerned that the Council took the wrong lessons from the Prop #1 vote. It is not, Not, NOT that the public has ‘tax fatigue’. It’s that the public did not trust our Council at that moment in time.
I’m homping on this because I have never known Des Moines voters to be anything but generous when it comes to tax votes – so long as they feel they are receiving value for money. Even today, we routinely approve fire levies, school levies, county levies. So long as the public perceives the value, we tend to vote ‘yes’. In my experience a ‘no’ is simply voters telling you to make a better case.
This Week
There is no City Council meeting this week. I am taking a few days off in conjunction with my fave time of the year – Passover (which began on Saturday) and Easter (next Sunday). But – if you wanna share your thoughts on finding the Afikomen, what’s so ‘good’ about Good Friday, or even something to do with ADUs and potholes? I’m there for ya… (206) 878-0578.
Last Week
Tuesday
Port of Seattle Commission (
Agenda) The highlight for us was a presentation on the various Economic Development Grants the Port dishes out every year. Those grants are funded through our property taxes and Des Moines only gets about $30k. 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.
These economic development grants have been a terrible deal for most airport communities. Our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info wrote a really good article on this which is a must-read.
Wednesday
King County Emergency Management Advisory Committee: We did a tabletop exercise where there was a big street protest during a FIFA game.
If yer a soccer fan, at an international event, you won’t necessarily see ‘people from all over the world!’ You’re likely to see hundreds of rabid supporters from one place, supporting one team. Wherever you have hundreds of rabid football fans from out of town, ‘stuff’ can happen. And the stadium is right next to Light Rail. So, the consensus seemed to be that it would be a good idea to have flyers at each match in the language of the teams. And also try to have at least a few people in Des Moines available who speaka zeee langweeedge.
Thursday
City Council Meeting
Every meeting seems to have a theme and for me this one was “we’re not serious.” Recap below.
Friday
I had the honour of touring the new Puget Sound Clean Air Agency Air Quality Monitoring Site at North Sea-Tac Park. This is a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge deal. Read about it at Sea-Tac Noise.Info.
Fingers crossed, we might have our own version of this in a few months! Having proper air quality monitoring – something we’ve been trying to get to for almost a decade – is a key step towards regulating aviation emissions!
April 10, 2025 City Council Meeting
Regular Meeting – 10 Apr 2025 – Agenda – Updated
Public Comment
There was a public comment from Christina Blocker of Elevate Black Wellness in Tacoma, who received the Black Wellness Week Proclamation.
Consent Agenda
Long Range Financial Planning study. The company we chose, FCS has worked with the City for years. I reviewed their work in doing a rate study for our Surface Water Management fund. Although I have no objection in this case, I always think it’s worth noting that service contracts are not subject to competitive bids. And in the past, not doing so has yielded (cough) ‘mixed results’.
Drone Show. Speaking of competitive bids, even knowing it was a lost cause I pulled this for a separate vote. Why? Because the product has been mediocre. Sorry. You know it. I know it. It may have been OK to use one vendor at first. But there is a lot of competition now. We did not even seek out alternatives. Instead, we accepted a $10k discount in exchange for a further two year commitment. We could also save $40,000 by going back to pyro – which is (sorry) still a superior value.
This goes beyond sloppiness. The Lodging Tax Advisory Committee, which is supposed to provide a plan for spending this money does not bother to record minutes, or even provide documentation of the spending. Which came in handy because in 2024 the Council never approved the contract – as required by law. Because the City never brought it to the dais. Not. Cool. Approved 6-1.
Regardless of where a Fund’s comes from it is all your money and should all be spent well. City funding is kept in separate cookie jars called Funds – usually indicated by where the money comes from. But whenever anyone tells you that each fund is so separate that it cannot be moved around as needed, you should walk away and then spit in their eye. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Your call.
For example, the Sixgill Shark thingee below will be funded from the Storm Water Management Fund – which is a tax you pay for to maintain your drains. The rationale is that it is also appropriate to spend a few bucks every year educating the public on the importance of not polluting the storm water – and 1ultimately harming Sixgill Sharks.
In the case of a drone show, the money does come from our Lodging Tax – a small tax paid for by hotel guests. No, we cannot use that directly for something like ‘Animal Control’ as one of my colleagues scoffed. However, one can also take that same Lodging Tax money and use it to fund any number of other City items we currently pay for out of the General Fund. Which frees up $80,000 for… animal control. Get it?
This is not some complex ‘financial instrument’ requiring a 2math degree from MIT to understand. Paying money from one account to free up money in another is called Normal. Corporate. Accounting.
And anyone who uses arguments like 3“It’s impossible” or “Hey, it didn’t come out of your property taxes, so quit yapping!” either don’t know what they are talking about, or they want you to believe it’s OK to make bad purchases.
City Presentations
Since Katherine Caffrey was away, the City was represented by Assistant City Manager (ACM) Adrienne Newton-Johnson. ‘A.J.’ has been ACM for several years. She informed me this was not her first time in the big chair – as I had suggested last week. Mea culpa.
- The State of the Court presentation from Judge Leone was postponed without explanation.
- There was a 30 second presentation on the as yet unformed Airport Committee. We were not offered a chance to ask questions and if I had it would have been to check that the application on the web site matches what the Council approved. (It has been updated. Apply here.)
- We concluded the discussion of ADUs (see below).
Accessory Dwelling Units
All this is driven by one of those danged state laws: HB1337-2023. The state is forcing us make it easier to build ADUs. Bastahds! 😀
But every resident I know with sufficient land, has considered this and often we’ve made it too hard. Many are aging out, so the most obvious use case is a multi-generational ‘compound’ to allow families to age in place. We should encourage this.
I’ve been through both sides of this: converting a house into a duplex, and then a duplex into a house. Oi. It has always been complicated. IÂ thought a big problem would be engineering (water handling, electricity) and connections to utilities. Apparently, not.
But the entire discussion mentioned ‘developers’. As horrifying as it may sound to some, a major use case has to be less experienced people. If the process isn’t made easier, it will be less successful than it should be. Or to put it as a neighbour told me: “If it costs me as much to build an ADU as it does to build a full-size house, no way I’m doing that.” Exactly. The building has to be less expensive and the building process has to be less expensive.
During the discussion I kept using the word ‘geometry’ because as time goes by I’m seeing ‘zoning’ as less relevant than simply providing adequate space ( ‘set backs’) and making it as simple as possible to obtain connectivity. In other words, the plan itself should determine what is appropriate.
Parking also came up. Some of us want to maintain parking requirements (a parking space for each unit.) I don’t. If we’re sincere about ‘getting people out of their cars’ we have to provide those options. But at the same time, we also have to be willing to discuss what that really means. For me, exploring parking permits on certain streets makes sense, but again, I know that horrifies some. Not me. I have personal experience and when it’s well-managed, it generates local revenue and helps reduce crime.
I keep asking dumb questions about manufactured housing. The build quality is often superior, but apparently, there isn’t some ‘seal of approval’ to make it easy for the City to know that a particular vendor’s products will work well here.
Anyhoo, I think the City will be bringing back some draft proposals to offer up to four units, a 1,200 sq ft. max for an ADU, and more flexible parking options.
Sixgill Sharks
A Sixgill Shark proposal passed 6-1. I was the ‘one’. 😀 However the decorative signage – which was the original idea we approved – was removed. That’s fine with me because, as I’ve written before, these signs have not exactly been game changers. That leaves the thing as some vague $10,000 ‘education event’, funded from the SWM Fund, to be held on July 6, 2025.
Why I voted no? At about 3pm the day of the meeting, new DPW Mike Slevin sent an email describing an education program he had worked on in Tacoma. Check this video. Can this guy sell water quality or what? 😀
I made a motion (which went straight to nowheresville) to approve the entire proposal but to postpone it. Why? Because this concept deserves better.
1It’s a real stretch, I know. But the State of Washington says it’s perfectly appropriate to spend SWM dollars on education programs. They don’t have to actually make sense. 🙂
2I have a gift card for the person who tells me what’s wrong with this GIF.
3I hate being ‘that guy’, but we have to stop hiding behind this kind of fol de rol. If the Council wants a drone show? Just say so.