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 deep-sixed our standing committees. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar here. 🙂
Update, update: Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. You’ll see a lot of ‘catch-up’ this year – more meetings, lots of ‘stuff’. Which is great. But until we have a long-term calendar, it will be too easy to have things slip through the cracks.
UW AAA study for kids with asthma – free indoor air filters!
The University of Washington is conducting an Asthma, air quality & airports fon children living near Sea-Tac Airport. This is a great opportunity to help improve the air quality for your child and help with important research! Learn more and sign up here.
Puget Sound Gateway Toll-Rate Setting Online Open House
Yes, tolling is coming to SR-509. I keep posting this because it’s only taken 50 years, so you can be forgiven for being a bit skeptical. But as you drive down 24th Ave you’ll notice that the exit onto I-5 is nearing completion. This is happening. Learn more here:
City Manager Stuff
City Manager’s Report May 9, 2025
In addition to a recipe for S’mores, the report is the first I’ve seen of our new logo. Among a bunch of good items to look at there is
- A summary of various rate discounts for seniors
- Field House admin moving to Activity Center here
- New Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program web site on line.
City Currents Summer 2025
Speaking of information: I try to maintain a library of all City Currents Magazines in PDF format. I started doing this because I’m visually disabled and PDFs are easier for me to read than the on-line version. Since then, I’ve found them to be an interesting way to learn the history of Des Moines going back to 1990.
The Race is on for City Council
Four seats up for election on our Council Here are the candidates who filed. Note that Traci Buxton (Position #5) and Matt Mahoney (Position #7) chose not to run for re-election.
In Highline Schools, our recently appointed District #5 Director Blaine Holien is running unopposed.
In all our neighbouring cities, every race has at least two, and often three and four candidates. But for some reason, we are unique in having so many unopposed elections.
Meanwhile, the race for our County Council seat #5 has six candidates – befitting the fact that our district also contains the much larger cities of Renton and Kent.
And in a slightly troubling sign – at the Port of Seattle – all three seats go unopposed. It’s a bit difficult to improve the quality of government if people don’t bother to run.
Airport Committee
Sign up for the 
Airport Advisory Committee. Despite being posted for two months now, unfortunately, only three people have applied for the position. This is bad as the clock is ticking on important aspects of airport expansion. Let’s get on it!
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant 3changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.
This Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commissions (Agenda) Highlights:
- $4,000,000 to renew contract for the 24 noise monitors. This brings the grand total to $19,000,000 of advertising. I don’t know what else to call it because the program has no regulatory value. This is one of those deals the public does not understand. The truth is so absurd people don’t believe me when I tell them this: the monitors have absolutely part in establishing noise boundaries, or holding flights to account for excessive noise. Nothing. It is monitoring, just for the sake of monitoring. Your tax dollars at work. 🙂
- The Port will purchase $950,000,000 in bonds – mostly to help finance the SAMP. That ability to borrow should give you a clue as to how well they are doing.
- They will provide their 2024 Environmental Sustainability presentation. This will give you a sense of how well they think they are doing. When it comes to the airport? Here is the sum total of their work last year:
Completed or made progress in insulating three single-family homes, 9 apartment buildings, and 3 places of worship.
And what makes those stats even less amazing? The three places of worship are left over from the Third Runway agreement – 1996. I’ve run out of jokes to deflect from how pathetic the Port’s approach to sound insulation has become over time.
Friday
6:00pm Mt. Rainier High School Art Fest! 6pm – 9pm. Big Band Jazz! Mariachis! Art! High school food for dinner! jk. 😀 If it’s as good as last year, it’s gonna be great. See you there. 22450 19th Ave S, Des Moines, WA 98198
2025 Art Fest Dinner Ticket Reservation
Last Week
Wednesday
I took a test drive on the 12 Seat version of the Artemis Electric Ferry along with Mayor Buxton and Cms Achziger and Mahoney.
Note that this is soooo not the 65 seat ‘pilot ferry’ boat we tried in 2022.
Hydrofoil tech really is impressive. If it can be made practical (a big if – keep reading) it will make ferry service much more pleasant for people who don’t enjoy all the ‘motion’ of a typical ferry. It was a very weak current, which is great for going north and south. But the pilot did a couple of 360s heading east/west – and the ride was just as smooth. The moment any ‘normal’ boat starts heading east/west across the Sound, there would have been major bobbing and rolling.
That said, these things are not cheap. The 24 seat version, which is a real product, has a 12 month wait list and costs $3,000,000. The 150 seater, the one that is supposed to be the real ‘transit’ for King County is $16,000,000 will not go to sea-trials until November. And you need at least two to run a route.
So all the talk of getting any of this going ‘for FIFA 2026’? I dunno, man. 😀
Another factlet. Last year, the City got a grant to put in a $1,000,000 charging station. But Artemis brought along a $20,000 portable charger. The difference? For $1,000,000 you get a 60 minute charge. For $20k, it’s overnight. That’s a pretty high cost premium for convenience.
On the plus side, despite the eyepopping prices, these things should be viewed like any ‘bus’ or commercial aircraft. Their lifecycle should be 30-40 years and they use a lot less energy than a diesel boat, which makes them much cheaper to run. So for a transit agency that can borrow massive amounts of money they probably make a lot of sense.
The question is: where is the use case? It’s 39 nautical miles to Olympia. It’s 16 to Tacoma and another 16 to Seattle. Where are the stops? How many per day? Is the main reason to have a stop in Des Moines for the fast charger? To get people to the airport? What happens in two years when the batteries get better and they don’t need to stop in Des Moines, but can go directly from Tacoma to Seattle and back?
Thursday
City Council Meeting (recap follows)
City Council Meeting Recap
(Regular Meeting – 08 May 2025 – Agenda – Updated)
Consent Agenda
Dock Replacement Engineering
I pulled this item. But only because I’m paranoid about 1sludge. After diving through a ton of paperwork, it looked to me like there was an increase in engineering fees, which doesn’t bug me, but a delay in billing or something which I was worried might slow delay the contractor from showing up and getting in-water projects done. If you read along long enough, you’ll hear references to ‘the fish window’, a period during the year when any in-water work can be done. If you ‘miss the fish window’ you have to either wait for next year to start, or you have to shut down in the middle.
Farmers Market
I did not pull this item. But it will continue to irk me – not because I don’t like Farmers Markets. They’re great. But because we have all these separate, but interlocking ‘things’ that are beloved by the community. People assume they all work together and create a ‘destination’. They don’t. They should. But they don’t. And I sure hope the new City Manager takes a lot of notes this year so we can make progress on that next year.
I yammer about it now because I never expected Ms. Caffrey to address this kind of thing in her first year. But I do expect the City to take notes.
Citizens Advisory Committee Re-Org
If you read last week, the City offered two big options for consolidating all our various ‘citizen’ committees. The Council voted (4-3) for Option A – what I called the Soviet Option. 😀
What troubles me, as with the election above, the Farmers Market, and everything is participation. We don’t have it.
I had hoped the City would simply defer this discussion until after we get a new web site (hopefully more mobile app-based).
There is this fib we keep telling ourselves that, “people who care enough will find a way to get engaged!” If that were true, it woulda happened by now. I also don’t buy the idea I hear that these are “the farm team for future leaders”. Really? No candidate for City Council in the past decade has had anything to do with these groups. Two members of the City Council were engaged on citizen committees (Jeremy Nutting 2013, Luisa Bangs 2015) – but they joined the Council as appointees, not people who campaigned for office.
There is an existential problem in civic life – a lack of participation, which is most acute in the areas and demographics of the City that are chronically under-represented.
ADUs Middle Housing
This was a win for our City. It might be one of the things I will look back on as a real accomplishment. Of course, since the proposal turned out exactly as I’d hoped (when does that happen? 😀 ) I would say that.
We voted to expand the number of dwelling units to 24 per acre – with a max of four ADUs (the remainder being middle housing – such as cottages.) We also voted to reduce parking requirements in these new projects. (But to be clear, not throughout Des Moines.)
A lot of the ‘parking’ discussion was about general concerns about on-street parking – again not part of this discussion. Parking throughout the City will be an issue for the Council to address, but not here.
- 3,696 properties between 3,000 – 10,000 sq ft.
- 2,392 properties > 10,000 sq ft.
As I said last week: this entire deal is a beta test. There is simply no way to know ahead of time what the effects of this will be because there are simply too many variables – including how many residents will take advantage of this. But to all the people who say “there’s no place to put more people!”, that was never true.
You can say whatever you want about ‘Destination Des Moines’. But the biggest driver of local business will always be our residents. The more easily developable new spaces we can provide for families, the more customers we provide for our businesses. Middle Housing and ADUs are the low hanging fruit.
Lakehaven Water District Franchise Agreement
This was the first reading on an agreement to lock in a six percent franchise fee for rate payers until 2041. In a rare moment of speechlessness, I literally could not put a sentence together on this. But I realised in the moment that I had not done my job. I was just ready to move it forward to the second reading without a second thought – as just one of those things that has to happen.
Perhaps like how we have a bajillion ‘committees’, the City has five special purpose districts. Which is a lot for a City of only six square miles. Each of these services require City participation and thus some form of compensation. The City can either charge a utility tax – which makes us look bad, I suppose, or charge a franchise fee to the SPD – and they tack it onto their rate.
Rate payers (you and I) are told that this state of affairs keeps rates low and preserves ‘local control’. They fight like badgers to maintain independence and franchises and avoid utility taxes. So, because nothing here is simple, we now have five separate, very long, franchise agreements.
However, IMO, any red-blooded city councilmember should prefer a (low) and standard utility tax. This gives the City the option to adjust rates as needed. I have no idea if 6% will be the right number ten years from now – especially with inflation.
Then there’s this: at Water District #54, there have been two Boil Water notices in ten years. Highline Water recently negotiated an agreement with the Port of Seattle over PFAS in the water. In SPDs with lots of old septic systems (North Hill), we have no way of offering better options for connecting to the grid.
All these staggered agreements prevent us from considering if there are better long-term approaches for the City to promote growth. The notion that it is automatically better for residents (and the City) having so many agreements (and so many agencies) in a geography as dinky as Des Moines seems harder for me to justify as the years go by.
Council Protocol Manual Update?
We ran out of time. 🙂 To be continued…
There is absolutely no sane reason for Des Moines to support a ferry. It’s way too expensive. Use the money for other, much more important things.