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.
We’re closing a six month trial without standing committees, instead doing a monthly Committee of the Whole (COW). Unfortunately, as the year goes on, items for consideration are veering away from each committee’s planning calendar. But for what it’s worth, each committee’s planning calendar are here. 🙂
City Manager Stuff
Back from vacation, the City Manager’s new weekly report format is viewable here. It includes some bad news on the Masonic Home. LUA2019-0032 Zenith Demolition Decision
The next step is a community meeting is scheduled for August 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Beach Park auditorium.
City Manager Report – August 8, 2025
The 24th Ave Road Project is finally moving along! Repaving began on Monday July 21st. There have been issues with traffic and traffic lights. Probably best to avoid if possible. 🙂
Highline College Survey
The College has asked that everyone take this College Perception Survey survey to help them understand how they can better serve not only the students, but also residents of Des Moines.
Sounders Free Tickets!
If you haven’t been to a Sounders FC soccer game, your first ticket is totally free! The program is sponsored by the Rave Foundation (which has helped fund projects at Midway Park, among other things.)
Can we talk for a minute? Like many of you, I got (re)-interested in football when my kids started playing. In addition to the fun factor, I got hooked on Sounders games because they are just so convenient by transit. For me, I just hop on the 635 Shuttle Bus to the Angle Lake Station, get off at Union, and the Stadiums are two blocks away. That’s how transit is supposed to work.
SR-509 Tolling and free Good To Go stickers
Here is a detailed blog post on how SR-509 and tolling will work. There is also an offer to get a free Good To Go sticker. (Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement of tolling. -I- didn’t support it. Remember that! 😀 But it’s happening. And if you don’t already have a sticker, you should at least get a freebie in case you need to use the tolled section. 🙂 )
https://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2025/08/tolling-begins-on-sr-509-expressway.html
https://engage.wsdot.wa.gov/sr-509-expressway-opening/
Metro Survey
As Link light rail gets ready to open here (maybe by end of 2025!) Metro invites you to learn more and take this survey by August 31.
Redondo Parking – get a pass!
However, Redondo Paid Parking is now live. So, get a sensibly priced annual pass by contacting the Marina. 🙂
Restaurants!
There have been more restaurant changes 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.
News Flash! After five years of being only ‘98198’, TakeOutDM is expanding its list to include establishments people think (or wish) were in Des Moines. For example, if you like French casual cuisine (and who wouldn’t?) I really like Peyrassol West in Normandy Park across from the QFC.
Last Week
Tuesday
There was an election and Peter Kwon and Steffanie Fain will vie in November for position #5 on the King County Council. Also of note, Edwin Obras and Kevin Schilling will go at it in the 33rd House seat.
I did not endorse either candidate but I heard more anger from residents about the 33rd than I’ve heard about any race in a loooong time. Both campaigns went negative (albeit in very different ways) and it soured voters on all sides.
I have reached out to both finalists and asked them to dial it back. The funny thing is: I don’t think it helped either.
I’m also a bit freaked out about all the moolah. Ms. Fain spent almost $200k . Both Obras and Schilling were near $150k. And this is just the primary? In one sense, the most successful candidate was Peter Kwon at roughly $50k. Speaking as someone who has spent about $4,500 to win two elections, ‘efficiency’ rules, we approve. 🙂
https://jcharrisfordesmoines.com/wp-content/uploads/20250805results.pdf
National Night Out
I attended four of these. Apparently, the mayor attended ten. 😀 I dunno how she does it. What happens to me is that I always find at least a couple of people who have interesting things to talk about…
Thursday
City Council Meeting (recap below).
Saturday/Sunday
I attended the Cambodian Cultural fest at Saltwater State Park. No piccies this year, but always fun. I try to remind people every year that this is the largest ‘event’ in Des Moines and as much as I like promoting our Marina, it is easy to book and the views are pretty spectacular.
Speaking of cultcha, I also attended ‘As You Like It’, presented by Seattle Shakespeare Company at the Beach Park. Not my top-five Shakespeare, but a good crowd and a lotta laughs (and a surprising number of kids!) I am sooooooooo proud and grateful for the City helping to organise and support fine arts.
City Council Meeting Recap
(Agenda).
Public Comments
There was a fabulous public comment from a resident of Huntington Park asking about transit. Be still my beating heart! 😀 Like moi she was a former New Yorker and mentioned Grand Central Station. She quizzed me on various bus lines and I failed miserably!
There were quite a number of public comments on the Masonic Home demolition EIS, both opposed and a large number in favour.
Zenith Demolition Presentation
After the City presentation we asked a series of questions. We will get the answers later. I tried to ask the questions the public has: Why the owner is allowed not to provide planning details? What are the possible zoning options? How was the mitigation negotiated?
Transportation Element
This was the last ‘element’ in our updated Comp Plan. We were supposed to have the whole thing finished last year. But the previous Planner retired, we got a new City Manager, so the new Planner has been doing a lot of catch up.
I am not a fan of comp plans – especially after watching the way the City has handled (or rather not handled) the Masonic Home. But I have to say the new team is a serious upgrade. I focused my questions on
- Bike Lanes – at some point we need to decide on a path to connect the City.
- Transit – the public comment on east/west options was perfectly timed.
- Traffic Calming – something that is not as fleshed out in the language as you might expect considering that it’s pretty much the number one concern people express to me transportation-wise.
On the left are our current bike lanes in purple. On the right was the 2015 Comp Plan, which was fairly grandiose in its aspirations. Note all the gaps? Since this stuff has become so stratospherically expensive and our budget has not, the practical goal should be to create one great path from the south end of town into the Des Moines Creek Trail to connect with the rest of the King County Trails System.
Barnes Creek 240 Extension
We approved a contract to complete one segment of 240th between 16th and 20th. Which is fantastic. But somehow it is being folded into the discussion of the Barnes Creek path that will ultimately make part of that trail connection. Cm Grace-Matsui pointed out that it’s $9M for only a few miles of road. But actually, it’s really $9M for four blocks.
I made the kind of comment I always do, “Who is in charge of making sure we don’t hit anything?” I’m sure it sounds snippy but I am frankly sick of almost every project having some form of delay or cost. One difference between myself and a lot of my colleagues – especially Cm Nutting who is in construction – is that, over time people get inured to that sort of thing. I get it. But at some point, you gotta start expecting these things to go right. It is possible to probably pre-map this stuff. I does happen.
Rando thoughts on two buildings…
There was a moment when the Masonic Home was likely doomed. But that moment was well over a decade ago, when the City decided to limit the possible redevelopment uses it would pursue. When you limit the things you study, you limit what is possible. In my opinion this is the worst aspect of government. Nobody to blame. Everything was handled with scrupulous fairness. How dare you suggest otherwise? But the results were totally planned.
If you look at our neighbours in SeaTac, they are about to embark on a project to replace a 45 year old office building with a new civic campus on 8.8 acres of parking lot at 200th and Pac Hwy. The final cost will be in the same ballpark as restoring 30 acres of absolute historic, architectural gold. People can’t get their minds around this. That’s just what any large building costs today. New. Used. Es macht nichts.
All the use cases failed to pencil out because they all depended on making money. There were never evaluations of other purposes. The new City Hall we’ve needed for years. The Community Center for the south half of town we will never have. Half a dozen others. Those use cases were never considered. They did not need to be. By the current owner today. By the City twenty years ago.
The real question was never money. It was vision. I’m sure the one-time money and the temporary construction jobs will be nice.
City Manager Caffrey did a radio interview on Tuesday that telegraphed the presentation on Thursday and then the decision for Friday. And if you think that timing on all these were coincidental? Well… 😀
My one concern on her messaging was where she said that her duty was to be financially responsible. I am unclear what she meant. But what the residents I’ve talked with heard was, “We need the construction money!” It may have unintentionally reinforced the constant desperation over money we’ve had here since I’ve been watching: Get the one-time money! And if you’re always living paycheck to paycheck, of course you’ll never save anything.
That said, her City Manager Report statement was much more nuanced and people should read that carefully. So other than that one small quibble, she is handling it with professional grace. But for those who are still unimpressed, I would remind them that it’s tougher to bleed for someone you do not know.
Given the length of time the property has sat, neither Ms. Caffrey or many others did not have friends who lived there. She never saw a show there. Or had a meal there. She never saw the place dressed. Or walked the magnificent rose gardens and orchards. She may never have stood at the entrance to witness the best view of the Sound in the entire area. I don’t know if she had been on a boat to see the property (ie. Des Moines) from the centreline with Mt. Rainier and the moon behind – no Photoshop required.
In fact, it says something about what our community values that I cannot find any of the photos or video so many people took back in the glory days. To a certain extent we all took the place for granted. As they say, “piccies or it didn’t happen.”
Ms. Caffrey has only been here a few months. She can only see the place naked, decrepit and with absolutely no dignity. The abandoned person in such rough shape one struggles to see as fully human.
If you listened to some of the construction workers eager to tear down the place, it sounds like a toxic, rat-infected scene out of Escape From New York. I dunno what to do with that. Because it’s not that. And you need just as many talented, well-paid workers to rehab a historic place as you would to tear something down and build 5/1 stick frames or towers or whatever.
In my closing comments I mentioned my niece who passed recently from a genetic condition at the age of 27. From the age of six she was well aware she probably wasn’t going to make it to 30. Only a few thousand people get it, so research was almost non-existent. About 10 years ago, gene therapy came into being and therapy for her illness went from science fiction to, ‘what if?’ and then a race against time – which she lost. She asked us to donate money to a foundation that supports the cure and my guess is that her illness will be extinct in the next decade because at least now it can be tested for. But in a final kick in the ‘nads, we learned last week that the primary researcher on the project has been de-funded by the administration.
I grieve. Not only for this. But for the fact that something so terrible is so friction-free. In my opinion, the best way to honour the Masonic Home is to make sure something like this never happens again. And that is one of the worst aspects of government: plausible deniability.
A tiny pebble starts downhill and after 100 bad decisions, all yer left with is, “We still have our memories!”
There is another bit of black humour about ‘military intelligence’ being an oxymoron. So is ‘urban planning’. As a practical matter there has been no such thing in my time here. You have dedicated city staff doing their absolute best to obtain grants and do the right thing as resources become available, but if you say that any of the major crossroads we’ve come to were part of some big ‘strategery’? You must be smoking something.
One notable feature of the demolition plan is $1.1M for historic preservation. When I first moved here I coulda told you ten places to put that. Now? I’m struggling to think of more than one. We have eradicated so much.
What has led to the gradual diminishment of our City has been the constant prioritisation of one-time money over long term planning. We’ve equated any construction project as progress because we’ve been so consistently broke. And I’m sick of that false narrative. Our job is to build the right thing, not just anything.
Have you noticed how hard we are struggling to obtain ten million to do the umpteenth down-sized version of the Marina Steps? We’re still $900,000 short. And if the Council figures out some way to make it happen, you should know that we pushed ourselves right to the edge for something a long way from what anyone ‘planned’. (A the next person who tells me “we can’t move money around!” should wash their mouth out with soap.)
When people tell me how much they like our little town, I assume they mean the few blocks near the Marina. I assume they don’t care about the ability to develop at least one bike trail. A better downtown. Transit stops. Better roads. And those were just the topics from this meeting. I assume they’ve decided that this is as good as they want. Not what was ever possible.
SeaTac can afford to build a new civic campus. And restore North SeaTac Park. And build sidewalks. And more housing. And provide far more community programs. It’s not some ‘airport magic’ that we can never tie into. It was a conscious decision we made to stay broke. The city of SeaTac was not given anything. They worked on agreements to benefit their city from the airport and they worked on it for 40 years. It’s not because of an accident of geography or God or anything like that. They kept pushing every year. The Port would say no to various things. But over time you work at it and you get something. Or you don’t and tell everyone how everything worked out for the best. Ignorance is bliss.