Weekly Update 05/11/2026

Some bits of business…

Calendar Nerds

And for those of you who, like moi, plan your entire life around our meetings, I put the City’s updated calendar of official meetings in the sidebar. You now have no excuse for not showing up!

About the cover

It’s been over a decade since we got red light cameras. They were controversial at the time. But let’s be real, girlfriend, we were going through yet another financial crisis at the time and the instant hot cash injection was pretty wonderful. However, they also caused a ton of disruption for the court. The money has gone down a lot. Some of them really have improved safety. But at least one (you know the one I mean) is still just a cash machine. And still cash we need. 🙂 We implemented a ‘park zone’ in Redondo, it took forever, cost a ton, and the complaints still keep rolling in. Same with any number of interventions where what we do doesn’t have the intended effect. We are now eligible for three more locations. And the recommended ones seem reasonable–they will write tickets. But honestly, are they the spots that will improve public safety the most? Tune in Thursday and find out. 🙂

Memorial Day

Transportation Survey

Transportation Survey – City of Des Moines, WA

The Fear Topics

Safety is such an intimate thing. Fear and freedom…

#1 Detention Center Policy

Detention Facilities – Zoning Code Interpretation This is a very ‘Des Moines’ way of addressing an issue. It’s wordy. It isn’t straightforward. But to be clear, there will be no ‘detention centers’ in Des Moines. They’re illegal, and physically there are no suitable locations. I know how freaked out many people are and you think a ‘proclamation’ will do the trick. I get it. But I’ve never met a proclamation that had any force of law. This document, and legally binding orders from the Port of Seattle, tell me that we will both defend the issue in court and those terrible places do not happen where they do not happen where they are not at least tacitly invited in or where they are part of long-established law.

#2 Flock Camera Policy

City of Des Moines Flock Portal This is the vendor web page linked to the City’s account. Many of you don’t want more ‘transparency’. You do not want these things. Message received. I want to acknowledge progress. We got the contract in 2022 and we never got this page. We now have SB6002. Do I want more privacy protections? Yes. Help me get three more votes.

And one other thing: People rail endlessly about ‘state government’. But the state is often very useful in being ‘the bad cop’. The state often provides the useful legislation we know we should do, but can never bring ourselves to actually do.

If you care about the issue? Advocate for strengthening SB6002. It could get rolled back.

City Manager Stuff

City Manager Reports!  May, 8 2026

The highlight for moi is the updated Construction list. I know a lot of you are upset about various construction projects. But on the other hand, as dark as this sounds, if you’ve been following on about our finances, I’m going to channel my Jewish Grandmother here for a sec:

You should be glad we’re doing something for you to complain… 😀

It’s just a fact that there have been years where there was no construction, if you know what I’m saying.

That said, by all means, if there are issues? Please let the City know. (and cc me.)

This Week

Monday

4:00pm Airport Committee (Agenda)

Wednesday

Emergency Management Advisory Committee (EMAC): We will get our final briefing on FIFA. Things I’m trying to get:

1. A complete list of road closures and regional traffic impacts. They are just all over the place. Not just the stadium, but I-5, 405, I-90, Light Rail, Tukwila, Bellevue. And… the president is rolling in to add to the fun.
2. Live information sharing—including positive messaging. Just in case something weird happens, the goal is to have a shared source of truth

Some FIFA info re. events (watch parties) and how to get around using transit. Highly recommended. You can use yer credit card

• Event Calendar | Seattle FIFA World Cup 26™
• SEA26 soccer – King County, Washington

Thursday

May 14, 2026 City Council Meeting Agenda Packet Highlights:

• Surplus Property – We go through a surprising number of vehicles every year and this is our first year with a truly budgeted approach to replacement
• Collective Bargaining Agreement Teamsters Local No. 763. This is fairly routine, but it’s worth watching because the City’s policy is to (try) to offer similar packages to non-represented employees whenever possible.
• Vision Zero Resolution – This is one of those state things we
• Photo Enforcement Program Update – 35 Minutes
  • We’ll be discussing placement of three new red light cams
  • Possible extension of one school cam to 24/7 (16th)
  • Noise Cameras. These are not yet legal in WA. The tech is not quite as fully-baked as people think.  Our current vendor now has one live customer in Honolulu? I would like to do a fact-finding mission. 😀 There is a data-collection program in Kirkland. Hopefully by the time the state passes legislation the tech will be provably. 

We will also have another Executive Session concerning ‘real estate’. These are becoming so hinky, I don’t even know what to say. And since they occur in secret, I guess that’s about it. 😀

Last Week

Thursday

City Council Combo-Platter (Agenda)

5:00pm Committee of The Whole

The Council agreed to support a regional letter for not cutting out the Boeing Access Road station for Sound Transit. I had no objection. However, the issue is not quite as cut and dry. (Whatever is.) There are other projects in our subarea (Federal Way to Tacoma) that might suffer instead. And frankly, one of the value propositions of Des Moines is its regional centrality. A lot of people (including moi) like visiting places to the south, not just the north. 🙂

The big ticket item was our tree code. This has been a striking thing to me over the years. People love trees. But the fact is, tree canopy throughout the City has been in decline for decades–both in terms of quantity and quality.

The Council failed utterly. There’s no other way to put it. People supported ‘heritage trees’ which sounds great and does nothing. Time and time again, residents have told us that they want us to retain and leverage the ‘character’ of Des Moines.

If you don’t give people a carrot (positive incentives) to plant a diverse set of trees, they are likely either to remove them (while hoping that someone else plants a lovely Monkey Puzzle!) or plant something generic from the Home Center. That sounds mean, but that is what all the research shows.

I’ve gotten ‘questions’ as to my assertion that Des Moines lost tens of thousands of trees with the Business Park. Fair enough. The area you know as ‘the business park’ or ‘the forest’ along 216th, was actually a residential area until 1990ish. It was cleared by the Port as part of a massive agreement called the Sea-Tac Communities Plan–basically the  ‘airport roundtable’ of people’s dreams. Part of it created a noise boundary around the airport. The area was always meant to be developed. But… as is happening now with ‘NERA’ in Burien, the agreement fell part quickly, people continued to live in the brown areas meant to become something else, with declining property values–which erodes the tax base.

So, when it was finally cleared, many people thought it had something to do with ‘Third Runway’. In fact, old-timers still call that area ‘Third Runway buyouts’, even though they happened before the Third Runway was finalised.

After the land was finally cleared, it then lay fallow for more decades, furthering eroding the tax base. But guess what… if you leave an area empty for a few decades, you get a consolation prize: “instant forest!” Get it? It had become something else.

But the original intent made it easy for the Port (and the totally jerkwad City) to value any of that area dollar-wise for peanuts and tree-wise at zero. An area thousands of new residents assumed was ‘an old forest’ had no ‘forest’ value at all. And thus required no tree replacement or tree-in-lieu money. You could say that the Port was rapacious. You could also say that we did not value what the place had become. We were just desperate to do something, anything, with the land.

The City of Des Moines wanted ‘development’. Fine. That is what was supposed to happen in 1976. But not obtaining any compensation for what it had become was just stupid. If the area had simply remained an ugly ‘pit’, like so many parcels in our downtown, one could understand.

If we had received the minimum tree in lieu fee the City proposed ($781–what Mount Lake Terrace now charges) we would have been able to bank millions towards the forest rebuilding program we need now.

That is what airport mitigation looks like. But to do that you have to be thinking about every project differently, not just in terms of ‘noise’ and one-time money.

6:00pm Study Session

The remainder of the meeting concerned our Strategic Plan. I wrote the City Manager my feelings which can be summarised like this:  It’s nothing any previous City Council would not have written. Even our mission statement has a misspelling… Did you just say The Puget Sound?

That sounds catty, I suppose but, it’s time to do a reality check for the Council: It’s been 900 days since Michael Matthias left the building. We’ve had studies. We’re still studying ‘ferries’. We’re doing more studies. We’ve had community engagement up the Wazango. We’re even lower information on airport issues than in 2024–which I would not have believed was even possible. There is nothing in there to suggest the challenges we face, or how we will face them. After 900 days, all those pesky details are still ‘tbd’.

Des Moines Council Study Session-Strategic Plan

Our Strategic Plan is five years. And it dawned on me that in 2019, about five years into Mr. Matthias’ tenure as Economic Development Director then City Manager, he declared the City on the road to… well… you know. That’s not being snippy. Our budget was temporarily OK. We had a slug of one-time money from the Business Park construction and red light cameras. We tend to go in these cycles. So it hasn’t been that hard to look like we’ve finally turned the corner on a five year window. Tony Piasecki declared victory in 2007. And then…

Friday

Environmental Sciences Associates Webinar/Briefing

ESA is a mega-consulting firm used by many airports (including the Port of Seattle) to prepare large projects like the SAMP (Part 150 Noise Study.) My group STNI attends these events and tries to get some 1:1 QandA time to be up to speed on changes to regs that might impact residents near Sea-Tac. Lucky me, this is my turn.