The City did a real solid in civics lessons by recording this presentation and Q&A. For those who prefer reading to watching long videos (me, Me, ME! 😀 ) took the liberty of adding a machine-generated transcript. It’s pretty good, but as with all such things: caveat lector.
City Council Candidate Orientation Slides
Opening Remarks – City Manager
Obviously, Des Moines has about 32,000 people. We were founded in 1959. I thought this was interesting—some of the demographic information about the community, just sort of who is the population here.
One of the data points on there was that about 80% of the population leaves the city during the day for work, so we are definitely more of a bedroom residential-heavy community. That parlays into this information I want to share with you—primarily we are a residential community. This is our zoning map, which can sometimes not always tell the most accurate or best picture, but really what I would encourage you to take away from it is the red and some of that purple around downtown are really business areas. Everything else is primarily residential.
How heavily residential we are really impacts the city’s finances and really tells the story about a lot of things going on in the community. As you all know, our primary commercial corridors are Pacific Highway and Marine View Drive. Future growth here will be definitely driven by redevelopment and increased density.
What’s also important to share is we have a very large percentage of tax-exempt property in the community, meaning development that does not pay any property taxes. That’s obviously all public things like churches and schools, government-owned buildings like the FAA building, Judson, Wesley—all of those developments are property tax exempt, and again those really influence the overall city’s finances.
Many of you are aware of this, but later this year we will be forming a planning commission, which I think will be a great way for citizens to get involved in a lot of these types of land use issues as they come up.
City Infrastructure and Facilities
A couple facts here about our public infrastructure, parks and public spaces, our marina—I’m not going to read all of this because you guys know this, but I wanted to make sure you had some good data at your fingertips should you need it. These are our city facilities and locations. These are the areas that the city owns and operates. I’m sure a lot of them you’re fully aware of. The Redondo boardwalk is actually considered a park, and so that is why that’s on there as well.
Major Institutions and Employers
A couple of our major institutions and employers—I’m sure you all are aware we have the Northwest headquarters for the FAA over on 216th. It’s a pretty large employer. We have not seen much of an impact of some of the federal things when it comes to employment at that space, meaning we have not heard that there have been huge reductions in their employment or anything. I don’t know if staff feel differently, but I have found though they pretty much fly under the radar—I guess pun intended. They do not—you know, I’ve reached out to them numerous times wanting to meet, have not received any response, so they kind of stick to themselves. They are not really active in the community.
We also have Riot Games, which is right near in that area as well. Sort of an interesting business here. Obviously want to highlight Highline College and of course Judson Park and Wesley. Of course, these are not indicative of everything in the community, but they’re a couple of our major institutions we wanted to highlight.
Form of Government
This is an area that I think sometimes because so many communities in this area are a little different—like they’re strong mayor forms of government—this form of government can sometimes not be really intuitive to people. So the city runs under a council-manager form of government. This sort of shows you how it works. Obviously voters elect the city council. The city council in January—who’s sitting up there—will choose amongst themselves who will serve as the mayor. Really the council hires, fires, reviews the city manager, and then the city manager is responsible for all of the city staff. It is pretty similar to sort of the city council acting like a board of directors and the city manager acting kind of like a CEO is the structure that we have.
This is the council’s mission, vision and values that the council worked on in November and then adopted in January. This is some preliminary work that the council did that we will then be using as sort of a jumping off point for the strategic planning process, which should be beginning later this year. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
Legal Requirements and Meetings
These are a couple things we just wanted to make you aware of. We do follow the Open Meetings Act, Public Records Act, which means all emails and correspondence to city staff and to city council members is public. Non-open meetings—both our kind of regular council meetings and study sessions as well as executive sessions—those all must be noticed like any other meeting. They don’t ever happen impromptu. There is a notice requirement. We’re happy to answer any questions about those if you guys have any later.
Role of City Council
This is a little bit about the role of the city council. I’ll let you all take a look at this, but really at a broad brush, the role of the city council is really to set the policy direction, and then it’s staff’s job to execute upon it. So there’s a lot of goal setting, high-level objectives. Really, what is the vision of the community that the council wants to create is really the space where the council primarily operates.
You are responsible for adopting the budget. Staff will prepare the budget and then take feedback from the council, but really the preparation of it and implementation was with staff. Obviously lots of community engagement—you all are familiar with the role of council with that—and then of course supervising the city manager.
The other thing I’d say as a staff person, not as somebody who has sat in your shoes, is that really sometimes I think when people are looking at council, they don’t always fully appreciate how much of it is being a team. You’re kind of only as effective as you can get three other people to agree with you on something, and so it really is a collective body that works best when you’re kind of marching as a whole. So just something to keep in mind.
Council Meetings and Procedures
This is a little bit about how the city council conducts its business. You all are pretty familiar with these study sessions, which are the first Thursday of the month. They are intended to be in-depth quality policy discussions, information sharing. Maybe presentations are made of things that are still sort of in the works. I would say since I’ve gotten here, we’re maybe doing that 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time they function a lot like a regular council meeting just because of issues that have been going on or time-sensitive matters, but that’s really the goal of them.
We have regular council meetings on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 6 PM. I think many of you have been in this room. Those are obviously our more formal meetings for voting and things like that. We talked a little about meeting procedures. You are guided by Robert’s Rules of Order. I’m definitely not the expert on that, so if you are elected, I encourage you—get a copy of that little book and watch some videos for cheat sheets. It can definitely get a little intimidating when you first start.
Then obviously your role beyond meetings—there are different committees and advisory boards that all of the councils sit on that are sort of will be figured out once the new body is sat in January. And then of course participating in all sorts of community events, town halls, ribbon cuttings—you know, the ribbon cutting that was on Monday for the memorial, things like that. There’s a lot of that that also sort of goes with the job.
City Organization and Staff
Now I want to talk a little bit about the city as an organization. So a little bit about me—I came to the city in November, so it’s been approximately seven months. I jokingly tell people it’s been both five minutes and I feel like I’ve been here 400 years at this point with how much we’ve had going on.
I came here from a suburb of Austin in Texas. It’s about 90,000 people called Cedar Park. I was there for about 17 years, sort of rose through the ranks. Prior to that I was with the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, and then before even that I was briefly with the city of Lawrence, Kansas, while I was working on my masters. I’m involved in all sorts of professional organizations that go with the city management field, and then here in the community I’ve joined Rotary and I’m on the Highline College Foundation board. But I’m at a lot of things, and so you’ll probably see me out and about.
This is our org chart. We’ll talk a little bit about the number of FTEs and staff we have in a second, but before I have sort of the key staff introduce themselves, I want to explain kind of the dotted line. So the city also has a municipal court that happens in this room, and we’re usually fighting out with them on getting space—like they just left a few minutes ago. The city council appoints the judge, and really, you know, she runs independently and the city manager really does not have any influence over the decisions she makes. So I’ll get emails from people upset about a certain ruling or decision, and that is an area, you know, I don’t weigh into. I am responsible though for her staff and her budget like any other department. So that’s why we use the dashed line on that.
Staff Introductions
AJ (Assistant City Manager): So I’m going to pause here and ask you and her staff to go around and just sort of like 45 to 60 seconds talk about your background and kind of your role. AJ—Adrian Johnson-Newton, our assistant city manager. You can see the departments she has underneath her.
My name is—I go by AJ, but my name is Adrian Johnson. I’ve been at the city since 2018. I started as the HR director and then I was promoted to assistant manager. I’ve been in public service forever, so about 22 years. I started in finance and decided that I wasn’t cool enough for finance, so I moved over into human resources, which has served me well. So I have a good balance between finance and human resources. One of the things I’m really proud about is I’m set to graduate next month actually from UW with my certification in public management. So really love the city. It’s been a great experience. I started first in transit, did brief county, and now…
So under me is finance—there is a dotted line from me and the finance director to the manager. I have obviously human resources. I have very recently—if you’re familiar with our Parks, Rec and Senior Services—we just recently changed the name to Community Enrichment Services, so we’re undergoing sort of a rebrand and refresh of that area. And then we just hired a grants management analyst, so we’re going to be looking at centralizing our grants. And then I have IT.
Bonnie (Director of Administrative Services): All right, Bonnie, you’re up next. You want to talk about your background or role?
Sure. I’m Bonnie Wilkins. I’m the director of administrative services. I’m born and raised in Des Moines, went through my whole entire life living in the house I grew up in. Go Rams! I have been at the city since 1998, so a thousand years ago. I started in doing payroll and then went over a couple years later to Parks and Recreation, where I worked my way up to office manager. And then the city clerk job came open and I thought, well, maybe now’s the time to change something and do something fun and different. And I did, and I loved every minute of it. Kind of my passion. But from there, I think with longevity you get a lot of knowledge of what’s going on. I think this kind of naturally moved up to my current role today. I have the city clerk under me in communications, and I support everybody. I have some knowledge, and I think they love to hear it. Sometimes I’m bossy and she doesn’t have a box, but it’s there called special projects, which is really kind of Bonnie’s bailiwick.
Mike (Public Works Director): Mike, do you want to talk about your background and the three kind of sections under your department?
I’m Mike. I’m a public works director. Prior to this, I graduated from WSU. I was there for 29 years. I retired from there about this place. I’m also a military officer—28 years, retired 2012. I did eight years active, 20 years. We have about 38 people. We have an engineering section that really manages our utility side and then also our roads and transportation side. We have operations and maintenance, and those are people you see every day. They’re here on standby or anything like that, or there’s a weather event—snow, ice, trees, whatever it may be. And then we have our capital project section—small section—that works on projects like playground replacements. Right now we have solar panels.
Jeff (Finance Director): All right, Jeff, do you want to talk about your role and your divisions? Sure, even though you are a square on there, I didn’t mean to skip you over.
So yeah, I’m Jeff. I’m the finance director. I’ve been working in government finance about 21 years ago. I’m a licensed CPA. We have about six people. We handle all the licenses, taxes…
Police Chief: All right. Oh my gosh, under University Sheriff’s Office investigate, sheriff’s office, my second career. So it’s cool. There’s two divisions—one is patrol, uniform police officers side of the house. The other half is everything else. That function includes animal control. It is literally duty for everything that across the department. One of the things really cool together, we’re all staff assistant. You’ll see a former relation.
City Manager: Great. I don’t want to skip Marina—Scott Wilkins, our harbor master, isn’t here right now. Bonnie can talk a little bit about him, but I’ll cover the marina.
Bonnie: I’ll give it a try. We do have kind of the only publicly accessible marina between Tacoma and Seattle. As you know, about 850 slips. Scott’s been with the city since 1996, so whatever that math would be—29 years. They have a staff of I want to say like 10 or 11 people, yeah, maybe 12. They also work seven days a week, so a few of the departments are really present seven days a week, like police. The marina is as well. And so he’s got a couple big capital projects going on right now, primarily the replacement of the L, M and N docks, which we’ll talk about in a second.
Rebecca (Community Development Director): All right, Rebecca, you want to talk about community building?
I have tons of seniority over me. I came from my previous—I have about 20 years in community development. I’ve got a bachelor’s in urban planning and public administration. I’ve got 12 full-time staff in my department. We do building planning, so we do both—you know, both projects go through both departments for permits. You’re also our SEPA official—yes, SEPA official. That’s the planning department, so got lots of projects dealing with SEPA and everything that goes through. I think we were just looking at a report—you know, we get about over 2,000 permits that go through each year.
George (City Attorney): Great. All right, last but not least, our former interim city manager, George, city attorney with the city for 17 years to practice law obviously here in Washington. What we do is we have a civil side, so we represent the city council as a whole and we do all the city department on the criminal side. We have two attorneys that do both arrested for misdemeanors. Also help…
And then something that I think sometimes will happen is the legal department represents the city’s legal affairs. So every once in a while we will get a citizen calling thinking maybe it’s like an attorney that will just help them. That is not really legal’s role. They also don’t really advise council members on things that are your own kind of legal things. It’s really about representing the city.
Tara: So Tara, do you want to introduce yourself real quick since you are just here early ahead of your six o’clock meeting?
I’ve been practicing for 12 years.
City Manager: And Sarah Lee in the background is our deputy court clerk—deputy city clerk, excuse me. They like to fly under the radar, but there she is. So she is at lots of meetings doing recordings, minutes, all of those types of things.
Organization Overview
So about the actual organization as a whole, we have about 140 full-time employees. Additionally, we have two limited-term employees, which are just what they sound like—you know, they’re employees but they have a kind of fixed term that they’re working for us. And then we have about 20 extra hires, which are sort of like seasonal employees. A lot of them are in like Parks and Rec programming things like that.
We do have a good chunk of union employees, both between public works and the police department, and I think some of the marina folks as well, right? But you can see the split between union and non-represented. And then our average years of service is a little over seven, so we’re actually a pretty new workforce, but we’ve got a lot of tenure you’ll find at the senior staff level, which is great for people like Chief [Name], myself, Mike, Rebecca who are new. There’s a lot of other people here who have been here a long time.
This is the breakdown of how kind of staff are divided. I always get sort of like—I don’t like how you show administrative services because it sounds like it’s the city manager’s office. It is not. There’s two people in the city manager’s office, but that includes things like finance, city clerk, communications, a lot of those types of things. That’s what’s included in administrative.
Organizational Culture and Initiatives
So when I got here—actually when I was even here during the interview process in August—I heard a lot from both employees and community members, a lot of concerns about the city’s ongoing communications issues, some trust and transparency concerns, and a lot about customer service. So I’m sure any of these folks can tell you that I like preach this a lot, but this is some of the work we’ve done internally. We’re trying to really kind of build upon the great things in this organizational culture but also sort of strengthen some areas that we have some room for improvement.
So these are sort of the four tenets of what are really important to us as employees, and these are things that if you are ever in the building you will sort of see them in every conference room. We are trying to really weave them into the kind of employee experience here. But really the four areas are:
- Customer service first and foremost—and I’ll talk a little bit about what we’re doing on that front in a second
- Better communication—so more timely, clearer, easier to access employees and city staff to get information and answers
- A lot of work obviously on our fiscal situation—so really taking ownership for, you know, your role as an employee and whatever budget or revenue source you may or may not interact with
- Finally, it’s important to us to make sure that employees like working here—we are extremely lean. I have worked at other organizations before that were lean. This is like leaner. We do not have enough people in any single department. So what that means then is if we’re asking employees to really have heavy workloads and meet a high bar, we need to make sure their experience being here is a positive one, that they find this a place that fosters their professional development, that they feel fairly compensated, things like that. So that made the list because it’s really important when you’re asking people to do a lot.
Communications Improvements
Some things that we’re doing on the communications front that I just want to share with you all so you’re aware of some of the things we do:
Tim started this when he was interim, but there’s a weekly city manager report. We’ve improved that. We’re looking at ways to even improve it a little bit more. That comes out every Friday. We’ve really started building an email subscription list. If you aren’t on there already, please feel free to scan the QR code and add yourself. We’re trying to get this out everywhere. We have about 7,000 people that receive our weekly emails, which is great.
I’m sure you all are familiar with City Currents. We are working to redo our city’s website—it’s terrible, I know. Bonnie is working on that project. We’ve received proposals. Staff are reviewing those and hope to bring that to council soon so we can really get that process started.
We are in the process right now of improving our financial reports and how they go to the public so that they’re clearer and a little easier for people to understand. So that’s something that you’ll be seeing more of in June.
And then we are really as city staff working to engage more with the community. So I and a lot of these people in the room attend a lot of community meetings and neighborhood groups. When I first got here, we did some coffees with the city manager where I met Pierre actually. We’ll start doing some more of those. And then this summer at every single farmers market on that Saturday, there will be representatives from city staff in that city booth every single Saturday. And so that is a lot to ask of staff that are already working during the week, but we’ve divvied it up. And then we’re also going to be doing a series of neighborhood popups. So a couple different areas in the community over the summer, we’re going to be doing a casual, you know, 5 to 6:30 type of popup in a neighborhood where people can come ask questions or, you know, just grab a popsicle, whatever.
I think it’s just important for both the community to know who we are and how they can access us and ask us questions, and most importantly, it’s good for us to hear from the community directly what’s on their mind.
Also, when I got here, there was no way for the public to really come into city hall. I think this was a holdover from COVID. So even though we share a building with court, so it’s a, you know, it’s kind of strange—like there’s the public entrance for court—but we also have opened up that door to the right when you were walking in. That’s sort of our city hall lobby, and that’s open Monday through Friday as well.
Major Initiatives
So there’s lots of major initiatives going on right now in the city, and I’m not going to go through all of these, but I do want to highlight a couple of the ones that are in bold.
The first one is that the city council received a presentation from me in March about doing a strategic plan. A strategic plan is really a long-term document that talks about high-level goals and priorities. As a new employee here, something that has been very challenging for me is that everything’s a priority because nothing is a priority. And so it’s really important that we go through this process of the strategic plan because we do have limited resources, and if we want to make real progress in some of these ambitious goals, we need to pick a few and really be marching in that direction.
That is a process that we will be kicking off with the community later this year. The council has definitely expressed a desire to have a lot of community engagement. That is something also that the new candidates who are elected in November will absolutely be playing a role in come January. So, you know, the outcome of however things go in November, there will definitely be opportunities for the council that is seated in January to have a big role in sort of what is in that plan.
You guys know about probably many of these if you’ve watched meetings where Rebecca goes through the comp plan. We have another one next week.
Another one I want to highlight though is our long-range financial plan and development impact analysis. We’re kicking off—we’re just starting that process right now. But we are doing a long-range financial plan to really look at what the forecasting sort of what the city’s outcome looks like. This plan is also going to be taking a look at maybe revenue sources we aren’t hitting or we could be leveraging more.
Candidly, and I say this to anybody, I don’t think it’s going to be everybody’s favorite presentation. It’s going to be pretty sobering, but I think it’s going to be really important for that transparency and just sort of set a good foundation.
We’re also doing a part of it called the development impact analysis, where it’s a tool that will allow staff to run a tool but provide information to the council when land use decisions come up. So if a land use is coming in and let’s say they want to put houses there, that is a very different financial impact to the city than if it’s commercial. So this is a tool that will help us kind of high-level get a sense of what is the revenue impact from a certain land use and what are the costs of that land use. Like it costs us money to serve a neighborhood, whereas, you know, the business parks on 216th candidly don’t really cost us much to serve.
So land use decisions are obviously made looking at community needs, vision, all of those things. This is simply sort of like one data point for those decisions. By no means will it drive it, but it is a way to sort of look at those through a fiscal lens, which I don’t think we’ve had that tool before.
The sustainable airport master plan—I’m sure all of you are very aware of this. This is an ongoing massive project that Rebecca, again, is our SEPA official overseeing. We expect some more to come out on that in the summer. That is obviously a process being led by the Port of Seattle, so we’re sort of like along for the ride. But as you all know, as an airport-impacted community, when things—and it impacts us pretty tremendously.
I am sure many of you are aware of a lot of these infrastructure and capital projects. Last week the council received an update on the Marina Steps. I encourage you to watch that if you haven’t already. Redondo Pier improvements—very positive. After a lot of, you know, Redondo making clear their desire for that project to really be happening, we are very happy to say engineering design is done, the project is fully funded, we have received the permits we need, and so we’re going out to bid. So that’s really positive. Yeah, so Mike was able to announce that last Thursday.
And then financial sustainability—it feels unfair to only put three bullet points under here because really this is the core of everything we’re doing these days around here. But again, I could go on and on and on about the number of cost-cutting and revenue-generating meetings and initiatives and ideas and programs and plans we are putting into effect right now on that. So please know that is an ongoing daily effort and things that this group of people talk about very every week.
City Finances
A little bit about our finances. As you all know, I’m sure many of you have gotten copies of our budget. It is on the website. Our fiscal year is January 1 through December 31. We do biennial budgeting, which means the budget that the council approved last December is for 2025 and 2026. So the council that is seated in January will primarily be hearing reports and updates on what’s going on with the budget, but really that budget creation process won’t really kick in until midway through the year, really when we start talking about 2027-28.
These are some of the key functions of the budget. I would say if people ask me what do I get out of the budget, the budget should tell you what’s important to the city. If you really look at that document, where the city is putting limited resources tells you what the priorities are.
This is your role in the budget: Again, you make sure that how we’re spending resources reflects those citywide goals and priorities. It’s one more reason why that strategic plan is going to be really important. You do review and amend the budget—like staff brings you things for consideration. We do have public hearings. We are looking at ways to improve our engagement with the public in the budget process. I know staff did a town hall last October right before I got here. I think we’re looking at sort of building upon that, especially when we talk about ’27 and ’28. And then of course you adopt the final budget. And then of course you will monitor implementation. So in June, Jeff will be bringing forward the 2024 year-end report and then also the first quarter of 2025, and then after that we’ll pick up the pace a little more so it’s not—it won’t lag quite as much.
General Fund Overview
This is just a snapshot of ’25 and ’26. I want to talk about the general fund because there’s a lot of funds, but really the bulk of our focus is really on the general fund because that’s the one that is just most challenging to really stretch every dollar and penny.
The general fund is our primary operating fund. It’s really all of our day-to-day services, but it’s—so you can see it’s public safety, it’s, you know, recreation and community, a lot of public works functions. It is not the marina staff. It is not kind of surface water management stuff—like there’s certain areas that sort of live in different funds.
Our major revenue sources are property tax and sales tax. I’m going to highlight those in a minute, just how tight those really are that come into the city. You can see our revenues and expenditures. It’s definitely a question to look at of sort of, you know, how balanced are we. We also really try to have a fund balance, which we talked a lot about to the council. I’d really like to see our fund balance grow. We are meeting our policy, we are in compliance, but it is, you know, much lower than what I think it should be. So that’s something I’d like to see us raise, but also right now we’re simply trying to sort of function, which is very tight.
Property Tax Reality
So something that I think a lot of people maybe don’t fully appreciate is how little of your property taxes go to the city. So this is sort of a, you know, average tax bill, but you can see all these different entities. About 8.3% of your property tax comes to the city. I am obviously very biased and partial, but the fact that the fire district, which is one department and one service, gets a larger percentage of your property tax than the city, which provides you all of these services, is pretty staggering and also really goes to show how frustrating it is because I see that residents feel like, “Oh my god, I pay so much in taxes, yet the city’s always telling me they don’t have any money,” and really we’re getting a very small sliver of what comes in.
So for example, if your home was worth $730,000—which if you remember from a few slides ago, our median home value is like 684 or something—only $623 come to the city. That is extremely tough to run a community with this many services on that. And I’m sure as you all are aware, the legislature puts some real caps on obviously how much that can go up every year, which as a taxpayer I totally get. As a city manager, very hard to run a city on that.
For sales tax, which as you know the sales tax rate here is about 10 cents on every dollar, we get a little less than a penny. So again, very small amount coming back to the city, which really then what you see as a result is a lot of desire for growth, economic development, fees, things like that as ways to sort of generate revenue because your traditional sources of sales tax and property tax are very limited in the state.
This really shows sort of the past few years. If we showed you the future projections, the lines don’t look great, but this is sort of a really high-level snapshot showing you revenue and expenditures. With inflation, demands for service, and sort of a lot of varying factors, it is very challenging for our revenues to keep up, even if we keep expenditures the exact same but simply going up, you know, to pay people for cost of living and things like that. It’s challenging. So revenue generation is really a key focus we have to have in order to really sustain ourselves as a community.
Other Fund Types
We also have a lot of special revenue funds. These are really funds that are more earmarked for like—it’s a certain type of revenue that can be used for a certain type of thing. I’m not going to go through all of these right now, but if you go through a budget document and you’re like, “What are all these funds?”—they’re kind of like funds that can be only used for certain things.
We also have several enterprise funds, which really means it’s a fund that works like a business, meaning that the money that is brought in for that service should be covering and must cover the cost to operate it. It’s very challenging and in many cases illegal to use enterprise funds for general fund expenses. So, you know, surface water management—that those fees that come in cover just that operation. Same thing with the marina.
Financial Transparency
This is an area we’re really improving. Before I got here, there had been a ton of improvement done, but there’s still sort of room for us to improve, you know, making those quarterly financial reports I think a little easier for like laypeople to understand. The budget is posted online. We comply with a lot of kind of state best practices. We do go through an audit annually. We actually just went through that and had a really positive audit. So if you want to listen to like a super exciting presentation from auditors, you can go back a few meetings. I mean, Jeff and I were really excited about it, but anyway, so there’s work to do there, but these are some of the things we already do.
Communication Guidelines During Election Season
And I’m wrapping up, and then we’ll get to your questions. So in this period where there are candidates and it is active election season, kind of this is sort of common in every city, but definitely what we’re going to do here is I would ask that you send all questions to me. You do not go to staff, and even when council is seated, really the role of the city manager is to be that point of contact for the council, elected officials, and staff.
So my email address is up there. I think each of you got an email from me, so my phone number is on there too. Please feel free to reach out to me with your questions if you have questions. We will be sharing them with all of the candidates. It is also sort of in like city manager school 101 that you share information equally. So if somebody says, “I want to sit down and understand, you know, everything about the history of the Marina Steps project”—although that’s a really big ask, so maybe narrow it down—we will provide that information to all of you. So just something to keep in mind.
And then several of you have already asked to meet with staff. I’m going to ask that those requests go through me, and I will be present in those meetings because again, that’s just sort of best practices and also lets us make sure that we’re sharing all that information with everybody.
These are some things that I’m sure all of you are already aware of, but we wanted to put them on here as good resources for you to check out.
Q&A Session
So this concludes sort of my presentation. I think we wanted to give you all an opportunity to ask questions, whether it’s actual questions about, you know, campaign signs and rules like that, or if you have questions about city things that are going on. This is a great time for us to sort of share the information with all of you.
Question about zoning districts: Yeah, the different… Yeah, so if you go online and go into community development, you’ll find the zoning map. And then on the side of the zoning map are all the different zoning districts. And if you go to the code—so like you can’t read it here, but if you were to blow it up anymore… Yeah, so where you would find that is in the city code. So if you just even—again, I hate saying it because the website is truly so atrocious—but if you find your way to the code, the search function on the code is pretty good. So you could put in, you know, “What is downtown commercial district?” and what’ll pull up is the city code with kind of what those are. Another good place to look at that—I mean, you could look at the comp plan, but really the actual municipal code is the better place to get a sense of what those zoning districts are.
Robin: Yeah, Robin, I did have a question… Oh, special revenue fund. That’s okay, that’s okay. I’m sorry. They’re not percentages—that’s a great question. They’re not really percentages. They are more so, as I’m looking at them, like fees we get for certain things that then have to go in that pot of money, and how those can be used is usually prescribed by some type of like state law or city code and kind of like how we use this source of money. Anything I’m missing, Jeff?
Jeff: Yes, oh yeah, that is one of our sources as well. Do you want to talk about that? Tax… That all goes to the city, right? Yeah, that’s the only source that 100% comes to us, I think so—business and operations occupations.
Robin: Okay, yes. Robin is very familiar… But I was watching and I saw sales tax.
City Manager: Sorry, yeah. I just chose the ones with the saddest story really to show. Correct, we also just implemented a square footage tax. So those kind of warehouses off of 216th that don’t pay property tax because they’re owned by the port and maybe aren’t the type of business that generates any sales tax—those were really in the city bringing in virtually nothing. And so the square footage tax, thanks to finance and legal, is a great way for us to sort of capture some revenue from them because they are in the city, they are occupying land that could be a different use. You know, their employees drive on our roads and things like that. It’s important that they contribute, but it’s still pretty minimal overall what they pay.
Question about legal department: And you’re separate? Yeah, we’re separate. So we answer to the city manager. There’s the direct line to us, right? But yeah, so we represent essentially the citizens of Des Moines in that aspect. We represent the city. So every—generally everyone charged with a crime will either have their own attorney or they get appointed one by the court, and so there’s public defenders, and then we’re the prosecutors. And so we work with the police department, and we essentially have to prove the crime. And it’s in this room, right? But we’re not a part of the court.
Well, generally we don’t have attorneys because those are infractions, so that’s like a ticket. So we handle the criminal cases—criminal being the key there where, you know, defendant’s entitled to an attorney, and so then the city needs an attorney to represent the city. Every—we do appear every now and again on the infractions, the red light cameras, speed zones, if there is an attorney for the other side, just if there’s legal arguments, then we can respond on behalf of the city.
Closing Remarks
City Manager: Any other questions?
Well, thanks for giving us an hour of your time. And then after the election in November, we will do a much more in-depth, like probably day-long orientation—get excited—where we’ll be looking at things, going far more in-depth on projects and things like that. But this was just sort of to give everybody kind of a snapshot of the city and let you know how best to communicate with us over the next few months. So we really appreciate your time, and I was going to say let us know if you have questions—let me know if you have questions per the last slide. But thank you for being here, and we will again post this on the website and I’ll send it out to you all afterwards with like a link to it. All right, thanks.