Des Moines City Council Meeting — March 26, 2026

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: At this time, I’d like to call the March 26, 2026 Des Moines city council meeting to order. And I get to lead us in the pledge today. Please stand if you are able.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you. Okay.

With that, please let the record show that all council members are present here in person. City clerk, do we have any correspondence from the public?

CITY CLERK: No, mayor.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. It’s now time for comments from the public. There are no persons signed up. Thank you.

Moving right along. So, as you know, we are currently running as a committee of the whole. However, council members do serve regionally on other committees. Do any council members have any items of interest to the public or the council?

Seeing none, we’re going to move right along to the city manager report.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Mayor and council, we have three items tonight. The first one that’s on the agenda is the 4th of July and then we have two quick announcements. So, assistant city manager AJ Newton will take it away.

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: Hi, good evening council and community. My name is AJ Johnson Newton and I am here to provide a preview of what’s coming up for the 4th of July. So, we’re hoping that you’ll come and celebrate with us. And so we are hosting a daytime event down at the marina from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. It’s going to be a family-friendly event. And we’re going to have different activities sort of spread across between the marina and the beach park. And so, I would think of it like a walking event, so you can explore and enjoy hopefully really good weather. We’ve been in coordination with the farmers market because that will be happening that day. There’s a park run which actually came from the CAB. So that was an idea that they gave us and so we are also looking at other opportunities to see if there’s activities that are happening that we could incorporate into our event.

We did meet with the CAB — forgive me on the date but it was at some point in March — and asked for some feedback of things that they would like to see and so that will show up in our activities. So we know we’re going to have live music, we’re going to have food vendors, we’re going to have some interactive elements, we’re going to have a dunk tank. So we are looking for volunteers from the council.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Okay.

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: So I will reach out. We did pencil in the city manager.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: They had me down for the whole event. I was like five hours and Harry and I are not doing that for two and a half hours each.

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: We’ll have a pie eating contest and so we’re also looking at some other options to what we’re calling enhanced attractions. So more to come on that.

In terms of the budget, we are planning for significantly lower costs than we did have in 2025, I think. It came to like $117,000 for lodging tax. So, we are planning that it’s going to be less expensive than that. And we have lots of quotes out. We’re confirming our activities, our vendors, the layout, and stay tuned. All of the final event details and the marketing will be out in April. So, mark your calendars. We do expect to see everyone down enjoying the fourth with us celebrating America’s 250th birthday. Thanks.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Any questions from the council about the event?

Okay. All right. This weekend, not quite as exciting as the 4th of July, but I have a pile in my garage.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: The recycling collection event. Can you pull that up real quick? It is still in the south parking lot in the marina. So, no change because of the construction. Residents would have been mailed a flyer in the mail that had everything listed you can bring. And you can also find this information. It’ll be in tomorrow’s city manager report. But, you know, plenty of junk to clear out your garage. So, take care in that.

And then the last thing is I was asked to reference the No Kings rally and let you all know that we have been notified about that event for this weekend. And our police department has been notified as they are typically in the past of this event. The group that organizes it has typically done a really good job managing the crowd to keep it a safe event that also allows traffic to flow and so that’s what we are expecting as well this weekend. So that concludes our city manager report.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Okay. Thank you. Will the clerk please read the consent agenda?

CITY CLERK: Item one, approval of vouchers. Item two, $10 car tab fee increase, second reading. Item three, salary commission ordinance, second reading. Item four, King County 2026 to 2027 waste reduction and recycling grant award. And that concludes the consent agenda.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as read?

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: Move to approve the consent agenda as read.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Seconded by Council Member Steinmetz. Do any council members wish to pull any items?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Items three and four, please.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Three and four. Okay. So, we have three and four to be pulled. So, we’ll now be voting on consent agenda items one and two.

Let’s go ahead and vote. All in favor, raise your right hand and leave it up there until I say your name. Council Member Achziger, Council Member Steinmetz, Council Member Harris, Council Member Desimone, Council Member Nutting, Council Member Blosse, and myself. That’s 7-0, passes.

Okay. Council Member Harris, would you like to speak to item number three, the salary commission ordinance?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Thank you. I just wanted the opportunity to vote no on it and I understand the will of the council. So, let’s vote.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I move to enact draft ordinance number 26-001 creating a salary commission for the city of Des Moines.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Seconded by Council Member Steinmetz. Any discussion? All right, let’s raise your right hand. Thank you. So, Council Member Oxiger, Council Member Steinmetz, Council Member Desone, Council Member Nutting, Council Member Boss, and myself. All opposed. Council Member Harris. That passes 6-1.

Council Member Harris, for item number four, please.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Thank you. I am in no way opposed to this. I would just like to encourage the city to provide an update on the costs. I am hearing left and right from residents about the increases in basically Recology costs and it’s been a while since we signed the contract and I think it would be good to have sort of a short explainer on what the reasons are for that. They’re understandable, but still you hear about it all the time. So that’s all.

TYLER BEEKLEY: Yes, just a quick response. Tyler Beekley, surface water manager, also managing the Recology contract. We are tentatively scheduled to give an annual report from Recology in May.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Yeah, I’m going to interrupt you for a second. I want to make sure that we’re talking about two different things here. This grant is for King County solid waste.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: No, I get it. I just wanted to have this because I heard from residents who conflate the issues.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So, that might be better for a new items for consideration.

I just got a responsive answer. So, I think we’re done. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Okay. Yes, Council Member Nutting.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I move to accept the 2026-2027 King County Solid Waste Division Waste Reduction and Recycling Grant and authorize the city manager to sign the grant document substantially in the form as attached.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Second. Second goes to Council Member Boss. Okay. Thank you. Let’s go ahead and vote. All in favor? Thank you. Council Member Oxiger, Council Member Steinmetz, Council Member Nutting — excuse me — Council Member Desone, Council Member Nutting — did I say Harris or Nutting? Sorry, I said Harris. Thank you. Council Member Harris, Council Member Desone, Council Member Nutting, Council Member Bloss, and myself. That’s 7-0. Thank you.

Okay, let’s talk about unfinished business. Item number one is the draft ordinance 26-009, appointed committee code and citizens advisory code update. And we have a presentation by city prosecutor Miss Vaughn.

TARA VAUGHN: Thank you, mayor. Thank you, council. Here to present first reading of draft ordinance 26-009. I’ll try to be briefer than I was last time you guys saw me. At the study session in March, we did bring proposed changes to the appointed committee code and the citizen advisory board code. There was some pretty thorough discussion and council requested some edits and additions. So today we are presenting the first reading of this ordinance that includes those requested revisions.

So, these are what has changed since the last time you guys saw this. Under the appointed committee code, we lowered the minimum membership age to 18. We added the word “geographic” to the section on appointments regarding diversified membership. We added a requirement that the meetings operate pursuant to Robert’s Rules. And we added language notifying the council of three or more absences so that a member may be removed.

Under the citizen advisory board code, we added language that provides more structure to the meetings and we included language that requires written subcommittee reports that go to the CAB and those must be submitted prior to the meetings.

And before I get to the motion slide, I would just like to say that something actually got brought up at the CAB meeting last night. One of the members had a question about whether subcommittees would be subject to the OPMA under this. Which led me actually to realize that the way it is currently written they would be, and that is because we have included the word “subcommittee” in the definition of appointive committee and the council wants the appointed committees to abide by the requirements of the OPMA. So, but it is staff’s understanding the council does not desire the subcommittees to have those requirements. So between now and if this moves to a second reading, we could add language that would exempt the CAB subcommittees from that requirement, which leads me to — so there’s a proposed motion that addresses that and then there’s just —

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So I’m sort of scrolling through it. It says under section 14, the citizens advisory board shall meet at least three times per year. And in watching last night, I was struck by it’s kind of become a monthly sort of a deal. Yeah. Is that the intent or is it — I’m just trying to get a sense of — because originally it was more like four times a year and it’s gradually sort of expanded. I’m not trying to put you in a spot, but I just don’t have a sense of what the — it seems sort of self-organizing in a way. And since we’re going into all of this detail, I wanted to ask about —

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Well, the feedback the CAB had given the council members who are the liaison as well as myself is that they really wanted to meet more often. So, the work plan that they approved in December or January, I think, has them meeting maybe 10 times a year. I think they take something off for holidays and maybe something off in the summer, that they are headed in that direction. I don’t know if Council Member Steinmetz, that’s the chair, wants to —

COUNCIL MEMBER STEINMETZ: Yeah, if I may, there was a desire to meet more often. It is 10 times a year. The month of August is taken off and the month of December is taken off. And so we do that, but also the requirement that they meet a minimum of three times a year is not limiting. In other words, you can meet more than three times a year and that’s what the CAB has chosen to do and I believe they have the wherewithal to do that. So yeah, there doesn’t seem to be a conflict in the code here at all.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: No, there’s no conflict with the code with meeting more than three times. That’s all the questions I have.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Council Member Steinmetz.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: Speaking of the CAB, the one thing that did come out of last night is the CAB did express a very strong preference not to call the arts committee, the senior services committee, and the human services committee “subcommittees.” They are committees of the CAB. And so, is there a way to change it in the code so they’re referred to as committees of the CAB without making them subject to the open public meetings law because they are not formal meetings of the whole body? They are committees designed to work on specific subjects and then bring that back to the CAB.

TARA VAUGHN: Yeah, I mean, we can — I think we could get that language to work with it being committees rather than subcommittees.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: And is “committees of the CAB” a good way to phrase that?

TARA VAUGHN: I guess that would be my suggestion unless — yeah, I’d like you guys — but yeah, that would be — something in that direction to make it clear.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: A point of order. Are we in the discussion phase or are we still in the questions phase?

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: We’re in the questions phase. Council Member Nutting.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: Yeah. I’m just wondering — I haven’t heard anything about moving away from the OPMA in committees and subcommittees. I was just wondering where that’s coming from.

TARA VAUGHN: And so, appointed committees are purely advisory bodies. They don’t have decision-making authority and so they are not subject to the OPMA currently.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: We would still have to — would we still have to notice the committee meeting if more than three council members were going to be in attendance to that meeting?

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Let me take this. So, you may recall, council member, that last year when we dealt with the new staff shortages we were no longer able to staff arts, senior services, human services in the way they had been before. So part of that solution was to have them folded as committees of CAB. And so as part of that, those groups meet on their own and then the transparency comes when at the CAB meetings — which are recorded, posted, there’s minutes — they report out what those committees are doing. So that was sort of the workable solution because we did not have the capacity to staff and record all of those. Does that answer your question?

TARA VAUGHN: And council members don’t typically go to those committee meetings. So it’s just the appointed committee members.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I guess my point is I did serve on the senior services advisory board and I was always at those meetings and several times other council members were there as well. Yeah. So my question is, if more than three council members were going to be at those meetings, it’s still part of the OPMA that they would have to be noticed in the paper or three other places. So by canceling the OPMA, you’re saying that four council members could be there.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Well, typically we don’t have council members going to those committee meetings. So, if I was alerted that three or four council members wanted to go to that, that would be a really big change from what’s been happening. But yes, we would then need to adjust and we would have to post and that’d be a really different thing. I don’t know if anybody who’s on CAB wants to talk about how the committees have been working.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Council Member Steinmetz.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: Yeah, the committees have been, as indicated, meeting on their own. The liaison from the council to the CAB have generally not been going to the meetings. And certainly not more than one. Yeah. And their — the council members’ only function is advisory to help understand the council-city manager process and the advice that is coming — that is bubbling up from the committees of the CAB to the CAB to the council.

And it would — my understanding of the OPMA is anytime there’s four of us in a room, if we’re going to be talking about city business, it better have been noticed. But that would be the only way that that would ever come up. And as it’s been functioning over the last year, maybe two, that’s never been an issue. I don’t anticipate it being an issue.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: So okay. Thank you. Yeah. Let me ask a quick question. In looking at — I’m on page number 46 of your packet and it says, under section two, point number three, “appointed committee shall comply with the requirements of the open public meetings act.” And you just acknowledged that we — they don’t have to be. But I believe this was at the direction of the council the first time we went through this as a red line that even though we are not required by law, it was the council’s wish that committees would comply. So that’s why this is here. Is that right?

TARA VAUGHN: That’s correct. Yeah.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: And that’s why it’s written as “you must comply with the requirements of the OPMA.” Why it’s written like that. Right. So, other questions? Council Member Desone.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: I apologize. I’ve gotten lost in the sauce at some point here. Are we specifically speaking about CAB or are we speaking about all of the groups with that specific note for CAB? Because I do have a question in there somewhere.

TARA VAUGHN: This applies to all appointed committees.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: All appointed committees. So one of my questions was, within the ordinance it says that the committees will vote on their chair and vice chair and it would be of the committee. Unfortunately, the CAB’s chair though is a council member. So are we going for continuity?

TARA VAUGHN: I believe with this ordinance we wanted the groups to all operate similarly. Yeah. So, as it’s currently written, there’s no requirement that the elected chair or vice chair be a community member. But if that is what the council would like, we could draft language to make that the case.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Well, so we actually — the code section that you cited is the general for all appointed committees, but specifically in 4.60.060, which is later on in this ordinance, there’s a provision specifically for the CAB that says that the mayor will select the presiding officer, which I believe — so the mayor selects the presiding officer for the CAB and for other appointed committees the members select the presiding officer.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: So that’s where I got lost in the sauce, I believe. So the CAB is going to have a different —

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Exactly.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: — bit of the ordinance, but the spirit of the ordinance is that the organizations work closer together so we can make it smoother. Okay.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: And that was something that the council had requested since the CAB is a little bit different and the presiding officer — it’s helpful that it’s a council member.

TARA VAUGHN: And I want to clarify that under section four under “appointment” it says “except as otherwise provided in the title,” which is like the catchall — this applies to everything except the things that it doesn’t apply to. Is that correct?

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Yeah. Because like lodging tax advisory, the presiding officer is designated by state. Right.

TARA VAUGHN: So this does not apply to everything unless it’s called out separately.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Correct. So that catchall kind of language is on that section 4.24.040, appointment, number one.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I wanted to check about the — how much of a change — because it seems to me that when we recruited and consolidated the members of the subcommittees to be a part of CAB, that it was done because of that time saving and they would have direct working assignments that they would do on — they would do on CAB but still a member of the total group. So, it seems to me that that is the definition of a subcommittee. They’re part of a committee that has a specific role. And this seems like it would be a pretty big change from the route that we’ve been going here and now we’re on the second reading.

TARA VAUGHN: I mean, they are sub within the CAB. So, I mean, “subcommittee” would be appropriate, but also, it’s really up to you guys if you want to change it to “committee.” I don’t think it’s going to change a whole lot.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: How can you be a committee of a committee?

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: So, they’re a board now and that’s how they seem to fit it. Yeah.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: Splitting of hairs on the words was very important to the CAB, like very important last night. And so yes, I think we view them as subcommittees, but the members felt like that was extremely important feedback they wanted us to deliver tonight.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Are there other questions? Council Member Desone.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: I did want to mention that in the many minutes we chewed on this language last night, it was determined that council is the only one that can change this language. And so they were super cool with everything else except the word “sub.” So, and that’s up to us to decide if we’d like to change it.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: All right. Do I have a motion or is that a question? Okay, Council Member Harris.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Thank you. Yeah. So, I’m kind of asking for feedback because I wasn’t in the room, but I watched the meeting intently and this was kind of a thing. I got a sense that there was one person who felt extremely passionate about it. I did not get the feeling that the 15 people in the room all had a strong feeling about it and I’m just — I didn’t get a sense it was a group decision. I got a sense that it was like it was very important and so I think that kind of matters and I wish they had sort of taken a vote on something before because I’m just saying watching the video it didn’t look like there were — so I guess I’m asking is this really what people thought.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: In fact, there was a vote and it was unanimous and there were many, many people in the room who were strongly advocating for calling them committees of the CAB, not calling them subcommittees. So it was very clear from those of us in the room and from the vote that this was a big deal and that’s the advice they have for the council and the only advice they had changing this ordinance.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So great. Thank you.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I’d like to make a motion, Mayor. I move to exclude Citizen Advisory Board subcommittees from the OPMA, Open Public Meetings Act, requirements and to call them committees of the CAB.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Okay. Is there a second? Okay. Moved and seconded. Are we going to do that separate from the next motion? Okay. Great. Any discussion about that amended motion?

Nope. All right, let’s move to a vote. All those in favor? Council Member Oxiger, Council Member Steinmetz, Council Member Desone, Council Member Nutting, Council Member Boss, and myself. All those opposed. Council Member Harris. The vote passes 6 to 1. Motion passes 6 to 1.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: I move to pass draft ordinance 26-009 as amended to the second reading on April 9th, 2026.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Second. Thank you. Motioned and seconded. Motion by Council Member Nutting and seconded by Council Member Steinmetz. Any discussion? Council Member Harris.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Yeah. I would like to amend — I guess it’s the meeting section 17 — and if memory serves, but where it says “at least three times” — but no more than six. In watching, I think that they do great work but everything that can be accomplished by the full committee can be accomplished within six and then that frees up staff time. I have watched the prosecutor in court and her day job is not trivial. So I’m just saying, and that would free up the committees of the committees to — they would continue to do their thing. But the original impetus was four times a year and six seems generous to me.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Do we have a second?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: It’s section 14. I’m sorry.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Don’t mean to cut you off, council member, but section 14. Okay, let me find it. Yes.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: I would like to nevertheless change that section, that sentence, please.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: It’s the first sentence of the meetings section. Here we go. Okay. Council Member Harris, would you mind stating your motion again just so I have it correct?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: I apologize, but I would like to change that sentence — a minimum of three per year to a maximum of six and with the understanding what I will also — they’ll also have like a meeting with the budget director and so forth and I want — so it’s six in total. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: So section 14, page 11. I’m looking for the minimum-maximum — so if you see the bolded “meetings,” it’s the first sentence. I see “at least three” — “but to a maximum of six.” So “at least three but not more than six.” The amendment was — eliminate minimum of three. So there would be no minimum number, just a max. Is that what we heard correctly?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: I’m pretty sure I said a minimum of three and a maximum of six.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Well, I’m — it’s okay. I’m asking for clarification now. So Council Member Harris is making the motion. If you want to just give us the sentence — it would read “and a maximum of six.” Thank you. That’s very helpful. Okay.

And I heard a second from Council Member Desone. Okay. Discussion. Council Member Steinmetz.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: There is absolutely no reason for this. It makes no sense at all. Why would you want to limit volunteer opportunities for people to give advice to the city and that’s essentially what we’re doing here. It is — although I appreciate the staff time that might be involved in that — we’re only talking about 10 meetings a year at the current pace and it could go down to less than that if the CAB is moving at a slower pace and decides they don’t want to. There is no rationale behind this that makes any sense at all and certainly isn’t obvious.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Yeah. It makes sense to me. First of all, it opens up four slots to have other committee meetings of which I favor. But regardless, again, I have watched the CAB, all of them, and I frankly was really wanting to get more intelligence from each neighborhood. The original impetus was to have nine neighborhood people. At the meeting last night, if memory serves — again, I’m old — it looked like there were 10 at-large members and only like four neighborhood members, maybe five. Consistently the at-large people swamp. We have not had a full roster of neighborhood members since basically almost since the beginning. And I watch them because I’m trying to get insights into each neighborhood that I can’t get otherwise without like walking and knocking on doors and stuff. I really want to know what’s happening at that neighborhood level. But when I watch the meetings, I am largely watching people talk about global ideas, which is great. But somehow I see people working on the three individual committees we used to have, but I’m not seeing that neighborhood-level input and that is what I had hoped to encourage. So that’s it. And I would like to bring back — have staff time for at least one council committee which I think is very important that we make time for in the coming year especially with our budget woes. Thank you.

DEPUTY MAYOR OXIGER: Yes. Thank you. Well, the one thing that did happen last night was for the first time the council — or the CAB — started excusing members who were not there. So there — I think there is a new emphasis in the CAB of if you’re on the CAB you better be there. So that would cause more neighborhood-specific council members to be there, otherwise they will be booted from the CAB. And I second what Council Member Steinmetz was saying about — this is a group of volunteers that is enthusiastic and has taken on some tasks. One of which being the survey. They were instrumental in going out and doing on their own encouraging people to participate in the survey process. I would hate to see us get to the point where — take for example the budget — if we limit them to the number of meetings that they can have and they expend all of their meetings at the start of the year, there’s no opportunity for the public to come back and speak. I really see no reason for limiting the number of meetings.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. Council Member Desone, your second time.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: I will disagree and I will defend my second. These — they’re not subcommittees anymore. I’m sorry. What do we decide? Sorry, what are they called?

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: Committees of the CAB.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: Committees of the CAB. Apologies. Committees of the CAB. We are not stifling their ability to get together and do what they’re currently doing. We’re not asking that to change. What we’re asking is how many times they report back as a group, as a whole, to the CAB. They’re all out in their smaller groups doing their work, doing all these things. I’m not trying to stifle energy. What I’m trying to do is consolidate and put more information in place less often so that we can get more done. That was my reason for the second. Nothing keeps them from meeting and doing these things. What we’re counting is the times that we get together and report back to the CAB. That’s what my original second was to Council Member Harris.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Okay. Well, I think that it’s important to recognize that one of the reasons we have the citizens advisory board is so that they can do some advising to us and for us to place an artificial limit on six times a year does not seem to make sense. They have determined that they went from four meetings to 10. We accommodated that and in the future they might go back down to four. They might go down to six. But it’s up to the people who are volunteers who have dedicated time in their schedule to let us know when they can come in and how often they think they need to conduct business. So I really believe that this is a bit of an overreach to limit the number of meetings that they have and I don’t believe that it will result in bringing back another committee which seems to be another motivation. So, I’m going to ask for a vote.

I’m going to ask for a vote. I think you had spoken twice. I’m sorry. I wrote your name down twice.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: I made the motion, but then the discussion. So, I mean, that’s — I’m sorry. I thought I had written it down that you had spoken twice. If I was incorrect, go ahead.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Thank you. So, I would just note Miss Kerry made a very salient point and there were head nods. What’s going to happen is the — I honestly still don’t know the right term. I’m going to have to work on that. But the committee of committee thing — she used the word “rubber stamp” and that’s exactly correct. People who work on the three committees are going to work very diligently and then bring their work to the full group and nobody’s going to question that. It creates an unnecessary layer when it should just go straight to the council for anything, especially involving spending. And thanks.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Do you have something new, substantial to add here?

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: I do. Okay.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: This amendment would not change that process in the least and has absolutely no impact on the committee of the CAB reporting to the CAB.

COUNCIL MEMBER SIMONS: All right.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: I’m going to call for a vote here. All those in favor of the amendment to this motion that would change the language and limit the CAB meetings to six per year maximum with a minimum of three. Please raise your right hand. I see Council Member Harris, Council Member Desone. All those opposed. I see Council Member — or Deputy Mayor Oxiger, Council Member Steinmetz, Council Member Nutting, and myself. That is four. And all those abstaining? Council Member Bloss. So the vote is 4-2-1. Is that correct? And the motion fails.

Now let’s move to a vote on the main motion which is to pass the draft ordinance. Any further discussion — I don’t think is actually needed and so let’s go to a vote. All those in favor of the draft ordinance raise your right hand. Thank you. Deputy Mayor Oxiger, Council Member Steinmetz — appointed — yep — Council Member Desone, Council Member Nutting, Council Member Blossom, myself. All those opposed? Council Member Harris. Motion passes 6-1.

Thank you. Thank you, Miss Vaughn.

Let’s see. We’re on to new business. And our first item is going to be a presentation from FCS on the benchmark city analysis and development tax impact model. And I want to say thank you very much to members of our planning commission who are here tonight to hear about this information that we were presented — was it late last year that we got this information from FCS — and it really is points of data in your future considerations. So, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate it. City Manager Caffrey.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Yes, as Tim gets ready to go, we’ve got two presentations. The first part is new to everybody but several months ago we hired FCS to do what’s called a benchmarking study which is basically where they looked at — we started with a very large list — Tim and I remember — of many, many cities that we were basically going to sort of compare Des Moines to and it’s for the purpose really of informing future policy decisions. So, it’s pretty frequent that the conversation comes up of like checking what other cities are doing on a particular policy issue or how they’re approaching a particular problem. And so, it is kind of a best practice to have a list of cities that you go to. Tim will explain sort of the process we went through as well as share the information about the cities.

Now, let me be clear, every city is similar and different, so don’t think these are a complete analogy. They’re just really meant to be — here are some communities that may have similarities we can look to for future data studying.

The second part, as the mayor referenced, is a repeat of something some members of this council saw but new to others. It is really a tool that was developed to help council and essentially the planning commission as well look at land use through the lens of revenue and costs. It is not by any means meant to be the only deciding factor. It is also not a literal “this is what will happen on this property.” It is a high-level tool to give you a sense of sort of the big order of magnitude of a direction of a particular land use.

TIM (FCS): So, thank you, Katherine, and thank you, council and planning commission. Really exciting to be able to address two bodies tonight about both of these analyses. As Katherine mentioned, the first analysis we’ll talk about is the new one. It’s the benchmarking analysis. And effectively this is, as Katherine mentioned, just a tool to compare this city to other similar cities. And the reason to do that is, as you’re considering new policy or new land use decisions or really any policy decision that this council and the planning commission take on, which cities should we consider as peers? And often that differs between the different policies that we’re thinking about. It can help highlight where the city is overperforming and outperforming its peers and it can highlight instances where the city is lagging. The idea is to use consistent data across the peer cities. So to the extent that we possibly can, we’re using apples-to-apples data here. Sometimes that’s easier than others because different terminology exists with the way that cities refer to revenues and expenses and policies and utilities and that kind of thing. And the other component of this is to just help to set the goals and priorities for the council and to identify instances where cities are doing things that we might want to emulate. Are they reacting to state or regional or federal policy in a way that might be beneficial for us to consider? And will enacting a particular policy put this city at a disadvantage or advantage relative to other cities?

But why would we benchmark? It just illustrates where you stand. And as you can see here in this example — not related at all to Des Moines this evening — but this is analysis we performed for the city of Tualatin, Oregon. And this is just one example of the different ways that we might benchmark. You can see here in this instance we’re looking at park utility fees and our client the city of Tualatin is on the low end there. So in this instance it’s pretty obvious what this benchmark can tell you — you’ve got some room to bump that up if you want to. And you wouldn’t be totally out of whack with your peer jurisdictions. It just helps calibrate that policy discussion. So, when the council is considering a particular motion, seeing what your peers are doing can help you understand the implications of what you’re going to do.

For this analysis, we took a four-step methodology. As Katherine mentioned, we identified a big list of 16 cities to start with, based basically on three factors. One of which was demographics, so looking at population similarities. One of which was more economic — which cities have a similar employment profile to Des Moines. And then finally, more geographic — so which cities are close to us that we want to make sure that we’re comparing ourselves to. And then also from the perspective of which cities have similar characteristics. So waterfront cities, for instance, that have done a good job of engaging those waterfronts.

The next step is to analyze — just to gather the data and then analyze it. So, our team at FCS gathered several different factors including population, employment, budgets and the like. So kind of high-level stuff to just vet whether or not this list was really a good starting place. We then refined that list based on our findings. So, some cities in that list weren’t great comparators. And that list of cities that we decided not to include were Camas, Issaquah, Stanwood, Tigard, and Tualatin. So, they were included initially, but we ultimately bumped them off because they were maybe not the best comparisons, and we thought that the other 10 that we found were better.

And then we finalized the analysis by gathering new data including land use — the share of different land use types within the city. The services provided by that city and trends for demographics. So looking back in time to see what’s happened over the last decade, say.

So the cities that we did include — here you can see the map there. You can notice we’re pretty heavy on the Puget Sound region. But we do have a couple down there in the Portland metropolitan area. So: Burien, Edmonds, Kenmore, Maple Valley, Mukilteo, PSBO, SeaTac, University Place, Woodinville, and West Linn. So those last two — those are our Portland metro comparators. And key distinction here is that you all have a list of cities that you benchmark to compare your employee compensation. This is a separate list, so we’re not conflating the two.

So let’s dive right in. We’ll start with population because that’s kind of the first thing you think about when you’re thinking about benchmarking. And you can see here that we’ve got a pretty broad range. You’re looking at 53,000 there in Burien and all the way down to 13,000 in PSBO. So we’ve got a broad range of cities. But the peer city average when we average all of those other 10 cities is about 30,000. So, Des Moines is right there in the middle of that bell curve. So, we feel like this is a pretty good first cut here. And with respect to trend data, we look back to just before the pandemic, so 2020. And we calculated annual growth rate for all of these cities. Des Moines is growing at about 0.4% annually. While the comparable city average is 0.7%. So kind of right in the neighborhood there. Statewide, the population is growing by 1.3% annually. But of course Washington is a big state with many markets. And so it’s to be expected that there’s going to be some variability. And since we’ve got so much concentration in the Puget Sound, we feel like that 0.7% is probably more indicative of what your market is doing.

Median age. And this is where this starts to get kind of exciting, at least for me. We’ve got again a broad range, although you wouldn’t notice it from the graph necessarily. You can see Edmonds there is at 46.3 years old at a median age. That’s our high end. And the low end there is Maple Valley at 36.5. But you notice that Des Moines is 37.5 years old with a median age there. And I think that’s great. I think that’s really great news. You’re on the far low end of this and I think the most exciting thing is looking back — in this instance we look back to 2010 just to get a better sense of the long-term growth. And Des Moines has grown 2.4 years younger and it’s the only city in this group where you can say that — that they’ve grown younger at all. All the rest of these cities have grown older. In fact, the average is two years older. So, all of these cities getting quite a bit older and the statewide population also has aged by 1.2 years. So, I think it’s a great testament to the affordability of this particular town. And we’ll get into some of that a little bit later on, but I think that this is something that you should really celebrate.

With respect to employment, you can see again we’ve got a really big range, but you’ll notice there is the big outlier. I think we can all understand why that is. At 34,000 jobs, that’s quite a few. The low end there is Kenmore at 3,700. So you’ve got about the biggest range of outcomes here that we have in this analysis. Des Moines is closer to the middle there at 6,200. So, certainly getting there, but again the growth rate over the last six years in this instance is close to 5% annually which is the second highest growth rate among all these cities. Only Maple Valley has a higher growth rate at 6%, but still I think that’s a great trend. Something really exciting. And you can see there that peer cities on average grew at 1.3% annually. So, you’re really outpacing them in terms of employment growth. And it should be noted that these are jobs that are inside of the city limits, not people in the city who are employed. So, just a caveat there. Peer city average, by the way, is just over 10,000. So, being at 6,000, you’re kind of close. And especially with SeaTac in there as an outlier, I think we can probably say if we removed them, you’d be much closer to the center.

This is where it gets even more exciting, at least for me again, which is — this breaks down employment by type. So this is just the share of employment in each of these cities by type. And we really have collapsed these employment categories down, but it helps to illustrate, and I didn’t want to overwhelm you with like 15 different employment categories. Like most of these cities, the city is primarily a service economy, and that’s true with most cities in the Pacific Northwest. Incidentally, the leader of that service category in Des Moines is healthcare. I’m sure that’s not a shock to anybody, but still a cool little data point.

The rest of this plays out pretty predictably. There are many more industrial jobs in Mukilteo and SeaTac. Again, I think we can all sort of understand why that is. But the thing that I do want to point out and something that’s going to be a theme throughout this presentation is the retail share there, which is just the second component of the column. 6% — pretty low relative to the rest of the peer cities. And of course that’s sort of a double-edged sword. You don’t want to entirely base your economic development strategy on retail because it’s a low-paying type of job by and large, but it does drive sales tax revenue. And again, we’ll see this theme a couple more times throughout the presentation. So, just something to consider.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: Tim, I’m sorry to interrupt you. Before you leave that slide, can you go back real quick? Yeah. I’ve gotten a couple questions about the 6% public administration. Public administration is the term that includes really any government workers, including school teachers, administrators, city workers, postal workers, but what drives up ours a little bit is the FAA.

TIM (FCS): Sorry, Tim. And thank you for interrupting. And also, I would like to just say if you’ve got questions as we go, please don’t hesitate to interrupt me because we’re going to go through a lot of this and I don’t want it to get lost in the sauce.

Household to jobs ratio. This sort of reiterates some of what we’ve already seen here. What this measures is the number of households — occupied households in the city — to the number of jobs. So the higher the number here, the more you are primarily a population center and not as much an employment center. So, comparing those two numbers — the population to the jobs that we have already looked at — not shocking that Des Moines is close to two households per job in the city. And you can see we’re sort of in the middle part here. The average among the peer cities is 1.4 households per job, but again, we’ve got SeaTac as a pretty strong outlier there. So, that drives that number a little bit lower. 0.9 households per job statewide, which again just as a comparison.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: But per job — correct?

TIM (FCS): Right. And that’s occupied living spaces, too. So, doesn’t include your vacant housing units, but just represents that there.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: While we’re interrupting — is it 1.4 or 1.9?

TIM (FCS): So the city — for Des Moines — is 1.9 households per job. The average of the peer cities is 1.4. Sorry for the lack of clarity there.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: No, it’s fine. Thank you.

TIM (FCS): Great. Any other questions on this slide?

So just to kind of emphasize this point a little bit more and again this sort of hearkens back to that retail economy component. We have a pretty high ratio here. So, and that does tend to drive up costs because more citizens, more costs. More jobs, you’ve got more revenue by and large. And we’ll see that too in the second half of this presentation.

Another way to look at this is from the US Census Bureau. They do what’s called an inflow-outflow analysis. So, this is sort of an odd set of data here, so bear with me. But what we’re looking at is that red bar there is the inflow which is the number of people who come into the city to work. So you’ve got a relatively low level there. Not shocking because there’s just fewer jobs here than there are in most of the peer communities. The live-and-work folks, that’s people who live here and work here. So relatively low percentage there. But again, looking across all these cities, it’s really not outside of the realm. And then your outflow — those are people who live here and work outside of the city. So, relatively high share there. We’re not breaking any news with this because we’ve already covered what this says, but just another way to sort of couch that data.

Moving on to land use and land area. And this is sort of a blunt force piece of data here, but gross acres, so just the size of the city. We’re looking at the number of acres here. 4,150 here in the city. Compared to the peer city average of 4,727, we’re right there. And of course again you’ve got your outliers. But the more interesting data with respect to this is land by zone. So here — again, lot of data, so bear with me — but what you’re seeing there is on the bottom part, that’s single family detached residential. So, most of these cities are primarily single family detached. That’s standard across all of the communities I’ve ever worked in. If it’s not — if it’s below 60% — it’s kind of shocking to me. That second component there, parks and institutional, so think your parkland, golf courses, government land, schools, and of course in the case of SeaTac, the airport. The next column component there — multifamily and mixed use. So high-density residential with some commercial components in there. And then at the top, commercial and industrial. So we had to collapse those categories down because as you can see it’s kind of small and to show that in two broken-out components there would be a little messy. In Des Moines, that 5% is made up 2% of commercial and 3% of industrial. So pretty solid split there. But again you’ll see within the peer cities — especially there at the top end — we do have a lower share of commercial and industrial, so less employment land inside of the city. Again hearkening back to that theme that we’ve discussed.

The next land use component is median home value. And when we were talking about the median age and the trends there, I remarked on the fact that this is a relatively affordable city and you can see why here. You’re certainly on the low end of this and I think that that’s really great. With housing as big of a point of emphasis as it is in this region right now, having an affordable housing economy is really quite remarkable, especially in the Puget Sound. And you can see here we’ve got just an enormous spread with SeaTac at $543,000 on the low end and then Kenmore all the way up at a million dollars per home there on the high end. And you have multiple cities there that are either there or they’re knocking on the door of a million dollars per unit. So, I think that this is something that the city should be really proud of. You should emphasize and just find ways to continue to pound that advantage in because I think it’s pretty impressive. The average here — $747,000. So you’re way below that which I think again is great. And this does include really any ownership homes. So you’re talking about single family detached, but you’re also probably talking about townhomes and those kinds of things, condos. But still that’s true across all these communities and so it’s really quite impressive.

This is total property tax levy by city. So again I’m throwing a couple data points at you. So follow me here. The bottom part of the column there, that’s the city’s property tax levy rate. So you’re second from the bottom here, which again I think helps that affordability argument. But unfortunately your other districts are quite high and it pushes the city up to being the second highest in total property tax mill rate. So this is the rate that’s charged per $1,000 of assessed value. So you’re in a bit of a conundrum in this case where your city rate is low, your other districts’ rates are high. So it’s sort of difficult to figure out what exactly to do with that, but I think you do have some room to run on your city rate. Of course over there on the right, I’ll just acknowledge that West Linn is quite an outlier. It’s an Oregon community. They don’t have sales tax. So this is really the only way that they fund the city.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: Yeah. The other district rates, it’s like fire, port, county to the extent that you’ve got something like that, schools, that kind of thing.

TIM (FCS): And yeah, the average city rate is $1.245 per $1,000 assessed value. So again, compare that to your 85 cents per $1,000. You’re doing great. And we did exclude West Linn from that. Yes.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Not to — but offline, could you provide a complete list of the those other things that make up that number?

TIM (FCS): Yes. Thank you.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: And you want that for all cities or just for Des Moines?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Okay. All right.

TIM (FCS): Okay. That’s a lot easier.

We’re starting to get now into more of the finances. So we’re touching on budget here. What we’re looking at here is property tax revenue per acre. So I wanted to normalize these figures to just recognize the fact that a bigger city is going to have more property, is going to have more property tax revenue. So again, we’re right there in the middle. And that’s a great place to be. I think you do have pretty major outliers here in SeaTac and Edmonds. I note that SeaTac has, if we go back, quite a high mill rate there at $2.17. And then for Edmonds, they have an overall property value that is really, really high. So, that’s the reason that those two are so far out outside. And of course, West Linn — again, we don’t have sales tax down in Oregon. So, I think that this is again another argument for this being a pretty affordable city, and that’s great.

Now, we get to sales tax revenue, which is sort of the culmination of that repeated line about retail employment and this kind of thing. You can see what I’m controlling with here is per capita, so per resident. We’re bringing in $131 per resident in Des Moines, and that’s quite close to the bottom. It’s well below the peer city average of $269 per resident. Again, this is reflective of that lack of retail employment in the city relative to your peers. When I controlled for retail and restaurant employment — the drivers of this — it’s almost miraculous how it normalizes across all these cities. And it’s effectively $2,500 per job for the city in terms of sales tax revenue. So, something to consider as we think more about land use and our economic development strategy. Again, don’t want to emphasize retail too awful much, but it does drive your revenue in a pretty significant way.

Now we’re looking at general fund expenses per resident. We are again below the peer city average of just about $1,100 per resident. The nuance here is that all of these cities provide different suites of services and for those that have the larger general fund expenses per capita, we’re talking about cities that just provide way more services for their residents — like they provide police directly, they provide fire directly, these kinds of things. So, I think the takeaway here is not necessarily that we have room to run, more so that you’ve done a really good job of kind of consolidating city services in such a way that you’ve done well to keep your expenses low relative to your peers.

And another way to sort of illustrate that is city FTEs per 1,000 residents, which is what we’re looking at here. We are relatively high. The average for peer cities being 4.7 FTE per 1,000 residents and we’re at 5.1 here. But again, you’ve got some variability in terms of the services that are provided by each of these cities. So I think that’s important to emphasize.

And then finally, with respect to the benchmarking, we’ve got the services that are provided by all these cities. So, my table here shows — if it’s a white circle, they don’t provide that service. If it’s the orange circle, they do. So, here in Des Moines, we’re obviously providing police. We don’t provide fire, water, or sewer. And you can see that half of the cities don’t provide any of those things. So, we’re doing a little more than half of the peer cities, but you can see also that we’ve got four cities that provide police, water, and sewer. And you’ve got Mukilteo, which provides fire and police, which is sort of an outlier there. Of course, those cities that don’t provide fire and police, they’re contracting with a fire district, a county. For the police, they’re contracting with the sheriff’s department. And then with respect to water and sewer, those are usually provided by districts. So, as you know.

So the conclusions from the benchmarking analysis are that this is a really good list of cities to start with, depending on the subject, because I think that the real use of this data is going to be to help inform those policy decisions as we talked about earlier. When we’re looking at a particular decision, you might bring a couple of these data points to bear just to frame it up a little bit. When you do that, you’re probably — this is probably more for staff than anything — you’re going to want to make sure that you’re looking at cities that are good comparables. And as we noted, SeaTac, West Linn, and Woodinville, they’re sort of outliers in a lot of ways. And so maybe those are good examples of things that you wouldn’t always include. Filtering by services is a really good way to start with that, especially when you’re looking at adding more services for the city. The lack of retail employment shows up quite consistently here. So as we transition into this land use discussion in the second half of the presentation you’re going to notice some more of that theme pop up.

Ideally this data — we’ll transfer all of this to staff so that they’ve got the database that we put together. And hopefully that gets maintained, it’s added to as the years go on and so those trends get longer and longer and kind of more substantial. And maybe other data points get added. For instance, we really think that the King County Urban Growth Capacity Report is a great resource for cities in the Puget Sound. And that can really help to inform especially future-looking decisions. But other components are vacant land data to the extent that that becomes available, utility rates just to compare where you stand relative to your peers, impact fees to the extent that you’ve got those, and then long-term growth trends as you go forward.

So that’s the end of the benchmarking analysis. Any questions from council or planning commission?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So, why Mukilteo?

TIM (FCS): I think probably because for one they’re a waterfront community and for two they’re just a community in the Puget Sound and the population profile I think is kind of close.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: No, I just — as a part-time Mukiltean, I was just curious as to why them as opposed to Mount Lake Terrace or — I’m not trying to put you —

TIM (FCS): Oh, sure. Yeah.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: And I like “Mukiltean.” That’s fine. And they have just spent decades trying to work with the Port of Everett to do their waterfront. And I’m just curious if you had any kind of scorings — like what made them stick out — if you had any —

I’ll just — the other thing is I was struck by the one slide where you mentioned SeaTac as being like 49% institutional. And I was like, I don’t think of the airport as — well, it is an institution, but my point is — and I’ve nagged the city manager — but they are very comparable except the 900 million pound — no, but my point is I haven’t figured it out, but there should be some way to tease out to normalize. And I don’t know if it’s parking revenue or if it’s all of the restaurant dough or something, but there should be some way to tease out the airport impact such that — and then look at them as a normal city about our size, similar demo and so forth, like what they would be if they were us.

TIM (FCS): Yeah. In so many ways they are — like in certain instances you can see, “Oh yeah, these are very comparable cities,” but then you see something like this or the employment graph for instance and you realize these couldn’t be more different.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So I’m just — if there was something in your spreadsheet where you could just — whatever — you know, you kids do a macro or something and just do something in 10 minutes that made them look more like us. I think that would be interesting. If not, you know, that’s it.

TIM (FCS): I’ll do my best. Thanks, man.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Any other benchmarking questions before we move on to the land use analysis?

TIM (FCS): Okay. So, this is a review for those of you who were on council last year. So forgive the redundancy, but we felt — especially dovetailing with this discussion around benchmarking — this is a good time to bring this back up and discuss the impacts of zoning discussions in the city, especially as it relates to downtown.

So, this is the approach that we took. We started with our key objectives which is to basically just model out at a 30,000-foot view the financial impact of different land use types on the city. And the idea there is to just provide staff with a tool that can give you as policymakers a sense for the fiscal impacts of zoning or siting or approving land use within the downtown.

What we did here is identify basically three separate typologies of development that we expect to see in downtowns throughout the Puget Sound. Mixed-use residential, multifamily with surface parking, and highway commercial — which is sort of shorthand for more or less commercial in general retail type development. And then we also included single family detached in there just as a basis for comparison, sort of like the null case.

And then we identified eight catalyst sites inside of the city. And those are by no means the complete universe of sites that this tool can help analyze, but we started there just to get a sense for — to prove the tool’s use.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: I’m going to stop you there for a second because I just want to emphasize this to our planning commission and to our new council members. They’re going to be talking about examples of properties in our city, but we’re not going to drill into that specific property. So, those — you’ll see pictures of those specific properties, but we are talking about a model that could be applied to general properties like that. And so, let’s not dig into the particular history of that one plot. It’s a model that we are using to talk about cost, usage, etc. Thank you.

TIM (FCS): That’s right. Yeah. Thank you. And so just some examples, just some visuals of these different development typologies there. On the top left, you’ve got the more mixed-use residential with retail on the bottom floor and residential on the top. Top right there, we’re looking at surface-parked multifamily style development. Bottom left — I mean, probably the nicest highway retail I could think of. And then bottom right there, your single family detached.

So, our approach included basically isolating some examples from within the city that exemplify these different development typologies. So, we took Highline Place 2 as our mixed-use residential example. It’s a pretty aggressive mixed-use residential example, but I liked it a lot. We used Woodmont as our surface-parked multifamily. We took both the Walgreens and then the Burger King/Popeyes that I think both are on Pacific Highway as our highway commercial examples. We did two there just because they each sort of captured parts of it that we felt like were pretty indicative of that development typology. And then we just took a sample of various single family detached throughout the community.

Then gathered other key data like population and average household size by types. So just to reflect the fact that single family detached is going to have different occupancy typologies than multifamily — basically just larger homes with more people in them. Took a look at the housing action plan. Gathered assessed value and property tax rates from King County Assessor and then looked at employment density using industry standards mostly taken from Puget Sound Regional Council.

And then finally, we took data from your budget, analyzing three years of budget over time, isolating down the revenues and the expenses that we think would be moved by different development types, and then accelerated them appropriately to reflect inflation over the course of several years. And then finally calculating average impact per employee and average impact per resident and then per assessed value increase.

So the example that we’ll talk about tonight — last time we talked about two, I’m just going to do one tonight to kind of illustrate the use of this model — the Seascape property down on 226th and Marine View. 24,000-square-foot lot, so not a huge one. Currently zoned downtown commercial, which we sort of expect most of these properties to be zoned. And an existing property value of $642,000 — or $24,000. So, appropriate for a vacant parcel. And just to point that out again for those not familiar, the red square there, that’s the one that we’re talking about.

So we’re going to go through each of the different development typologies and talk about the fiscal impacts, both the expenses and the revenues. So we’re going to start with mixed-use development. So this includes 49 new apartments and then 7,600 square feet of commercial. Cost to serve is $841,000. So pretty high. That largely reflects the fact that we’re adding so many new residents on such a small property. But then the revenue gained is $858,000. So, we’re making it break even. $17,000 over a 10-year period of time. Pretty much a wash. But I will note that the second table down there on the bottom is the one-time revenues that we expect to see from this type of development. So, we’re talking about construction sales tax and then traffic impact fees — close to half a million dollars there. So, stick that into that 10-year forecast and you’re talking about a pretty good windfall.

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: On this one, I did want to make a comment because I believe last time there was a lot of like surprise that, “Oh, we thought mixed use would do better.” A couple things to keep in mind on this. The pit is actually a pretty small parcel when you really think about it. And a development that only has 49 apartment units is much smaller than what we would typically see. So I think some of this is the scale makes those numbers maybe not as impressive as we’d hope. So I just — keep that in mind that the parcel itself is pretty small and the amount of retail it would be including at the 7,660 square feet is pretty small as well. So that could change depending on the site.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: Yeah. Is there a way to sort of model this with more residential, more apartments and how that might play out?

TIM (FCS): Yeah, absolutely. The model scales based on the size of the parcel. So, if we were talking about a 1-acre parcel, for instance, you’d see this substantially increase, I think.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: But that wasn’t what I was asking. A parcel this size that went up higher and more apartments.

TIM (FCS): Yeah. It would just be a matter of tweaking the assumptions in the model. So, okay. Yeah, we could certainly do that.

COUNCIL MEMBER BLOSS: I think — your increased revenue, does that take into account the new residents are going to be shopping through the shops, the restaurants?

TIM (FCS): No, you’re way ahead of me. I was going to mention the fact that with all these new residential development types it’s really difficult to quantify in a responsible way second-order impacts like that. But you could imagine that 49 new apartments that bring probably close to 100 new people to downtown — those people will all patronize businesses downtown. And so you’re going to have second-order impacts on sales tax, for instance, and patronization of local businesses. So, I think it’s important to keep in mind because that makes this number much better than it looks right now.

COUNCIL MEMBER BLOSS: Absolutely true. Yes.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: This may be a Tommy question, but when calculating — is there a standard industry standard for like when you collect traffic impact fees, how long are they designed to last? Like the life of the road surface or — you see what I’m getting? Because you kind of have to amortize it over — because you only get the money once.

TIM (FCS): I mean, unless Tommy has a magic answer, I think we’d want to get back to you.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Okay. No, I just thought you had some kind of — thank you. That’s it.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: I did want to ask about the ideas of parking when we’re describing these different projects. Are we assuming it’s side street, on the street, or is there some type of magical algebra for in the structure?

TIM (FCS): Certainly that would be development by development. In this instance we assume underground parking.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: Okay.

TIM (FCS): Any other questions about mixed use? Okay. So we’ll move on to surface-parked multifamily development. And in this instance, because it’s surface parked, you’re only adding 17 apartments relative to that 49 that we were seeing earlier. So, fewer dwelling units added. But you’ll notice that the net fiscal impact to the city has gone negative here. The cost to serve this is $209,000. The new revenue generated from it is $151,000 over 10 years for a net negative impact of $58,000. That just reflects the fact that again it costs more to serve residents than it does jobs. And that there is no sales tax impact for this type of development because there’s no retail component to it. Of course, to your point, there would be second-order effects, but again, difficult to quantify that. We do have $150,000 worth of one-time revenues, but that’s much lower than the mixed use, largely due to the fact that we’re just adding fewer units.

And then highway commercial. Again, probably better to just call this “commercial” because it’s not on a highway. But in this case, we’re adding only 3,300 square feet of new business. That’s about half of what the mixed use assumed. Again, because of parking. But in this case, we’re net positive by quite a large amount. Just under $100,000 to serve it over 10 years and $225,000 worth of revenue over 10 years for a net impact of $129,000. This really underscores the importance of that retail sales tax. I feel like I’m being evangelical about it, but this does sort of underscore that. And again, we’re looking at about $150,000 worth of one-time revenues here. So similar to that surface-parked multifamily.

And then our sort of null case — single family detached — adding four units, not shocking there. And net negative impact although again we’re kind of at that wash — it’s the same impact only on the other side of the ledger from the mixed-use development. $64,000 to serve versus $47,000 worth of new revenue over 10 years for a net impact of negative $17,000 and only $48,820 in one-time revenue.

So again, this is not really meant to be one of the recommendations. It’s just to show relative to other types of land use.

So, the findings from this are that mixed use and commercial uses often are going to be more net positive for the city. You’re just adding more units with mixed use. You’re adding much more revenue with commercial. I will note that dense residential development does fuel downtown commercial. So, difficult to quantify that impact, but important to note and shouldn’t be overlooked or discounted. Just difficult to illustrate that in this model.

Employment uses just help the city’s bottom line. I think that at this point we’ve probably gone over that enough. Surface-parked multifamily and single family detached are net negatives, although they’re still important to the ecosystem of a city. One-time revenues shouldn’t be discounted. And they’re pretty significant. So, something to really consider and keep in mind when we’re looking at this type of stuff. And this model is just a tool — not a set of land use recommendations or anything like that, but just something to illustrate to decision-makers the impacts of their decisions.

Any questions overall?

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: So, getting back to that second-order thing — has any work been done that can provide guidance on radius to downtown or — because we have done some things like we built a hotel and we built a business park and one of my predecessors bet me a lunch that all the FAA people would head down the hill, but it turns out they can actually also turn left as opposed to turn right. And so I’m just — I’m not — I’m just asking is there like existing work that sort of gives us some sense of how close you have to be to a particular area before that kind of thing starts to kick in? Because I can tell you a mile is probably too far given past experience. And I’m sorry if that sounded a bit snippy, but there must be some kind of way to understand how close you have to be to the action.

TIM (FCS): I’ll find you something. My instinct is quarter mile because it’s got to be walkable for people, but that’s just off the top of my head.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: No, I love that kind of thing. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Any other questions? Thank you very much.

TIM (FCS): Thank you. Always a pleasure to get to see you all and I hope you have a great rest of your meeting. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: All right. Our second item is going to be a lodging tax overview, process, funding approach update from assistant city manager AJ Johnson Newton.

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: Thank you, mayor. My name is AJ Johnson Newton and I am back up here again to talk about lodging excise tax, to provide a lodging excise tax overview, to get you briefed on the process, and to talk about a funding approach that we will be taking back to the ELTAC.

So, as I mentioned, tonight we’re going to look at the lodging tax requirements, the process, review how the funds have been used to date for signature events, and then outline our thoughts on next steps.

As a reminder, this is basically like lodging tax 101. It’s collected on overnight stays in the city in hotels and short-term rentals. Collection rate is going to be 8% beginning in April of 2026. It used to be 1%. As you can imagine, the revenues fluctuate based on what’s happening with travel and lodging. The fund use is restricted by an RCW. And the simplified version of that just says that the funds may only be used to support tourism, promotion, and community events. And the eligible entities — ones that could apply for the funding — are cities, towns, counties, convention visitor bureaus, nonprofits, and public facility districts.

The lodging tax, in order to have consideration for funding, has to go through the lodging tax advisory committee. And so the way that committee is comprised is there’s two members that represent lodging businesses that collect tax. So traditionally a member of Four Points has served on the board. There’s two members that represent organizations that are eligible to receive funding and right now that is McKenzie Meyers from the Quarterdeck and Doug Myers from Edward Jones. And then one council member who serves as a chair and that is our mayor. And we have one staff liaison assigned to the committee which is Ed Armillo, which is our grants management analyst.

And so the process would be — if someone was interested in applying for funds, they would submit an application. The ELTAC would review the request in a public meeting and then the ELTAC would make the funding recommendation but ultimately the city council makes the final decision on approval of funds.

And so, that little icon to the left is a plug. We currently have two vacancies for representatives from lodging businesses. And so we have been doing outreach. We’ve sent out letters, we’re calling. So, just wanted to mention that if there are applicable lodging businesses that are interested in applying, we do have vacancies.

So, on February 5th, I came to the council to talk about our signature events and asked the council essentially if there was interest in us moving the bulk of the funding that we typically ask for from the lodging tax to one signature event and sort of spreading that over multiple events. And the council said that yes, there was interest in that. And so that is what basically brought me up here tonight.

So, as I mentioned, right now, funding decisions are currently made on a case-by-case basis. So if ELTAC gets the application, again they determine if the application meets the criteria for the funding and then they make a recommendation and we bring it back to council. Funding historically has supported city-led tourism activities and there’s really no defined allocation framework for distributing funds. And so what we’re looking for is trying to develop a more balanced funding approach. Given that there is interest in the city doing more multiple signature events, we are looking to work with the ELTAC to decide if they would be interested in looking at designating a portion of lodging tax funding to support city activities and then designating a portion of lodging tax funding for other entities that might be interested.

So, for an example, without getting ahead of the work that the ELTAC needs to do, the way that we would approach this is if there was $100,000 and the council was interested and they said 60% of the funding that’s in the lodging tax fund the city could apply for — not guarantee funding, but that the city could apply for. So, that would help us on our end with budgeting and planning. And then we would like to allocate 40% of whatever is collected for other entities to be able to apply for. So again, this just really allows us to designate a portion of the fund. It’s not intended to guarantee any of the funding because regardless of the group that’s applying for the funds, they would still need to meet the criteria.

And the other thing that’s really important to us is even though historically the city has been utilizing the funding to support our tourism activities, there’s lots of other entities out there that are doing that same work. And so this would also give them an ability to go after some funding to help support attracting visitors to the city. So it sort of shares the work between the city and other entities that are interested.

So, next steps is we’ll go back to work with the ELTAC to develop a proposed funding allocation model and then we will bring that ELTAC recommendation back to council for further direction. And that concludes my presentation. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Time for questions. Council Member Steinmetz.

COUNCIL MEMBER STEINMETZ: Yeah. Historically, what has the distribution of those funds been? Has it always gone to the city? Has it gone to private? Is there a split? Do we have a clear sense of that or has it just varied all over the place?

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: For the period of time that I looked — which was about five years — it looked like it was primarily the city that has applied for the funds and received it.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thanks. Council Member Harris.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: I don’t know how to frame this, but see, it’s a lodging tax thing. And what has always been — I guess since your community enrichment — it’s like we have an events planner and then we have the lodging tax thing. And it seems to me that then we’re basically saying that the ELTAC is, functionally speaking, sort of the event central for — you understand, you’re essentially a nexus for money for events throughout the city versus — because what I’ve always noticed, and just one more second, is just there have always been a number of different conduits by which events, food trucks, different things get planned. And I have always thought it might be a good idea to somehow centralize them. And I’m just — how does what you’re doing sort of connect with the — with this group — connect with other events planning kind of things that we might do?

CITY MANAGER CAFFREY: So, AJ, can you talk a little bit about examples of community events that we just fund out of the general fund because they don’t have a regional draw and then distinguish that from the type of events that do bring in a regional draw which is a tourism-generating event?

AJ JOHNSON NEWTON: So I think a real easy example is the egg extravaganza, right? That is something that’s really designed for our residents. We’re not anticipating necessarily that that would draw visitors from outside of the city into that event. So those types of activities would not likely meet the criteria for us to be able to apply for lodging tax because the idea is that you are not only using the funds for something for residents but that you’re drawing people outside of the city into your city for tourism-related activities. Versus like the 4th of July — particularly when we had the drones — the idea was that the drones were a draw. We know that lots of other cities are not necessarily doing Fourth of July activity. So that may be of interest from someone from Tacoma or someone from SeaTac coming into the city, Des Moines specifically, to watch the Fourth of July show.

So, when I’m up here talking about us going after or applying for ELTAC funds for events specifically, it doesn’t have to just be for events. It’s tourism-related activities. But when I’m referring to it about events, what I’m talking about is signature events intentionally designed to not only accommodate our residents, but events that would attract people from outside of the city to come.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: No, I’m just thinking about if I were another organization or whatever. I just — it just seems like — I don’t know — somehow this needs to be somewhat centralized, integrated. I don’t know the right word, but — I apologize. And that’s it.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Other questions? Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Right. It looks like we have arrived at new agenda items for consideration. Now is the time for the purpose of proposing new business items for discussion on a future agenda. Any recommendation will simply need a hand raise from three council members. Do we have any council members who have a new business item they would like to propose?

All right, I’m going to take that as a no.

Now it’s time for our council member reports which are limited to four minutes and I’ve been told that we might be using a timer today and the tone that you get is a 30-second warning. So let’s go ahead and start with Council Member Steinmetz.

COUNCIL MEMBER STEINMETZ: Great — as my computer is updating but who knows when that’ll end. I did have the pleasure of attending the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce board meeting the other night where they were reviewing a lot of what they have planned. They’re getting a lot of good response. I found it to be a well-run meeting with lots of good input around it and a pretty big board. So they’ve got a lot of people who are interested in helping and they are getting really focused on how it is that a chamber can operate successfully in the city of Des Moines and what they can deliver to their members. So that was very positive. That’s about it though.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. Council Member Harris.

COUNCIL MEMBER HARRIS: Thank you. Just in my day job with STNI, I attended the Port of Seattle’s annual audit session and in a minor win, the port is adding their grant system to their August auditing agenda. And I have been talking about basically freeing up more money from that institution for quite some time. So I am hopeful. I think people would be very surprised at the number of organizations throughout this city, throughout the area that benefit and should benefit from that large — let’s see —

And two small things. The state of Washington is for the second year offering an e-bike rebate. It’s a lottery system, but the rebate is really sweet. So I urge everybody — just search “e-bike ecology rebate.” And if you haven’t ridden a bike for a while, an e-bike is transformational. It’s like a microwave. You don’t think you need it and then you get it and it’s like —

And the other thing is I was reminded we get requests about HEPA filters. If you are a family in Des Moines you can get a free HEPA filter through the University of Washington DEOHS right now. Just again, search “UW DEOHS Healthy Kids Healthy Schools.” They have the grant money so go get them.

And with that, let’s see. I think it’s going to be Passover and Easter soon. And happy both of the above to all who celebrate. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Council Member Desone.

COUNCIL MEMBER DESONE: Thank you. I was a speaker on a Zoom meeting today for the LEAD learning collaboration group. There were over 20 people on this Zoom meeting and we were discussing how LEAD can help with the businesses and with neighborhoods. I am very familiar with LEAD. I believe Chief Bo also is familiar with LEAD and it is a program that I believe Des Moines will be participating in. We will have a representative for Des Moines. I’m tripping over my words. Anyway, so I did speak today about the experience that I’ve had with LEAD in the past and the experience I’m looking forward to with having LEAD in the future. And these people were from all over the state, Colorado, Chicago, New Orleans. We were all sharing our perspective of how we’ve worked with LEAD in the past, how LEAD has helped us, and what we’re looking for with working with LEAD in the future. So, I see this as a positive and I’ll be sure to keep everyone informed on how that program is working and when it gets to be implemented here in Des Moines. Thank you.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Council Member Nutting.

COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING: No report.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. Council Member Bloss.

COUNCIL MEMBER BLOSS: Nothing to report.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: All right, I’ll go to Deputy Mayor Jean Oxiger.

DEPUTY MAYOR OXIGER: Thank you, Mayor. Excuse me. Just want to remind everybody again, the city manager did touch on it earlier, but the organizing group for Indivisible, which is organizing the No Kings Rally on Saturday — they’re expecting their biggest crowd ever. They’ve, to date, they generally have people on Burien View Drive, but this time they’re expecting it to be so large that it will also include 7th. So, anybody driving through town, please be careful. And it’s truly amazing how organized Indivisible is. They’ve got it down pretty much pat as to how they’re going to handle things and hope things go well.

Oh yes — the time. It is Saturday. It is this Saturday the 28th and it’s going to be from noon until 2 p.m.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you. I attended a couple of meetings. I’ll just highlight a few. One was the Highline Forum organized by the Port of Seattle which centered much around our preparations regionally for the FIFA World Cup. And there are many activities that are going to be hosted, including several from our neighbors in Burien and SeaTac, but I also want to make sure that folks know that we’re offering a free event for the USA versus Australia game on June 19th over at the Des Moines Theater. I’m looking forward to it. And then you can head right over into all the things that will be happening in July this year as well.

I’m hoping that this will become more of a regular event, but I am hosting “Coffee Chat” — breakfast-type items — with the mayor on Monday morning the 30th. And the first one is going to be at 9:00 a.m. at Alena’s Cafe. So, if you’d like to come by, please do. I’ll be there from 9 to 11. And I will also be holding some other sessions at various times whether it’ll be an afternoon, evening, or a weekend to accommodate people’s working schedules and their daily lives. And so please keep that in mind. Information will go out in the city manager report. I believe it might even go out in the next City Currents. We’ll see about that. But I do hope that you come out and tell us more about what concerns you or things that you want to congratulate the city on and I hope to see you on Monday.

I want to say thanks again to all of the folks who are here tonight because they’re volunteering and giving back to their city and serving in a capacity that is — I’m sure going to be exceptionally glamorous. But it’s just a testament to how much commitment you all have because it’s probably not going to be glamorous, but it’s necessary. And I think that if you’re like me and you think code revision is lots of fun — I love code cleanup — then it’s a good time. But more importantly, I just appreciate your initiative and commitment to giving to this place that we all live because I think that’s something that we all share. No matter what neighborhood you’re in or no matter what phase of life you’re in — I won’t personally — it’s not me personally, but I can say my block contributed to the lowering of the average and median age group just this month. My neighbor gave birth to a second child. So, we’re all very excited about that.

Right now, we’re going to head into an executive session. The purpose of this executive session is to discuss property acquisition under RCW 42.30.110(1)(b). This executive session is expected to last 20 minutes and that means we’ll be here until 8:05. No formal action will be taken at the end.

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[Executive session]

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MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: — who have waited so patiently for all of us. We are at the end of our meeting. Our next meeting will be a city council committee of the whole and study session which is going to be on April 2nd starting at 5:00, 2026.

Is there a motion to adjourn? Oh, I get to do it. No, I move that we adjourn.

COUNCIL MEMBER [UNIDENTIFIED]: Second.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: All right. All those in favor?

ALL: Aye.

MAYOR GRACE-MATSUI: Thank you very much. Have a great night.