It’s not a puppy

This is Page 21 from Ferry Demonstration Project Scoping and Reconnaissance Report dated 08/31/2021. To my knowledge this has not been brought to the Council or any Committee. It does not appear on the City web site until Friday, December 2, 2022.It predicts that a six month ferry program will lose between $997,000 and $1,450,000. But that small bit of information was not included in the information the Council had before voting on any point of the Ferry Pilot program. And for that reason alone you should not be happy.

Same thing happened with the Diedrich RPM Demand Study in 2019. We paid for it, but it took me doing a public records request in 2021 to see the results. The Council voted to approve the project without seeing those results. (We also did not see the 2015 King County and 2021 PSRC Studies–both of which see no future in ferry commuter service here.)

I cannot say for certain, but in this case, it looks as those the City did not want to have to explain why it wanted to move forward with such a dire forecast and simply avoided that problem by simply not mentioning that the report even existed.

And the City Manager made it clear that the report was available. He chose to provide the report after the meeting. And I’m glad that cat is finally out of the bag. Not providing data to the Council until after the meeting is a strategy.

As soon as the presentation ended, and even before taking questions from the Council, the City Manager asked the Council to move to create a second ferry ‘trial’ in the Spring, with no budget. And my colleagues seemed more than eager to act on that. They just want it.

Some specifics…

And we were also given a lot more information we had never received.

• We were told that the program had come in at less than 50% of the original contract, woo hoo! But in my world that is not a good thing. If one’s cost estimate is that far wrong, explanations are warranted. We received none. (Seriously, if you contract with a company for a new roof at $20,000 and then they hand you a bill for $10,000 wouldn’t you have questions?)
• We were also told (silly!) that the Ferry was never intended to be sustainable (ie. to cover its own costs.)
• In fact, we were told that covering 40% of costs was better than expected performance. (Not to beat a dead horse, but we were never informed that 20% was considered ‘normal’.)
  
• We were told that the overwhelming number of riders arrived at the dock by automobile.
• We were told that the ridership was mostly seniors so there was no way to know how well it would do with commuters–which is another reason why we need that second trial! (Actually, there’s a very good way to know–just look at the previous for realz studies done by both King County Water Taxi 2015 and the PSRC in 2021. They both indicate that commuter demand will not be great–if it were, they would have considered adding Des Moines to their list of stops. Again: we already know that there is no great demand for commuters in DM.)

At Crazy Eddie’s, how do we keep prices so low?

Circling back to that final cost. How did the City get such a deal, a steal, the sale of the century? I asked. Got nothing. But here is a slide from the Presentation compared to the contract we approved in July:

• 
• 

Ta da!

Since the Council didn’t actually see, you know, the books, here’s what it looks like to me at the moment.

• Somehow we got two months for the price of one. (Is that a one-off, was the estimate crazy-wrong or will we continue to get that kind of a ‘bargain’ going forward?
• Annnnnnnnnnd… we simply did not include all those (very real) marketing/management charges on the presentation (note the little asterisk.)
• Also, nowhere do we include any ferry consultant fees ($5,000/mo) and our various advertising and other ferry consultant fees (yes, we’ve had multiple consultants.)

But no matter how you present it, the thing is a big money loser. The only question is how much. And the fact that we have chronically felt the need to hide information, dissemble, and even fiddle the numbers to make it look better than it is, should be alarming. One thing you can take to the bank is this: it loses money. And the longer we run it, the more money it will lose.

It’s not a puppy!

If one reviews the mountain of PDFs the consultant provided, most of it involves how happy people are about having a ferry. They like riding it. They like seeing it come and go. I get it. But only one or two pages are concerned with the finances. And that is because that part of the story is simply not very much fun. Yeah, you can spin it as ‘better than expected’, but that’s like saying a D+ is not as bad as an F-. Neither are passing grades.

I have to admit that I’ve been as frustrated by residents who support the ferry as by my colleagues.

That over-eagerness feels to me a whole lot like when yer kids bring home that stray puppy. They want it. And so their strategy is to, by hook or by crook, keeping it around as long as possible, whether it makes sense or not, so that little Barkley becomes a part of the family.

Aside from the fact that I’m an extremely fun person, this has nothing to do with the fun in riding a ferry. Cruel truth: The money we’re spending on this ferry is money that we’re taking from core functions (public safety, parks, roads, programs for kids, seniors, etc.) Sorry, Brenda, but if we keep that St. Bernard, we can’t fund your college fund. Awwww, gee whiz, Daaaaaaad. 😀

The dream that makes it all OK…

The only way one might justify this spend would be if one could demonstrate that it will eventually bring in more revenue long term. But read carefully: neither the City or the highly paid consultant has provided any evidence to support that notion. It is all a dream.

The City claimed that ‘many’ businesses had received a noticeable uptick in business. But the Council only received one letter to that effect. And of the 111 Passenger Ferry Comments included with the report, none are from businesses.

However, I’ll leave you with one small stat…

Over seventy percent of the riders originated in Des Moines, headed to Seattle and took a return trip. Which means (duh) that less than thirty percent of the ridership will be coming to spend money here. And the vast majority of riders originating here are discount fares, who will take up parking we do not have and spend money at very nice places in Seattle.

Get it? The ferry can never be a revenue driver for Des Moines. It is impossible. (However, it can compete for scarce parking resources.)

Still insane, man…

I wrote back in June, This is insane. The City Manager asked me to reconsider that assessment in light of the final report and my reply is: Still insane, man.

Frankly, we don’t seem to care–on multiple levels. We don’t seem to care whether a program like this was evaluated in a transparent fashion, we don’t care whether it works or not, and we don’t seem to care what the long term consequences will likely be. It really does strike me like that puppy your kids want you to keep. They just want it.