A land use migraine

At last night’s Budget Session, the Mayor and City Manager teamed up on yet another totally blindside move which was at least as egregious as last month’s Marina Redevelopment Community Meeting. It’s a pattern.

What Happened

At least a day before the meeting, the City Attorney had prepared a Draft Ordinance placing an ’emergency’ moratorium on land use applications under a provision of State code RCW 36.70A.390, to apply to a stretch of 216th from The Barnes Creek Trail to 24th Avenue.

But the item was not on the Agenda as part of a public process. And it was not mentioned in the City Manager’s section at the front of the meeting (where he also regularly throws out blindside items with no prep.)

No, this was next level. Instead the Mayor waited until the end of a three hour budget meeting, with almost all of the public gone, at the section allocated for Councilmember New Items For Consideration, and gave the City Manager the floor for an ’emergency’ item. But without telling us what it was.

The City Planner steps to the dais to give a presentation describing an emergency need to immediately stop land use applications for the next six months. But without specifying what that emergency was or is or why it couldn’t simply be put on an Agenda Item. There are vague references to GMA and Vision 2050, which I’m not sure some of my colleagues have even been briefed on. (Spoiler Alert: The GMA and PSRC provide targets, not requirements that suddenly need to be acted upon overnight.)

The Clerk then passes out the draft ordinance to read with an aerial map and no mention of how it conflicts with the current Comprehensive Plan the Council has already vetted and approved. We then sit in silence for ten minutes reading. And then there are actually two discussions. The Council votes to invoke Rule 26a, which is another ’emergency’ rule to pass an Ordinance without a second reading. And then the discussion went even more Orwellian. There are concerns about “not zoning for more trucks”, which sounds sympathetic to residents, but actually has little to do with this. But then the actual “Whereases” are strongly weighted towards more commercial development–the exact opposite.

The reason you see me squeezing my head is that I have tried not to scream at my colleagues or staff this year. The get put at the dais and it’s basically daring me to throw hard balls at our staff which no one wants to do.

But Councilmember Pennington told a story, with Councilmember Steinmetz seeming to nod approvingly, which was simply not accurate. He referred to a previous zoning hearing concerning my neighbourhood in 2019, while I was running for office. It’s one of the 327 irritations the City (and my colleagues) developed with me long before my election.

Zoning is now so intrinsic to the functioning of every city, it’s hard to believe that it only really came into use in the 1920’s. But the manifest potential for abuse has always been so profound, courts have gone out of their way to try to take local government out of the equation.

If a City can simply declare an ’emergency’ any time it chooses, how is one to know if any project is being chosen fairly? Why couldn’t the City have simply invoked the same moratorium on the area around 240th and Marine View Drive back in 2018… you know, ‘to give the public six months to provide feedback on the city’s future’?

There are only two possible reasons to make this an ’emergency’,

1. Either because the City has received some intelligence of an application that might be forthcoming, in which case, it could have discussed the nature of the emergency with the City Council in Executive Session.
2. Or simply because the City (and majority) finds it convenient to jam this kind of thing in, just to get more things done, without you know, going through all that pesky ‘process’. Several times this year, the Council has been presented with contracts that had to be approved tonight, because the City was up against some deadline we were unaware of.
   • First of all, unlike any of our sister cities, the Council has no calendar of important deadlines, or even a functional ⁵Future Agendas Report.
   • Second, as a college prof once told me (which annoyed me as much then as it probably does our staff now) your lack of preparation is not my problem. My job is to have time to review items and give the public adequate opportunities to weigh in.

Here’s the deal…

• On September 27, the City (and Mayor) unilaterally changed the Marina Redevelopment plan.
• At the very beginning of last night’s meeting, the council granted a ten year lease extension to the Quarterdeck, thus locking in the marquee piece of the waterfront redevelopment for $381 a month.
• And at the very end? The City and Mayor again pulled a fast one, invoking a zoning provision designed for emergencies to ‘prevent an emergency’.

Hey, I guess if it’s legal…

As I walked out the door I heard the two remaining audience members discussing what had just happened and one seemed to shrug it of cheerily by saying, “Hey, I guess if it’s legal.”

The funny thing about that is that the resident has been doing his own campaign to get some longstanding issues resolved in his neighbourhood.

My colleagues will argue that the outcome of the moratorium might be good. Agreed. The zoning in that are should be cleaned up. But that’s just more ‘the ends justifies the means’ rubbish. ⁴One could declare martial law as an excuse to find a cure for cancer. Noble, but screw that.

What has caused bad government here for so long is not merely the leadership. Sorry, but it’s also our residents. You vote for this. And you also tend to see everything as transactional. You’ll laugh about “that crazy City Council” but not make the connection with your issue.

Friends, the City is like any corporation. It has a culture. It does not do some things one way and other things another way. The lesson people should take away from last night is this:

This type of hanky panky is how everything works. So, your issue is being handled exactly the same as we handled this issue. So even if you’re personally satisfied, you don’t know that it could likely be a whole lot better.

The reason it sometimes seems as though I focus on issues like this ‘process’ stuff more than any individual concerns is  because if we can just move away from single issues, and fix the broken process, we instantly make every individual concern easier to deal with. That resident is working an issue that has metastised over two decades.

Two. Words.

Planning Commission.

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₁The last time we invoked this moratorium thingee was in 1998 with regard to Third Runway and Pacific Ridge.

²I am intimately familiar with the area. It includes Stephen J. Underwood Park as well as the Post Office and some houses across from the FAA building. The zoning is nuts. But it’s been nuts for quite some time and we have Comp Plan updates every year. All those years no one seemed to be particularly annoyed that the Barnes Creek Trail is zoned as BP. So saying that is now some hair-on-fire emergency just for the sake of ‘having a public discussion’ is pretty rich. Points for audacity.

₃One note about that RCW, which may (or may not) be instructive. It was amended last year in order to account for affordable housing and emergency homeless shelters, which all cities are now required to site. The law was passed because every city (including Des Moines), and regardless of its concerned rhetoric, has consistently stonewalled  siting all such things as hard as they used to redline neighbourhoods against people of colour.

⁴We just ended 2.5 years of giving the City Manager emergency powers, most of which he did not need.

⁵If you click the link we technically do have a (cough) Future Agendas Report. It usually only gets filled in from meeting to meeting. Eg. the agenda for the 17 November meeting got filled in the day of the 27 October Meeting. Most of the time, it just contains placeholders for all the possible meeting dates–many of which get cancelled.

⁶And by the way: this is exactly the reason Rule 26a (which allows for ordinances to be propose and passed on the same night as we did this Thursday) is such rubbish. Without that second reading (which my colleagues dismissively refer to as ‘two-tap’), there’s no time for the public to learn and engage and get to the right solution. It’s sort of like the right to a fair trial: even though most people who are arrested are guilty, a fair process is worth it because we’ve decided as a society that ‘most’ isn’t good enough. You need that extra layer of protection because ordinances (and especially zoning ordinances) often have permanent consequences