They’re doing walk-ins now pretty much everywhere. 🙂
This Week
Tuesday: 6:30PM Highline Schools Listening Session at Mt. Rainier High School, with Superintendent Dr. Ivan Duran and District #5 Director Azeb Hagos. I made a comment at the end of this week’s meeting which I fleshed out here on Facebook. This has nothing to do with the merits of Prop 1. It’s truly for information only. But the HSD ballot info on the tax implications was not exactly ‘clear’. So please read and attend this meeting.
Thursday: Public Safety Committee Meeting (Agenda) (Video)
Saturday: 9:00AM – 3:00PM Fall Recycling Event at the Marina
Last Week
Monday: Meeting with Finance Dept. to ask budget questions. I made some comments on the format of the document, which I go into below. One improvement was this infographic. We have a huge number of seniors living alone, many in their own homes (which were affordable years ago.) The current tax system the City of Des Moines is based on, both property and utilities, is highly regressive. The City needs more revenue. We need the higher assessments that the next generation will provide. But we also need a way for seniors, who did their part, to age in place gracefully.
Monday: Dept. of Ecology meeting on Aviation Emissions. After all these years, we still do not have a single Air Quality Monitor anywhere near the airport. We have like five organisations working on it and that should tell you something about how slow-walked things have been here on fighting aviation pollution.
And I learned something. A community activist asked if she could get a small stipend for door-to-door community outreach. I’m ashamed to say that never would have occurred to me. But it was exactly the right thing to ask for. You could spend $15,000 on a billboard or you could print $50 of flyers and hire some kids to go door to door–and get waaaaay more people to show up for any community meeting here.
Tuesday: Speaking of which, the Port of Seattle did their Budget Study Session. Their process is very different from ours. Due to their complexity, they have sort of a rolling process which starts in July. And unlike us, they publish all their presentations up front. And this meeting was also their Tax Levy Presentation. It was also the start of the first Part 150 Study in nine years.
Tuesday: I was thrilled to attend this meeting of the Des Moines Historical Society and hear Ken Robinson speak.
Thursday: City Council Meeting. (Agenda) (Video) Highlights?
- First Budget Reading. 2023 Preliminary Annual Budget
- Transfer of lease to new owner of Quarterdeck and extension of lease for five years plus another five year option at $381/mo. I voted against this. It’s not that I don’t love ‘the QD’. I praised owner Ken Rogers a good deal for the reason that there have been several other restaurants on the Marina Floor and frankly, the Quarterdeck has been successful because he did not take it for granted–he worked hard to market properly. That said, the place does not need to be in that precise spot (it’s literally a cargo container, right?) And the long-term leases of both that and SR3 lock in the entire design of the Marina. Given the uncertainty of the whole plan (and the US economy), it is wrong to box in our choices. This is for the entire City for the next generation.
Council Meeting Recap
Budget: First Reading
There wasn’t a lot of new information in the budget. So my comments/questions centered around the format of the document. For you bookkeeper types, our budgets strike me more like a trial balance than a budget.
The intro to the document says that budgets are statements of values. Absolutely. But our budget consists almost entirely of what my company used to call bodies and buckets, not ‘values’.
A City budget mainly consists of many funds (the buckets)—think of them as your bank accounts. You might have one for ‘college’ and one for ‘vacations’ and one for ‘retirement’. Just so, we have a Marina Fund, a Transportation Fund, a Development Fund, etc. The budget process here is to pump dollars into each of those buckets. We don’t generally say, “We’ll spend $20,000 on project (x).
But we also vote for staffing levels for each fund (the bodies.) So, this is where we could say, “add four more police officers, tout suite!”
An obvious cognitive dissonance is that those bodies represent dollars. So, realistically the staffing ends up being driven by the amount in the appropriate fund. IOW: the buckets also determine the bodies.
We vote ‘x’ dollars for something called ‘public safety’ or ‘marina’. But we do not vote specifically for a ‘boat hoist’ or any specific road project. When the Council votes on ordinances and resolutions during the year, the City Manager pulls the money from the appropriate fund.
But as the City Manager said, the Budget is supposed to be about values. I call the current Budget Document more of a ‘trial balance’ than a ‘budget’ because although it shows those numbers, it doesn’t explain the Why? ‘Why’ are the values. Why are we spending (x) here and (y) there… and not the other way round? Why do we expect this revenue to be up and that revenue to be down? Decision makers need the Why as much as the dollars.
To do that properly, the document needs footnotes and explainers to go with all the key numbers. Ideally a budget should be almost self-documenting. Any person who understands the basics could read it and ‘grok’ how and why money is flowing here, there and everywhere. Currently we’re not there.
And I write this the way any golfer describes that perfect 18 holes at Pebble Beach. You can never get there, but that’s the dream. And no one should take offense at describing that ideal document. I took pains at the meeting to say how much work those footnotes can take. (It’s just like writing computer code, programmers hate documenting their code because it takes almost as long to do the ‘explainers’ as to get the actual code done.) You do all that extra work because it’s not for you. Others have to be able to read and understand it.
A trial balance tells the bookkeeper that everything adds up. But a budget needs to be far more than that in my opinion. Otherwise, it’s far more difficult to determine what the City truly values. OK, enough speechifyin’.
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.
In 2018, a neighbour and I got wind of a developer’s plan to build an apartment complex on 216th and 14th. That conflicted with the City’s Comp Plan. His plans, which the public had not seen, included ingress/egress through the residential neighbourhood. (It had nothing to do with 24th Ave. as my colleague said.) The tension was that there were several property owners within the proposed development who were aware of the plan and were eager to be bought out, regardless of the impacts to the surrounding neighbourhood. (Ironically, I had first heard about it from one of those enthusiastic home owners.)
The City had slipped in a Draft Ordinance as an amendment to the annual Comp Plan review to re-zone the area for apartments. The Council was not voting on the apartments per se, ‘only’ to change the Comp Plan to allow for apartments.
Like everyone else, my neighbour tried writing some letters and was typical in his frustration. Hee and I spoke, I suggested a strategy, and he really came through. He established a mailing list and together we organised about twenty people to show up and scream bloody hell about it; not once, but twice. And after the 6second reading…
The Council backed down.
Without that organised and very vocal campaign, they were totally going to approve it.
That is what happened.
This year, I was happy to see another project presented to City Council, this time with a plan we could see, for 23 Town homes, providing ownership, and no disruption to the neighbourhood. That was what the Comp Plan provided for. That is the power of local activism. And that is why I try to tell people over and over how to organise and why you must organise. Because. It. Works. You just have to do it.
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’,
- 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.
- 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.
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
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