For me 2013 is the most useful and fascinating year in recent DM history. And if I could, I would insist that every current member of the Council and all future candidates listen to this stuff (especially the April 6, ‘all options on the table’ meeting) and take notes.

Introduction

As you’ve perhaps heard many times, in 2013 the City was absolutely tanking. Among the first words spoken by Mayor Kaplan at the April 6 Retreat is that the City was running a $2,000,000 annual deficit.

In addition to Mayor Kaplan, the Council consists of Matt Pina, Carmen Scott, Melissa Musser and Bob Sheckler. Dan Caldwell is ill and will soon resign–being replaced by appointee Jeremy Nutting.

And you can trust me on this: some of the Council got along no better then as now. They have dramatically different views on various issues. And yet? If you watch any bit of these meetings, people seem mighty friendly. There is actual discussion.

April 4 Study Session

April 4, 2013 Study Session Packet

On Thursday April 4, the Council held a typical Study Session to discuss regular stuff (actually the long term plan for Pacific Ridge which is very important and City Manager Piasecki’s attempt to improve meeting agenda items), and then prepare for another meeting–a special Retreat at the Senior Center two days later on April 6.

April 6, 2013 Council Retreat

April 06, 2013 City Council Retreat Minutes

This was referred to as “the all options on the table” meeting. This is, hands down, the most informative meeting I’ve ever heard. It explains pretty much everything about where we were, how we compare with other cities, various possibilities and basically how we got to today. It’s over three hours, but it is fast-paced and anything but boring because it is so action-packed. And you quickly realise that the participants were completely aware of the stakes involved.

It’s interesting that they chose to hold such an important planning meeting–with lots of graphs and charts, in a place with poor audio, no video, and lots of airplane noise, at 9AM on a Saturday morning.

Radical or Traditional

There were two sets of talking points, ‘Radical’ and ‘Traditional’.

You can read the list for yourself in those minutes, but to give you a sense of the ‘radical ideas’, one was to move City Hall down to the Marina and then open up 11th Ave for commercial development. Another was to outsource the police to King County (as Burien, Normandy Park and SeaTac all do, by the way.). Another was to un-incorporate various sections of the city (not the whole town!) which had previous been annexed, but with the experience of time, had proven to be obvious economic losers. All options really were on the table and one can only applaud the Council for having the courage to discuss these things in public.

But some of the non-radical ideas were not exactly mild salsa either. They include grande lower-level staff cuts totalling over $1,000,000 per annum. And Economic Development Director? Assistant City Manager? Gone. Reduce our reliance on consultants. Combine various departments. Go ‘paperless’. And, end most of the ‘citizen advisory groups’, including the public planning commission.

One thing that stands out to me is the annoyance of a couple of CMs (led by Pina) that the City Manager has all these ideas on the table, but has no numbers to indicate the potential benefits for each. How can they possibly choose without more information!? Sheckler points out that there will be a political cost, so they have to know what they are getting themselves into.

City Manager Piasecki calmly points out that the point of the meeting is to ask the Council to choose which options to research. Each of these bold options will take a ton of research to run the numbers and they can’t possibly study them all. So, how about if the Council whittles down the obvious non-starters, elevate the ones that have obvious appeal and then go from there. And as the conversation progresses, it’s clear why he is saying that. Although various CMs say they are interested in the numbers, they have obvious biases for or against various ideas–regardless of how much money they might raise or save.

June 6, 2013 City Council Meeting

In June, the City Manager presents a report and some recommendations on implementing the ideas discussed at the April 6, 2013. There is also a big presentation on IT and the whole ‘going paperless’ thing. (For the first time councilmembers will be getting their own computers)

Update from April 4 Study Session-June 06, 2013 City Council Packet

August 3, 2013 Budget Retreat

August 3, 2013 Budget Retreat Packet

At the annual Budget Retreat, the ideas from April 6 were re-visited. None of the ‘radical ideas’ went anywhere, but it did end the Public Planning Agency in a 5-1 vote (Carmen Scott being the lone ‘no’.) The main sentiment being expressed by Sheckler, “We can always bring it back any time we want to.”

Aftermath

The Council actually doubled-down on the use of consultants, a practice that has only increased over time. But some of the traditional ideas definitely went somewhere.

• Eventually it did consolidate the roles of Assistant City Manager and Economic Development into a single hire, Michael Matthias
• There were a series of staff cuts
• Increases in utility taxes were implemented
• Red light cameras were installed
• Paid Parking at the Marina did get started
• And it did end most citizen advisory groups

Recovery

As they say, “history is written by the winners.” The story told by the current majority is that they “saved the city”, which implies a certain “all or nothing” thinking:

1. If not for the new City Manager and Council’s strategy and courage the City would have ‘gone under’, ie. “swallowed by Kent!” I’m convinced that at least some of that jazz comes from April 6, 2013. Bob Sheckler was quite correct to worry about even talking about ‘radical options’. Just talking about unincorporating a few parts of the City were pretty easy to turn into “We’re all gonna diiiiiie!”
2. That things were foundering and, when the 2016 Council took over, ‘the ship was righted’ in short order.

As those meetings demonstrate, neither of these assertions are particularly accurate.

• In fact, there were options for fixing the immediate deficits the City was experiencing–as well as lots of long-term ideas.
• And also, the ideas which the current majority tout as ‘tough decisions’ were all discussed in 2013. Love ’em or hate ’em, they all took time to put into action and then take effect.
• Finally, and here is your moment of calming zen for the day, government budgets are like the tides. The energy driving the system starts building years before the wavefront hits the proverbial Marina. 😀

So even as those people sat there one Saturday morning in April of 2013, as City Manager Matthias is fond of saying, ‘macro-economic forces’ were already starting to build.

• Housing prices were recovering (slowly.)
• Construction was recovering (slowly.) Various projects such as the Four Points Hotel and Des Moines Creek Business Park were coming on-line–bringing big slugs of one-time money.

It just so happened that the recovery from ‘The Great Recession’ was the slowest in modern American history. So it took almost eight years for Des Moines to reap the benefits of that recovery.

We had a couple of years of relatively good performance, and then COVID hit.

It’s like déjà vu all over again…

And one could say the same thing about the previous decade. There was a recovery after 9/11, the City seemed on an upwarded trajectory with absolutely booming home sales and a much healthier downtown than people seem to remember now and then… 2008’s Great Recession.

As the Finance Director points out at the April 6 Retreat, Des Moines seems to go through these ‘waves’ every so often. Councilmember Carmen Scott comments that the City should stop spending so much and (once and for all) commit to building a healthy reserve.

No one is consistent

But it’s also worth remembering that Scott, one of the most conservative members of a conservative City Council, was also the driving force behind  the Beach Park restoration. She kept pushing to spend a lot of money to preserve those ‘old buildings’, at a time when the City was hemorrhaging cash. (Which is why she was also the lone vote for retaining the public planning commission.) She had a soft spot for historic preservation.

I’m not picking on Councilmember Scott, not at all. Though she and I would have disagreed on many things, I too have a soft spot for historic preservation and I’m glad she pushed for something that seemed so extravagant at the time because I know it was the right thing to do long term.

But on the other hand, if no one has the will to say ‘no’, you should expect to start tanking.

The funny thing is…

If you know that Des Moines is cyclical, you can remain calm and do something cool like the Beach Park and not turn it into a hair on fire deal. It’s actually quite hard for a city to go out of business. We can simply cut services and raise taxes. It sucks, and it’s not healthy to always be focusing on ‘now’ but we can (and do) do it.

But my takeaway from that year is mixed.

On the one hand, those meetings have the dynamic I think we should want from our government. The staff are saying: lead. The councilmembers are not all that far apart ideologically and they do seem willing to work together to come to some kind of consensus.

The Council makes some choices, but ultimately cannot seem to land on any vision, which was kinda the point of these meetings–finding a new direction leading to long term success.

I would argue that restoring the Beach Park, finishing the Des Moines Creek Trail, Carmen Scott’s passion, things that helped the city tank, were also among the few truly visionary items accomplished in that era because although they were part of the financial pain, they are things that everyone agrees are great and will continue to be great forever. But they were never part of some holistic ‘vision’.

You have to want it…

And I would also note that the Council was willing to dump all the Citizen stuff because of low participation rates. It was a Catch-22. Why have all those ‘citizen groups’ if no one shows up?

But it’s also notable that the Council did have that most important of meetings at a time and place which almost guaranteed poor public enagement–a bit like the September 27, 2022 Marina Town Hall also held at the Senior Center.

It’s easy to blame the public for checking out, but that absolves government from any responsibility for bringing people together. A City is a corporation. In most corporations, whether for profit or non-profit, if customers are losing interest, one has a strong motivator to regain it. But a municipal corporation like Des Moines can keep cranking whether the public is there or not; and that creates all kinds of incentives to avoid keeping your customers in the game.

The one visionary thing I wish the council of 2013 had considered was to do something real to break that cycle of declining public engagement. Rather than save some short-term money and dump all that ‘citizen’ jazz, I think it would have been better to spend a few bucks and try to revive them. Maybe it woulda worked, maybe not. But if the Council could, itself, not reach consensus on a grand vision, it may not have been the worst idea in the world, especially with the onset of social media, to let the public have a whack at it.

It may not only be ‘good hygiene’ to encourage the public to show up, it may also be what we need to develop the compelling ‘vision’ people have talked about for so many decades.