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The Hard Things Are Not Easy

Who can argue with that, right? 😀 Those were among the final words from Mayor Mahoney at our 7 July Meeting. He was responding to my final comments about the Council’s 6-1 decision to update our Rules Of Procedure in November based on a verbal proposal from Deputy Mayor Buxton.

That ₁process seemed about the same as every other group process we’ve voted for during my tenure, including ARPA Spending, Budgets and the Council vote to update the City’s web site of 7 April. Which is to say, terrible.

They’re all intended to be terrible processes. And I’m tired, not only of their obstruction, but frankly of that portion of the public who seem to have become so uninformed, cynical, or so conflict-averse that any misconduct short of SPACE ALIENS seems just business as usual in Des Moines.

So, I want say this as clearly as I can:

The goal of the next update to our Rules Of Procedure is, specifically, to silence me. But far more importantly:

It is an attempt to make the bullying, unethical and corrupt behaviour of our Council, Mayor and City Manager ‘official’, and thus ‘normal’.

What’s the prob?

Obviously I cannot predict the future, but the process, and Mayor Mahoney’s comments make it pretty clear what the majority intends:

1:46:40 “I will also make a comment about the council rules. We need the rule changes. There are things like social media that need to be adjusted. There needs to be clarifications of the use of city email and whether you [JC Harris] have the authorization or designation to contact outside you know entities and governances and so forth without the designation of council. We also need some um guidelines if so if that happens what do we do as a Council. It it’s not been a secret in this council that we’ve had problems with that and they need to be addressed. Also the council rules aren’t relevant to today like i said mentioned before social media and a couple other things. This is a good process that needs to happen and what we’re doing here is going to be the is going to be the rules that will lead us into the future. The hard things are not easy and in this case this will not be an easy thing. It’ll be contentious. I tell everybody now most of the contentiousness will be in the November, December window, but it’s a necessary thing that needs to happen…”

This sounds to me like:

Attempting to place limits on a Councilmember’s speech off the dais.
Creating a formal email policy limiting the use of City email only to certain purposes of which the majority (or City Manager) approve.
Creating a policy whereby Councilmembers must seek permission from the Council before speaking with any ‘entities and governances.’ Which I assume to mean both electeds as well as government agencies.
Creating some enforcement mechanism if any of the above is ‘violated’.

The word ‘unconstitutional’ comes to mind.

And as an added bonus…

Worst of all, rule changes tend to be permanent. So this is not about me. Any future members of our Council will be hamstrung by this long after I’m gone. One of the great lies all governments tell is, “Hey, if it’s not perfect, we’ll fix it later.” I dunno who’s the bigger idiot: the politician who says that or the public that believes it. We’ve had a dozen updates to our Rules of Procedure over the past 25 years. We’ve never unwound any mistakes.

The fact that my colleagues are happy to spend public money on a personal vendetta that will make government worse is bad enough. And as an added bonus, we get to screw future CMs. Gosh, I wonder why more people don’t run? 😀

Turning good to bad…

Everything the majority objects to are not only legal and appropriate; they are things that every Councilmember should be encouraged to do.

It’s kinda like objecting to people who do their own research, work hard, and when they see something bad happening, they say something. Actually it’s not like that; it’s exactly that.

Nobody who has the public interest at heart should object to how I’ve been doing the job or support anyone who would support the ideas Mayor Mahoney mentions in his comments.

Examples…

Some of the issues the majority (and administration) object to are visible, like this blog and my posts on social media. But the far more important stuff they dislike you will not see unless you’re reading carefully every week.

In 2019 I helped create a law to get homes with bad Port Packages fixed. There was immediate momentum to get it implemented and then COVID hit. But I keep talking with the Port, and the law’s sponsors Senator Keiser and Rep.Orwall. And yet, I got an email from the Mayor a couple of weeks ago saying that it was “an inappropriate use of City email” for me to write Port Commissioners on “reinsulation.” (I assume he meant sound insulation systems.)
Frankly, the article I wrote last week on the Ferry Pilot (This Is Insane) was because I am the only curent CM who could write such an article. If it was embarrassing, it is only because the proposal is an embarrassment. The hell they put me through just to see the bills we pay is shameful.
Two years ago, I began asking for a report on sales tax revenue by geographic area. I was told it was ‘impossible’. Actually, it is already done in several cities, including Poulsbo. In April, I asked the Mayor of Poulsbo how they do it so we could apply it here. Instead of being appreciative, Mahoney comes to the dais and tells an absolute whopper about how I ‘misrepresented the city’. At Tuesday’s Port of Seattle Commission Meeting, the Mayor will extol the benefits of expanding the Des Moines Creek Business Park. He can do this with a straight face because the City has no data to describe the economic impacts (plus or minus) of that area.
There’s a Fourth Runway you also don’t know about called The Sustainable Airport Master Plan (SAMP) and SR-509 Stage 2. Last year, I could not get our Transportation Committee to schedule a briefing from WSDOT. So I simply asked their communications consultant to see their latest animation. Totally appropriate. At our June Transportation Committee Meeting, our COO, DPW, the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor discuss how they can obstruct me from further contact with WSDOT staff. CM Achziger says nothing.

That’s four of hundreds of examples. But that last one is truly remarkable:

The administration and fellow electeds are openly collaborating to prevent a councilmember from doing legitimate research.

This is misconduct so beyond the pale I’ve struggled to find similar examples anywhere. It may happen other places in private, but the fact that everyone here is so casual about this form of corruption is really next level. And remember: this is simply me asking legitimate questions about SR-509.

The fact that my colleagues are willing to engage in such behaviour should not be tolerated. It’s bad ethics and it hinders your right to know.
The fact that others stand by and do nothing should also not be tolerated. Council-Manager Government cannot function if the majority (and the administration) knows that no one will speak up.

You should want councilmembers who are intellectually curious; people who seek out better ways of doing things. You should want councilmembers who are appreciative of others expertise. And you should want councilmembers who are willing to have their ideas judged based on merit; who do not feel the need to silence and smear opposing points of view.

This is how democracy dies

I almost titled this article ‘this is how democracy dies’, because, well, because this is how democracy dies. 😀

It’s a long way to November and I don’t expect you to remember all this. But if you had any doubt before, now it is out in the open. This is your Council. It’s not individuals. It’s the entire culture.

The biggest failure of our government is that over the past 20 years it has been able to convince the public that how we do business here is normal. Other cities have their problems, but they do not work like this. The notion that ‘getting along’ or ‘civility’ is some indicator of good government is what has enabled this kind of ongoing corruption.

Why you should care…

If you volunteer or if you work with the City, you’re just interested in getting your short term project done. All this stuff I’m going on about is an abstraction. (Many of you refer to it as ‘the drama’–implying that all the tension on the council concerns a bunch of ‘drama queens’.)

This about ongoing corruption, implemented by the very nice city councilmembers you shake hands with at the Farmers Market every weekend.

It’s a ‘dampening field’ which prevents us from rising above a certain ceiling on any number of longstanding issues. It determines whether your children have healthy air to breathe; your streets are safe; your schools are good; restaurants thrive; programs for seniors and kids are on par with other cities; even the state of entrenched racism which never seems to go away.

I know seeing any tension on the dais is annoying for some of you, but I will keep pushing, because if we can fix this we can fix everything.

And for those who do get it, my question is this: How do we communicate this better to the rest of Des Moines? Many of your neighbours have exactly the same complaints and concerns as you do. How can we make this message clearer?

₁I’m honestly not clear on the ‘process’. In fact, I made a motion asking Deputy Mayor Buxton to put down on one sheet of paper what she was proposing. Voted down 1-6. It seems that we will hire a consultant to interview each CM on their ideas. The Mayor will create an Ad Hoc Rules Committee to collate that information. Their output will be brought to a November meeting for a vote. I just want to point out that we’ve done dozens of Rules updates and this is the first time we’ve felt a need to hire a consultant to assist us in this process. In contrast, previous councilmembers (eg. Richard Kennedy) taught themselves to write formally correct draft ordinances.

Airport, Environment, History, Transparencytrees

Port of Seattle assigns Panattoni to develop to Des Moines Creek Business Park West

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I almost titled this post “This is what a sellout looks like” But I restrained myself. 🙂

At the 12 July Port of Seattle Commission Meeting, the Port voted to proceed with the Item 10b (Des Moines Creek West Ground Lease.) (Presentation.) This is the scrubby forest land west of the FAA building on 216th with the road connecting to the Des Moines Creek Trail. It will become Phase 4 of the Des Moines Creek Business Park (DMBCP).

Des Moines Mayor Mahoney and Deputy Mayor Buxton mentioned all the “jobs” and “economic development”. The Port announced that it was exceeding the City’s current tree code with a 4-1 replacement provision. As Commissioner Cho said, “What’s not to like?”

A few details…

*As the presenter said, the FAA paid for most of the original land. And WSDOT bought the rest as one of three possible routes for SR-509. There is also a corresponding parcel at the northern end of the Des Moines Creek Trail.
In 2016, both those north and south parcels were up for auction. The north was offered to the City of SeaTac, the south to the City of Des Moines.
- In 2021, the City of SeaTac bought 8.8 acress on the north side (a large portion of it with a grant from King County), and is converting their end to BMX trails and forest.
- The City of Des Moines turned the 14.4 acre parcel at the south end over to the Port of Seattle, who bought it for about $3,000,000 in 2021. And that leads up to today’s agenda item.
According to the Port’s real estate manager, the new development will generate over $3.4M in annual lease revenue for the Port.
The developer is Panattoni Development, the same firm that developed all three previous phases of the DMCBP. Please take a drive around the existing DMCBP and let me know how well they’ve done so far in terms of ‘tree canopy’. A 4-1 replacement program sounds nice until one asks, “How well has the City of Des Moines ever enforced our existing tree code on commercial projects?” (†Spoiler alert below.)
The Mayor and Deputy Mayor mentioned “jobs” and “economic development.” Please ask the City Manager of Des Moines how much money those existing projects have generated for the City of Des Moines. (I tried to get the City to create such a report and was told that it’s ‘impossible’, despite the fact that other cities do exactly that.

Frankly, I do not care about “jobs” or “economic development” for the Port of Seattle or King County–unless they’re in Des Moines.

What if…

If the City of Des Moines had bought the land, we would have control. We could explore a whole spectrum of development opportunities:

On one end we could have done as did the City of SeaTac, extended their forest and parks.
Or, we could have done exactly what the Port of Seattle is doing and then we would have that $3.4M in lease revenue.

Do you have any idea what $3.6M would mean for a City like Des Moines? It’s over 14% of our annual general fund. It’s enough money to pay for the entire dock replacement program. It’s enough money to power basically every project we would ever need.

Of course the Port is enthusiastic about the project. Who wouldn’t be excited? They got land partially subsidised by Federal and State dollars and they have no responsibility for the outcomes for the residents of Des Moines. But they do get all that juicy money. Forever. And they can add the project to their list of “economic development” and “job creation” wins, because so long as it’s King County, it’s all good as far as they’re concerned. Double plus good? They can also say how ‘environmentally woke’ they are by talking about a ‘tree replacement’ plan that they will ultimately have no control over.

History Repeating itself…

Ground breaking for FAA building at DMCBP. CM Jeremy Nutting, three Des Moines Mayors: Bob Sheckler, Dave Kaplan, Matt Pina, Port Commission President Tom Albro.

Mayor and Deputy Mayor got to make the exact same arguments that former Mayors Sheckler, Kaplan and Pina made ten years ago. Arguments that have been proven false with all three development phases. And what is so scary is that people are now signing off on the same same trickle down economics for a fourth go round:

Whatever “economic development” is generated by the project will (somehow) accrue to the benefit of Des Moines. Not true.
The area is an environmental mess, so whatever they do will be better than what is there now. Wrong. Even a crappy forest is better for the environment than acres of impermeable surfaces.
That the same developer who stripped bare all three previous phases of the DMCBP will (somehow) embrace a different ethos on the fourth try?

If you let yourself be fooled four times, you’re not a fool; you’re in on it.

The In Private World

One last thing: in assigning ‘blame’ it’s worth noting that our City Manager did not present the option to the City Council. However, more than one of my predecessors did know about it. I certainly did as early as 2017 (you could just ask WSDOT. It’s public information, after all.)

All my current colleagues and predecessors have told me they were super-jazzed about it. And certainly nobody spoke up. The fact that they did not feel a need to inform the public is the real problem in my opinion.

Unlike every other nearby city, we’ve had no public planning commission for a decade now. I’m stunned that people don’t realise how important this is. One has only to look at every other city (who do have planning commissions) to notice all the surveys and town halls that’s the reason.

So when you hear about trying to censure me or changing Council Rules to block my access to information, this is why. We don’t want the public to know unpleasant facts. They’d just slow things down.

In Des Moines, neither (most of 😀 ) the Council, or the public, see the design for almost every project until it comes to a vote. And none of the new CMs so far have mentioned this as a problem. We’ve become addicted to the “in private world.”

*When planning large projects, government agencies frequently buy several parcels of land in an area so that they have choices. When the final route is selected, they then auction them off. The Barnes Creek Trail is another SR-509 route that was not chosen.

†My conflict with the City Manager began literally at our first meeting after my election. He showed me a page from Chapter 16 of the DMMC and demanded an apology because of a public comment I had made before my election. During that comment I had asked why we hadn’t been replacing trees on commercial property in Des Moines. He considered the excerpt he had handed me to be proof that the City had been good stewards of the environment under his leadership. He said that my comments had damaged his reputation and that he did not know if we could proceed with our professional relationship until I offered that apology. To diffuse the situation, I told him I would do some research and if I found out I had wronged him I would issue a robust apology. I immediately did a public records request asking for a total number of tree replacements during his tenure. I was told that the City does not collate either removals or replacements and that the only way to know would be to go through every jacket by hand searching for the required form each developer is required to fill out. The clerk assumed I would not want to do that. But, me being me, I made an appointment to sit in the North Conference Room with every jacket since his hiring. I was joined by both the City Clerk and her assistance because he had required them to do so for some reason. So we all spent the afternoon together. Me going through jackets. Them watching me. Sure enough, there was a form in every jacket where the developer duly notes each tree removal on a diagram of the property. But in over 200 jackets I found zero indications of tree replacement. Regardless, one has only to take a walk around the perimeter of DMCBP to assess the tree cover. Now, here’s the punchline: I was later told by another staff member that the ‘3-1 replacement’ section of the code was put in place at the behest of WSDOT and Sound Transit in order to comply with a State law on transportation projects.

Engagement, Marina

*Improving the ferry pilot program

My post on the Ferry Pilot Program (with the subtle title This Is Insane) has been one of the best moments in my short career as your low-rent elected. I’ve had the absolute (and rare) pleasure of having at least *~~ten~~ people tell me last week,

At first I was all for it. Then I read your article.

A significant number of average people took the time to read a fairly dense article with a very provocative title, with some actual evidence and… wait, here’s the best part: Changed their minds.

It doesn’t get much better than that. 😀

Now what?

An excellent question. I have a couple of action items below. One of them even involves instant gratification! The others are boring, hard but also quite doable with your help.

But first a bit of background:

The money for the first two months sailings cannot be recovered. However, the City has also booked other costs, such as a $70,000 marketing campaign, which may be at least partially recouped.
The Council established no metrics for success or failure of this pilot project. And that means there’s no ‘off’ switch.
- [update] The fare will be free for the first week, then $10 and $5 for seniors. With sixty two (62) passengers and 22 sailing days a month, even with 100% full price capacity, the City will lose $75,000. But because of the schedule, summer vacation for kids, and the proximity for seniors, my guess is that many of the riders will not be paying full price.
At our ARPA Spending Meeting last year, the Council voted money for a web site and other materials (including a model and video animaton) to explain the entire Marina Redevelopment to the public as it… er ‘develops’. 😀 The first step would be a Town Hall Meeting. My idea was that the project was so large and it would be changing over time, so we needed this to start filling in the gaps for people, rather than just ‘unveiling’ each item as separate things. (nb: at our 14 July RCM I asked for this to get underway and got nothing. This matters for two reasons:
- The project is far enough along to where everyone, boat owners, condo owners, etc. wants to be able to visualise where everything is going to go, like the Adaptive Purpose Building (APB), dry stack, hotel, parking,
- People don’t seem to get that the Marina is about to undergo many years of construction. You think that one crane is annoying? 😀 There are going to be crews down there working on all that stuff for the next decade. Are you starting to tune in to the frequency here? We need the public to understand the schedule.
The entire Marina was set up to be an independent business known as an Enterprise Fund. It is, in fact, the largest business source of revenue for the City. The whole point of an enterprise fund is that it must pay for itself. So any project within the Marina must at least break even.
When the current City Manager took over, he almost immediately broke the Marina into pieces. The docks are still in the Enterprise Fund, but as you can see from this graphic, the fishing pier and the old “Wasson House” near the beach are not.

That made it much easier to finance the seawall replacement–the City can use it’s full borrowing authority from the General Fund. But it also made it easier for the City to finance other projects on the floor. And that is, in fact the case with the Ferry Pilot. The City Manager decided that the Ferry Pilot money would come from the ‘Waterfront Zone’, which means it does not have to break even. And it is now drawing from the same pool of money as every other core City function: police, parks, human services, roads, etc.
For many years, the Des Moines Marina Association (DMMA) (the boat owners) had an extremely contentious relationship with the City and many brutal public town hall meetings. That changed several years ago. Now, the City attends DMMA monthly meetings. Neither the public or even representatives of the condo owners are usually there. But it has been there that much of the Marina Redevelopment planning has been rolled out first. For example, when the Marina Redevelopment survey was done, it was distributed only to those boat owners! Giving the DMMA so much influence over the entire Marina Redevelopment process was even more insane than the Ferry Pilot itself, for the simple reason that over 80% of the boat owners do not live in Des Moines.

Policy…

These are the things I need your help with to bring some accountability to both the Ferry program and the Marina Redevelopment. It’s always worth repeating that the way the ferry is being handled is the way every aspect of the project is being handled. Everything we can do to make the ferry program more transparent and accountable will have the same benefits for every other aspect of this $50,000,000 project.

#1 MARINA Town Hall

The City Council should vote to execute on the Marina Town Hall Presentation we funded at our ARPA Spending Meeting of September 2021 immediately. The entire ferry program should be put on hold after the initial sixty (60) days until after the presentation is built and until we can have that town hall meeting to explain the entire thing to the public.

The presentation should include a complete fly-through animation model of the expected components, a complete financial overview, and a five year projection–including the ferry.
It should be followed by a statistically valid survey of Des Moines residents.

Only when these tasks are complete could the Council vote to re-start the program. Consider this a public vote of confidence, which seems appropriate given the scale of the Marina Redevelopment.

#2 Marina Committee

We need a full City Council Committee devoted exclusively to the Marina. Given their expertise and special interest, the DMMA would continue to have great influence of course.

- But this discussion is the biggest chunk of money we will ever spend and the entire public should be able to participate in the process and every bit of it should be conducted as a public meeting.
- Also, it’s the only way to get at least a few members of the Council better educated on the topic. The whole point of a Transportation or Public Safety Committee is to have a subset of the Council put in extra time to really learn the material.

#3 Put the Ferry in the Enterprise Fund

The Ferry is a boat. It’s inside the docks. That is within the Enterprise Fund. So, it should accounted for in the Enterprise Fund. If it’s a real money maker? Schweet. The revenues will help pay for the docks and Marina upkeep. If not? It dies a quick death, without sucking oxygen out of the General Fund. Putting the Ferry into the Enterprise Fund provides instant accountability.

Action Items

Look, if it’s ‘free’, I would advise most people to ride the ferry. It’s not like boycotting grapes or whatever. That’s the fun part.
OK, now write the City Council citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov or show up for public comment at our next meeting Thursday July 7 at 6:00PM and show your support for the two above policy items:
1. Town Hall Presentation
2. Council Marina Commitee

We are considering an update of our Council’s Rules of Procedure this Thursday. And it is in those rules that committees are defined. So the timing could not be better.

*When I say ‘improve’ this program I’m taxing my ability to be open-minded to its absolute limit. Because the program is even worse than I described in the original article. This is a page from the contract we never even got to at the meeting. Sharp-eyed viewers will note that I was trying to be extra ‘nice’ at that meeting, even when I’d ask a question and the City Manager, instead of quoting a number would say, “it’s in the packet.” Actually, we’re spending at least $470,000 on this two month turkey. Check out the fuel no one mentioned and the $70,000 for marketing. Think about that: $70,000 on a ‘marketing program’ for a $200,000 ‘test’. (In fact, I’m thinking I may have to order more air quotes from Amazon if this thing keeps up.)

*As of July 17th, at least fifteen.

Neighborhoods, Policy, Public Safety, Weekly Updates

Weekly Update: 07/03/2022

This Week

Thursday: King County Flood District (Agenda)

Thursday: Public Safety Committee Meeting (Agenda)

Body Camera Update
Summer Events Update

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda)

The administration is recommending that we lower the speed limit on Pac Highway to 40MPH all along Des Moines.
We will discuss how to update our Council Rules of Procedure, which were last updated in November 2019.

How to participate in our meetings

City Council Meetings are scheduled for Thursdays at 6:00PM at City Hall 21630 11th Avenue S., Suite #C Des Moines WA 98198. They can also be viewed live on Comcast Channel 21/321 or on the City’s YouTube channel. Committee Meetings are either at 4:00PM or 5:00PM, also on Thursdays.

You do not have to sign in to attend a meeting!
The sign-in sheet is only for people wishing to make a Public Comment.

There are three ways to provide Public Comment:

In person: Show up a few minutes before the meeting and sign the sheet. Public Comment is usually conducted at the beginning of the meeting.
By e-mail: All e-mails sent to citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov are considered public comment. They are instantly available to all members of the City Council and the City Clerk who includes them into the record of public comments at the next meeting.
By US Mail: Attn: City Clerk Office, 21630 11th Avenue S., Des Moines WA 98198 no later than 4:00 p.m. day of the meeting. Please provide us with your first and last name and the city in which you live.

All letters or e-mails requesting a specific action are referred by the City Clerk to the appropriate City department.

If you would like a follow up from me, personally please indicate that or call me (206) 878-0578.

The Clerk does not read e-mails to the Council in full; only the subject line. However, we do see them as soon as you send them. Your comments are added to the Agenda Packet available on the City web site following each meeting.

Last Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda) (Video). This was me taking a stand on the corruption in our City. In my public comment I tell the Commission about a letter from Mayor Mahoney which suggests that either the Port staff or our staff or the Mayor are guilty of unethical conduct that should be investigated. We do not have ethics or audit committees, but the Port does. And that is where this is heading.

I hate to sound so vague, but articles like last week’s discussion of the ferry take a certain amount of time to prepare. Last year I tried to tell people “This is a news year” and they think I’m kidding.

To give you a sense of the generational decisions being made, this is comparable to about 1966:

The Marina was just getting started.
The condos were being built.
Marine View Drive was being constructed with the current strip malls.
The Second Runway was under construction.
I-5 was about to reach into Redondo.

That’s the level of generational change that is about to occur with the Marina Redevelopment, SR-509 and the upcoming SAMP.

And nobody is covering any of it critically. But our connections with the Port and WSDOT run so deep it’s ridiculous. And it’s never been to our benefit.

New Rule: Follow the rules we already have…

At our last meeting, Deputy Mayor Buxton asked to schedule an update to our Rules of Procedure. And presto, it is on the 7 July Agenda.

There have been a couple of dozen updates to our Council’s Rules of Procedure. The last was in November 2019 the meeting immediately after my election. Was I happy about it? I do not think I was. 😀

However, although I took it personally, I should not have felt ‘special’. The more I’ve looked at previous rule updates, the more I’ve noticed a theme. And over the past twenty five years the unspoken narrative seems to be:

‘The City is getting more complex, the situation is getting more dire, we’ve got a ton of stuff to get through, and we need to move things along faster.’

The net effect has been to provide less detail to the Council, give less the authority to the Council and give more to the Mayor, all things I vehemently oppose.

Council Manager Government was designed for seven equals. The ideal (swear to God) is people who are willing to utilise each person’s talents. It takes a lot to work well in this type of environment, but a lot of rules it does not need. Obviously, it takes a great deal of integrity, but it also takes something else: humility. We all get the same vote, no matter our level of expertise or experiences. We can choose to study, or not. We can choose to listen to one another, or not. No ‘rule’ can help with these things.

In this post, I’m not going to cover any rule changes. I’ve written about those elsewhere. Instead, I’m just going to review a few of our current rules to see how well we’re complying with the system as it stands.

Rule 5: Presiding Officer

“The Mayor shall preside at meetings of the Council, and be recognized as the head of the City for all ceremonial purposes. The Mayor shall have no regular administrative or executive duties.“

We could simply hire a professional meeting facilitator for a couple hundred bucks a month to run the meetings and dump all of this. That would take away all the temptation, competition and misunderstandings as to what ‘mayor’ does. It would be the single biggest improvement to our government in history. And nobody would go for it because down deep, a lot of people don’t want seven equals. They want to become “the good king.”

Rule 9: Agendas

In Des Moines, the Mayor sets the agenda. If he deletes an item, it’s supposed to be brought back at the next meeting. We have blown that off so many times, I’ve lost track. Three CMs can ask to have an item put on the agenda, but then there is the section near the end which is confusing:

Any Councilmember seeking to bring forward a new community event or project for consideration shall provide the details of the proposal to the City Clerk in written format, to include the estimated cost and staff time for the proposal.

The joke is, we need the City Manager’s permission to obtain any staff research or we need to first get another vote of the Council to authorise the research. So basically, the only ideas that move forward are ideas people already agree with.

Rule 10: Study Sessions

These were supposed to be monthly ‘informal discussions’. We have very few of these. First off, we rarely have them, second there is so little obvious regard for each other’s ideas there’s never any real ‘discussion’.

If that sounds harsh, I’ll just note that every other city at least occasionally holds another kind of meeting called a Retreat. A retreat does not have an agenda and does not conform to all the legal formalities of a ‘meeting’. It’s mostly a way for CMs to get to know one another. One would call it ‘team building’ in the corporate world. We have not held a retreat during my tenure. The seven of us have never been in a room without the City Manager and City Attorney also present. And note that we’re also the only Council in the area with no group photo on the wall.

Rule 11: City Manager

The City Manager is required to attend all City Council Meetings, which my colleagues have interpreted to mean that he can go so far as to attend his own performance review. He is supposed to keep the Council updated, but the rule has no required report or details. We are the only city I’m aware of where the City Manager chooses whether or not even to take questions.

Rule 14: Seating

The Mayor gets to choose where we sit. Seriously. We have a rule for that? Pina changed my seat three times. Just because.

Rule 17: Councilmember Interference

“Except for the purpose of inquiry, the Council and its members shall deal with the administrative branch solely through the City Manager and neither the Council nor any committee or member thereof shall give any orders to any subordinate of the City Manager, either publicly or privately; provided, however, that nothing herein shall be construed to prohibit the Council, while in open session, from fully and freely discussing with the City Manager anything pertaining to appointments and removals of City officers and employees and City affairs.”

Our City Manager interprets the rule to mean that neither he or staff are required to answer any inquiry from any Councilmember off the dais. He has gone so far as to state that the Council has no oversight role.

Rule 18: Parliamentary

Rules of order not specified by statute, ordinance, or resolution shall be governed by the most recent edition of Robert’s Rules of Order.

(a) Courtesy. Members of the Council, in the discussion, comments, or debate of any matter or issue, shall be courteous in their language and demeanor and shall not engage in derogatory remarks or insinuations in respect to any other member of the Council, or any member of the staff or the public, but shall at all times confine their remarks to those facts which are germane and relevant, as determined by the Presiding Officer, to the question or matter under discussion.

(b) Interruption. No member of the Council shall interrupt or argue with any other member while such member has the floor.

Who knew, right? 😀.

Rule 20: Order of Business

Before Public Comment, Pina started reading the following text out loud concerning public conduct and Mahoney continues to do so:

“Any person making personal, impertinent, or slanderous remarks, or who becomes boisterous, threatening, or personally abusive while addressing the Council, may be ordered to leave the meeting.”

No other city does that.

RULE 23

We have five standing committees: Economic Development. Transportation. Municipal Finance. Public Safety. Environment.

Stick with me.

The Economic Development Committee actually functions as a Planning Committee–which is zoning and land use. Other cities have a public planning commission, with… er… well… members of the public. We ended that in 2012. We have no ‘economic development’ committee per se.

The Municipal Facilities and Transportation Committees used to be combined. That is somewhat normal in other cities because the upshot is that these two functions cover capital spending (building, roads, etc.)

In practice, the MFC and EDC and TPC tend to get overlapping duplicate presentations. The MFC and EDC often have duplicate agendas concerning the Marina. And the MFC and TPC also get duplicates of anything ‘roads’.

So nothing ‘Marina’ gets studied or decided at the Committee level because there’s no single ‘authority’.

We’re also the only city with no Finance Committee–which controls the IT department (web site, meeting videos, etc.)

We should have a Marina Committee. We should have a Finance Committee. We should have a Public Planning Commission.

Rule 26: Ordinances

An ordinance is something that goes into the Municipal Code. It takes two ‘readings’ (votes) and thus two meetings. Rule 26 has a clause 26b that allows CMs to bypass the second reading and pass the thing in a single night. It was designed for emergencies.

What the City Manager almost always does is place that Motion 26b to bypass second reading on the agenda to enact the ordinance in one vote. That has become the default.

I always note no for the simple reason that most of the public only hears about issues at the first meeting. So their only practical chance to comment would be at the second meeting. There are almost no agenda items that can’t wait two weeks.

Rule 30: Advisory Boards

All statutory boards and commissions and Council citizen advisory bodies shall provide the Council with copies of minutes of all meetings. Reports to the City Council shall be made during Administration Reports as needed to keep the Council apprised of the actions of the body. Not less than one time per year, the board, commission or citizen advisory body shall have a representative provide an update to the Council of the body’s activities.

In 1996, our web site clearly showed every member of every advisory committee, the minutes of every meeting at least quarterly.

In 2022, I doubt if anyone except the Mayor now knows the names of the members of all our advisory committees. They no longer keep minutes.

And some of these ‘advisory’ committees shift from ‘private’ to ‘public’ For example, the Police Chief’s advisory committee was ‘private’. But somehow I was removed from it by the Mayor in April and now it’s listed as a ‘public’ City advisory committee with a ‘liaison’. But there is no Council resolution authorising it, no members, no minutes. We’re flexible like that.

Rule 32: Complaints directly to a CM

When administrative policy or administrative performance complaints are made directly to individual Councilmembers, the Councilmember may then refer the matter directly to the City Manager for his/her view and/or action. The individual Councilmember may request to be informed of the action or response made to the complaint

The City Manager has failed to comply with this rule so many times I’ve lost count.

Rules 35, 36: Recordings

I’ve already written about this many times. It’s reason #327 why we need a Finance Committee, to provide some oversight over IT.

7/89, 7/90, 10/90, 11/90, 8/91, 10/91, 12/91, 4/92, 2/94, 3/94, 8/94, 6/95, 9/00, 5/03, 9/03, 8/04, 4/05, 5/06, 1/11, Res. 1140 4/12, Res. 1189 2/17, Res. 1356 2/18, Res. 1379 11/19, Res. 1409

Engagement, Transparency

New rule: Follow the rules we already have

July 3, 2022December 7, 2023

1 Comment

At our last meeting, Deputy Mayor Buxton asked to schedule an update to our Rules of Procedure. And presto, it is on the 7 July Agenda.

‘The City is getting more complex, the situation is getting more dire, we’ve got a ton of stuff to get through, and we need to move things along faster.’

The net effect has been to provide less detail to the Council, give less the authority to the Council and give more to the Mayor, all things I vehemently oppose.

Rule 5: Presiding Officer

Rule 9: Agendas

Rule 10: Study Sessions

Rule 11: City Manager

Rule 14: Seating

The Mayor gets to choose where we sit. Seriously. We have a rule for that? Pina changed my seat three times. Just because.

Rule 17: Councilmember Interference

Rule 18: Parliamentary

Rules of order not specified by statute, ordinance, or resolution shall be governed by the most recent edition of Robert’s Rules of Order.

(b) Interruption. No member of the Council shall interrupt or argue with any other member while such member has the floor.

Who knew, right? 😀.

Rule 20: Order of Business

Before Public Comment, Pina started reading the following text out loud concerning public conduct and Mahoney continues to do so:

No other city does that.

RULE 23

We have five standing committees: Economic Development. Transportation. Municipal Finance. Public Safety. Environment.

Stick with me.

So nothing ‘Marina’ gets studied or decided at the Committee level because there’s no single ‘authority’.

We’re also the only city with no Finance Committee–which controls the IT department (web site, meeting videos, etc.)

We should have a Marina Committee. We should have a Finance Committee. We should have a Public Planning Commission.

Rule 26: Ordinances

What the City Manager almost always does is place that Motion 26b to bypass second reading on the agenda to enact the ordinance in one vote. That has become the default.

Rule 30: Advisory Boards

In 1996, our web site clearly showed every member of every advisory committee, the minutes of every meeting at least quarterly.

In 2022, I doubt if anyone except the Mayor now knows the names of the members of all our advisory committees. They no longer keep minutes.

Rule 32: Complaints directly to a CM

The City Manager has failed to comply with this rule so many times I’ve lost count.

Rules 35, 36: Recordings

I’ve already written about this many times. It’s reason #327 why we need a Finance Committee, to provide some oversight over IT.

7/89, 7/90, 10/90, 11/90, 8/91, 10/91, 12/91, 4/92, 2/94, 3/94, 8/94, 6/95, 9/00, 5/03, 9/03, 8/04, 4/05, 5/06, 1/11, Res. 1140 4/12, Res. 1189 2/17, Res. 1356 2/18, Res. 1379 11/19, Res. 1409

Transparency, Transportation

This is insane

17 Comments

The following is a reality check on the Ferry Pilot program the Council approved at our 23 June Meeting. Now, there is a long-winded introduction and I know some people don’t read the long-winded introductions. But it addresses the numerous complaints about the ‘arguing’ at our 9 June meeting so I hope you’ll read. If not, you can skip directly into the program.

Intro

Residents tell me all the time to “be calmer” and I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve certainly never deliberately attacked anyone. Or gotten visibly angry. I do get animated. I tell my version of ‘jokes’. I’m occasionally sarcastic as hell. But this always theatrics. It’s meant to be didactic. I’m trying to tell you, the audience, “Wake up! Pay attention to this. This is the important bit!”

Because after so many years watching our meetings I came to realise that almost no one was really listening. Most people have no idea what is really going on. So the meetings kinda drone on like the way me dad used to leave the TV running in the breakfast room. And unless there are markers to indicate “Wake up! This is important!” you’ll miss the stuff that really matters.

You can be too calm…

We started heading in the wrong direction a very long time ago. There have always been one or two councilmembers who tried to push back and reform our system. Their strategy was to always be as nice and friction-free as possible. They tried their guts out to be “cooperative”, even when there was no reciprocation. But by working so hard to be constantly “friendly”, I’m convinced that the public slept through a whole lot of bad. We’d have a meeting on some big construction project and people would not realise just how awful it was. People hate screaming. I get it. But most of us kinda need it otherwise they miss when something spectacularly wrong occurs.

One sentence…

So at this meeting, I limited any snippiness to one line, regarding the ferry. “This is insane.” And by being so gosh darned “nice” otherwise, afterwards I got several messages telling me how excited people are about the ferry and how glad they are to see the Council all on the same page!

That tells me it wasn’t just the poor audio quality that kept people from hearing. I’m sorry to say, but this is just further proof that when things are too “pleasant” people just don’t pay enough attention. Especially on issues like the ferry, which many of you want so much to believe in I need to be unambiguous.

I told you: This is insane. And here is why.

The program…

The Council voted to approve a sixty day pilot project (contract) using the sixty three passenger whale watching vessel Chilkat from Puget Sound Express.

It will initially have four sailings a day: from Wednesday through Sunday, from our guest moorage to Bell Harbor Marina.

10:00 am 11:00 am
12:00 pm 1:00 pm
2:00 pm 3:00 pm
4:00 pm 5:00 pm

₁The initial fare price will be zero. You heard it here, folks. free, Free, FREE!

You’re welcome.

Concerns…

#1 Sunk costs

I want to point out that, in addition to the $975,000 the Council gave to the City Manager to play with at our 14 April Meeting, we have already sunk at least $200,000 in other costs into (cough) ‘researching’ this thing. Including at least these:

TOTAL	$204,500
Diedrich-RPM private (cough) demand study	$35,000
Peter Philips Ferry consultant retainer ($3,000/mo) that will continue indefinitely.	$72,000
Maritime Consulting Partners a second consultant hired to find the vendor, create the start-up systems (fare box, gangway, etc.), promote the program and. furnish the final performance analysis	$7,500
Start up costs (docks, fareboxes, customer service, etc.)	$90,000

And none of that includes staff time, schmoozing, various reimbursed business lunches, etc.

and… if one actually reads the contract, take a look at page 30 where the actual commitment is not ($87,500 x 2 months.) It’s $470,000!

#2 Beta test?

The City Manager, and all my colleagues, referred to this sixty day program as a ‘beta test’. It’s only June but I can confidently announce that this will win the Inigo Montoya Award for 2022.

When software engineers build a large program, the first version that leaves the lab is an “alpha”. It (mostly) works, but the features are still being debated. It is not shown to the public because we’re not sure if the thing is even saleable. The ‘beta’ is a working version that is “feature complete.” We let a small group of ‘power users’ try it for the purpose of working out bugs, not to see if people like it and not for market testing. In fact, management discourages engineers from making changes because every time you do that, you run the risk of introducing new bugs. The nightmare scenario for a software company is a beta test where the users demand major feature changes. That scares investors. It signals that management might not have a good read on what will actually sell.

The contract requires us to pay $87,500 a month to the vendor to run this thing.

Some details on what you get for $87,500…

No Monday or Tuesday.
No commuter runs either in the morning or evening.
The ‘test’ is being run in August and September, the most likely time for people to take a fun, free ride but the worst time to determine real ongoing demand.
The City acknowledges it may run into significant challenges obtaining staff. Going so far as to consider hiring ₃high school students to crew in lieu of shortages of vendor staff.
For those of you unfamiliar with Bell Harbor Marina, it’s the home of the Port of Seattle on Bell Street and Alaskan Way. It’s an easy to walk to fun places like Pike Place. But it’s about a mile to Westlake Center. It’s about a mile to 4th Ave. It’s about a 20 minute walk to anywhere white collar people work. And it’s a serious bus ride to any blue collar jobs. Every try to get a bus off Alaskan Way to SODO? Goooooood luck. So after your leisurely whale-watching adventure (..er.. ‘commute’), an actual commuter should plan on the same amount of time for the rest of their journey. And maybe a bus fare. (True blue ferry riders might want to cut the middle man and simply apply for a job with the Port of Seattle.)
And again for the cheap seats, the contract actually specifics $470,000!

So the City Manager, and my colleagues, were already talking about more ‘beta tests’ from September on to, you know, iron out some ‘details’. 😀 And just to be clear: any changes to those variables will come with additional costs TBD.

This is no “test” in any meaningful sense of the word.

#3 Revenue Potential

Another detail, which once again makes me think no one else actually reads the packet. The contract requires us to pay $87,500 a month to the vendor to run this thing four times a day, five days a week.

Pick an eventual fare price. (It won’t be free forever, Virginia, get real. 😀 ) Let’s keep it at $11 a ride since we’re a bunch o’ swell people who don’t want to gouge the public.

Now let’s do a quick bit o’ math, shall we?

62 seats x 7 or 8 sailings a day (depending on where she spends the night) sailings a day x 21.5 days x $11 a ride is…

$117,304.

At $11 a ride and 100% capacity we would make $29,804 every month. Sounds pretty good. Now add in $46,800/month in fuel.

Whoopsies! Absolute best case scenario? We lose $16,996/month.

OK, so I leave “showing my work” on the rest of this as an exercise for the reader. For now, my guesses are these:

The break even fare for a five day, four sailing ferry is $16
The break even fare for a five day, five sailing ferry is likely closer to $20.
The break even fare for a seven day, five sailing ferry is probably $24

Which means that even if there is one hundred percent capacity at every sailing (no bad weather or mechanical or labour cancellations) the thing will still never pay for itself. It’s not that it won’t make a lot of money. It will never make any money. It will always need to be subsidised unless the fares are so high that the only commuters who will use it regularly are people who currently have enough money to pay to park downtown. Meaning almost exclusively white collar. The rest would be ‘occasionals’ people taking their gran down to Pike Place for a fun-filled day trip.

Or… and this was truly said at the meeting, “People on layover at Sea-Tac Airport would Uber over to our Marina, get on a ferry, go down to Bell Harbor and then come back to continue their journey to their final destination.”

Seriously?

#4 bait and switch

Given all the publicity from the first ‘test’ back in September, I think it’s reasonable to assume that everyone thought this ‘beta test’ might be comparable to the 178 seat Orca II, moored at Pier 57 (University–the Big Wheel.)

Stick with me here. On 14 April, the Council approved $975,000 for the City Manager to identify a vendor to do a second round of “testing.” I asked why that number and got no response. I think we all assumed that $975,000 was the cost of a boat similar to the Orca II.

He then comes back with the contract we saw for $290,000. What a bargain! But the Chilkat (capacity: 63) is one third the size of the Orca II and Bell Harbor is half a mile north.

Even more troubling for me is this. The contract is dated 25 May, which sounds reasonable. But here’s the reason it is so egregious when my colleagues do not examine the vouchers and the City obstructs me from so doing:

A quick review of the timing of the consultant fees makes it clear that the City had already identified the new vendor in February and likely settled on the new boat ($290,000) months before asking for $975,000.

What annoys me particularly is the last item. Council Meeting 04/14. We paid the consultant to do *something* related to that City Council Meeting. But I do not recall him taking questions from (wait for it) *the City Council*,

In other words, the City Manager likely knew when he came to the Council for $975,000 that he would not be using the boat from last fall or that vendor. But he did not tell the Council. In fact, they likely already knew the vendor they did want, and the boat and the cost of the sixty day ‘test’, which is $290,000.

It is common practice for the City to keep negotiations under wraps. But this is beyond the pale. The City provided no information for the Council. They asked for $975,000 up front to perform a single test, but their real intent all along seems to be to have money ‘in the bank’ to do multiple tests.

So. Not. Cool.

#5 It misspends money

When you waste a dollar, you misspend two dollars. The dollar you should not have spent; and the dollar that could have been spent well.

This project needlessly takes money away from any number of important core programs. What programs are you concerned about?

Roads?
Parks?
Public Safety?
Housing?
Human services?
Airport noise and pollution?

All of us may reasonably disagree on which of those are of highest priority. But regardless, surely we can all agree that those are the core functions of the City and that a ferry is not. Every dollar that goes into a total money loser, is millions of dollars that will not be going towards those essential functions.

#6 The first hit is free

Since day one I have been asking for something very simple: A business plan. I have received none because there is none. The only possible justification would be if the service somehow drove some other money making businesses. Again, there is none. They are all ‘TBD’ because they do not exist.

The only thing I’ve ever read or heard is this, from the Waterland Blog:

“A passenger ferry could serve two purposes:

1. Commuting to downtown Seattle (or other destinations like Tacoma).
2. Tourism attraction that could serve as an “anchor” to a revitalized Des Moines Marina.

The ferry service will also be an essential component to regional emergency plans and regional resiliency plans as it is the closest harbor to the Kent Valley, our center of warehousing and manufacturing,” a study by diedrich-rpm said. “The Kent Valley is vulnerable to flooding in an earthquake or dam breach.”

No one boat can do all those things well. And I have heard no agency mention any willingness to pay Des Moines to keep the engine running on an emergency ferry. You know, for the impending Cascadia Megaquake.

Basically, the plan is to keep (cough) spending money ‘testing’ this thing until it becomes a permanent fixture. And as any successful drug dealer will tell you, the best way to sell something like this is to give it away in the beginning.

The City Manager is simply asking the public to believe that somehow a combination of a “ferry”, a “hotel”, a “farmers market”, an “SR3” (none of them money-makers) will somehow create some “magic” that brings in “tens of thousands of tourists.”

These are words from our Mayor in supporting the City’s offer to subsidise SR3 back in 2019:

It’s great about our eco-tourism. This alone is going to bring tens of thousands of people into our town. They’re going to eat at our restaurants. They’re going to get educated about our community. It’s a complete win. And… we get to help some of our sea life in the Sound… and… uh… that’s very important as well.

I fully support SR3’s mission. But I used the word ‘subsidise’ because we give SR3 far more in grants than they will likely ever pay in rent on the Marina floor.

Mahoney knew when he said those words that the facility would draw no tourism because *SR3 cannot draw tourism. We have a long history of hucksterism like this. The City took advantage of our residents’ deep attachment to sea life to needlessly give up one of the most lucrative spots on the Marina floor.

The ferry is exactly the same thing. A ferry is one of the most romantic notions imaginable. And the City of Des Moines is going to be giving it away to make it even tougher to get people to understand what a waste of money it is. In both cases, the City is manipulating the public’s emotions to keep people from looking at the terrible financial prospects for our community.

As a business proposition the ferry makes no sense.
To call this contract a ‘beta test’ is an insult.
The project misspends hundreds of thousands of dollars that could (and should) be going to core programs; the things we actually know how to do really well. We should spend our money on those things because those are the things that serve the interests of all our residents.

As a business owner, a professional engineer, and a steward of the public trust, I resent all three with every fiber of my being.

Summary

The ‘test’ has no commuter sailings.
The ‘test’ is being run during the two worst possible months for evaluating revenue potential.
The ‘test’ doesn’t even include Monday and Tuesday.
The boat is too small to test parking issues.
There may be significant staffing challenges.
It provides no meaningful transit option except for possibly a limited number of high income office workers.
Regardless, on its own it will never make money. Ever.
And worse, the Marina writ large has no concrete business plan.
At the same time, it robs over a million dollars away from important core competencies and the more it sails, the more it robs.
The entire “test” is a bait and switch.

Best case, this will be an indulgence for a very small number of people; and it will be paid for by the rest of Des Moines. Taking money from core services in order to do something based on wishful thinking is so elitist, so wasteful and so unjust for the wider community interest I can only close as I opened.

This is insane.

₁There is nothing at all in the agreement concerning fares. On the video, the City Manager states his intent to set the initial price to zero, specifically for the purpose of attracting interest.

₂No fare price was ever seriously discussed. I picked the $11 fare price because that was a number that both Mahoney and Matthias floated during a 2019 Council study session. In fact, the optimal fare price according to the (cough) demand study was $8.

₃The City Manager states that he has already had discussions with Highline Schools COO Scott Logan about the possibility of using Maritime High School students as crew. I welcome opportunities for young people to have their first job (especially on the water.) And I do not claim to be an expert on their curriculum. However, it requires not one, but two State certs to deck hand on a State ferry. The job is public safety after all.

*SR3 originally chose to site the facility on the corner of 223rd and Sixth Ave, the location of Harper Studios. (Doreen Harper is a board member of the SR3 Foundation.) The whole idea is to keep the animals in a quiet spot isolated from the public. But since so many people are so emotionally attached to the animals, it’s simply impossible to have a “by the numbers” discussion of the wisdom of siting the facility in that specific place.

Transparency

Lights, Camera, Action!

2 Comments

Super-fans of our City Council may notice me laughing as I look down at the start of many meetings. My phone “blows up” with texts from residents complaining about the meeting video, audio, etc. As if I can do something about it. 😃 I have complained and complained and complained.

*But… I have not seen any letters to the City Council. And I’ll just tell you on this as on every topic.

Do not text me. Especially during a meeting. Seriously, dude.
Do not write the City staff. Not the Clerk, not the IT guy. Why? Because City complaints are not forwarded to the City Council.
Instead, write the City Council, which is automatically read by the City Clerk.
And when you do, please mention me. Not to feed my ego (my ego is doing just fine, thanks very much), but because, unlike my colleagues, I worked in IT for 25 years. Even if you don’t know how the correct way to fix it, I do. On many issues, there’s this ongoing back and forth where the City will say “we’re working on (x)” and my colleagues say “OK” because they know about as much about IT as I do about brain surgery. So nothing improves. For years. Your support gives me leverage in getting a better solution implemented.

If you don’t write to back me up, it’s assumed that I’m “just making shit up”

So please write citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov

The deliberator

I know the audio problems were particularly bad at last Thursday’s meeting. That may be because this was the first meeting where the deliberators were hooked up. I’ve asked the City Clerk about it because I am now blocked from even emailing the IT manager directly. I mean that literally. My emails are refused.

Closed Captions and Transcripts

But before that, one minor victory I’ve had while in office has been to encourage the IT dept to hit a button on Youtube which auto-magically creates closed captions for our meeting videos.

The last meeting was closed-captioned so you can see the transcript even for the bits you cannot hear. Hit the ‘cc’ button and re-watch. 🙂

But some are not. So I also upload every meeting to my Youtube Channel and make sure its closed-captioned just in case. That’s your backup plan. 🙂

You can have the captions move along as you watch OR you can see the entire transcript all in one go by clicking on the “…” on the line below the video with the “Like” and “Share” buttons.

The Law

Our Council’s Rules of Procedure #35 and #36 require that meetings be audio and video-recorded. However, the quality of the recording is not specified. Regular watchers may have noticed the wide range of audio and video quality both during meetings and -between- different meetings.

Eg. at this meeting both main cameras are out of focus. And the “1 shot” and “2 shot” (ie. where the camera zooms in on people as they speak) only worked for Tim George. When members of the Council are speaking it’s only the wide shot. It’s supposed to zoom on each CM as they speak.

Action Minutes

A bit more troubling for “democracy” writ large, the City shifted to “action minutes” about a decade ago. Action minutes mean that only the actions are recorded in the minutes, not what anyone said. The Minutes only tally the votes. They say nothing of the content. Which means that the video is the only detailed account of what was said.

Speaking of the content…

And it is the case that there are several meetings, as recent as 2017, where:

There is audio, but no video.
Or the audio and video are horribly out of sync.
Or some of them are these horrible postage stamp size Windows 95 things.
And of course, many of them were not closed-captioned. (Again, if you have difficulties, search for the meeting video at SeaTacNoise.Info. All those are closed-captioned.)

If a meeting falls in the woods…

Although the meetings must be recorded, there is (AFAIK) no retention requirements of any kind.

So I have no idea where many of those meetings are before 2006. I know for a fact that the City had a video system as far back as Kennedy (1990-ish), but the IT Manager (who started in 2002-ish) has no idea and because he is not required by law to care, he does not care.

SeatacNoise.Info to the rescue…

As part of SeaTacNoise.Info‘s ongoing project to document every aspect of the airport, we have tracked down many (but not all) of these older videos. So if anyone ever wants a trip down memory lane with people like Don Wasson and Terry Brazil, that’s the place to go.

(It’s slightly unnerving to think that I may be the only person left with videos of City meetings more than 15 years old.)

Why it matters…

We keep making a lot of the same mistakes over and over and I wonder how much of it comes down to the fact that nobody cares about the past. And that indicates a certain form of arrogance. What happened before is irrelevant because “this time will be different.”

Apart from that, with the end of detailed meeting minutes video is becoming the only reliable way to know “what happened.”

With video the truth at least has a fighting chance. Without it, democracy has none because then people can say whatever they want.

*26 June, 2022: Today, the City Council received its first complaint on the matter of my tenure. Congratulations!

Neighborhoods, Policy, Public Safety, Weekly Updates

Weekly Update: 06/20/2022

This Week

Monday: Delrose Manor BBQ, hosted by Stephen Dziadosz.

Thanks for the invitation to this evening’s Delrose Manor BBQ, hosted by Stephen Dziadosz.

When I arrived there were already large contingent of residents and a ton of mighty tasty looking food which I did not get a chance to eat,

Also in attendance were Mayor Mahoney and Deputy Mayor Buxton and a surprising number of very small children running around which is always nice to see.

Also on the plus side, I got to chat with several residents, which was great–but not everyone as I had to cut out to get to another thing. So if I missed anyone, please feel free to contact me any time (206) 878-0578.

Again, I want to mention how much I appreciate these events. In addition to making friends, it makes for a safer neighbourhood. It also helps keep the City’s attention on the area. All good things.

Best.

Wednesday: Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. The agency is deciding on a location for the first fixed-site air quality monitor dedicated to Sea-Tac Airport and aviation-specific emissions. I’ve written that sentence dozens of times and still it amazes me.

In the ’70’s, soon after the Clean Air Act and NEPA were passed, the public was outraged by the dramatic increase in noise and pollution. What is interesting to me is how an entire region can become acclimated to a situation.I often bore people by mentioning Clair Patterson, the chemist who first demonstrated how much lead was present everywhere. Sky. Ocean. Land. As with the noise and pollution from the airport, slowly people got so used to having lead everywhere it wasn’t possible to understand how much damage it was doing to public health. It was only after we stopped using leaded gas and paint and so on that scientists understood the hundreds of thousands of deaths and illnesses every year. People had just learned to live with it.

Thursday: Economic Development Committee Meeting (Agenda) (Video)

Masonic Home Demolition EIS Update (moved to July)
Housing Action Plan
Quarterdeck Lease Extension presentation by owner Ken Rogers. Mr. Rogers is requesting a five year extension, with a further five year option.

Thursday: Municipal Facilities Committee Meeting (Agenda) (Video)

Fieldhouse Lightpole
CIP grant opportunities

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) (see below)

How to participate in our meetings

You do not have to sign in to attend a meeting!
The sign-in sheet is only for people wishing to make a Public Comment.

There are three ways to provide Public Comment:

In person: Show up a few minutes before the meeting and sign the sheet. Public Comment is usually conducted at the beginning of the meeting.
By e-mail: All e-mails sent to citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov are considered public comment. They are instantly available to all members of the City Council and the City Clerk who includes them into the record of public comments at the next meeting.
By US Mail: Attn: City Clerk Office, 21630 11th Avenue S., Des Moines WA 98198 no later than 4:00 p.m. day of the meeting. Please provide us with your first and last name and the city in which you live.

All letters or e-mails requesting a specific action are referred by the City Clerk to the appropriate City department.

If you would like a follow up from me, personally please indicate that or call me (206) 878-0578.

Last Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda)

Wednesday: Puget Sound Regional Council Comprehensive Plan Workshop

Wednesday: Mt. Rainier High School Graduation at ShoWare Center

Thursday: King County Flood Control District

Friday: South King County Housing and Homelessness Partners (SKHHP)

City Council Meeting Preview

Last meeting featured thirteen Consent Agenda items that were not exactly ‘routine’. This one has seven significant presentations.

I once again nagged the City Manager to publish his four presentations ahead of the meeting. It drives me a bit nuts to see those things cold. We’ll see.

City Manager Report

SAMP UPDATE
SMALL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT CENTER PRESENTATION
MARINA REDEVELOPMENT UPDATE
PARKS, RECREATION & SENIOR SERVICES UPDATE

New Business

Public Hearing on Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) The TIP is something at least one person in every neighbourhood should read. It shows you a prioritised list of all our road projects along with their budget and timeline. If you’re on the Transpo Committee, you should be thinking about possibilities to move items around based on new grant opportunities or community need.

Draft Ordinance 21-064 – National Pollution Discharge Elimination
System (NPDES) Source Control Best Mamagement Practices
Passenger Ferry Pilot Test Implementation. Last month we voted to approve $975,000 for a pilot project. What came back is less than a third of that. It’s a sixty three seat whale watching boat called the Chilkat that will have four sailings a day from the Marina to Bell Harbor and back.I know you’re getting all hot and bothered. But needless to say, I have questions. Including:
- Why is there no suggested fare price in the proposal?
- How do we gauge succcess?
- From the few invoices I’ve seen, we voted on the thing on April 14 and then another paid consultant chose this vendor almost immediately. We have no idea who, if any, other options there were. And the Council has no clear idea who all the players are we’re working with.
- Seriously. how does this make money? It’s beginning to look like a $90,000 ‘marketing expense’ that we simply eat in order to be the ‘cool marina’. OK, let’s say I buy that. What does being cool do for us?

Caveat Emptor: this may or may not be the boat to be discussed. It’s the promo photo for the vessel and vendor named in the contract. Whale not included.

Pet Licensing (PRR 16116)

Year	Dog Licenses	Dog Revenue	Dog Licenses with Penalty	Cat Licenses	Cat Revenue	On-Line Licenses	On-Line License Revenue	Total Pets	Total Revenue
2017	1013	26,707	8	203	4,100			1224	31,097
2018	980	25,823	3	207	4,140			1190	30,023
2019	554	14,511	2	90	1,762			646	16,233
2020	757	19,020	2	165	3,300	49	5,940	947	28,320
2021	226	6,602	6	42	840	198	13,770	973	21,342

Roughly speaking, how much annual revenue does the City receive from pet licenses?

I asked that question from the dais months before I filed Public Records Request #16116 with the City. It was information I thought would be useful in deciding whether or not to move Animal Control Services to Burien C.A.R.E.S.

When I originally posed the question, I just assumed it was routine information the City would have at its fingertips. After all, we’ve had an on-line licensing system now for two years.

Now I have some follow-on questions:

How difficult is it to gather this kind of information?
How does our compliance track with other cities?

Dirty Laundry

I’m also posting some ‘dirty laundry’ because residents frequently tell me the issues of good government I raise can be difficult to follow. This is hopefully a more straightforward way to illustrate some of those issues.

As I said, l originally asked this question from the dais. A staff member agreed to provide the answer off-line but did not do so.
As usual, I did not get an explanation as to why it went unanswered. It was just ignored.
That’s the reason for most of my public records requests.

Background

The City does not and has not responded to virtually any of my off-line requests for information for over two years. Both the administration and the majority repeatedly blame me for this state of affairs, alleging that I overburden staff with ₁“thousands of pointless questions”; while providing no examples to back up their claims.

Fortunately, there is a fairly simple way to judge for yourself.

By our Rules of Procedure and the RCW, when a Councilmember asks a question from the dais, the administration is required to respond.

Now: nobody expects staff members to have every piece of information available at the drop of a hat. To avoid holding up meetings, electeds routinely accept their responses off-line. But the off-line response still carries the same obligation.

The City simply does not comply. And our Council refuses to enforce that requirement.

In short: the administration refuses to answer questions made by an elected official, no matter how simple, even when made from the dais, and even after they agree to do so.

So I end up making public records requests; which cost the City money.

The choice

I can certainly raise each incident of misconduct at every City Council meeting. But ironically, I pretty much never do because doing so is simply asking for a fight. So I choose to avoid conflict.

And there’s the rub:

To avoid conflict, one must simply roll over. That is the price of cordiality.

And that is the choice at every meeting:

Do not ask for even the most basic information.
Do not embarrass the administration for non-compliance.
Do not point out the Council’s ongoing role in enabling that misconduct.

That is a small portion of what it takes to avoid making the public cringe.

Public Safety, Transparency

Pet Licensing (PRR 16116)

Year	Dog Licenses	Dog Revenue	Dog Licenses with Penalty	Cat Licenses	Cat Revenue	On-Line Licenses	On-Line License Revenue	Total Pets	Total Revenue
2017	1013	26,707	8	203	4,100			1224	31,097
2018	980	25,823	3	207	4,140			1190	30,023
2019	554	14,511	2	90	1,762			646	16,233
2020	757	19,020	2	165	3,300	49	5,940	947	28,320
2021	226	6,602	6	42	840	198	13,770	973	21,342

Roughly speaking, how much annual revenue does the City receive from pet licenses?

When I originally posed the question, I just assumed it was routine information the City would have at its fingertips. After all, we’ve had an on-line licensing system now for two years.

Now I have some follow-on questions:

How difficult is it to gather this kind of information?
How does our compliance track with other cities?

Dirty Laundry

As I said, l originally asked this question from the dais. A staff member agreed to provide the answer off-line but did not do so.
As usual, I did not get an explanation as to why it went unanswered. It was just ignored.
That’s the reason for most of my public records requests.

Background

Fortunately, there is a fairly simple way to judge for yourself.

By our Rules of Procedure and the RCW, when a Councilmember asks a question from the dais, the administration is required to respond.

The City simply does not comply. And our Council refuses to enforce that requirement.

In short: the administration refuses to answer questions made by an elected official, no matter how simple, even when made from the dais, and even after they agree to do so.

So I end up making public records requests; which cost the City money.

The choice

And there’s the rub:

To avoid conflict, one must simply roll over. That is the price of cordiality.

And that is the choice at every meeting:

Do not ask for even the most basic information.
Do not embarrass the administration for non-compliance.
Do not point out the Council’s ongoing role in enabling that misconduct.

That is a small portion of what it takes to avoid making the public cringe.

Transparency

Seriously, who pulls a Voucher Report?

2 Comments

At last Thursday’s regular City Council Meeting you saw me, for the first time, get truly fed up. In the past, I’ve tried only to react only to the most severe attacks. But the events of last week caused me to do something I never expected to do. I pulled the Voucher Report from the Consent Agenda and voted against the City’s official check run–something I can’t recall ever seeing any elected do in any government setting over 600+ meetings.

Friday June 3, 2022

As happens every month, I received the Voucher Report from our Accounts Payable clerk. It’s been almost a month since our last meeting, the number of bills had piled up. So the list was over 400 items and totaled $5.7 million dollars.

Since our municipal code requires we vote to approve this list, I reviewed them. And as I occasionally do, I sent an email to the clerk asking politely to see the underlying invoices.

I was stunned to receive a reply back from the City Manager.

Councilmember Harris,

Your continued insistence on violating the law of the State of Washington is nothing less than disappointing.  I have expressed to you multiple times that your engagement with City staff can be intimidating and is essentially illegal.  I remind you of the following from the State of Washington Revised Code [RCW 35.18.110 City manager—Interference by councilmembers] that explicitly states,

“the council and its members shall deal with the administrative service solely through the manager and neither the council nor any committee or member thereof shall give orders to any  subordinate of the city manager, either publicly or privately.”

Your email below is a direct request for action by City staff and will not stand.

I wrote back:

From: JC Harris <jcharris@desmoineswa.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2022 1:17 PM
To: Michael Matthias <MMatthias@desmoineswa.gov>
Cc: Tim George <TGeorge@desmoineswa.gov>
Subject: Re: June 9th Voucher Certification & Reports

I was asking for invoice copies to support vouchers I am being asked to vote for in excess of $5.7M. Are you saying a member of the City Council is not entitled to see those invoices?

---JC

And I received back:

I will not under any conditions aid and abet you in violating the laws of the State of Washington, which govern your role as a Councilmember.  If you wish to review invoices you can request that of me directly and I will provide the opportunity for you to physically come to City Hall and review hard copies of the invoices and Bonnie will provide appropriate oversight while you review the documents.

Michael Matthias
City Manager 
City of Des Moines, WA
206.870.6554
mmatthias@desmoineswa.gov

This was entirely new. In the past, I would simply receive PDFs from the A/P Clerk. And just so you don’t think this is some unusual request, here is the justification from the State Auditor’s Office (SAO) Budgeting, Accounting and Reporting System (BARS) GAAP Manual.

Regardless, to try to judge how ‘difficult’ I was being, I went through my records and in my two and one half years on the Council I’ve asked for no more than forty invoice copies out of over ten thousand checks I’ve scrolled through.

And just to be triple sure, I contacted Municipal Resource and Services Center (MRSC) for confirmation which is listed in the footnotes. Ironically, their legal advisor recommends a conversation with the City Attorney, which I am forbidden from having–unless the City Manager approves, of course. 😀

But… what-ehveeeeer. I scheduled an appointment for noon on Thursday–the day of our City Council Meeting.

Thursday, June 9, 2022

I show up to the North Conference Room, assuming I’d get a stack of bills. Nope. Instead, I’m presented with a list of files on the big screen TV. I was told that I had to review them using the supplied keyboard. I could request copies (via Public Records Request) for later. And I had to be monitored during my stay because otherwise I might access other parts of the network.

As some of you know (including the City Manager), I have a ₂visual disability, which makes it impractical for me to use a standard computer. I have a variety of eyeglasses I use to get around. I can ‘pass’ so long as I’m prepared for each specific situation. If not, to onlookers it can appear a bit comical, but for me it can be unpleasant.

So as our City Clerk sat there checking her phone, I go back and forth, one bill at a time, clicking the mouse, then walking up to the big screen on the wall, attempting to recognise the image, walking back to the keyboard, and skipping to the next item. Hilarious.

And after half an hour struggling through what should have been a five minute task, I left. Did I have questions? Of course. But there was no opportunity to ask questions. There never is.

Awkward

I rarely speak about vouchers because according to staff, I am literally the only CM who ever requests to see any invoices. If my colleagues feel OK with approving the list with no review, that is their choice, of course. But it is unthinkable to me that any finance director would not cheerfully offer invoice copies if the final approver asked on occasion.

The City Manager said that I’d be looking at hard copies.
But like any modern business, the City scans vendor bills into their system. I caused no scanning work for staff.
I was told the PDFs could not be emailed to me because of their size. Despite the fact that I have received large batches of files via batch service (similar to Dropbox) which the City provides for public records requests or thumb drives.
And since I was told I’d be looking at hard copies, I did not bring the correct eyeglasses to accommodate my visual disability.
So the City Clerk had to sit with me while I struggled through all that because supposedly there was no way to create a protected folder to keep me from breaking into the rest of the network. Like some spy movie. Or maybe Windows 98.
Afterwards, I asked the City Clerk how long it took to prepare that folder. I was told was that doing so took the clerk between 30 and 60 minutes to prepare. And I don’t know what to do about that because my company wrote accounting software–and with every serious product we worked with it would take like five minutes. And the City just bought new accounting software this year.
But regardless, I did ask for some reasonable explanation. I wish there could be some kind of dialogue to avoid these situations.

This wasn’t the usual obstruction. It didn’t just waste my time, it wasted the valuable time of one our highest paid staff members to do so. And failing to provide a simple accommodation made me physically uncomfortable and required me to take medication to continue the rest of the day’s meetings–which I also do not appreciate.

The City Manager constantly mentions hair on fire “Councilmember Interference”. He even quotes from the RCW 35.18.110 to demonstrate how severe my infraction is.

the council and its members shall deal with the administrative service solely through the manager and neither the council nor any committee or member thereof shall give orders to any subordinate of the city manager, either publicly or privately.

Sounds pretty cut and dried right? Not exactly. He always leaves out six little words. Just six. No big deal, right? 😀 Here is how the passage actually reads:

Except for the purpose of inquiry, the council and its members shall deal with the administrative service solely through the manager and neither the council nor any committee or member thereof shall give orders to any subordinate of the city manager, either publicly or privately.

Except for the purpose of inquiry. If you’re simply asking a routine question, the statute does not require Councilmembers to deal ‘solely’ with manager. The passage also makes clear that ‘inquiry’ is not the same thing as ‘giving orders.’

In normal cities, Councilmembers email who they need to with their occasional and reasonable inquiries and cc the City Manager. And those reasonable inquiries are accommodated for cheerfully by staff who understand that a small portion of each work week should be set aside for such things–just as they are expected to respond to all manner of general inquiries from the public. If there are concerns that a CM might be asking too much, a pleasant conversation ensues and the issue is amicably resolved.

Here’s a question for freshman philosophy majors: Is every request for information an attempt to direct an employee to take a specific action? You bet it is. But it’s those six little words that make that specific action not only legal, but also a requirement.

For the past two and a half years, the City Manager has been claiming that he has the authority to interpret any legal right of inquiry as an illegal ‘order’.

The purpose of insisting on being the sole conduit for any requests for information is not merely to avoid responding to perfectly acceptable inquiries. The obvious purpose is to shield staff from even becoming aware of my questions; to take away their agency.

It is not my questions. It is not the way I ask them. It is obstruction. And the entire Council enables it.

Fixing it

I want to again point out that our City Council is 100% majoritarian. If a Councilmember has any concern as to the functioning of any aspect of the administration it takes four votes to take any action. So it is the case that, although I am required to review the bills, if the City Manager chooses not to cooperate, there is no enforcement mechanism beyond asking my colleagues to do the right thing.

The failure to provide a reasonable accommodation to any employee, let alone an elected, is another matter entirely.

And one last thing. The City has already started its annual auditing process with the SAO. We will receive their report in the autumn as part of our budgeting process and I fully expect that the report will once again be very good. The Administration uses these reports as an imprimatur of transparency and good government. But issues such as Councilmember review are never a part of their audits. State audits only make sure that money is collected and disbursed according to state law.

Everything else is left to the oversight of the City Council.

₁Unlike my colleagues, I am not allowed to speak to the City Attorney.

₂A form of Neural Binocular Diplopia. I have asked for accommodations before and been denied. But who wants to be the Councilmember who files an HR claim against his own City, right?

From: Jill Dvorkin
Sent: Tuesday, June 7, 2022 1:59 PM
To: JC Harris <jcharris@desmoineswa.gov>
Subject: Inquiry re: review of voucher report and supporting invoices

Hello JC,

Below is an inquiry and response written by my colleague Oskar Rey. Similar guidance has been provided by our finance consultants, as well.

Prior Inquiry and Response 19-0674:

Inquiry (by phone):

What is the role of the Council in reviewing City finances? Is it required to review and sign off on vouchers, or may it rely on the Finance Director to certify the accounts?

Response (by email):

MRSC has fielded a number of inquiries on this topic over the years.  There are a range of options available to Councils with respect to the amount of information they receive when approving claims and vouchers.  The thing to remember is that it is not the Council’s role to certify payroll or vouchers.  That is done by the “auditing officer” which can be a finance director or a finance committee of the Council.

Here is an inquiry I responded to in 2017 on the issue of what level of detail needs to be set forth for voucher approval in a council agenda:

The Council should approve all claims and vouchers, but there is not a state law requirement that each voucher appear in the agenda packet.  RCW 35A.12.170 provides that all demands against a code city shall be presented and audited [by the finance director or treasurer] in accordance with regulations prescribed by charter or ordinance.  RCW 42.24.080 also sets forth some overlapping provisions on presentment of claims.

Neither of these provisions explicitly require council approval vouchers and claims, but MRSC has taken the position that council approval is a best-practice and the SAO expects it. It is also implied by RCW 42.24.180 and RCW 35A.33.125. Finally, have a look at the voucher certification procedures in the BARS Manual.  Section 3.8.5.40 sets forth the minimum information required for a council to approve claim vouchers and payroll. It does not require a list of individual vouchers.

Pursuant to Des Moines Municipal Code  Section 3.28.020, the finance director is the auditing officer for purposes of compliance with RCW 42.24.080. The next code section, DMMC Section 3.28.030, describes the presentation of such warrants, checks, and payroll transfers to the council.  

₁I recommend discussing all of these issues with your City Attorney. Our guidance is general and not intended to substitute for the advice of the city’s legal counsel—who is in the best position to advise on specific questions.