Some bits of business…
This is a truncated Weekly Update. Sorry. I cut out a ton of stuff which I’ll try to put into next week to summarise 2024. This year reminds me of the old joke, “I spent a year of my life one weekend in Des Moines.” This is a year that felt like ten. 😀
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
Salty’s Redondo
Many of you know that Salty’s is up for sale. I am beyond sad because, to paraphrase one of the most legendary of the Las Vegas School economists, “If I cannnn’t make it there. I can’t make it annnnywhere!” (Too soon? 😀 ) But seriously, this is a conversation we need to have: what kind of commercial venue can make it in Redondo?
Salty’s Redondo, Des Moines, WA | Retail Space for Sale
Police Weekly Snapshot
This is really interesting and there’s a lot to say about it. But not today. 🙂
The SAMP Comment Period closes
The Sustainable Airport Master Plan Draft EA Comment Period is closed. Thank you to everyone who stepped up to comment. There’s a lot more to say, but for now, I’ll share something I said to the City Manager this week to express some of my very mixed emotions as to how the City has handled the situation from 2018 to today.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
The SAMP is the generational decision for Des Moines. What I told her is that you have to do better. Which sounds harsh. But I also have to do better. And so do all my colleagues. Even if the fiendish FAA and the diabolical Port of Seattle and the dysfunctional Congress and the pain in the neck State or even our own City Council lets us down? Tough Noogies. Someone has to step up and save us from ourselves because some things are simply too important to screw around. We can’t afford to get this wrong. All things considered, she took it pretty well. Some of my colleagues on the other hand? 😀
City Manager Stuff
The City Manager Report, in PDF Format, is back and in living colour, baby!
City Manager’s Report December 13, 2024
Lots of good stuff, including a new recipe. 🙂
This Week
Airport meetings, mostly. If your idea of game night is “I’ll take Part 161 for $800, Alex!” Give me a call. (206) 878-0578.
Wednesday 5:00pm: Sea-Tac Airport Aviation Roundtable (Agenda) Zoom Registration
Last Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Agenda. Their last meeting of the year, a record year, both in terms of airport operations and revenue.
Several people showed up to comment on Item 10d, which concerned expanding the Port’s tourism program. Bless them. After years of crying into the void, people are starting to put it together: the Port spends billions goosing up demand for flights. All the new flights are not the result of ‘organic demand’. We in Des Moines do not benefit from it and in fact we suffer from it.
There was also the Commission’s approval of their end of the Des Moines Creek Basin Plan. Here are my comments on this as part of Sea-Tac Noise.Info. In fact, the Basin Plan should be a conduit to environmental improvements throughout Des Moines. Instead, it turned into a storm water processor. We can and must do better.
Item 8j Des Moines Creek Basin Plan V5 – Sea-Tac Airport Noise And Pollution
Thursday: Environment Committee (canceled) We were planning on having a planning meeting :D, but ironically, the one time we have open for it, is the time of the year people have the least amount of time to prepare. Welcome to local government. 😀 I’m hoping we can have an informal discussion sometime over the holidays and hit the ground running in January.
Wednesday: Emergency Management Action Committee (EMAC) Agenda. Last meeting of the year. We discussed something very mundane that every local government should have addressed twenty years ago: connecting the earthquake warning system known as Shake-Alert to buildings, phones and people. We could provide a twenty second warning to everyone in the event of an earthquake. But even that level of preparedness has not been undertaken. Given the recent 7.0 in Northern California (which is actually on the same plate as Puget Sound).
Here is a presentation on Shake-Alert from the same person.
As with the SAMP, someone has to step up. Some things are simply too important. For now, you should sign up for Shake-Alert right now.
Thursday: Our last City Council meeting of the year. Agenda. This one gets the Action-Packed Seal of Approval.
December 12, 2024 City Council Meeting Recap
Regular Meeting – 12 Dec 2024 – Agenda – Updated
Last meeting of the year. Several of my colleagues mentioned surprise that we got through a ginormous agenda in two and a half hours. They should not have been. In fact, it woulda been under two hours had there not been unnecessary kerfuffles. Every member of this council has already made it clear to new City Manager Caffrey that she has, essentially a blank check… er… our complete confidence. 😀
Consent Agenda
There were a bunch of items I coulda groused about. But I was going for that blank check … er… confidence! vibe.
Item 2. SENIOR ACTIVITY CENTER SOLAR POWER GRANT ACCEPTANCE
Item 3. SOUND TRANSIT CONTRACT AMENDMENT
Item 4. WATER DISTRICT 54 FRANCHISE AMENDMENT
Item 5. HEMSTAD CONSULTING CONTRACT RENEWAL (AMENDMENT 3)
Item 7. 6TH PLACE/287TH STREET PIPE REPLACEMENT PROJECT
Item 8. 2025 VEHICLE PURCHASE
Item 9. TRANSPORTATION CONSULTANT SERVICES CONTRACT
Cm Mahoney pulled the WD54 item. This was labeled as contentious by the Waterland Blog. That was not the most contentious item on the agenda by any means. (I’m gonna show you ‘contentious’ very soon in my year-end wrap up!) For now, Councilmember Grace-Matsui recused herself from the Water District Franchise Agreement, which passed 6-0. I’ve given my feelings on the item more than once.
Unfinished Business
The Warehouse Tax passed with a slightly higher rate than originally proposed. My only grouse was that it has an automatic annual rate increase which does not kill me.
The Council set aside the Mission, Vision and Values thing after I asked ChatGPT to read it and here is what it said. New Years Resolution: Propose that the City Council run every goofball idea through the AI first. 😀
We voted to renew our SAMP ILA with the Four cities. Passed 6-1. I voted no because it is the worst strategic mistake since the Council voted to spend 25 million dollars for bonds in 2023.
PUBLIC HEARING/CONTINUED PUBLIC HEARING
Item 1. 2024 ANNUAL BUDGET AMENDMENTS
Basically, we gave the rest of the ARPA money over to shore up the General Fund. Blank check… er… ‘confidence’ strikes again.
Item 2. 2025 2026 BIENNIAL BUDGET
I’ll get into what I think this all means in a bit more detail next week. But for now I again want to express my appreciation to Finance Director Jeff Friend and City Manager Caffrey for taking one for the team. As I’ve written many times, these cuts were necessary – and a whole bunch reaaaally suck. In my career, I’ve watched thousands of people get canned. Been fired a few times. Never had to lay off anyone, let alone round the holidays. And this is the ‘easy’ part.
Passed 7-0.
NEW BUSINESS
Item 1. DRAFT ORDINANCE 24-088 – SUSPENDING RESTRICTION ON USE
OF ONE-TIME REVENUE FOR 2025 AND 2026.
See essay below. This discussion was the shocker of the meeting. It made me reconsider the whole blank check… er… ‘confidence’ approach.
Item 2. DES MOINES MARINA STEPS PROJECT – BID REJECTION
We rejected the bids on the Marina Steps. I had nothing to say because DPW Slevin has promised to come back on 9 January, so why speculate.
Item 3. 2025 AND 2026 HUMAN SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
I’ve had a lot of criticisms about the Human Services Advisory Committee during my tenure. The people are fantastic. The goals even more so. But the process? Often it has fallen short. So, budgeting $150k is better than I expected and speaks well of Ms. Caffrey’s values. However, I grieve that we have never gotten to one percent of general fund. That pitiful level is not who we as a community should aspire to be. But until we get real about our finances, this is as good as it gets.
Building Just to Build
I visited the Soviet Union many times before it fell apart. They had countless jobs simply to achieve 100% employment – elevator operators and concierges in even modest apartment buildings, excess customer service staff at stores with empty shelves. They were obviously focused on activity rather than an actual economy.
Post-War America has benefited greatly from an unprecedented era of construction, including buildings, roads, and infrastructure. But just as the Soviets confused jobs with productivity, at a certain point here we began to confuse building with economic development. It’s not putting up the building that creates the sustainable revenues – it’s what will live inside it for the next fifty years.
The City of Des Moines has struggled with this concept. For example, we now have the third highest percentage of tax-exempt land in King County. At #3, the City of SeaTac is 42 percent tax-exempt, aka Sea-Tac Airport. #2 is Seattle. Neither is comparable.
The Warehouse Tax we passed at our final meeting of 2024 is great, but it should be noted that the businesses it will apply to are on tax-exempt land owned by the Port of Seattle. So even there, we’re only getting half the benefit we should be getting from commercial property.
We are outliers in any number of ways like this. You can see something of a pattern across the City, including the downtown, Redondo, and the Marina. Time and time again we’ve avoided developing a strategy to properly develop and exploit our limited resources in order to provide adequately for the future.
In 2012 the Council created an ordinance to set aside construction taxes on projects in excess of $15,000,000 – the sensible notion being that in a small town like ours such projects would be relatively rare. So, saving a sliver of that one-time money for long term community projects made sense.
Sadly, we’ve almost always had to override that to pay immediate bills. Because the reality is that, even at our best, we’ve never had the dough to do otherwise. To quote my father-in-law, “You can’t have no fiscal discipline if you ain’t got no fiscal to discipline.”
At our last meeting of the year, I intended to vote for that override ‘one last time’, in order to give the new City Manager support in a tough spot. (After all, none of this is her fault.) But when I heard the majority say they see nothing wrong with viewing this money as reliable revenue – and the City Manager seemed to agree – calling it ‘variable recurring revenue’? After that, I changed my vote not just to ‘no’, but ‘Hell No’.
For whatever reason, in the moment, the term “variable recurring revenue” struck me with the oxymoronic weight of a lead balloon crushing a jumbo shrimp. Either money is predictable (recurring/structural), or it’s not (variable/one-time).
Relying on a constant stream of construction revenue here does not match what has consistently happened here or my notion of sustainable economic development. It’s like thinking that building airplanes alone makes for a healthy aviation sector – when in fact, the broader airline industry is nine times larger. Similarly, building construction is just the foundation; it’s the businesses, residents, and activities inside that create lasting economic value.
If you continue to focus on highly variable construction money, you’ll never pursue more stable revenue sources like commercial property tax, business activity, and yes, compensation from the airport. This “if you build it, they will come” approach mirrors the Soviet mistake of confusing activity with productivity. Construction is important, but just as workers need a useful purpose, and airplanes need passengers and routes, buildings need vibrant businesses and residents inside to generate the real sustainable economic growth for cities like Des Moines.
