Some bits of business…
This is a very long Weekly Update. Sorry. In fact, it is waaaaay too short. I cut out a ton of stuff which I’ll put into next week in order to try to summarise 2024. It’s not just because it’s the end of the year, it’s also because this year end is so action packed.
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.
The SAMP Comment Helper
Our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info have created a presentation Commenting on the SAMP. I did not write most of it, which is good because it’s a lot better than what I woulda come up with. 😀 Attend the City open house, for sure, but read this before you write your comments to the FAA. The thing we try to get right at STNI is this: positive change is within reach, but only if we talk about things which are possible. These issues are so complex, and we’ve gotten nothing for so long, it’s easy to use the SAMP as primal scream therapy rather than to accomplish anything useful. 2025 doesn’t have to be the worst of times. It can be the best of times. Airport-wise, at least.
Lady Throckmotron Contest Winner!
OK, I got two correct entries. So, there are two gift certificates on the way, one for Marina Mercantile and the other for Tuscany Des Moines Creek. Oh, now you regret not putting in a little more effort? I try to tell you: the prizes are good!
I asked you to look at the 11/17 Weekly Update (paying particular attention to the Council Meeting Highlights) and watch the meeting. And then pick out at least one error/mistake/difference. Without going into ‘naming and shaming’, what both people saw was that the first page of the Agenda did not match the items actually discussed at the meeting. For example, one item concerned a contract the Council had already voted on a month before.
Congratulations, State Senator Orwall!
King County Democrats have chosen Tina Orwall to take over as our State Senator in the 33rd District from retiring Karen Keiser. Her slot as State Representative will be taken by SeaTac resident 1Edwin Obras. Congratulations to both.
City Manager Stuff
For some reason the City has reverted to not providing her report in a PDF format. So, I am again providing a replica: City Manager’s Report 12/06/2024. Lots of good stuff.
I’ll just plug one more holiday thingee…
Monday 5:30pm – 7:00pm 
Santa Parade and Canned Goods Drive will be in Marine Hills. No, technically not Des Moines, but this is a short drive for people in the south end and if you have kids, you really need to do this.
Be sure to follow the Santa Tracker! which usually doesn’t go live until just before they hit the road.
This Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Agenda. Their last meeting of the year, a record year, both in terms of airport operations and revenue.
This bears repeating over and over and over. The SAMP is over 800%, eight times, more expensive than the Third Runway. And yet, the Port of Seattle is rolling in money, an accomplishment that goes unappreciated. When the Third Runway opened in 2008 it was 400% over budget, scandal-ridden, and almost ruinous. Adding insult to injury, at the time they were also being eclipsed by the Port of Tacoma. (Container ships found it more profitable to sail half a day past Seattle.) So at the beginning of the Great Recession, they were on at least the same shaky ground as the City of Des Moines.
Sixteen years on, Des Moines is once again in another financial pickle. Whilst the Port of Seattle has transformed itself into the economic engine they always advertised themselves to be. Except that now it’s for realz. With a five year outlook that is going nowhere but up.
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’re gonna discuss dealing with an earthquake. Given the recent 7.0 in Northern California (which is actually on the same plate as Puget Sound), this is not an entirely unrealistic exercise.
Thursday: Our last City Council meeting of the year. Agenda. This one gets the Action-Packed Seal Of Approval. So many items it gets its own section!
Consent Agenda
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 6. INTERLOCAL AGREEMENT FOR COORDINATED SAMP REVIEW
Item 7. 6TH PLACE/287TH STREET PIPE REPLACEMENT PROJECT
Item 8. 2025 VEHICLE PURCHASE
Item 9. TRANSPORTATION CONSULTANT SERVICES CONTRACT
Item 6–the SAMP contract is a hard mistake. The deeply frustrating thing is that both City Manager Caffrey and I have worked very hard to try to get up to speed on airport issues and I appreciate her effort. But she insists this is a trivial item and I know it’s not.
Unfinished Business
Item 1. SQUARE FOOTAGE TAX SECOND READING. This will bring in an estimated $700,000 a year in new structural. You’re welcome. 🙂 My only other comment is this: I’d been trying to get the City to consider this since 2020. As painful as our next budget is, it was not even under consideration until this year, and as with so many other revenue items we could have been pursuing all along, one should stop to wonder where we’d be without it.
Item 2. CITY OF DES MOINES’ MISSION, VISION & VALUES. Here they are. Remember, we spent four hours (the longest City Council meeting of my tenure) and at least $5,000 to produce the following…
PUBLIC HEARING/CONTINUED PUBLIC HEARING
Item 1. 2024 ANNUAL BUDGET AMENDMENTS
Item 2. 2025 2026 BIENNIAL BUDGET
As I wrote above, I was asked not to show ’em to ya. But if you refer back to the updated Study Session Packet
12/10/2024 update: Here is the final budget we will be voting on:
NEW BUSINESS
Item 1. DRAFT ORDINANCE 24-088 – SUSPENDING RESTRICTION ON USE
OF ONE-TIME REVENUE FOR 2025 AND 2026
Shocker: We’re again using one-time money to plug budget holes. So whatever you hear about not using one-time money and ‘sustainability’? Yeah, take it with a pinch of salt.
Item 2. DES MOINES MARINA STEPS PROJECT – BID REJECTION
Shocker: We maxed our our credit card in the highest inflationary cycle in 30 years and now come to find we don’t have the money to do the project. I begged my colleagues to break the project into smaller pieces. But nooooooooooooooo.
Item 3. 2025 AND 2026 HUMAN SERVICES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Shocker: From a certain perspective this is actually good news. At $145,000 this is still higher than we ever got to outside of one-time ARPA money. I know it was $250,000. But recognise it took a freakin’ PANDEMIC grant, money that (DV) will hopefully never come again to get there. The real issue is why even 1% of budget for Human Services has never been a realistic goal.
Last Week
Monday December 2 Port of Seattle Commission planning meeting. To their credit, they do it right: Instead of paying a ‘facilitator’, they book lunch at a very nice Indian restaurant. Even if I learn nothing, any excuse for a tax deductible samosa works for me. 🙂
Tuesday December 3 6:00pm SAMP Community Meeting. Sustainable Airport Master Plan Public Meeting – City of Des Moines, WA You might think I’d have some comments and provide links to the City’s presentation. And… you’d be wrong. This is not ‘reverse psychology’. I really do not encourage you to watch the presentation because it was so… er… not great. Not. Kidding. The only plus is that it got a hundred more people into the game. But at the cost of giving that some really not great information. It’s the reason I’m pulling Item 6. on consent. We’re committing to another four years of this and I cannot tell you how strenuously I object.
Wednesday: Budget briefing with City Manager. We received a copy of the final budget. But were asked not to make it public in order to give the City Manager time to break the bad news on various cuts.
Thursday 5:00pm Finance Committee – 05 Dec 2024 – Agenda – Pdf
A lot of the meeting was replicated at the big show, so I’ll save that for the Council Meeting Recap. But of note: to his credit committee chair Mahoney, suggested we put together some ideas for a tentative work plan before the January meeting and as with the Environment Committee above, I agree.
Since it’s the last meeting of the year, my summary of the first year of our Finance Committee? There have been some pluses–most notably the Warehouse Tax.
We also proposed and moved the City to biennial budgeting, which sounds like less oversight, but which should actually free up the Finance Director’s time for other things.
We also proposed the ill-fated tax levy. I voted for it. And then spent the rest of the year trying to kill it. Yeah for me. 🙂 It’s nothing to be happy about. We really do need the money and unless you’re totally bloodless this will hurt. But I felt then, and feel now, that the City simply would not have made progress on any number of necessary reforms had we simply given it another $3M.
But there is only so far this committee can go given the obvious differences of opinion. If we cannot agree on how we got here, how can we hope to agree on where to go forward?
However, to end on a positive note, the Finance Committee is another one of those things we used to have, then got rid of. At least this is one thing we brought back. How grateful should one be for restoring a portion of normality I leave to the reader.
What do I not like?
- The constant focus on month to month. We have to stop thinking like that. At the risk of sounding insensitive, that’s the Finance Director’s stress. Our job is policy, not the day to day (or even month to month), particularly how to avoid the need for him to be monitoring so closely.
- The incessant focus on ‘general fund’. In addition to the warehouse tax, I’ve also made proposals to increase revenue in other funds. But because they’re not to do with ‘general fund’, it’s as though those monies aren’t as important.
- Having more money in the Marina Fund counts. It means you don’t have to borrow to finance dock replacement.
- Having more money one can use for roads, crosswalks, sidewalks, curbs (none of which are ‘general fund’ sounds pretty useful to moi.
‘General Fund’ has become synonymous with ‘financial health’. Which is like using your checking balance as a proxy for your entire financial health and ignoring other aspects of your life. It’s just another version of short term thinking.
December 5, 2024 Council Meeting Recap
Study Session – 05 Dec 2024 – Agenda – Updated
Public Comment
There was one public comment from the president of the Rotary Club. For years, the City has offered a number of ad hoc discounts to a few beloved charities like Rotary. But the deal is: if you’re giving people ad hoc discounts every year, they stop being ‘discounts’; they come to be unaccounted for expenses. I support shifting to a grant-based model–as we do with Human Services. Allocate a fixed amount every year and let organisations apply for those funds so we can maintain a proper budget.
Legislative Agenda
We approved several recurring items. I’ll just point out some things I found notable:
- The City always votes to ask the State to lift the 1% Property Tax Cap. I do not support this. Again, not because I’m ‘anti-tax’. It’s just that the voters of WA have said ‘Hell, No!’ so many times that, at some point, we need to accept it rather than trying to defy that collective will.
- We support the State allowing us to apply a teeny-tiny sales tax add-on for public safety. The first question every City gets asked is “Have you gone to your voters first, before asking the State?” Well, this year we did. So I would be OK with this.
- We’re asking for $2M to replace the the Redondo Fishing Pier. We were told that the odds of success were low. Despite the popularity of the pier , instead, I supported asking the State for $1.3M to replace the boat launch at the Marina. Because a dry stack system would bring in $250,000 a year. Something we’ve been trying to get to since at least 1999!
- My colleagues supported three modifications to the section on Airport Impacts (for which I am very grateful):
- Air Quality Monitor in Des Moines
- Study. The SAMP Draft EA provides for exactly zero mitigation for any of the impacts of airport expansion. We can appeal. But to do so effectively, every aspect of the document will need to be scrutinised by independent subject matter experts. That takes money. Since the State is one of the primary beneficiaries of airport revenues, it is only fair that they provide us with the data we will need to obtain a reasonable outcome.
- RCW 53. Under State law, the Port of Seattle is legally allowed to provide airport mitigation in only two ways: property buyouts and sound insulation. The Port of Seattle will make record profit this year. And every year from now on. We must find ways to make it possible for them to spend their own money for other aviation impacts.
Budget Presentation
The full Council got a budget presentation which is radically different from the First Reading we got before Ms. Caffrey took over. This will likely sound harsher than I intend but there’s so much it’s gotta be a Lightning Round until we pass the thing (with all the gory details) next week.
- The presentation in the packet (start on pg 45) is a step up from anything we’ve seen to date in terms of clarity. Well done. For now, it (mostly) gets past the foolishness of trying to sell the tax levy and provides some very clear action items.
- Ms. Caffrey proposed a number of painful, but conventional cuts. They are things that probably any competent manager would do. That’s actually a relief because again ‘conventional’ does not mean easy.
- She also took pains to point out that this is not ‘sustainable’. Good. I’m not sure who was listening because what we tend to do is endure these acute episodes and think this is ‘the cure’. It’s not. It’s the surgery. Unless we act differently from this point forward we’ll be right back here in two years. And the next two are going to be no day at the beach. As I said: If I never hear the word ‘sustainable’ again it’ll be too soon. Between the SAMP and our cyclic budget woes, the word no longer has any reality for me. And a bit more humility would not go amiss.
- My only quibble with her comments is that she made a point of emphasising that there will be unmet service-level expectations. Which I found a bit odd since there currently are no expectations. 😀 It’s not really a joke. Residents really have no idea what constitutes acceptable response times. In fact, they often tell me they worry that they might be complaining too much! All I think people want is some specific service-level expectations. If we need 48 hours (or 48 days) to do something? Fine. Just put them on the web site and the residents will step up. 🙂
- She promised to do something about the web site in 2025. Great.
- She promised to do something about the budget book next year. Great.
- She chose to retain the City Currents, perhaps with more ad support, and cut the summer Beautification program? Not great.
- She set aside some money for economic development. My colleagues talked about the absolute necessity of ‘economic development’. But I have no idea what that means.
- I asked why we have not done the groundwork to have three new speed cameras installed throughout Des Moines. This got some pushback that more speed cameras are not possible. Even though it says so right here: HB2384-S.PL
De-Compression
I’ll try to fill in the gaps next week. But for now, I’ll close by mentioning one of my true beefs. Calendars and Compression. Every year is the same: the meetings at the beginning of the year are a flurry of activity, followed by a bunch of empty in the middle, which accelerate to a smash, hit finish at end of year.
The number of ‘things’ in these last two meetings is truly overwhelming, but even without a new City Manager and the SAMP and all the ‘budget’ stuff it would still be nuts.
Other cities (and the Port) do a much better job of load-balancing. They are intentional about spreading various decision processes over the course of the year. The Port uses its planning meetings, not just for the great food, but to address that sort of thing. City councils like Burien have a calendar check-in about once a month. SeaTac begins budget meetings in April. There are many ways to address this, but you get the idea.
Load balancing not only provides more time for each item, it also minimises blindsiding–the chronic practice of staff presenting items for Council votes (almost always on the Consent Agenda) which have to be made that night. Or else! The go to move is for the City to do a presentation explaining how routine the item is, rather than… wait for it… simply scheduling the item for a normal discussion.
I’ve lost track of the number of times, the Council has been told that if we don’t vote to approve (x), grant (y) won’t happen, or penalty (z) will ensue.
That’s a big part of the reason I mention the Futures report every week. And scream about the absolute necessity for a Calendar. It’s not just for the public to know what’s going on. It’s to help us.
The obvious reason it never happens, as with so many other things, is that in recent years the Council gave so much authority to the City Manager. If you have absolute trust in management, then why not put as many things on consent as possible?
I’ll close with that SAMP Consultant Item 6. It’s not just that it was a terrible agreement back in 2018, it’s that we’ve had two years to address the issue. And because we put it off, we now are told that we can’t pay the people we hired for work they’ve already done without renewing it. Which now makes continuing down the wrong road almost inevitable. Fighting airport expansion was always going to be hard. But it shouldn’t be this hard.
So many of the challenges our Council faces often come down to something as simple as scheduling.
1Mea Culpa! The original version of this article incorrectly said that the spot had been given to Burien resident and party vice-chair Sam Sam Méndez. I regret the error! In my defense, he was the top ranked of the three finalists and had the support of Rep… er… Senator Orwall. However, the final choice is up to the King County Council and apparently they had other ideas!
