JC Harris For Des Moines, Washington
City Council, Position #2
Non-partisan. Independent.
Next City Council Meeting is January 9, 2025
Working hard to support local businesses!
An advocate for airport issues!
Articles concerning the Des Moines Marina, including ongoing plans for economic development ideas like a Passenger Ferry. You can start by reading the Marina Timeline which tracks key events from 2008 on.
In 2008 the City of Des Moines hired the UW School of Architecture 'Storefront Studio' to do a 're-imagining' of Des Moines. (Actually, we did this again in 2011 witha WayFinding project.) Here is a complete copy of their great work plus some explainers on some of the key ideas and images. If you have any interest in Marina Redevelopment, this is a must-read....
In 2008 the City of Des Moines hired the UW School of Architecture (Storefront Studio) to do a ‘reimagining’ of Des Moines. Actually, we did this twice. I keep meaning to upload these images. It covered all of the downtown as well as the Marina. It had all kinds of cool ideas–including making 223rd the
The UW CEP Marina District Wayfinding Project is a wonderful bit of history I hope you'll find useful and interesting. It's from the January 12, 2012 City Council Packet which is one of the more significant Marina-related meetings in our history. The document was a senior-class project for the UW School of Community Environment Planning which goes over their design ideas for the downtown and the Marina. It's only about twenty pages and very readable. I urge you to look at it because it demonstrates some very important ideas we should be thinking about today.
A list of key events in the history of the Des Moines Marina beginning with 2007 Master Plan, which laid out the broad outlines of the current waterside and landside options. Water side topics include removing the Sling launch, passenger ferry service, dock and seawall financing. Land side topics include segmenting the floor into separate funds, public vs. commercial uses, connection with 223rd, paid parking, boat storage, retail and restaurants....
This is a shameless plug for a free program called Google Earth. People with an interest in the Marina often mention Poulsbo, Edmonds, Point Ruston, Tacoma, Kirkland, and other spots, as models we could use for our economic development. I've used all these Marinas, so I've seen them from both 'land and sea'. But I'm not sure most people have. One thing I know for sure--they're all very different from Des Moines. I tried and couldn't find a single image that adequately captures any of these places. There's simply too much 'there' there. That's why having a way to visualise places (as I've talked about with a Virtual Marina Tour here) is so valuable....
At this meeting, the council received, what I considered at the time, to be a fairly sensible plan for dock replacement. It kept the dock finances and the seawall separate and did not pretend to address big 'plans'. The City got yelled at because one method of financing depended heavily on raising moorage rates and raising fuel costs, both of which had always been below market rate. But that had always been intentional; the Marina had been intended as a public marina. What the boat owners failed to acknowledge at the time was that by now most people paying for moorage did not live in Des Moines....
There seems to be a ton of confusion about any number of aspects of the Marina proposals. This article addresses what is arguably the central bit of real estate around which everything else revolves: 223rd Street. The Big Picture The original idea for Marina Redevelopment was to have a ‘Marina Steps’ to allow pedestrians to
... continue reading.This is Page 21 from Ferry Demonstration Project Scoping and Reconnaissance Report dated 08/31/2021. To my knowledge this has not been brought to the Council or any Committee. It does not appear on the City web site until Friday, December 2, 2022.It predicts that a six month ferry program will lose between $997,000 and $1,450,000. But
... continue reading.
This was done with Google Earth Pro (GEP.) GEP is very rudimentary and I have the drawing skills of an 8-year old. But GEP does allow one to draw boxes to scale. So all the ‘buildings’ are about 35ft high (the zoned limit.) I actually started this project to see if the September 27 Skylab
... continue reading.