Weekly Update: 02/12/2023

This is an article about equity. It may seem like just another post about the Marina, but I promise we’ll get there at about the 2/3rds mark. And regardless of how the word ‘equity’ makes you feel, the word taxes are in here a good deal as well. So, I think it’s fair to say that this is a discussion everyone will get something out of. At bottom, this is about spending the biggest chunks of money in our City’s history in a way that is fair for the entire community.

I was a guest at the last Des Moines Marina Association Meeting. They discussed how they might make more of the public aware of the importance of replacing the docks.

After the meeting I spoke briefly with one member, and he used an expression my father-in-law was always fond of:

“Don’t buy a house if you can’t afford to fix the roof.”

My kinda guy. 😀

Fifty years ago, the of Des Moines built our Marina to provide recreational boating and fishing, which were very popular, everyman hobbies. And to pay for it, we set up an Enterprise Fund–a business inside a government; like the U.S. Post Office. An Enterprise Fund is supposed to be self-contained; to live and die on its own finances.

A lot has changed. Most people who visit the Marina now never set foot inside the docks. And unfortunately, we stopped treating the Marina like a self-contained business a very long time ago.

So the DMMA is quite right to be concerned about those docks and you should be too. Because the fact is, the City now needs $50 million dollars to replace all the worn out docks. Plus tens of millions more for worn out seawalls. (That $12MM North bulkhead? Yeah that’s just one portion; there’s actually far more left to do.)

What the DMMA gets, that I don’t think most of you do yet, is that the entire City is now on the hook to pay for those docks–not just the boaters.

When the State of Washington graciously leased us the shoreline to open the Marina in 1970 they provided no off switch. Someone has to pay to keep it in good repair. Forever. Whether you run the business properly or not. And whether you keep offering boating services or not. And since we have to keep it going, we may as well do it in the most financially responsible way possible.

We’ve been talking about this little problem for a very long time. I said the current cost is $50MM? Well, it was basically half that fifteen years ago–when interest rates were also less than half what they are now. Every year we wait, the costs go up, Up, UP!

But if you’ve been watching our City Council, you’ll notice that the majority of our Marina Redevelopment talks are about a hotel and Steps and ferries and everything except financing the docks. The one thing we have to do.

In a very real sense, the docks are the Des Moines equivalent of the Federal Deficit. As I said, over the past 15-20 years previous Councils considered plans to finance everything, but always kicked the can down the road. Mostly because they could. Why? Well given the choice, most of us prefer spending money on immediate needs–especially when it’s not our money.

What’s that old joke, “In government, an accident is when a politician speaks the truth.”? 😀 I heard a former mayor one day getting frustrated addressing a crowd complaining about the Marina and he blurted out, “What are you all worried about? None of us are going to be here in ten years!” Which is mostly true. For various reasons, today, people tend to reside in DM less than ten years.

But putting this off didn’t make it go away. Inflation just kept making it more expensive for each new generation. And now you have the joy of paying for the sins of the fathers, so to speak. Because time’s up. We barely got the North Bulkhead done before it collapsed. The boat hoist was shut down last year. Tick. Tock.

Regardless of what part of Des Moines you live in; whether you use the Marina all the time or whether you never visit the marina, sooner or later you will be paying for it. And sooner is a lot cheaper.

We have to start explaining this the same way we teach financial literacy to our kids: paying off a big credit card at 10% is just like investing in a stock that provides a 10% return. Because that’s what this is. Start paying now, and we’ll have a lot more money later.

Now if things are as dire as all that, how is it that we paid for that North Bulkhead? Well, we got four million dollars from the State which was nice. And we also got seven million for the Redondo Fishing Pier.

That sounds very smart, right? Using other people’s money. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful, one might calls that going to the State for repairs to the roof. It’s money we’ll never get to grow the rest of the City.

Every dollar you get from the State to fix something broken is money you can’t ask for something new. A new ¹park of any kind. A major downtown redevelopment program. If you wanted to buy the Masonic Home? The price tag was $11.5 million–basically the sum of all that repair money for the Marina and Redondo.

We keep using all those State gifts for repairs. And not just for repairs, but for repairs to a very small area near the water. We spend so much time and energy repairing this one small area that sometimes I feel like we don’t know that the rest of the City exists.

My primary interest in the Marina was never about boaters or condo owners or any of the current or planned activities on the land side. Actually, my primary interest has always been equity.

When people talk about equity, it sometimes has this vibe of lofty proclamations. You know what I mean. Speeches about Martin Luther King, Jr. and all that. But another of my father-in-law’s quotes is:

“People love to hand out proclamations. I’d rather have the money. Money is the real equity.”

The docks/seawall are the ceiling on equity for all of Des Moines. It’s the limit on what we can do to grow and service the entire city.

Delaying dock replacement adds costs for everyone. And using money that could get those projects done faster for anything else only makes it more unfair.

The most equitable thing we can do for our entire community is get those repairs financed and out of the way ASAP. Stop obsessing on other Marina projects that don’t make money until we get that sorted out. It’s like buying a new car and then putting your roof repair on the credit card.

And my advice to anyone else who will listen is that the discussions about the Marina are not about the water side or the land side. They’re really about values.

Will we do what is most equitable for the entire community or not?

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¹To make this concrete, today I visited the Burien Dog Park off of 160th. They have a great number of mini-parks like that sprinkled throughout their city.  Des Moines has concentrated our park space in existing areas and done almost nothing to expand availability (ie. parks within 1/4 mile) over the past two decades. And this disparity is in some of the most diverse areas–with many families and young children.