Weekly Update: 02/26/2023

This Week

Thursday: 5:00PM: Public Safety/Emergency Management Committee Meeting (Agenda) Highlights: Body Camera Update, Police 2023 Leadership Retreat, Police IEMC Application, King County Emergency Management

Thursday: 6:00PM: City Council Meeting (Goal Setting Retreat) The only official item is something called ‘goal setting’. Frankly, if it’s like last year’s similar Study Session. The work product from that meeting consisted of two pages (26, 27.) And if you look at those two pages, perhaps you can forgive me if I curb my enthusiasm. 😀

Last Week

Thursday: Economic Development  Meeting (Cancelled)

Thursday: Municipal Facilities Committee Meeting (Cancelled)

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Amended Agenda) You can find out how to provide public comment in the right sidebar. Some highlights include:

Olympia: I testified on behalf of myself on three bills:

• SB5199 which would provide a fund for local journalism. Still alive.
• HB1791 which is a revamp of the Second Airport discussion. And just to be clear, I don’t give a hoot about a second airport per se. But back in the 70’s, when the Sea-Tac Communities Plan was thunk up, the whole idea was that every time there was any airport expansion some money would kick back to the communities. When we do better, you do better was the argument. That never is part of any second airport discussion. And my feeling is that if by some act of God, a second airport does get funded, there should be the odd million or two in there for Des Moines. Still alive.
• HB1446 which would have clawed back one tenth of a cent of State sales tax for police officers. Yes, WASPC supported it, in fact all the testimonials but two were from police depts.  I showed up because I wanted the committee to know this is what I think the people of Des Moines want. IOW: It’s one thing for police to be showing up, but I felt strongly that the committee should understand that a lot of people want more police a lot more than they want all the other very nice things the State is pushing for. This is the largest State budget in history and if we can’t find the dough for cops now, when will we?

City Council Meeting Recap

Future Cities

I love these presentations from the Pacific Middle School Design/Engineering program. D/E Students compete in a national Future Cities competition. Every year, entrants are required to imagine a particular aspect of a city 150 years in the future. I will deeply miss Sandy Gady who pioneered the program for PMS and now it is available throughout the Highline School District.

I made a somewhat snarky comment (moi? 😀 ), which is actually kinda true: Their 3D presentation of San Francisco in 2150 was better than what we got for Marina Redevelopment Community Meeting. The thing I like so much about these presentations is that you don’t have to do “The Matrix” CGI to be informative–even some simple blocks can be extremely informative.

Public Comment

You can read the letters from our last meeting in the (Updated Agenda Packet).

City Manager’s Report

City Manager Matthias gave a teaser on the March 2nd Council Retreat. It did not exactly sound like blue skies ahead.

Consent Agenda

I pulled Item #6 on the Consent Agenda, concerning police cars. Here were my questions to the City and the City Manager’s answers…

Let me tell you one difference between myself and most of my colleagues. They also get punked just like this. But they don’t mention it. And they would probably suggest that keeping mum is a plus. I suppose the idea is to never air ‘dirty laundry’ in public. Even if I thought that was a good idea, I would suggest that it does nothing for the cultural problem. Under no circumstances should any elected official ever not get their questions answered cheerfully. Wanna know why? Because if a corporation will do it to their board? They’ll do it to their customers (aka you.) That’s as real as I can be.

What the City Manager failed to mention is that several nearby cities (and the Port of Seattle have already started investing heavily in EVs. Not just for some airy fairy reason like “saving the planet!”, but because they can save money. There is a lot more to developing an EV fleet than buying a dozen cars and chargers. We should not be the last kids of the block to gain practical experience.

Old Business Communication Consultant

Apparently, we’re to vote on a ‘Communications Consultant’ for $6,000/month. At that last ‘goal setting retreat’ on April 7, 2022, I made a proposal for:

• A better web site with a properly functioning calendar, notifications, search, marketing and SEO.
• Mobile apps for things like public safety, emergency notification, customer service, permits, bill pay, surveys, and events.
• A digital marketing strategy for local businesses

Instead, the City Manager whipped out a pre-made proposal to hire a ‘communications consultant’, which I did not ask for and which I do not want.

To support his plan, he did one of his history lessons.

Well, here’s the presentation he referred to from our June 1, 2017 Study Session.

It’s like Deja Vu All Over Again

We’ve had the same ‘communications’ problems for years. And that is because the Council does not agree on what the public has been clearly telling them for over a decade. We’ve tried, on multiple occasions, to pay people to tell us the same things. And hiring yet another communications consultant to interview each of us for an hour will not change that. All it will do is:

• Waste another $72,000
• Allow the City to claim that it worked the problem
• Possibly develop more effective messaging to push back against moi., which Mayor Mahoney has said many times, including during this discussion, was a big part of the plan.

Currently the City is paying for a City Currents Magazine which is expensive, outdated and is not disabilities-friendly. We also pay for a coaching professional used by senior staff (and some of my colleagues). We should take those monies and hire someone to run a proper digital strategy.

The debate was excruciating and I was disappointed that both CM Steinmetz and CM Achziger thought they could somehow fix a terrible idea, rather than simply voting ‘no’.

Who we actually hired

Actually, there was probably another strategic aspect going on. Please look at the Consor Engineering web site. Does this look like a company with a core focus on ‘communications’? Of course not.  They’re civil engineers.

The person signing the contract is Chris Hoffmann. Very nice guy. He was the former communications liaison with WSDOT who gave me a virtual tour of the upcoming SR509 Phase II–which the City claimed was somehow ‘violating’ the law. But the fact that we just happened to choose a company we’d already been working with for a long time and which does not have digital communications as their core focus is in no way surprising to me.

I could be wrong, but Consor looks like just the kind of company you’d hire to sell the wonders of an Urban Creek system, something else I do not believe the public wants, but which we have already spent $309,000 on.

This is not a one-off. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, this is yet another beginning of a beautiful friendship, Louis.

The Hard Fork

Last week I wrote I wrote one of those ‘expansive’ articles last week called the Hard Fork, which people find irritating because they wish I would simply “get to the point”. The point is this: Microsoft was only able to grow 10x when they stopped being in total denial.

The public uses various words like ‘communication’ to express a variety of unmet needs, but I do not believe they want any of what the City is proposing. And when we are not giving the public what they want, we should vote ‘no’ rather than wasting $72,000. That’s real money that could help real people. And if we can’t do something useful with it today, the least we can do would be to save it for when we can. Instead, we shrugged off yet another bad decision in order to say, “we did something.” We sure did. We hired another firm to help sell something even worse down the road.

The Hard Fork Des Moines is to stop making the same mistakes over and over and over.

New Items for Consideration

I brought back one of those trivial items that should be easy to do. Two years ago I proposed the original LGBTQ Proclamation that one public commenter spoke about. Last year, I noticed that the flag pole at City Hall is obscured by trees as soon as Spring comes. I proposed moving the flag pole to the median immediately south, which is empty and unobstructed, and landscaping it appropriately as an area for ceremonies. City Clerk Wilkins helpfully suggested that the City would be trimming trees in the area and that might be a zero dollar solution. That was all the excuse my colleagues needed to vote ‘no’. And the tree trimming did not occur.

Now: normally, I love zero dollar solutions. But (this is a theme today) that was not what I asked for.  And I don’t make these requests lightly because even moving a flag pole does cost real money.

But this kind of detail bugs me because I really do care about presentation; a lot.

• When we do an Anti-Semitism Proclamation, we should pronounce ¹Bet Chaverim properly.
• And when we have an LGBTQ flag? We should want everyone from the Webb Telescope on down to see it waving proudly.

It isn’t the proclamation that matters. It’s how sincere we are in calling the City’s attention to the event and the issue. You can have all the proclamations you want, but if we can’t pronounce names and places correctly; when we don’t place flags prominently, it says a message as to what we really value.

Executive Session

Labour negotations, so mum’s the woyd, pal. But you can usually get a sense of good news vs. bad news by the length of an ES. This one took fifteen minutes. My censure in January took an hour. 😀

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¹For the goyim out there in TV land 😀 , it’s pronounced bayht hah-veh-reem. It means “house of friends” and is a fairly common name for Jewish congregations. Here is a very nice version of a popular folk song. “Goodbye Friends”.