Weekly Update: 04/30/2023

This Week

Thursday: Public Safety Emergency Committee ( Agenda). Topics to include: Animal Control Update, Camping Ordinance Update, Flock Camera Update, EOC Staff Training Update

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) Details are below.

Last Week

In the interim between the last Weekly Update and now, I (finally) received a copy of the December 8, 2022 video which was the entire ‘evidence’ of the censure complaint. The rest of it was/and is a complete fabrication. Here is a link and far from running away from it, I urge you to watch, read carefully, and judge for yourself–bearing in mind that no one (including moi) saw it before the censure vote.

 

Wednesday: I hung out, at the… er… Quiet Skies Puget Sound hang out. The title of the meeting said the topic would be Why local elections matter on airport issues, which I took to mean Des Moines, but Port Commissioner Fred Felleman showed up to do a re-election campaign stop. Which is another kind of local politics, I guess. 😀

What is concerning to me, is that presenters opened up the floor to questions and… <crickets>. And that is the problem. People have no questions–and you really should.

In speaking with all the Commissioners, they constantly remind me how little any of the public now shows real concern about airport issues–even though the Port Commissioners do understand the damage the airport has done to the area. So, as electeds are in something of a quandary. Stick with me here for a second.

Post Third Runway, both the Port staff and local cities (especially in Des Moines) did a remarkable job of cultivating relationships and convincing one another to adopt a partnership approach. The Highline Forum, a quarterly gathering of electeds (credited to our former Mayor Bob Sheckler), was meant to do that. It has never been about discussing problems or negotiating over mitigations or anything else that might continue the ‘conflict’. The whole point was to focus on what everyone agrees on (ie. economic development.) The culmination of this approach was the Port hiring our former Mayor as their relations manager to the airport communities.

This approach has been so ‘successful’ that someone like Commissioner Felleman can now walk into a QSPS tent meeting and the ‘opposition’ is basically a group of seniors drinking Chardonnay, rather than hundreds of people with families truly concerned about their health. That’s no disrespect to attendees. It’s simply a fact: Port Comms these days have literally nothing to fear from even a tent full of people gathered to talk about ‘noise and pollution’.

So when I talk with Port Commissioners, we may actually agree on the merits. But…

Fred Felleman is now the ‘old guy’ (his words) on the Commission. And he only joined in on the fun in 2015. Commissioner Felleman has a sincere interest in water quality, but none of the Port are conversant in aviation issues and none have any memory of the effects the airport has had on the community. It cannot be over-stated how complex the Port’s businesses are or how little time the Port Comms have to spend learning about airport issues. So every four years, there are one or two new electeds who have less and less understanding of the situation and thus less and less interest in the issues.

So for them, they have to listen to the currently elected voice of their communities. Our City will, with a straight face, travel to D.C. and say that the Port and all the cities are ‘doing everything possible to reduce noise and pollution’. Which the Port Commissioners know as well as anyone is completely ridiculous.

But there’s the rub. How do you get an increasingly distant Port to take actions in favour of the public interest when so few people are actually willing to demand it?

Thursday: I attended a Boston/Logan Airport FAA public webinar on how their airport works. Here is a video of that presentation. You can consider this two hours of yer life you’ll never get back or you can consider this to be better public engagement. It’s basically every common question everyone at Sea-Tac has or will have. Curfews, Noise, Pollution, Complaints, etc.
You probably will not like the answers, but they’re straightforward, easy to understand explanations and the fact that they are willing to have this kind of engagement puts them ahead of Sea-Tac. That’s how low the bar is atm.

Friday: I attended a Des Moines Historical Society meeting. It’s great to see the group re-convening post-COVID. I was there trying to help re-connect them with the Hillgrove Cemetery (another connection with Commissioner Felleman who helped get the cemetery rejuvenated–it seems to be all Fred, all the time this week. For those of you who are unaware, Hillgrove is located on 200th and 18th Ave. It is the final resting place for many of the 1850’s settlers of Des Moines. A visit offers a fascinating entry-way into the history of what is now the town of Des Moines.) If you’d like to volunteer and otherwise get involved? DMHS.ORG

Friday: I also hung out with local artist/legend George C. Scott. This was not the Saturday Open-House he offered, which I hear it was well-attended. It was, you know, just hanging out. 😀 Anyhoo, I’m super-pleased to see this “coming out” 😀 It’s always a tricky thing. You want to allow artists their privacy, but you also want to make more people aware that they’re here in order to build a thriving arts community.

Mr. Scott is the creator of a lot of the coolest public art in Des Moines, usually involving glass and light, including big things like the Octopus and the Rocket Ship at the south end of the Marina and smaller things like the compass rose at the Marina near the guest moorage (look down.) Both of those bigguns started with found objects that he added glass wonderfulness to.

Speaking (again) of the Port. I’ve had multiple Port Comms mention his work, without knowing who he is. The Port spends much money on public art (go check out the new International Arrivals Facility) and George is the kind of artist that should be getting money for projects here.

May 4, 2023 City Council Meeting Preview

Consent Agenda

Ferry

We’re bringing back the ‘Ferry Pilot’ for a second year, which is now being re-branded as a ‘water taxi’. Its basically the same boat. Here’s the good news:

• It will start somewhere in mid-May (probably May 23?) and run four months until mid-September.
• It expand service to cover morning and evenings.
• It will also dock at a more common sense location: Pier 50, which is where the real King County Water Taxi docks.

However, the packet language no longer mentions the program being conditional. Rather it talks about commuter demand to be the only thing left in question. But we already know the answer to that, since as I’ve posted many times, King County did a thorough study in 2015 and, spoiler alert: there’s no way a 65 passenger boat meets any commuter needs.

And as with last year, the numbers do not include fuel, moorage or marketing. So, using last year’s contract as a baseline here is a more realistic budget.

When I say ‘realistic’ not only does it include all those very real costs, it is also in line with the expectations from King County and the PSRC, ie. it’s the reason they have never supported a ferry here. It simply does not pencil out. If the discussion is about commuters, instead, they have always encouraged us to focus our efforts on Light Rail–that’s the reason the County was willing to fund the 635 Shuttle Bus–to get people to Angle Lake Station.

And if one is interested in tourism, I’m all for it, but the final report from the 2022 pilot program, which was about tourism, showed that over 2/3rds of the riders originated here, ie. they were people looking for a cheap way to spend a nice time in Seattle. They weren’t Seattle-ites coming here to spend money.

The fact is, it takes about $24/PAX to break even on any ferry system in the 4-D Time/Space Continuum we all currently inhabit.

I’m reminded of the Seattle Street Car, a quaint and absolutely lovely water-front gizmo that is also a total money loser and had been fought over for decades until Seattle struck it rich in the dot com era. But now the City of Seattle has a budget nearing seven billion dollars (that’s with a ‘B’). So for them, losing a few mil every year on a tourist attraction is now a rounding error. For us, gambling $800,000 for four months of service is beyond irresponsible. There is no universe in which it builds enough business/tourism to justify itself, which means it will need to either be funded on the backs of DM taxpayers or from some outside source. But even saying that risks offending some local business owners who (rightly) expect better marketing support from the City. But this is not the way to do that.

After last year, the administration began hinting that, after this year, someone else will have to pay for it. The packet says

“In the future, if City Council wants to proceed with water taxi service beyond this trial, we anticipate that passenger ferry service would be financed through a public/private partnership. We are not currently associating this effort with the Washington State ferry service.”

Fine, since we’re paying $5,000 a month for an ongoing Ferry Consultant, that implies that they already have at least some suitor opportunities in mind. If so, they should make themselves known, or the full Council should be informed of their existence in Executive Session. By throwing out an evidence-free and completely vague enticement about next year, it gives the Administration a free pass with public money this year.

It was insane. It is insane. It will continue to be insane.

Drug Possession

The City put out a very public and breathless press release from Mayor Mahoney about this proposal which I found problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which heavily implied that (once) there is no time to delay on immediately passing something.

As many of you know, in 2021 the State Supreme Court, published the Blake Decision, essentially de-criminalising all ‘drugs’ in WA. The State Legislature immediately scrambled to pass a two year stop-gap bill to which expires on July 1, 2023. Since then, the Legislature has struggled to pass a permanent bill. The latest try failed at the end of this year’s session with SB5536. A couple of details:

• The Washington Association of Police Chiefs expressed support for that final version.
• Currently, Governor Inslee has indicated that he intends to call a Special Session dedicated to getting a bill passed before July 1.
• Everyone I have talked and read about has stated that they would much prefer a State bill to a bajillion individual city bills.
• Sound Cities Association (which represents all cities in the region) is holding a meeting to discuss a group position the same day as our meeting.
• An ordinance only takes 30 days to take effect. So the Council has some time to gather information. And yet, the Mayor has decided to put this on the agenda for passage in one night–as if it were an imminent emergency.
• In fact, the item could simply have been put on the Public Safety Committee agenda for a review and then sent to the next City Council meeting with a recommendation. At least then there would be at least one pass for review and tweaks to the language.

I understand that this is a ‘hot button’ issue. It demands action in time to meet the deadline. But there is simply no reason to pass this in one meeting without hearing from SCA, from the State or even our own Court and Police and Public Safety Committee.

New Business

Housing Action Plan

There is no action item, but I would suggest that you read this carefully because it’s one of the better reports I’ve read since I’ve been watching our local politics.

I’ll just throw out some other tidbits

• We all know that the cost of living here is crazy. And to a certain extent that’s just the deal. It’s more expensive here because, wait for it, more people want to live here
  than in Ohio. Desirability costs.
• It is true that by some ‘averaging’ overall home values have tripled here (mind blowing.) But most homes have not increased nearly that much.
• And it is also true that wages have only moved a fraction of that amount. There is a huge gap. And the thing that bugs me most about that is the inability for many people to save enough to even consider ownership.

So for me, the freaky thing is the cost differential between ownership and rent. A typical homeowner like myself can rent their home for three times (3x) the mortgage! That puts house renting–which is what many families desperately need in the absence of savings and affordable ownership–completely out of reach. It’s insane that renting should be so onerous.

• More study is necessary, but all evidence shows that building more housing does improve affordability.
• One reason I have advocated for Port Package Updates so passionately is that this is about affordability and justice. Des Moines is still one of the best value propositions in the entire area. It was meant to be for families. Port Packages were intended to be a permanent mitigation, one that preserved the value of the property for all subsequent homeowners. If a home has a failing Port Package, it’s not only noisier and less healthy, it’s now artificially lower in value. Currently, the Port’s sound insulation systems are best in class. But if an existing home requires a new sound insulation system many homeowners cannot afford that expense and will have to settle replacing it with something of lower quality. That lowers the health and value proposition of that home permanently.
• And speaking of sound insulation, Des Moines rescinded its sound code in 2012, which used to require new homes to have noise reduction equivalent to a Port Package. Sound insulation is crucial for homes in our area but especially for town homes and any other up-zoned housing. We need to re-instate that code requirement immediately. In fact, we never should have gotten rid of it in the first place. EVERYONE DESERVES SOUND INSULATION.