Weekly Update: 06/18/2023

Some bits of news…

Please Sign up for Code Red

As most of you know by now, there is a Boil Water Notice for residents who get their water from Water District 54–which covers home from prox. 230th north to about 213th and a tiny slice of Normandy Park.

I received a text and a phone message about it early Sunday from King County Code Red Alert program. If you haven’t already signed up for Code Red, now is the perfect time to do it! When you sign up for Code Red you’ll be notified IMMEDIATELY when there is a possible health threat.

Also: A huge shout out to WD54 staff. Because not everyone is signed up for Code Red, they were also out this morning going DOOR TO DOOR to hand out flyers and inform every affected resident.

As to the burning question: “When will it be over?” Last time (September 2013) it took 3-4 days.

North Sea-Tac Park

For those of you interested in various airport issues, there seems to be some good news concerning North Sea-Tac Park. This gets really into the weeds. Back in the ’70’s the FAA bought property on all sides of the airport as part of the Sea-Tac Communities Plan. The whole thing was something of a giant experiment to figure out if the airport and the surrounding communities could live together. So almost every aspect had some bugs. One of them was that all those lands were left under the ownership of the Port of Seattle, including North Sea-Tac Park, but also what is now the Des Moines Creek Business Park. Long story short, my group SeaTacNoise.Info has been advocating for years to reform those regulations.

• Good news: Congress is working on a revision to FAA regulations which provides a way to permanently protect North Sea-Tac Park.
• Bad news: It’s super-specific to that one park and provides no chance for any similar help to Des Moines. I don’t think the public understands that the DMCBP brings in almost no revenue to the City of Des Moines, even though it brings in millions for the Port. It’s an astoundingly unfair situation.

If you’re the kind of person who lives to read legislative burble, here ya go.

New Police Chief

The City Manager has chosen Tim Gately to be our new Police Chief.  Press Release. Tentative to start in August.

Ferry Cancelled

The summer passenger ferry program has been cancelled. Press Release.

I do not believe in Schadenfreude. I simply want as much money back as possible, and any funds already allocated to that project to be put back where they can be used for other purposes. I also want the City Council to acknowledge that this is one of those times where The Universe is sending us a message that we should re-focus our economic development. More on that another time.

For now, this points out one of many problems with the idea that I did not raise in the beginning because no one wants to even consider catastrophe. But the whole idea of one boat being a ‘commuter option’ was never plausible. By definition, creating a bus or a train or a ferry system, means having spares. That we would deploy one anything, without backup, meant it was neither transit or tourism. Rather, it was optional. If it were something that we actually were counting on, we would have planned and executed this thing very diferently.

I am not casting blame. But again, there is a reason no other city does this and why both the State and County have not wanted to do this. We’ve had two tries with the program and in the most optimisic reading, neither has gone smoothly. Your Council has been more than generous with ¹funding, but even so, any organisation that cannot afford to do what it takes to run proper trials should not be in this business.

Fund Raising? So annoying…

I got a complaint last week about how “I can’t read the Weekly Update because of your ad…” Well, that’s kinda the point. 😀

But it’s only annoying for five seconds. If you count to five and then click anywhere on the advert, it goes away. (And just to make it clear, I added a little timer.)

A couple of things about fund raising. I’m doing it all wrong, of course. I’m not taking any PAC money or party money or friend money or self-loan money. And if you look at how City Council races are usually funded, that takes like ninety percent of the money off the table. I’m not kidding.

It takes a while because the donations are small and almost all from people who live in Des Moines. But I think that’s a good thing.

And for what it’s worth, we’re almost there.

This Week

Monday: 11:00AM As per usual, I’ll be attending the Juneteenth celebration at the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle The museum has excellent exhibits and there is no better day to visit. 🙂 Apart from my family’s personal connection, I take the day seriously because the absence of civil rights is not some ‘ancient history’. My father-in-law often liked to share this fun fact from his childhood: In 1890 the number of black registered voters in Alabama was close to 200,000. By 1965 (when the Voting Rights Act was passed) it was less than 2,000.

Thursday: 5:00PM Economic Development Committee Meeting (Agenda) (Video) Staff will provide an overview of the draft Public Participation Plan, potential stakeholder groups and project timeline for the Committee input. Staff will provide an overview of recently enacted State legislation related to housing and other local mandates designed to increase the range of allowable housing types, to support affordability, to fight homelessness and streamline review processes.

Thursday: 6:00PM City Council Meeting (Agenda) (Video) Highlights

• If you need a reason to watch the next meeting,  you can witness the final reading and vote on our new Protocol Manual (aka Rules of Procedure.) We’ll be picking up where we left off–and the burning issue will be? Dress Code. The idea is to ban, wait for it hats and go for a ‘business casual’ look. (Whatever that means.) Until someone shows me otherwise, we’re about to become the only government of any kind in WA (at least none of any size) which attempts to enforce a dress code on its electeds.
• There will be a vote for $525,000 to do various upgrades to the Field House playground. If that sounds crazy expensive, you’re not wrong. Costs for this kind of thing have skyrocketed. To quote one of City Manager Matthias’ fave phrases, this really is a matter of ‘macro-economics’. If you go to the grocery store, you’ll notice that everything is waaaaay more expensive now. And notice how all the in-store cheap-o brands are gone? It’s not some ‘supply line shortage’. Once manufacturers figured out that customers would pay $3.50 for a Coke that used to cost $0.99 they saw no reason to give back those extra profits. Likely the same deal with play equipment. Residents have been waiting years to get playground equipment and manufacturers know it. So… all the more reason not to waste money. 🙂
• There is an item to spend $145,000 from our Lodging Tax fund for the Fourth of July Drone Show. Wowza.
  • The original contract was $90,000.
  • So we’re saying that the supplemental costs will be as much as $55,000?  Traditional fireworks that go ‘boom’ are usually about that much.

Look, I understand that for a certain number of residents the boom is super bad. But that’s a lotta dough. And frankly, no matter how quiet, it will do nothing to alleviate all the illegal home fireworks we can’t seem to get a handle on. The item also mentions that the Lodging Tax Committee discussed and approved this. But, like all our advisory committees, their meetings are in private, they keep no minutes or publish any work product–which we used to do and which our code seems to require them to do.

• There will also be an Executive Session at the end “PERFORMANCE OF A PUBLIC EMPLOYEE – RCW 42.30.110(1)(g) – 40 minutes”. ie. the City Manager. This is the first time in years we’ve actually performed this review. But… as is typical, I have absolutely no idea what the format of the meeting will be. This is #312 of things that should be worked out in advance by the Council–or put into our Rules. But never are.

Last Week

As I said, I took the week off.

Psych! 😀

I actually spent a good deal of time on airport issues (like the above.)

And also, talking to homeowners regarding housing. There has been a surprising amount of interest in ADUs (or as we refer to them as ‘ALQs’.) Which is why residents should be attending those Economic Development Committee meetings-hint, hint.) Learn more about ADUs… er… ALQs… here.

Ferry…

For what it’s worth, as recently as our last City Council Meeting, this was the optimistic tone from the city…

“Dictator for a Day” (#327 Flagpole Edition)

Whenever I ask one of my neighbours what she’d like the City to work on, she likes to say, “If I were dictator for a day” 😀 (That’s her joke. Not mine. My joke is Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe. She insists that ‘dictator’ is far better than ’emperor’. And the voter is always right.)

So, this is a piccie, taken directly across the street from City Hall, of the flag pole. It’s currently flying the Juneteenth and Pride flags beneath the Stars and Stripes.

OK, now… here is what you see walking down the street in either direction, north or south…

Totally obscured. You can’t even see them driving by.

I’ve been trying for three years to get the City Council to vote to move it to where it actually belongs.

Where it belongs is the pad immediately south of City Hall,  separating the Engineering Bldg. That location is completely unobscured and has plenty of room for a nice landscaping.

I’m only goin’ on about it because residents often don’t realise that we’re all competing to get our little projects done. 😀 If you read these articles, you know how expensive everything is, how tight staff resources are. So I guess my message is: Hang in there. Keep showing up. 🙂

In this case, I really do think the proper display of these flags matters. And I can never understand why my colleagues, several of who seem to take these sorts of things fairly seriously in other contexts, would not. In my opinion, when people can’t clearly see the flags flying, it sends the wrong message.

OK, I’m done. 😀

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¹There’s never been a full accounting, but between the consultant fees, ad campaigns and expenses, the losses since we began considering this in 2019 are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ironically, we’ll likely save over half a million dollars by not running the thing.