Weekly Update 06/29/2025

Some bits of business…

Tardiness

As I said last week, the past 2-3 weeks have been chaos! Not Camp Khaos. TOTAL CHAOS! I am back. 🙂

One note about Club World Cup. Although it was not the massive event World Cup is expected to be, operations at the airport were up, transit ridership was up, but no one seemed to notice much. Which is good, I guess? But it might be interesting to see how booked our hotels were for those matches.

City Manager Stuff

The City Manager’s new weekly report format is viewable here. Since the Fourth of July is this week and the City is promoting a bunch of stuff from Sharks to Drones, go there for all the deets.

City Manager Report – June 27, 2025

Water District 54 Annual Report

For those customers in WD54, here is their WD54 2024 Report. It contains important info as to their ongoing relationship with Highline Water District and plans to rebuild their facilities after the 2023 boil water notice. Since I get asked this a lot, here are links and maps for all the SPDs and utilities.

SR-509 24th Ave is now open and it’s free!

Temporarily. Drive north on 24th Ave and before you get to 200th you’ll see a new exit onto the first mile of SR-509, which will take you directly to I-5. It will also be tolled – but not yet! So take the next month and stick it to da man! WSDOT has promised free GoodToGo cards, but I haven’t seem ’em yet. Stay tuned.

Redondo Paid Parking

Speaking of having to pay, Redondo Paid Parking is happening. But this too is free for for one more week. So… stick it to the City, too! And then get a modestly priced parking pass by contacting the Marina. 🙂

Restaurants!

There have been more restaurant changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.

News Flash! After five years of being only ‘98198’, TakeOutDM is expanding its list to include establishments people think (or wish) were in Des Moines. For example, if you like Fr I really like Peyrassol West in Normandy Park across from the QFC.

This Week

Nothing! (Well, nothing ‘official’.) But since I will be taking a brief detour to the 51st State (too soon? 😀 ), this gives me a shameless opportunity to display to plug one of my fave beavers of all time in celebration of Canada Day! (That’s not AI, btw, courtesy of Mike’s Beavers in Splendid Saskatchewan!) 🙂

Last Week

Tuesday

Port of Seattle Commission meeting

(Agenda) Of importance for us was the Commission’s deep dive into the results of the 2025 state legislative session. These tend to be far more in-depth than any city council receives because the Port covers so much more ground. There will always be a certain amount of revisionist history. They will say how they tried to support (x) when in fact they did everything possible do kill it. That may sound unkind but it’s important to know when the tail is wagging the dog. You might think that the Commission drives the legislative agenda. But when you watch these presentations, notice how often the Commissioners ask their staff, “Where did we stand on that issue?” 😀

DesMoines Historical Society

The DMHS held an annual event with speakers Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard of the Seattle Times Now and Then columns. It was very interesting. The DMHS needs volunteers! Full disclosure: I was in one of their episodes on the Masonic Home.

If you visit the DMHS on a Saturday, look for a poster in a corner which talks about the beginning of the City in 1959. At that time, the population was about 2,000 and the boundary was essentially 216th to Kent Des Moines Road and did not include the Marina (because the Marina did not appear until 1970) and  to 24th-ish. Of those 2K souls? 415 voted in that election. And the vote was something like 245 to 168. In other words: voter turn out was as low then as it is today, and the decision was barely 60% — not exactly a landslide. Since then, we’ve cobbled together 23 Annexations and almost all, including the decisions that led to the Marina, have also been very close votes.

And my point is this: despite what you may have heard, Des Moines has always been changing, but it has never been one big, happy family. The question for me has always been: can we sincerely shift to a model that is actually more representational of all of ‘Des Moines’? Stay tuned. 🙂

Wednesday

StART

The discussion of six airport communities concerned goal-setting. Since the group discourages recordings and has had no public in-person meetings in years it’s tough to describe what these are really about. But STNI was able to cover the meeting and will provide a summary soon.

Citizens Advisory Board

Here is the video/transcript/agenda of their last meeting, plus a powerpoint summarising on how it’s all changing. Or not. It’s confusing.

I also got some public flack from my colleagues at the Council Meeting about it here are my thoughts on that. 🙂

Thursday

City Council Meeting

(Recap follows)

City Council Recap

Regular Meeting – 26 Jun 2025 – Agenda – Updated

As always, these are the things I think are most important. And here’s one that was not on the agenda.

Zoom!

This meeting was the first truly successful hybrid format (in-person and remote) we have every done. For the past several months, Cm Nutting has been appearing strictly via Zoom. Ironically, until our 2023 rules changes, that would have gotten him booted off the Council as we only allowed for one remote participation a year. By phone.

For about two years during the pandemic, then mayor Matt Pina and the clerk would be the sole people at City Hall. The City IT whipped up a Zoom system for essentially fully-remote participation. We also have to run the Court (which uses the space far more than the Council overall). So to provide better remote participation with SCORE the City invested in upgrades. Aside from some initial glitches, the system worked fairly well.

But what people have forgotten so quickly is that it allowed residents to Zoom in as well! We had much greater public participation at both committees and full meetings due to the convenience of Zoom.

But as soon as the ’emergency’ was over, unlike every other City, the Des Moines City Council went back to 100% in-person, and cut off remote participation by the public entirely.

For reasons passing understanding, the City would say that Zoom was ‘technically impossible’ – even thought it had worked. The few times we tried it – during the City Manager hiring process – it would barf pretty much every time. The reluctance was so intense that the Council voted to pay the recruiter to fly in for one meeting, just to avoid another glitch.

So what makes me smile now is how convenience makes the impossible possible. The new Council rules removed any limit on remote participation by Cms. And somehow, with no ‘tech upgrades’, the system now magically works well enough that not only can Cm Nutting keep his seat, Cm Achziger was also able to participate remotely. Can the system stand the strain?

The system always could do this. The only thing that changed was politics, and it’s kinda shameful.

Now that the pretense of ‘technical difficulties’ has been removed, we should be able to speak even more candidly: making people schlep to City Hall for meetings is probably the single biggest hindrance to expanding public engagement. Having the City do various neighborhood events is nice, but that also feels very twentieth century.

If the City really wants to expand public participation, it should go back to the future and re-instate public remote participation – as other cities, the County, the State, and the Port of Seattle do – at least for public comment.

Sergeants

There was a ceremonial swearing in of two new sergeants, which is definitely worth watching. Chief Boe gives an explanation of the vetting process and the importance of the rank – they are essentially team leaders on each shift. One detail he left out – from what I understand, passing the Sergeant’s Exam is no walk in the park. Each officer I’ve known who achieves the rank earns it. Congratulations! 🙂

Libraries

We had a great presentation and events calendar from two relatively new leaders at our two libraries. As I’ve been saying for years, the Des Moines and Woodmont libraries are the de facto community centers for Des Moines. They have more useful events every month than anywhere else. They also have a way to connect their calendar with the City and one measure of success in our upcoming web site will be: can we integrate all their great events into our calendar and increase public participation!

CAB

We had a short but intense vote to approve three members of the Citizens Advisory Board (CAB). All three passed. I voted ‘no’ on all three, not out of concerns over any of them. I object to the whole ‘thing’.

However, former councilmember Susan White passed only 4-3 because Cms Nutting and Mahoney objected, but in that case they did seem to have personal concerns, and that struck me as unkind.

All three applicants are fine and I wish them all success. 🙂 I voted ‘no’ because, as constructed, the entire group does not achieve the goals the group was meant to provide: broader representation, transparency, and accountability. The CAB has expanded from being a typical 2 year appointment – a way for residents in nine neighbourhoods to provide meaningful feedback on neighborhoods – a fantastic idea – to a version with at least 19 members – seven of which will be ‘at large’ and four (or is it two?) year terms depending on what the group decides?

There are to be three subcommittees to replace the Human Services, Senior, and Arts Commissions, each TBD and with five or even nine members? More than the entire City Council? 😀 At least two of those will be  recommending grant funds. An important reason for the previous commissions was so that the Council could provide direct appointment to people recommending the spending of public money. This does away with a direct line of accountability. And if you object, it will look like you’re complaining about the group as a whole. Not. Cool.

The idea of a Citizens Advisory Committee was a response to real problems. Participation had become spotty at best. Forget nine or even five members. The commissions these CAB subcommittees are meant to replace struggled to field three. Also the Council had stopped hearing from them except once a year – whereas back in the day we’d get periodic reports – as required in our own code.

The public outreach to fill all those seats was as terrible as it has always been. One can blame ‘people’ – like we always do. But I talked to residents who wanted to apply but had no idea how to do so. I couldn’t figure out how to apply. Apparently, CAB people helped fill seats by telling friends. That is not how we insure full representation. That is how you perpetuate the status quo.

A better solution is to fundamentally change the way we do public outreach – like allowing Zoom participation (and make recordings with high quality transcripts automatic.) For years, people were totally unaware of opportunities to serve, and unhappy when they did. Simple as that. This actually narrows that pool to the very few people already ‘in network’. It may empower those few, but it does nothing to provide full representation to the interests of all residents. Rather than extend transparency, accountability, and community it actually contracts it.

Q1 2025 and Q4 2024 Financial Updates

The longest portion of the meeting concerned the 2024 Q4 finances – essentially 2024 totals, followed by 2025 Q1. Being only three months behind is actually progress. I am not here to nitpick, but this graphic caught my attention. The boat indeed appears to be ‘flying the chute’ at full speed. But it’s also getting pelted with rain going in the other direction. 😀 I choose to see it as a an undiscovered Van Gogh. 😀 Anyhoo… it captures how I feel atm.

On the plus side…

• Being only three months behind is actually progress.
• In some ways, these presentations are much better than what the Council has received in a couple of ways. For me, the biggest is this All Funds pie. In previous years, the City would focus almost obsessively on General Fund. And in fact, when anyone would say “What’s your budget?” they meant “What is your G/F?” That was super-wrong because although those other funds are supposed to be ‘separate’, almost all of them have strong interactions with the rest of the budget. Just one tiny example: Marina employees work on lots of stuff in other funds involving events and parks and rec and so on.
• The obsession with General Fund is understandable because
  • That’s where most of the salaries come from.
  • That’s where the discretionary money tends to be – the things you can control (ie. cut.)
  • It’s also where the cash reserve is kept.
• Having shifted to a cash-based accounting system is making it easier to explain things. In the past, we used a modified accrual system which… never mind. 😀 A cash-based approach works more like most people expect it to outside of corporate-world. 🙂
• For example, the cash system is also making it easier to see how tight things can get. We like to talk about having a ‘balanced budget!’ and ‘16.67%!’ (ie. two months savings) but those things were always somewhat artificial. The new presentation is more honest and we have nowhere near two months cash on hand. That matters because just like you, we need that cash to pay for weekly bills. But unlike you, a lot of our revenue only comes in from the County/State every three months. You want to have enough cash in the bank all the time so that you aren’t having to ‘go online’ in the weeks until the next check comes in.

Stress Levels

I feel a bit guilty banging on all the time about ‘better financials!’ But these reports don’t give us what I think we need – which is a healthy sense of urgency. My accountant used to lecture, scream, beg, cajole, anything to get us to avoid complacency and keep us focused on the future. Thanks Gary. 🙂

Since before I ran in 2019, the council majority always believed passionately in telling people how well we were doing. And when that was no longer plausible, at least ‘keeping it positive’. I always felt this was a mistake. At every meeting discussing money there is always some blather about how ‘all cities are struggling!’, ‘COVID!’, ‘inflation!’, ‘how well we are doing, comparatively. One city is going bankrupt! (the city mentioned is filing as a legal maneuver to counter a lawsuit by a land developer, not because of cash flow issues.)

My father-in-law called all that ‘poor man thinking’. “Yes, things are tough all over. That’s their problem. My job is how not to be like them.” 😀

The public had no prob voting down Prop #1 last year, in large part because of trust. The new City Manager comes in, improves communication, makes some painful, but very standard cuts, and people are happy. But except for perhaps animal control, the public is not experiencing much difference. For many, that ‘proves’ that all the yammering that the sky is falling was not real. For them, it means we could always have done more with less. City staff may say they are over-burdened and under-staffed. But if the Council’s only move is to applaud people for going above and beyond, the public is quite likely to say, “Keep going above and beyond. Please!” 😀

If the public doesn’t understand the practical effects of our situation, how can we ask for more? They may instead continue to see all our lobbying at the State level for more taxes as completely disingenuous – attempts to go around them. It will feel like, “Think you can say ‘no’? We’ll show you!” rather than convince. The opposite of ‘public engagement’.

The trade-offs

Looking closer at this pie is disheartening. That huge blue area contains all the bond money we borrowed. And notice that there is not even .5% for social services.

If I were doing that chart I would label the blue area a Pac Man critter called “Steps, Docks, Fishing Pier” – because it looks like it wants to eat everything else. Hopefully people really appreciate the Steps because for better or worse, they’re making a whole lot of other things impossible for a long time to come.

See that’s the other thing: you don’t know about the trade-offs – the programs you’re not getting as a result of the choices we previously made. Or what we could be doing better now. Or next time. These numbers are just flat. They don’t tell that story over time.

At some point we have to start making more money. But I never sense any urgency. No sense of healthy stress.

Transportation Improvement Plan

We also talked about the Transportation Improvement Plan. This is one of those trade-offs. Since I’ve lived here we’ve never been able to do more than one big project at a time – and usually only in partnership with the Port or WSDOT. We lack the money and the capacity and at a certain point the current levels became ‘as good as it gets’. And it shouldn’t be. There needs to be a way to message the fact that we appreciate what the City has been able to accomplish, and it’s nowhere near good enough. It will be very tough to create new economic development if we can only rebuild one road every five years.

(On the plus side, City Manager Caffrey has budgeted for a full-time grant writer – not a substitute for generating more structural revenue, but nevertheless an important step towards obtaining more funding across all domains.)

Telling that story over time: Marina Fund

I also wanna close with this, the Marina page of the Q4 Financial Report. Again, this is actually an improvement from where things were when I joined the Council in 2020.

My guess is that for most people it looks like things are going OK. Or at least, it looks impressive. 🙂

But that’s not how I see it. Here is how I see it.

Just for today, I want you to ignore almost everything except the top half – the Operating Income (OI). That is how profitable the Marina business currently is. The only thing I want you to notice from the bottom is the Debt Service line – what we borrowed to rebuild the docks.

95% of what I care about are those two numbers: OI and ADS. But not just here. This is just a snapshot.

Because the real Marina isn’t one point in time. It’s a forever-investment and despite already spending over $1,000,000 on previous (cough) ‘marina redevelopment which went nowheresville, and now spending $13,000,000 on three new docks this summer, there is at least four times more left to do. Have you felt any urgency from the City on how to pay for that?

We will hire consultants to work on this. But we always could have done something like this, if we had wanted to…

Think about your house and your roof. The roof will need replacement every 15 years or so. So, you should probably make sure you have enough income, not just to pay your monthly bills, but also to be able to save for that – as well as retirement and so on. Except that neither cities or voters generally feel the urgency to save for the future that most sane individuals do. Cities can simply devote 100% of their efforts to making people happy now because unless you have a family, you will likely not be here in 15 years – when the roof (or fishing pier or road or whatever) needs replacing.

Which is why we are borrowing to fund docks and the Redondo Fishing Pier and the Marina Steps. Because years ago that government spent all its money on those residents and didn’t leave us any money. They screwed us. We’ll likely screw the next generation. When it’s not going to affect you personally, that’s what tends to happen. In my field we call this a perverse incentive.

So, for example, when we started to notice a fishing pier wearing out, all we could do was…

1. Wait until it fails
2. Wait until we could take out a new credit card to cover some of the cost, which we immediately maxed out
3. Wait for a grant to cover the rest

I go on about the Marina, because it was the one time in City history that voters gifted us a serious revenue opportunity to counter those perverse incentives. It can pay for itself and power a lot of other good things in the City. It can help keep your taxes lower and avoid us having to wait more years for the next grant. But it’s been decades since we treated the Marina like the business it was always supposed to be.

You may find that harsh, but in reply I would ask you a question: What kind of business does not provide five year backcasts or forecasts? A business that believes waiting until things fail is an acceptable strategy.