Weekly Update: 06/30/2024

Some bits of business…

Future Agendas

Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.

Passages

Services for Ms. Kaylene Moon will be at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church on Military Road in Kent on July 16 at 1pm. See comments from Councilmember Achziger and myself at the end of last week’s meeting. Kaylene Moon | Obituary | Seattle Times.

Long time Senior Center manager Charisse Gregory retired last week after ¹932 years of service. I will miss her. Her Christmas Wreaths are the best and I hope she keeps selling them during the season. 🙂

City Manager Stuff

City Manager’s Report June 28, 2024

• The City’s summer overlay (repaving) projects are listed here.
• The Redondo floating dock is back.
• There is a street musician playing at Redondo on the Boardwalk. But apparently it’s one person, not Black Sabbath. But ‘yes’, it would be nice if the Council (and the public) were told about this sort of thing in advance. If for no other reason than promotion. 🙂

This Week

Tuesday July 2 There will be a special meeting of the City Council. The only item of business is an Executive Session to discuss the City Manager Recruitment. So probably not much to see.

Wednesday 6:00pm: Citizens Advisory Committee. The (Agenda) is not exactly riveting, but it always ends up being more than expected. You can watch it on the City’s Youtube Channel.

Thursday July 4th The party starts at 5PM. Food trucks. DJs. Stuff. 🙂 The Drones attack precisely at 10:20. 200 of the little devils whizzing by for 15 minutes. We were told that there will be synchronised music and speakers pumping that madd bass at both the beach park and the Marina.

And for the rest of y’all? The new home Fireworks Ordinance will be in effect. Basically, it’s easier to ticket people for home fireworks–which have always been illegal. Will there be some citations? I sure hope so! 😀

Last Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission (Agenda) Highlight: The Commission voted Director Metruck a three year contract extension for $474,000 a year. I only mention that to make two points: The CEO of the Port of Seattle is making less than 2x what our last City Manager made, but is governing an organisation forty (40) times the size of the City of Des Moines. But, if the PortComms fire him? His severance will be half that of our last City Manager.

Tuesday: 7:00pm The Des Moines Historical Society had two presentations at the Oddfellows Hall. But oddly 😀 they were more about the future of SR-509, a fifty year project that has (literally) changed the shape of the entire City. It was absolutely great and I wish it had been recorded.

But I did see these two new graphics, which explain the two biggest confusions I hear from residents.

• There will be direct access to I-5 from Veterans Drive and many people will no longer bother with Military Road. My prediction is that this will the single biggest road improvement in decades.
• The north end is also a huge deal. But not in a good way. And this has nothing to do with the much-discussed toll point.

But the two big negative impacts for us are:

• It directly connects the Port of Tacoma to Sea-Tac Airport to the Port of Seattle. That was always the game. And that’s why it’s been built from both ends for the past 50 years.
• See the southern access point off of 26th? The other goal was always to create a Southern Entrance to the Airport. The biggest choke point on increasing operations was always the single (northern) main entrance on 518. Every normal airport has several entrances. (The one on Pac Highway never counted. Far too clunky.)

SR-509 will start allowing freight to whiz directly on and off the airfields onto highways in order to leverage cargo flights. Which are at night.

Wednesday: Sea-Tac Airport Roundtable (StART) There was a presentation on the new ‘second airport’ committee in Olympia. The first meeting will be July 11th. Like the last one, this will go nowhere. Historically all these ‘we need a new airport’ discussions have basically been checking a box to say ‘we tried’… and then go on to expand Sea-Tac Airport.

Thursday: Municipal Facilities Committee – 27 Jun 2024 Agenda

Highlights:

• Staff provided details on revenue/expenditures of Events Rentals–which the Finance Committee looked at last month. Eye popping. Or eye watering. You make the call. 😀
• There was another mention of asbestos remediation at the Beach Park. But still no engineering report or cost estimates.
• Marina and Beach Park Paid Parking was declared a success, having brought in $40,000 in the first month. It will be interesting to see the results of upcoming events like Blues and Brews (see below.)
• There was also talk of demolishing the ‘barn’ at Sonju Park. It’s become rickety and an occasional haven for squatters.

Thursday: Economic Development Committee – 27 Jun 2024 Agenda

Highlights:

The Sound Code discussion. The Committee ‘head nodded’ to move forward with ‘something’ but it was still disappointing. The administration trotted out the same tired discussion from 2012. Basically, we rescinded our sound code back then because developers (and our former Mayor–who now works for the Port of Seattle) complained about the added costs. But, keep this in mind (there will be a quiz) Burien and SeaTac did not rescind that same sound code. Here is the key part of what was rescinded:

It then goes on to describe construction specifics to achieve noise reduction. Those change all the time as the technology (and the understanding of the physics of ‘noise’ improves.)

The two things that never got considered were public health and the FAA.

• We automatically look at these things through a developer lens. The City wanted to reach out to the developer lobby for their opinion. Can you imagine asking the developer lobby for their opinions on fire code? The only entity that really should matter are public health officials. And they are in agreement: even the current standards are simply too lax.

“Aircraft noise is one, if not the most detrimental environmental effect of aviation. It causes community annoyance, disrupt sleep, adversely affect academic performance of children, and could increase the risk for cardiovascular disease of people living in the vicinity of airports…”

The sound code was implemented as part of the Federal program to provide sound insulation money. By opting out we risk never getting another dime in FAA money to provide more help to more residents. And, what never got mentioned was that both  Burien and SeaTac have both built more houses than we have. With a sound code.

Thursday: City Council Meeting – 27 Jun 2024 Recap below

June 27, 2024 City Council Meeting Recap

Regular Meeting – 27 Jun 2024 – Agenda – Updated

City Manager Recruitment Update: As of today, we’ve gotten twenty applications and we’ll be having an Executive Session on July 2nd to go over that list. The timeline now says that finalist interviews will begin on August 28. We will be asked to select ‘four questions’ from sixteen choices, that each applicant will need to answer. I asked for an additional choice, based on a question I recall former Mayor Pina asking in similar situations:

“Although it may not look like it on the dais, we often have strong disagreements. If you are appointed to this position, how would you handle those situations?”

Q1, 2024 Financial Report
I did my little rant on ‘report quality’ last week. One number the Finance Director has pointed out repeatedly in recent months is the amount of unconstrained cash— basically the size of the check we could write if there was an emergency. It’s currently about $1.6M. Which is 2% of our investments. For better or worse, I think of it as being like you having $4,500 in a checking account if you make $80k a year. I don’t want to stretch that analogy any further because the $71M in total investments is not like a retirement account we could ‘tap into’. Most of it is allocated for things like those bonds for the Marina and Redondo.

We named the Alley behind the Theatre ‘Backstage Alley’ We also voted to direct the City to bring back a resolution adding a ceremonial name “Waterland Way” on 223rd Street from Marine View Drive to Cliff Avenue–which is what I wanted. 🙂

We voted to give the Rotary Club a 75% discount for the Blues and Brews event: Last week I called this a $9,000 freebie. That may have been a bit unfair because the proposal included both a 75% discount to Rotary and offering free parking–so the total benefit, including the expected loss in parking revenue was $9k. Basically, we mistakenly gave Rotary a 75% discount last year. So this year they asked for the same. I don’t mind people asking for a discount. But they referred to the correct amount as a ‘rate increase’. Which I did not think was cool. Anyhoo, we approved the 75%, but disallowed the free parking. It was also interesting to see not one, but two ‘amendments’ get voted down 1-6… and not be me on the ‘1’ side. 😀

This is a management issue

This is the kind of thing our Council should never look at–and this meeting explains why. Every few years the Council goes so far as to re-write the code to create more ‘discipline’. And then promptly caves when it comes to some beloved local group–almost always at the Marina. It’s totally unfair to treat various groups differently. But we cannot help ourselves. All the ‘connections’ the Council has with local organisations makes it impossible.

When you run a business, you hire managers, in part to do the occasionally awkward work of giving bad news to customers. But instead of the City simply saying ‘Sorry, we made a mistake last year. Glad you enjoyed it. Here is your bill.’, the current mechanism passes on the guilt trip to the Council. 😀 .

If you take away nothing else from this discussion: we tend to spend more time on hard hitting issues like this (and ‘alley naming’) than a $26M bond sale. Not. Kidding.

So I leave it to the reader: is this just a ‘mistake’ bringing this kind of item to the dais? Or is it a distraction to direct attention away from the stuff we should be looking at?

You wanna make money!

For the ten 😀 people who actually care about this stuff, if you watched that discussion carefully you might get a glimmer as to why the City has never become the ‘destination’ people talk about.

We’re the only city-owned marina in the area. But there has never been agreement on what the Marina should be. Which is why we don’t run it like a business. We have always tended to support various ideas that make no financial sense, but which sound great and appeal to various local interests. After thirty years of watching, the fascinating thing for me is that faces come and go, but the same points of view persist.

During the discussion, Mahoney mentioned that Blues and Brews was sold out. ie. implying a hard limit on the number of paid tickets we can accommodate at these events. Grace-Matsui seemed to come down on the side of public park–ie. providing generous discounts for worthy causes. Nutting and Buxton seemed to talk solely in terms of rental revenue.

These are all fair points of view. If we accept any of these has boundaries, we’re basically placing hard caps on what the Marina can do for the city–how much tourism it can ever provide, yes even if we obtain (free) passenger ferry service.

What we can never seem to get to is the absolute necessity of figuring out how to make more money. Even with the pressure of deficits, the only discussion we’re now having concerning our budget shortfall? Service cuts and tax increases. Woo hoo!

Other People’s Money is a great play. Larry The Liquidator is a jerk, but he has a good point: We stopped really caring whether ‘the Marina’ made money or not a long time ago. But if the Marina could make more money by ‘manufacturing wire and cable, selling fried chicken or growing tangerines’? I’d have to give it strong consideration. Because that would mean more services and lower taxes for you.

We built the Marina not just to be a fun amenity, but to make money. It is stocked with 80% tenants who do not live here, footing the bill for the rest of us to enjoy the space. That’s economic development. It can support some public uses. But time and again, we’ve taken more money than it generates and avoided developing its proper economic potential. And now all the taxpayers will foot the bill for rebuilding the docks via that $25M bond sale!

Events have never made money. We’re finally we’re coming to grips with that. In fact, we’re thrilled that we’re losing less money now than previously. Woo hoo! But here’s the question: What is the incentive for holding weddings if the best they can do is to not lose money? If we stopped holding weddings, I’m about 100% certain people would still find places to throw garters around and jam cake in each others faces.

But Events are supposed to be ‘economic drivers’. They’re supposed to be things that bring people here and generate more money. Arguing for an hour over a discount for Blues and Brews is an acknowledgement that we aren’t even close to doing it.

But it ain’t for lack of money. We gave away $300,000 to underground utilities behind the Theatre to create an ‘alley’. We wasted more than that on the ferry thing–and last month we spent $8,500 in lobbying for… more ferry. Now there is at least $9M for Marina Steps.

One can make a case for supporting Blues and Brews, Waterfront Market, SR3, and even the Quarterdeck, and whatever as local public goods. Great. Fantastic. But I resent presenting them as part of a grand economic development strategy when they are actually not driving economic development. They are costs shared with the Marina–which does make some money–to benefit a relatively small number of regular users.

It’s not a serious business unless you have a real plan that says, “If we spend x,y and z, then in 5 years we can look at these 10 KPIs and agree whether or not we are succeeding or not.” And that’s because there are no Key Performance Indicators. We don’t have them.

We are still running the City using 1980’s vibes. But the world has changed. We cannot exist with conventional forms of revenue. We have to get more creative, especially given the unique blessings we’ve been granted.

It is unfair to the rest of the City to have the only city-owned marina in the region and not have such a plan. I believe the Marina and everything that happens there should work to serve the entire city–and by that I mean helping to support more services throughout the City.

Constantly throwing so much sheer energy into various efforts at the Marina, without a for realz business plan and with no demonstrable targets, does not feel like good stewardship of your money. We can and should do better. And if we can’t do better? There’s always the option to stop losing quite so much money.

¹I gotta stop using that joke. It was probably more like eighteen. 🙂