Weekly Update: 07/30/2023

Some bits of news…

• Be sure to vote by Tuesday August 1st. Primary Elections:WA State has a ‘top two’ primary system, meaning that the Primary Election is only for campaigns with more than two candidates. That is the purpose of the Primary: the top two vote getters in the August Primary then move forward to the General Election in November.
  • In 2023, there are three Council seats up for grabs in Des Moines. One is uncontested, the other two (including mine, please donate here 😀 ) have only two competitors. So… no Primary for Des Moines City Council. 🙂
  • However, because one Port Comm seat has 3 candidates, you get to vote on Position #5. And that vote matters. Here is the analysis and recommendation for Todd Curtis from SeaTacNoise.Info
  • And… wait for it… even though Highline School District has assigned Districts for each Director, you also get to vote on seats outside our own District #5. So, there are two HSD seats to vote for… Normandy Park and White Center. Study carefully because, as I’ve written many times, test scores in DM–which used to be great, are now terrible, despite having some of the highest funding in the State. If you care about our future, don’t just vote for the levies or labels, vote to turn around a 20 year slide in academic achievement.Here is a Highline School Board Candidate July 12 Forum Recap written by Highline Schools watcher Stuart Jenner.
• I’ve done some updating to the Public Service Announcements page. There are a lot of activities planned for the Marina/Beach Park this summer, including food trucks, bands, theatre, so check ’em out!
• Ta da! 😀 Here is the official 2023 City Council Protocol Manual, which the Council spent four committee meetings and three full meetings sweating over. Here’s a stat: this document is the single most time the Council or a committee has spent on any single issue in the past 3.5 years I’ve been on the Council. (No, I didn’t believe it myself at first.) But not even various Marina projects have gotten as much undivided attention–which should tell you something about this Council’s priorities.
• ICYMI, here is an updated from Water District 54 on where they’re at with the chlorination and future options.
• There was some significant news about the developer we chose for the now cancelled hotel projects: Point Ruston building permits voided after months of inactivity. I always get some hate mail when I post this kind of thing, but I feel strongly that the Council did not do nearly enough due diligence in approving our former partnership with this firm. That is not to pick on any individual. Rather, every developer we look at should be scrutinised carefully–but especially at the Marina.
• Finally, if you ferret around on this web site, you’ll find a lot of nerdy articles on various stats and here’s one about the King County Metro Route 635 2018 – 2023, aka ‘the 216th Shuttle bus to Angle Lake’.

This Week

Tuesday: National Night Out. The City will be helping promote the event at Midway Park starting at 5:00PM but there will, of course, be other events throughout the City. Hope to see you there!

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) Highlights include:

• The City Manager’s Report mentions a ‘St. Anne Hospital Update’. At press time I have no idea what that means.
• On the Consent Agenda is a series of motions to move forward with rebuilding 24th Ave. S. The project is over $7MM. And if you look at the schedule, the last time the Council or the Transportation Committee looked at this was in 2021. The Open House was also quite some time ago. Although it should go forward, it should not be on Consent. Instead, the item should have been placed on the main agenda to offer the public and new Cms a refresher. If you’d like to get up to speed, here’s the Open House video we held in 2021.
• Compost Procurement Ordinance: The ordinance is required based on a 2023 State Law which is meant to reduce the size of landfills. I don’t want to hold things up, but our policy needs to go a lot further. At some point (soon) DM and our residents–and all cities, will need to be creating our own compost, not so much ‘procuring’ it. We have to find ways to generate less solid waste. It may seem tiny but… I built a worm bin in 2005, based on a commonly available plan, which cost me about $25 and an hour of my time. And since then I’ve had all the soil amendments I’ve needed for a fairly large vegetable garden.

Last Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda/Video) The Commission voted on a proposal to (finally) fund the ‘accelerated sound insulation program’ originally proposed in February 2020. The ‘acceleration’ is getting a number of apartment buildings and houses of worship (finally) completed before 2026.

However, those buildings were a part of the Third Runway discussion, so many have actually been waiting for thirty years. And, the Commission walked back its commitment to Port Package Updates, saying that such a discussion would need to occur in the next Part 150 Study–which could be as far away as 2027! This bodes very poorly for any upcoming discussions on the Sustainable Airport Master Plan (SAMP.) Despite a very progressive PR campaign, this is the least airport community-friendly Commission since I’ve been watching.

Wednesday: Highline Forum (Agenda) The main item of interest (for me) was a discussion of workforce development–apprenticeships and trade education. Highline College has a very interesting Logistics Program–an industry that meshes perfectly with the Port’s mission. Logistics (not just ‘shipping’ but the whole science of moving things around efficiently) has traditionally been sort of a ‘you have to know somebody’ business–typically run by families over many generations. Creating this program is a very smart way to get more people into the game.

A different kind of traffic…

As you know for 3.5 years I’ve been in a minority position. Frankly, there’s been no reason to push ‘economic development’ because, unique amongst all cities in the region, our City Manager is our Economic Development Director–he was elevated from that post to City Manager in 2016. He, and the majority, have a very specific vision, which I would characterise as “Marina-centric”. Everything is supposed to flow from the Marina up and outware to the rest of the City and that is why you see almost every effort to make Des Moines a Destination centred there.

However, I was, and remain, about 9x% certain it is the wrong strategy and that has been the driving force behind so many of my votes against various funding programs be they popular or not, including the hotel, the ferry, the steps deal, or even SR3 or the Farmers Market.

A business may lie to everyone else about what it’s trying to do, but it simply cannot afford to lie to itself. There’s no point in having a ferry if it doesn’t drive people here to be a net plus. Or a hotel. Or even SR3 or a farmers’ market, or whatever. No matter how fun or noble any of those things may be for residents, if they lose money and don’t truly help support a sustainable business environment, the City should not be funding them–or at a minimum, we should not tell the public that they are some great ‘magnet’ which will drive traffic here and improve the business climate.

Again, to be clear: That does not mean they are not cool things or that they should not be here. It simply means that the City should not be funding them. Instead, the City should be funding things that do build sustainable business revenue.

Boring anecdote you’ve heard many times…

Many years ago, I bought a tiny specialty restaurant in an aging suburb of Detroit and, through no ‘genius’ of mine, it became extremely successful as these things go. In fact, the entire area became ‘hip’. Think Ballard or Fremont. To the extent that the city helped it was by in doing some dead simple things that encouraged younger people to buy and develop businesses, which (duh) attracted younger people–the people who have money, to stop in and buy things. In other words, businesses started to spring up which attracted people from elsewhere. The bulk of my clientele was not ‘local’ because there was never going to be enough older ‘locals’ to keep me in business.

Our retail environment has not thrived here for a few basic reasons, but mostly because we’re not honest about who our target market is. We keep trying to appeal to the small number of people who live here, rather than the much larger number of people who do not–the traffic that retailers must have to survive and build a for realz business sector.

But here’s the funny part: We already get a ton of traffic. People literally complain all the time about ‘traffic’ on Marine View Drive or Pacific Highway. But I see that not as a bad thing but rather as this river of potential customers. If you’re a retailer, your problem is getting these people to stop.

We had had, and continue to have a lot of retailers who put out a very good product. What we haven’t done is make it easy for all that traffic to find them, and make it easy for them to stop.

The best we seem to be able to do is offer things like EATS vouchers–which are great one-offs, don’t get me wrong, but frankly they’re yet another unsustainable subsidy where we’re encouraging more of us (seniors) to dine here, which will never, Never, NEVER work long term. You have to attract other people (and especially younger people) to spend money here.

Ironically, the City has spent the past two years and been given a million dollars to do just that. The Council voted to develop a passenger ferry to be like all the other subsidised stuff at the Marina–to be some kind of big magnet.

However, I would suggest that a magnet that, at best, will only ever ‘attract’ a few thousand people here every week (assuming they use it to come here as opposed to going somewhere else to spend money–big if), ain’t much of a magnet. From a retailer’s POV, a ferry’s key advantage is that it generates something of a captive audience. They get off the ferry and they’re stuck here for several hours wandering around, so they probably are going to buy something.

On the other hand, you could ask yourself if there isn’t another kind of magnet that might attract the bajillion people already stuck in traffic every day on MVD or Pac Highway or First Ave to stop.

A much better magnet…

Actually that universal magnet probably does exist and you already know what it is: a grocery store. There isn’t one here because it does not and never will make sense for a private firm to start one.

On the other hand, the City could simply buy a space and then create a professionally managed, volunteer-driven organisation to run it.

What you say? Socialism! Er… isn’t that exactly what we did with the ferry? We literally subsidised a system that both the County and the State said, “no thanks” to. And isn’t that professionally managed volunteer staff system exactly what we did twenty years ago with the Farmers Market? 😀

But instead of losing gobs of money every year servicing only a few thousand ferry riders a week, or a few thousand Farmers Market customers every Saturday, we’d be creating a useful service that everyone both in Des Moines and (more importantly) transiting through Des Moines, would use. Seven days a week. A grocery store is a reason to stop. It’s not ‘a’ magnet, it’s the magnet, the focal point which drives traffic to support all the other establishments.

Small ball…

Of course there are many other small ball things we can and should do right now to make life better for our retailers and their potential customers. There are many, but here are just a few.

• Despite having several ‘marketing channels’ in total, we don’t market well. Full stop. We market internally (within that small base of local residents) poorly and almost non-existent-wise externally (to the rest of the world.) This hasn’t been a City function and it needs to be because, frankly, there is no one else to do it in a cohesive manner. There are very successful models in other cities and grant money to support the concept from places like the Port. We should simply copy those models. One specific thing: We need an integrated calendar, both for the public and for retailers. Every retailer, including Food Trucks, needs to know the events both from the City and other groups and businesses waaaaay ahead of time so that every event maximises traffic on those days.
• We need much better signage. Again, this is something only the City can provide. Thousands of people are stuck in traffic every day just a few feet from some of our tastiest restaurants and they have no clue they exist. We should have kiosks and offer every lightpole to businesses as an opportunity for beautiful and consistent branding.
• We should do whatever it takes to make it easier for people stuck in their cars on the way home to pull into a shop. That might mean re-thinking parking, or ingress and egress. We need to have a commercial street improvement budget every year starting now. Some may scoff, but customers are fickle, especially drivers. If you make it frictionless, they stop. If you don’t, they don’t.
• We should encourage an urban village approach to business development. Right now, we spend almost the entirety of our energy on that Marina-centric approach. This leaves no room for developing other neighbourhood markets. There are opportunities in Redondo, North Hill, Zenith, Woodmont and on Pac Highway that are currently not even afterthoughts for the City.
• I brought up the 635 Shuttle for another reason. We also need to make it completely frictionless to get people back and forth. Not enough people from Wesley, Judson, Huntingon Park, Redondo or North Hill or basically everywhere are using our restaurants. As I’ve said many times, we need a second shuttle, to service Highline College and the south end of town. And we should consider experimenting with some kind of scheduled drop-off shuttle service to/from the Marina and Downtown and other spots in town, perhaps at lunch once a week.

I wanna stop here with a positive note–the reason I think it’s worth experimenting with all this stuff. Even without a hotel or a ferry or whatever, you really can see all kinds of little ‘seeds’ of growth here that just need some <expletive> WATER! 😀 It’s been that way since I’ve lived here and that is what has created my sense of frustration. You can see businesses that should be doing a whole lot better. But every few years we try some sort of grand idea (a ferry, an FAA building, ‘Cape Cod’ shingles on downtown buildings) instead of simply making it easier for people to find us and stop in.

But there have been several days this summer where I’ve seen three places doing live music. And that’s before the Theatre has opened! That’s a great sign. It means our business owners are doing their part! The City has also done a good job of scheduling summer events and implementing some food trucks. Well done! This is all happening organically. What is lacking is the  integration (the calendar for example) with the retail community and the marketing. In short, everyone’s doing the right things, in isolation; the two aren’t leveraging one another.

In the short term, the City can take the reins on marketing and messaging, do some simple things wrt signage and accessibility, and make our existing retailers lives a whole lot easier.

In the long term, we can do the real magnet, the grocery store, and make a generational leap for the entire community.

And as a coda, regarding Marina Redevelopment, I believe that by adopting this approach, the market (ie. the business market) will tell us what to do about the Marina. In other words, I opposed the ferry, the hotel, and even the Steps because frankly, they all strike me as sort of ‘central planning’, with no clear end game–which I’m not convinced we’re very good at. I think it would be much wiser simply to give the business community the tools they need to do their thing organically and only step in with some basics that they cannot do on their own.

(Everyone has wanted and known that we need a grocery store since forever. A ferry? Nice, but not exactly a necessity. See the difference?)

All the rest of that stuff like hotels and ferries? They will happen when it makes sense to developers and regional governments for them to happen. Trying to force them before we’re ready in the hope that they will be the magnet is not only wasteful, it’s backwards.

But in the meantime, we can do things to improve our current retail system by converting more of the traffic we’ve been ignoring for many years.

And one last, last thing: this has never meant I oppose any of the stuff people enjoy at the Marina. It just means that the City has very limited resources and we should be using public money for the things that really generate money and benefit the entire City, not on things that are entertaining but do not. By kidding ourselves and perpetually siphoning off so much money on a very things that do not make money, we’re actually hurting our larger business community and thus preventing the City from developing the revenues that can support a whole lot more public benefits long term.

I hope you will let me know what you think and ask questions. I know this was a long article, but this is the topic people here have always wondered about. If I had to sum up my difference of opinion with the City on ‘economic development’ this would be it and this is as short as I could make it.