Weekly Update: 08/13/2023

Some bits of news…

SR-509 Update…

There has been and will continue to be some significant work on SR-509, including the 216th bridge over I-5. Here is an update from WSDOT.

Responsiveness

As we enter into ‘campaign season’ my current turnaround on non-urgent communications is slow. You will find it about 800% faster if you call me on (shock!) this device known as a telephone (206) 878-0578 or (shock!) an email. And one other thing. It would take a lot for me to ghost someone. I mean a lot. If you aren’t hearing from me promptly it’s either because you’re trying to text me (which I cannot do very well) or because I’ve reached that age where I can no longer work eighteen hours a day to stay current with email–which used to be my one and only *superpower.

This Week

Wednesday 5:00pm: Citizens Advisory Committee

Thursday 6:00pm: City Council Study Session (Agenda) There is one item on the agenda. Water District 54.

Both meetings at City Hall. If you can’t make it in person, look for them on Youtube.

Last Week

Monday: King County Public Health. Talking about what we can do to move the needle on this study from 2019/2020, which concerns the health impacts of aviation on our health. This fifteen minute section of a much longer set of presentations is by Dr. Kris Johnson and gives an excellent overview of what this means for Des Moines.

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda) The main item was a review of their Q2 budget. The Port will announce that aviation revenues are down slightly. But that is not a big boo hoo because overall below the line income is actually about 10% above budget. And some of the aviation revenue will likely be recovered by year end through various accounting dealios.

There was also be a post-mortem for the whole ‘second airport’ discussion known as the CACC and I would encourage people interested in airport impacts to watch because this was pretty much the most straightforward discussion of the issue I’ve seen to date.

Saturday: Cambodian Festival at Saltwater State Park. The music and food were super fun and, these are, hands down the best attended community events in Des Moines–yes, even including the firew… er… ‘drone show’. 😀

And I mention that because Saltwater State Park is an excellent place to hold events. 🙂

It’s in the water…

At that Cambodian Culture Festival, I not only got a totally awesome scarf 🙂 I also got a chance to catch up with the Friends of Saltwater State Park, which is doing an amazing job of water quality monitoring in McSorley Creek. I mention their work a lot because we depend on citizen scientists for some pretty important stuff like this:

And that reminded me to remind you that we cannot take any of our three inter-related water grids for granted.

First of all, as I say over and over, everything around here comes back to the airport. So my group SeaTacNoise.Info does do quite a bit of research on water quality in the area.  And that is because water quality around the entire perimeter of the airport was (and remains) an issue of concern.

A reminder that most of the area used to be unincorporated King County, so residents decided to establish many independent special purpose districts. Over time, though, we’ve consolidated into this:

Kinda like Des Moines gradually annexed a bunch of dinky areas into one city, Highline Water District has become the water company for most of Des Moines –cobbled together over time from a number of other small SPDs. WD54 remained independent.

One piece at a time…

One other thing. If you look at a detailed map of any grid (storm, sewer, water, phone) you would see that it has (mostly) been built out like that Johnny Cash song, One Piece At A Time–especially phone and internet. Until recently, we tended to lay down grid (any grid) not according to some long range ‘regional plan’ but on an ad hoc basis to accommodate the immediate need of whatever development was being built at the time. If you wonder why you can’t get high speed Internet, but the guy right across the street can?  Why the guy right next to you is on septic and you’re not? That’s the reason. Maybe that sounds like a criticism, but not so. It’s just what we did/do, largely because the cost of infrastructure is so amazingly expensive. However, over time, this approach has lead to very complicated grid maps.

Everything is fine. But…

Now, it’s extremely hard to strike the right ‘tone’ when discussing infrastructure. You don’t want to freak people out. But you also want to make it clear when there are challenges. We take for granted that the water comes out of the tap, the lights turn on, without considering that this stuff can be life-or-death and it costs an absolute fortune and it wears out.

WD54 is not the only place in Des Moines to have had water quality issues in recent years. We have long term challenges throughout Des Moines on all three inter-related and aging grids: water, sewer and storm drains. And it’s just a fact that even in the 3.5 years I’ve been on the Council we’ve had concerns (and downright emergencies) on all three:

• WD54 Boil Water Notice after line break
• Highline Water District PFAS contamination from airport run-off.
• Midway Sewer over-spill (multiple) leads to beach closures–first detected by the Friends of Saltwater State Park.
• Woodmont landslide (storm water.)

That’s a certain amount of activity for services one is supposed to take for granted.

Cost sensitivity…

Not to rehash history, but a couple of years ago, I got voted down on the Environment Committee over a choice we had to make on raising storm water rates. The choice came down to a few dollars a month. I wanted the higher rate and lost. As much as I understand my colleagues’ desire to keep rates low, Low, LOW! that money pushed our replacement program back three years. You’re betting that something won’t break.

My point here–there is a point–is that every grid manager can be rightfully proud of their work to keep life moving every day of the week. But… these kinds of accidents can (and do) happen to every provider.

What I find slightly disconcerting is that so much of this discussion has focused on the loss of commercial activity. That matters; for sure. But if you take nothing else away from everything I write, it’s that I would like us to think about what lessons there are to be learned across every grid and not continue to think about this one incident at a time.

Emergency Notification

We’ve all been hearing about the devastation in Maui. And it has me thinking (again) about the importance of communication. According to multiple sources, for whatever reason, emergency sirens did not sound. You can’t attribute any specific harm to that failure, of course. But it certainly did not help.

Currently, despite our City’s focus on Emergency Management, neither the City or any of our SPDs have the ability to instantly reach members of the community. Any emergency contact is voluntary, through the County’s Code Red program (which you should sign up for now.)

However, consider this: if a child or senior citizen goes missing, the police can issue an Amber or Silver Alert. Your phone or TV is gonna get that alert whether you sign up for it or not. Someone decided that the life of a child or senior matters that much.

Now, God forbid, there is a for realz contamination of any portion of our water system. Or any other potential harm where people need to be contacted immediately. As it stands today, you would only get an alert if you had voluntarily signed up for a program like Code Red.

Do you really want your family’s safety to depend on whether you remembered to sign up for an alert system? Or to put it more bluntly, why is it considered normal to have a true emergency alert system for one life, but make that protection optional when it comes to thousands of lives?

In short, we should do whatever we can at the municipal level to provide a mandatory alert system in the case of public health emergencies. And if State legislation is required, we should make passing such a law a top priority for our Legislative Agenda in 2024.

We shoulda done it in 2013–after the last Boil Water Notice. I said so at the time and in 2021. Frankly, I think we’ve become somewhat complacent even as to ‘e.Coli’. It’s bad for business. It’s a pain. But apparently it’s just not worth an Amber Alert. However, given the challenges and complexity and expense of our various grids, one of these days, my guess is that it will be.