Weekly Update 08/16/2026

Some bits of business…

About The Cover: Welcome, Officer Junior!

A lot of this article is going to be unpleasant so why not start with something nice? 😀  Community Engagement Officer Uluao ‘Junior’ Uaumave is taking over for Tonya Seaberry, which is a bit like trying to follow Walter Cronkite at the news desk–tough act to follow. But I met with Junior a few weeks ago and, unprompted, he said basically everything I hoped he would say about where we need to go. I mentioned my efforts to support Reach Out Des Moines several years ago and they proved that human interventions–simple things like after-school activities, are important to crime-reduction and the overall success of our community. Junior radiates warmth and I really look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

I made a comment that his email address should be ‘junior’. But his real contact info is…

uaumavae@desmoineswa.gov 206-966-2928

Last chance: SAMP Comment Period closing!

The Sustainable Airport Master Plan state comment period closes this Thursday. Please comment! If you plan on being in Des Moines for the long term, this is one of those huge deals that may not seem like a huge deal because there’s no immediate ‘threat’. If you need some ideas on what/how?  SAMP Comment Instructions and Ideas

City Manager Stuff

City Manager Reports!  August, 14 2026

The highlight for moi is a list of specific improvements to bus service starting at the end of this month. I serve on the Regional Transit Advisory Committee and some of these improvements took a lot of ‘robust discussion’. 😀

• Route 156 – Kent Des Moines Station to Southcenter: More trips will be offered every day of the week, with connections to Link light rail at the new Kent Des Moines Station and a more direct route through McMicken Heights.

• Route 164 – Kent Des Moines Station to Green River College: This new frequent route will replace part of Route 165 and provide more trips every day of the week, connecting riders with Link at Kent Des Moines Station.

• Route 166 – Kent Des Moines Station to Burien Transit Center: This new peak-frequent route will travel through Des Moines and Normandy Park, replacing part of Route 165 and providing additional daily trips and connections to Link.

• RapidRide A Line – Federal Way Downtown Station to Tukwila International Boulevard Station: The A Line will connect with Link light rail at the new Federal Way Downtown and Kent Des Moines stations while continuing to serve Angle Lake, SeaTac/Airport and Tukwila International Boulevard stations.

This Week

Tuesday

Burien/Des Moines Joint Airport Committee. Senator Tina Orwall will be a guest and is likely to talk about her ideas on state funding for airport issues in the next legislative session. There is no one solution. First of all, there will be no quick fix. No ‘second airport’. It will take ongoing work–the kind no one has put in for 15 years. The Three Cities are trying to obtain local relief (via the Port of Seattle), Senator Orwall can be a big help on Port Packages and air quality research at the State level.

Wednesday

Regional Transit Committee Advisory Committee We had a big presentation at Thursday’s meeting on local improvements. This upcoming meeting continues the ‘robust discussion’ over how to pay for it.

Last Week

Tuesday

Not one, but two Port of Seattle Commission meetings. The afternoon meeting was essentially another listening session on the SAMP. But the morning session was the more impactful. It concerned yet another multi-billion dollar expansion of the airport that is is not part of the SAMP. Coverage at STNI.

I also attended the City of SeaTac’s City Council meeting and it was stunning to me to find that they too, even with their agreement with the Port, are struggling financially. The benefits of the airport have been oversold for far too long.

Wednesday

Flood Control District Advisory Committee. I talked about this a bit at the meeting. The FCD not only funds traditional river flood control, it also funds many projects that concern Des Moines–mostly due to the State’s ongoing interest in salmon-recovery. That includes WRIA-9 (shorelines, Des Moines Creek, etc.) and urban flooding, which we have a ton of in Des Moines (eg. McSorley Creek, Barnes Creek, etc.) wetlands run all the way through the mid-section of the city. The FCD is running a huge deficit, putting funding that Des Moines cares about at risk.

Thursday

City Council Meeting As I wrote last week “This is exactly the kind of load balancing crap I detest.” And this meeting is why. (recap below.)

August 13, 2026 City Council Meeting Recap

August 13, 2026 City Council Agenda Packet

Long meeting, short: We went four hours. But still avoided discussion on several consent items that merited discussion. We made a hash of two major decisions, but still had to omit two others for time, and even then remove the usual end of business sections. We turned down a major grant from the state for absolutely no good reason in a move that will cost residents more money in the future. It was what happens when you don’t have committees to educate the Council, waste the precious time you do have on frivolous meetings and then try to cram three meetings worth of material into one.

City Presentations

There were several big presentations: KCLS, Metro Bus Service, Police Annual Crime In Washington State Report. All three are worth watching, but the word count is already high so just a few lines on the Police report.

Crime is going down pretty much everywhere, including Des Moines, and in most of the categories that get major press: particularly violent crimes and auto theft. It is ridiculous to try to render crime as ‘one number’ but that decrease here was -18.7%.

No way can you discuss a 1,000 page report on ‘crime’, let alone what it means for Des Moines in a 20 minute overview! It trivialises the entire subject, which we know is always number one with residents.

Specifically, I wish we could talk more about victims by gender and relationship. It was impossible to see, but most of these issues with women and children are not ‘stranger danger’. More and more, the solutions–which I know Junior can help a lot with, will involve pro-active interventions.

Our force is at its lowest real-world staffing level in a long time. Response times still seem to be very good for the most serious calls for service (though we haven’t had good stats on that in two years.) And yet ‘crime’ is down. When voters rejected as public safety property tax they were not convinced that if they didn’t spend more on staffing the sky would fall. They were proven right. On the other hand both hiring and retention are getting tougher.

In a ‘normal’ corporate setting management is praised for ‘doing more with less’. But how does that square with such a high stress job as policing? You want officers that persist and right now, people are not staying in the field, or at one place, for an entire career–as they used to do. Police chiefs can talk all they like about the low officer/resident percentage in WA. But to improve that situation, someone will have to make a better case–hopefully before the next inevitable uptick.

Consent Agenda

As I said, there were several items that merited debate. Ironically, I did not pull them because this was such a lengthy agenda and I wanted to be a ‘nice guy’. I’ve been trying to take the whole ‘team-building meeting’ thing seriously. 🙂 Of note:

Item 3 — WSDOT Signal Maintenance Agreement: Approve an agreement with WSDOT for maintenance of traffic signals throughout the City. Traffic management deserves an entire Study Session. It is noteworthy because among other things 223rd Street (see below) will require new lighting.

Item 6 — Stormwater Management Planning: Hire Parametrix for engineering support for the City’s Stormwater Management Action Plan, for $93,826.40. This gets really into the weeds, but the stormwater plan we’re working on this year is the Des Moines Creek Basin Plan–a project originally created with the Port of Seattle and WSDOT during the Third Runway. Both agencies backed away from funding a looooong time ago and this should have been added to the City’s list of airport mitigations.

Item 7 — Redondo Parking Lot: Award the parking lot resurfacing and striping contract to AA Asphalting for $105,560.06, plus $9,439.94 for contingencies. This also merited discussion, only because the parking lot continues to be a source of headaches for residents.

Item 8 — Barnes Creek Trail / PSE: Approve an agreement with Puget Sound Energy related to construction of the Barnes Creek Trail and authorize the City Manager to sign it. Again, super-wonky, but this was not routine. I’m seeing possible ‘issues’ similar to the 24th Ave. problems. This is a reason to have a Transportation Committee. No way should we be approving things like this without educating the Council on how these projects work.

Public Hearing

Carters Dock Development Agreement. The company is buying both Salty’s and the ‘Surf Shack’ across the street. As I said from the dais, the two projects are inextricable. Think of them like a horizontal version of the Des Moines Theater. As with the Theater, the real money is in the housing units; doubtful that the restaurant pencils out on its own. (By the way, these are Townhomes, ie. ownership, not apartments.)

What the Council voted on, which was not made clear was two things:

• An allowance for five more parking spaces along Redondo Way
• Turning over further consideration to a Hearing Examiner

The developer brought some very rudimentary drawings, which I found to be a distraction. The Council was not considering any of those design issues. In fact, we were voting to hand off control of that stuff.

My colleagues made comments that ‘there will be many other chances for the public to weigh in!’ No there won’t. There will be exactly one. Before the Hearings Examiner. Saying otherwise was disingenuous.

The developer said that doing better renderings was expensive. This is 2026. One of the most profitable movies of 2026 (Backrooms) was done by an almost teenager who learned how to do 3-D illustration on an old laptop. When will all us geezers stop listening to ‘magical tech’ excuses. I’d say that everyone under 30 cannot believe we fall for that crap, but that would imply that anyone under 30 watches our meetings. 😀

On the other hand, there’s really no point because, again, we weren’t deciding on the design. Get it? We were actually deciding on some parking spaces and an administrative hand-off. So all this kerfuffle just got people needlessly worked up and gave the Council a chance to dismiss their very reasonable concerns.

Having a good restaurant there could be a great thing for the area. Having good townhomes will be helpful, too. But if the goal was to provide confidence to stakeholders on this particular proposal? Not great.

New Business

Item 1 — Staff revisited the alternatives for 223rd Street. Back in April, in a rare move, the City Council chose to reject a $580,000 state grant to perform planning work on 223rd–specifically water quality improvement for the entire north end of downtown. Woo hoo! Oddly, the City presented three options for developing the street–and none of them mentioned that grant!

What bugged me was that only Option #3, supposedly the ‘Cadillac’ option was the only one that could accommodate the grant. It was also the least expensive for tax payers.

The history on the project is that, originally, we had a proposal for Marina Redevelopment which had all sorts of extravagant ideas, including a functional creek going down 223rd Street! That wasn’t the Cadillac version. It was the Starship Enterprise version.

In 2024, the Council saw a less extravagant version, but still including ‘bioswales’. That came in at about $20,000,000. Call that the Cadillac version.

Then in April of this year, we got a slightly scaled down version at $13M call that the Cimarron version 😀

The ‘Option 3’ version the Council saw Thursday was neither of those. It was simply the normal type of project specified in our own Comp Plan. It’s called a complete street. It’s not called a fancy-pants street. It does what it says on the tin:  a complete street.

Really look at that. Does that look like something fancy-pants? Of course not. It’s just a normal street for 2026 that protects the future. That’s why it’s in our Comp Plan.

For a working model? 216th Street is a complete street: safe lighting, undergrounded utilities, bike lanes, some low-key foliage. According to our own Council’s stated goals, that is how every major improvement moving forward is supposed to go. A complete street is a normal street. The other two options: doing nothing and doing an incomplete street were what we’ve been doing in reality. For example: with all its heartaches and delays, the recent 24th Ave is not a complete street. We punted on undergrounding.

Yes, it’s $4.2 million dollars. Gee willikers, Becky! That’s what the North Hill street improvements will cost. That’s what the 240th St. improvements cost. That’s what a normal street costs these days and nobody stresses about those. Why? Because it’s grant money, not City money. All it takes is patience and persistence in finding those grants.

If we want to make Des Moines ‘The premier waterfront destination in the known universe…’ we have to at least do normal–at least in our downtown.

Second, and this gets back to the reason to have committees (or not.) There was this absolute whopper of a fib that accepting this grant would somehow slow down progress on other projects. That it would somehow obligate staff to drop what they’re working on now in order to focus on 223rd.

This betrays either a) bad faith or b) a lack of understanding of what streets cost and/or c) a real lack of understanding as to how engineering projects are sequenced. Whether you use local money or not, they still require many layers of grant funding–all of which take time. It is the funding that determines the sequencing as much, if not more than when the Council ‘decides’ to do things.

Debt = Speed

In fact, the only way you can really control when projects occur? When it’s 100% your money. Which has literally never happened since I’ve lived here. The only reason we were able to do the Marina Steps (such as it is) this year was because we borrowed money–essentially making taxpayers foot the bill. So long as you can be patient and work towards grant funding, you can have your cake and eat it too: complete street, and no burden for local taxpayers.

Whoever set up those slides did the public a great disservice. All three options were false choices designed to get the Council to refuse really good free money. It betrayed a continuing lack of sophistication by the Council when it comes to money. People were literally voting against their stated values and the City’s interest. Both Options #1 and #2 are (literally) more expensive and less environmentally good than Option #3. Why? Because sooner or later, we will have to redo 223rd. (Have you walked there recently?) And by avoiding this grant, it will likely be another incomplete street, it will definitely be more expensive in the long run, and it will not have the proper water purification to protect the Sound. None of those are part of the Council’s recently stated strategic goals.