Hopefully you’ve already seen the Christmas In July post. Please send me your ideas!
Public Service Announcements
This Week
Monday: Meetings with Port people, including Comissioner Ryan Calkins on the SeatacNoise.Info Remote Works Better thing.
Wednesday: Sea-Tac Airport Roundtable StART Meeting. This is the first ‘reveal’ of the Sustainable Airport Master Plan environmental review process. Frankly, there hasn’t been much going on for almost a year, but this would be a good one to attend. Airport expansion is the biggest Des Moines issue you don’t know anything about.
Thursday: Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission. Des Moines resident Steve Edmiston is a member of the commission and will be giving a presentation. I have nothing to do with it aside from watching, but I always mention their activities because it seems to be part of my job to crush people’s hopes. See below…
Fri: South King County Housing and Homelessness Partners (SKHHP) Executive Board Meeting.
Last Week
Sunday: I gave King County Council candidate Shukri Olow a tour of the south end of Des Moines. I generally don’t give or receive endorsements. So the only reason to mention this is because I always encourage everyone to get to know everybody. You never know who will win. And I want everyone to get to know each other at least a little bit–what they care about and what I’m concerned about for Des Moines. We drove through the south end of town because frankly, whenever people visit Des Moines they usually seem to focus on other spots.
A brief word about the Metroplitan King County Council. Yes, it’s an over-simplification, but a big part of what King County does is ‘human services department’ for cities like Des Moines. They handle issues of health, housing, arts grants, etc. I get lots of impassioned calls begging the City to do something about various social problems when oftenn it’s really the County that has, not only the authority, but just as importantly the infrastructure already in place. And I mention that for two reasons:
- Because when you vote, candidates promise all sorts of stuff. So when you give some thought not to what they aspire to, but to what they actually have the authority to do for you and Des Moines.
- And also because there is so much attention now on the City using ARPA money for various purposes. So many great ideas that would be hard for Des Moines, but easy for King County.
Monday: I spoke with State Senator Karen Keiser about our Remote Works Better program. Yeah, not super excited. 😀 It’s interesting how different the reactions have been.
Wednesday: I attended the Reach Out Des Moines meeting. As usual, they discussed how to get more activities for kids in Pacific Ridge. The goal has been crime reduction and school attendance and they have been remarkably successful on both counts. Again, not to over-simplify, but accomplishing both goals often comes down to giving teens things to do. It’s cheap. It works. And we should do more of it throughout Des Moines.
Along those lines, there’s been talk of a building a community center in Des Moines for a long time. Everyone acknowledges the needs in Pacific Ridge. But there is also a very longstanding desire to have a similar activity center in the South end of town. I don’t want to take anything away from the great work happening in Pacific Ridge. But what I dearly want to see is a proper survey of Des Moines–neighbourhood-level detail to assess where we stand throughout the City.
Thursday: I met with Noemie Maxwell an activist working to save North SeaTac Park from development by the Port Of Seattle. She’s also thinking about how we could have a more regional approach to tree cover.
All the airport communities really are defined by Sea-Tac Airport. If it weren’t for that property, it’s likely that most of our cities would have formed some sort of a single ‘Highline’ government decades ago. From the air there is an obvious outline of one big ‘city’ and ‘forest’. Sea-Tac Airport is like that giant foot that came down in Monty Python sketches and artificially divided the entire region. It would be much more efficient if we could somehow plan regionally for the forest and creek systems.
Oh, you want answers?
The paradox of City Councilmember is that the gig allows you to really understand what is needed at the street level. On the other hand, you’re often not in a position to actually do much. You have to (sigh) you know, ‘convince people’.
Dumb engineer guys like me want to be able to say to residents, “Look, here’s what’s really going on. Here’s why it hasn’t been solved. Here’s what we need to do (finally) to get there.” I believe the current term is ‘mansplaining’? People really love that. 😀
You also want to be able to question every program the City engages in, not just at the City level but also regionally. But this is not ‘academia’ where people like me are used to giving each other routine grillings. So if you do that, you’re instantly hurting a lot of hard working people’s feelings. They themselves would be the first to acknowledge that a lot of these programs are not the greatest but they’re making the best of the situation. So you feel like a jerk pointing out that that this is, ya know, public money.
At the end of the day you run the risk of seeming heartless to everybody. Never underestimate how much the desire to look like government is trying drives so much bad policy and bad spending. If you’re me, this cocktail of easy and ineffective can have you constantly checking the clock to see if it’s not too early in the day for that first drink.
Two practical Notes from the week…
- I sincerely support what SKHHP is trying to do. But at the end of the day, the main reason we haven’t built ‘affordable housing’ in Des Moines is not because of any mysterious forces of nature. It’s because voters told us what they wanted and government has responded. If the people who actually vote really, really wanted more places for people to live? We’d have had them decades ago. Groups like SKHHP exist because the term ‘affordable housing’ is just one of a growing list of items that Cities now spend money on in order to try to secretly wish problems away. It won’t.
- I fully support the CACC. 1But it won’t help Des Moines at all. Again, the reason there isn’t a second airport in the area is because nobody else wants a second airport. But governments keep putting energy into this rather than things that would help Des Moines because, again, it’s just easier.
The fact is, we spend a ton of energy and/or money on policy stuff like this that is at best questionable, but woe unto you for saying so. (Talk to me about the squillions we’ve wasted on salmon recovery. See? Now you think I’m a 4salmon hater, too right? 😀 )
Poking the bear…
I often discuss thorny issues here, mainly because no one else does. You cannot expect the public to engage on the issues unless they are aware of the issues. The City communicates its successes, generally not the problems. Some people perceive these criticisms as ‘poking the bear’, but that’s really not the point. The real point is that we haven’t had a decent argument in Des Moines for a very long time.
Where are the town halls?
Almost every day now, I also talk with residents who demand, “Where are the Town Halls!?!” And I’m like, “3Dude, we did have town halls back in the day. Ya know why we don’t have town halls now? Because people screamed a lot!”
You don’t know that because, more than half of you only moved here within the past decade. You have no idea how much things have changed. The City gradually abandoned all sorts of public engagement for a very practical reason: Having real discussions means people disagree.
See you think there’s a lack of ‘public engagement’, but I know that it’s really a lack of basic accountability. (I told you there would be man-splaining.) The administration thinks it’s perfectly fine to treat both of us as they do. And why shouldn’t they? Who is out there telling them otherwise? (I’m not being rhetorical. Councilmembers get lots of letters. But the number demanding better public engagement is exactly the same as the number demanding equal treatment for all Councilmembers. 😀 )
I ‘poke the bear’, not to be prickly, but because I have the right to ask any damned thing I want in order to serve you. I don’t work for the administration. I work for you. I know who works for who. The administration may not. My colleagues may not. But that’s not my fault. It’s their fault for trying to game the system. And it’s also yours if you don’t speak up in support of Councilmembers who poke the bear. (See what I did there? 😀 )
Seriously, though: you want town halls? As soon as you insist on a government that understands who works for whom, trust me, you’ll get your town halls. (And progress on airport issues, housing and all that stuff we spend money on as opposed to actually doing something.)
1People in other areas see what the airport has done to our area and they’re like, “Yeah you can keep that.” The reasons are exactly the same as in 1989 when we had a similar commission. And whenever this conversation comes up I feel like it’s my duty to mention that, even if ‘they’ built a second airport, doesn’t matter what kind or where it’s located it will never reduce the operations at Sea-Tac Airport. Ever. ever. ever. ever ever. I could write ‘ever’ 150 times and you still would not believe me. 😀 Partly because people always have hope, right? But also for the same reason that most people believe that adding another lane to a highway reduces traffic congestion (It does not.)
You would think building a second airport would be like opening a second hamburger joint across the street–half the business would go there. Nope. If you build a second airport all that happens is that you get more hamburgers… er… planes at the new airport. It does nothing to reduce traffic at the first airport. Really. Truly. And I keep hammering away at that, one voter at a time, because so long as people have this misguided hope that a second airport will reduce traffic, we can never deal properly with Sea-Tac.
2OK, except Chinook and Coho. Unless human beings pack up and leave Des Moines, they’re probably screwed.
3Artistic license. I really don’t address constituents as ‘Dude’ all that much.
4I have a deep and, some would say, almost spiritual connection with fish. The Incredible Mr. Limpet is a true classic of film, OK?