Weekly Update 08/24/2025

Some bits of business…

City Manager Stuff

City Manager Report – August 22, 2025

Despite getting off to a slow start, the Marina dock replacement is on schedule! You can watch videos of progress in action here: https://www.youtube.com/@CityofDesMoinesMarina

There is also a new Community Survey. Yes, we did a parks survey and a communications survey just a couple of years ago, but well… new management, right? 😀 This one also asks for your ideas on a broad range of stuff like event planning and programs for kids and seniors and it”s all great. 🙂

And… since you can never take too many surveys, this is my personal fave, this concerning some big improvements at the Beach Park. Take the Beach Park survey!

The 24th Ave Road Project is finally moving along! Repaving began on Monday July 21st. There have been issues with traffic and traffic lights. Probably best to avoid if possible. 🙂

SR-509 Tolling and free Good To Go stickers

Here is a detailed blog post on how SR-509 and tolling will work. There is also an offer to get a free Good To Go sticker. (Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement of tolling. -I- didn’t support it. Remember that! 😀 But it’s happening. And if you don’t already have a sticker, you should at least get a freebie in case you need to use the tolled section. 🙂 )

Cut to the chase? I got a $15 FlexPass for free! You can too!

https://wsdotblog.blogspot.com/2025/08/tolling-begins-on-sr-509-expressway.html

https://engage.wsdot.wa.gov/sr-509-expressway-opening/

Metro Survey

As Link light rail gets ready to open here (maybe by end of 2025!) Metro invites you to learn more and take this survey by August 31.

Restaurants!

There have been more restaurant changes in town. So this is a good time to remind you of the local restaurant guide TakeOutDM.Com or TakeOutDesMoines.Com. There is a sign-up form which emails signees when various establishments are offering specials! If you are a new restaurant owner, you should also let them know when you are having said specials so they can spread the woid.

Last Week/This Week

It’s been a quiet week in Lake W… er.. 😀

We’ve had a mostly ‘meeting-free’ August. But that does not mean nothing is going on, far from it. These meeting deserts seem fun, but go against my long-standing feeling that meeting schedules should be load-balanced – ie. map out the Council calendar more evenly.

Given the various staff cuts we had to make, the Council agreed to give the City Manager free reign to reduce/re-organise committees and generally try to give staff a break. However, in my opinion we have over-corrected. This ‘break’, coupled with the lack of standing committees, means that the next few meetings, and into budget season, will likely be as bad or even more jam-packed than in previous years in terms of passing legislation without adequate consideration. For example, I think it would be better for the community to have a Finance Committee meeting regularly to discuss our budget in more detail than giving the new CAB one presentation from the Finance Director.

Masonic Home

Last week I attended the City’s Masonic Home demolition open house at the Beach Park. There were relatively few people there, certainly not most of the people I know are deeply concerned. There were some good questions, but the mood seemed more like one of the lattermost of the Five Stages of Grief than anything else. Apparently the Waterland Blog recorded it but has not published the video as of yet.

The one comment I keep hearing, which I always find offensive is that the current City and Council are blameless.  It’s the old “Wasn’t on my watch!” nonsense that every government or management uses to avoid any accountability, for anything, ever. Said it before, say it again: when you accept leadership, it doesn’t matter who started whatever, or whenever, if something happens on your watch, it’s your fault. That’s what “the buck stops here” means. It’s my fault. It’s my colleagues’ fault. It’s the City’s fault. The future won’t care about names. They’ll blame all of us for being so stupid as to let something this meaningful slip away in such a friction-free manner. And rightly so.

The process of courting development was never transparent. Going back many years the City had an obvious intent. And without ratting anyone out in particular, I can share one clear example. Since taking office, I’ve had the honour of meeting all our federal electeds at least once – and many on multiple occasions. I have found all of them to be straightforward. If you mention ‘Des Moines’, they and their staff all mention ‘the Marina’. But if you ask about ‘the Masonic Home’? To a person, they and their staff have all said, “The what home?” We lobby like crazy every year for ‘Marina’ stuff. But the Masonic Home, the one project that always needed and deserved federal funding? Never on the radar.  Contrast that with the City of SeaTac, which, every year lobbies at the federal level for projects they care about — like North SeaTac Park. You can tell what any city actually cares about by looking at what they lobby for and how they do it. Full stop.

What slays me is that no one seems to notice that the City Council controls zoning. Over the past two years we’ve been going through a lengthy and extremely labour-intensive update to our Comprehensive Plan. That building is zoned ‘IC’. People who care should have looked that up a very long time ago. My guess is that almost no one, residents, electeds or developers think that stuff actually matters–at least not here. Perhaps there is an implicit notion that the moment someone buys a property of that magnitude they will be able to do basically whatever they want with it. What that tells me is that none of us understand or take seriously the City Council’s role in planning. But you or I cannot buy property like that. Individual homeowners have to respect a rigorous set of guidelines for what we can and cannot do with our small pieces of property. We certainly can’t buy a parcel under any assumption that we can change its use case. But the fact that no one has mentioned the future use of that space, based on our Comprehensive Plan, is another clear tell.

I could be totally wrong of course. But I don’t think it matters much all that much that the developer has not revealed their plans. Do you really think they would have bought the place and assiduously avoided public engagement unless they felt sanguine that, whatever zoning changes they requested would be okeedokee?

By not having a firm plan, since the first discussions 15 years ago, the City and the Council have been telling developers that it’s open season at Marine View Drive and 240th.

I may not find the developer particularly user-friendly, but they have done nothing wrong as far as the Council can tell at this point. What they are doing is taking advantage of a city with a chronic history of strategically avoiding planning. Plausible deniability for all concerned is just a bonus.

Marina Steps

Speaking of planning, at the September 4 meeting, the Council will decide whether to move ahead with the Marina Steps project. It is being described by the City as the final ‘go/no go’ decision point. We are $900,000 short, even with the bond money, numerous attempts at downsizing (including a $100,000 value engineering fee)  and taking money from other funds. The only path forward would be to take more money from other projects in future years, such as necessary repairs to the police station.

I suppose we could offset that $900,000 by doing what we always do: go to Olympia and beg for grants and then proclaim ‘success!’ if we succeed. Maybe it would work, maybe not.

But to my mind, constantly having to rely on grants to perform necessary functions is another example of the lack of planning that has plagued this city since I’ve lived here – essentially dealing with the emergency du jour and leaving the future to fend for itself. It is a key reason we have been so chronically strapped and why I pushed so strongly to reinstate a planning commission and to develop some form of financial analysis.

We are going ahead with both those ideas, but notably not until after this decision point. And the Masonic Home. And Des Moines Creek West. And. And. And…

Also, as you read above, the City is conducting a community survey (which you should take).

We should wait until all those processes are complete and then figure out what the true potential of the Marina Steps project is, how the community truly feels, and how to prioritize it properly for the long term.

The thing I always keep coming back to is that when the Marina opened in 1970 it began making money on day one. It didn’t have to make a financial case or justify itself in any other way. It’s paid for itself many times over and everything else we now take for granted there was just the gravy.

The City has just committed several million dollars to renovate the Redondo fishing pier, an existing structure that had failed. Great. That is a project with unquantifiable benefits – which is OK because nobody expects it to pay for itself or be transformative. It doesn’t have to justify itself because what it did was enough. Frankly, it has not been particularly transformative and if it continues not to be, no one will mind. It’s all gravy because that was not its purpose.

No benefits from the Marina Steps project can be quantified. But that is a very different situation. From day one the Steps project was explicitly sold to be transformative. To leverage the downtown area. To create growth for the community in a way perhaps almost as significant as the Marina itself. That is what the City, and several of my past and present colleagues have said. As such, it should be subject to a much higher standard of scrutiny regarding that potential across all domains – especially financial returns.

In contrast, there is no shortage of necessary projects at the Marina and these are eligible under the ordinance – projects that will require tens of millions of dollars to complete, including dock renovations and seawall (which are not optional) and boat storage which was recommended 25 years ago because it would be an instant cash generator. And you don’t need to be a CPA to know that the one thing this City needs is cash.

Those truly necessary projects, projects with clear long-term financial benefits, will only become more expensive over time. So, the best time to do them is now. If that is possible, acting now would save the City millions in borrowing, far more money than we could ever hope to generate from a Marina Steps. Boring, but true.

You can already see some of the bones of the original Marina Redevelopment planning. If you look at the new park above the Beach Park, that is close to what was proposed over a decade ago. The upcoming Beach Park renovations have also been on the board for over a decade. But the Marina Steps, and everything from the center of the Marina south is nothing like what was proposed starting in 2017. For whatever reason, we should admit how far the project has drifted and stop saying that getting anything is better than nothing. The sunk cost fallacy is a fallacy. Spending more money on the project you did not plan for just because you’ve already spent a ton does not make the project any better.

This is supposed to be the marquee project for our waterfront. It must be the Pearl of Great Price. To move forward with anything else would be to do what mothers everywhere tell you, “don’t settle.”

To be clear: I have always supported connectivity between the Marina floor and 223rd. And there are many really great ideas we can get to if we can be patient enough to wait for the right project and the right funding.

I am particularly concerned that the City has not provided a ‘Plan B’ and I have urged the City to have that ready to go in the meeting packet.

Thus far, we have used the bond money productively for docks and for Redondo and the Flag Triangle. We can quibble on some details, but those are all projects people can take pride in. Given our financial position and how many other needs the City has, even the strongest supporters of the Steps should take those wins and not feel bad. Nobody bats 1,000.

We should make every attempt to repurpose the remainder of the bond money towards other eligible projects and make them a net plus over time. Boring, but financially responsible. When the City is stronger, we will then build the project that residents and business truly deserve.

Don’t settle.