Weekly Update: 08/27/2023

The rezone notice on 216th…

Last year, the Council voted for a six month (which turned into a 12 month) emergency moratorium on permitting in an area along 216th. We were not told why. But apparently the City has already prepared a Draft Ordinance with suggested zoning changes.

As part of the legal process, the City is required to send a legal note to all property owners potentially affected so that they can show up for a public hearing–which will happen on September 7th.

Apparently, that notice went out. ¹Unfortunately, the legal notice is not exactly (cough) user-friendly and it immediately raised concerns with residents that the entire area was about to be re-developed in some horrendous fashion. That is not true.

However, the changes are not nothing and as much as I support the goal, as written, this is a terrible idea. But the good news? It’s a very easy fix.

The major proposed changes are to convert areas zoned as ‘business park’ (BP) to ‘multi-family’ (MF.) One reason they are currently zoned BP is due to noise. The properties are directly under the flight path. If you live in the area (as I do) you know, the two proposed spots are among the noisiest in all of Des Moines.

Now, the FAA provides guidance to planners in cities near airports. And their thought is that, in high noise areas, to rezone them for parks, businesses, churches, etc. Places where people would only be subjected to the noise for short periods. Another possible solution is sound insulation.

So today, whether you know it or not, almost all of you living in or near the indicated area have Port Packages, ie. sound insulation systems paid for by the FAA and installed by the Port of Seattle between 1993 and 2002. Part of the deal with the FAA was that Des Moines would upgrade its building code to include similar sound reduction requirements. That way homes built afterwards would have sound insulation at least as good as (and hopefully better than) the Port Packages. The FAA wanted every home under the flight path to have sound insulation. We did this in 2007 via Ordinance 1407.

However, in 2012 the City of Des Moines rescinded the sound reduction portion of the building code. For the past ten years, homes built in Des Moines have had no such requirements.

And just to be clear, both Burien and SeaTac also updated their building codes in order to obtain Port Packages for their residents. The only difference is that they never removed it. And as you’ve probably noticed, they have built plenty of housing in the past ten years. The sound code did not stop developers from building profitably.

This Spring I proposed that the Council revisit the sound code and the Economic Development Committee agreed to do so. However, it hasn’t happened yet.

We should not rezone those areas as multi-family until we restore that requirement to our building code because it is unconscionable ask people to live in a multi-family dwelling directly under the flight path without proper sound insulation.

If we vote to rezone before fixing our building code, a developer can come in immediately and propose yet another project without sound insulation and there would be nothing the City could do to prevent it.

I strongly favour increasing our housing stock, but not without sound insulation. Fortunately, it will take only a short time to re-instate our sound code–after all it is exactly the same template used by Burien and SeaTac. And again, it is unjust to build any new housing directly under the flight path without it. The FAA and every health organisation on the planet, including King County Public Health recognise that noise is a hazard to human health–especially for children; not merely a ‘nice to have’.

Sound insulation is no panacea. But if you live directly under the flight path (as I do) you’re glad you have it. And if you already have it, surely you want your new neighbours to have those same health benefits?

Please write citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov and ask the Council to delay this rezone until we re-instate our pre-2012 sound code. Every home directly under the flight path deserves it.

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1We could easily fix these communication problems in several ways, for example, by placing a QR Code on the printed notice with a direct link to appropriate page on the City web site.

This Week

Important: Look out for traffic closures on Kent Des Moines Road all this week. From the City:

Last Week

Monday: I spent the afternoon in Burien gathering info on their downtown business development. While it was on my mind, that evening I watched their City Council Meeting, which was once again was dominated by homelessness. (Despite some notes the Council received, they did not approve an anti-camping ordinance.)

However, they did have a very interesting presentation on the state of crime in Burien by their Chief of Police, including a really good report from WASPC on Crime in Washington 2022 Annual Report. Here is just one sample providing a comparison between neighbouring cities. Highly recommended.

wednesday, Wednesday, WEDNESDAY (not Thursday) 6:00pm: Study Session concerning Water District 54. (Agenda.) My previous sparkling prose on water quality (see what I did there? 😀 )

Saturday: I attended the funeral of Carol Davis. It may seem a bit unusual to take a photo of a funeral, but Ms. Davis was no ordinary person. And as everyone said in this packed house, this was a celebration. Among other things, Ms. Davis helped found the Des Moines Food Bank.

One message I heard over and over was in the numerous tributes was this: she (somehow) found a work/life balance, which made space for some epic public service. I’m not sure she planned it that way, but I’m engaging in some mild scolding here because our city desperately needs younger people to get involved in public service–especially parents. I know it’s tough finding that balance. But decision makers are human beings, not robots. We all tend to mirror our points of view. So if you’d like the City to address your concerns, who better to bring that vision into action than you?

Study Session Recap

My kryptonite is wasting time. It’s not ADHD. I can stare at the stars for hours. But the very things many people who watch our meetings loooove are the things I cannot stand.

I walk into the room and on the table where printed copies of the Agenda are placed, there is a printed copy of a WD54 After Action Report we are about to review. Dated August 9th. Arrgghghghghgghghg! 😀

Public Comment

One business owner made a comment that the response from the insurance risk pool was poorer than last time. What he meant is that businesses have a State fund they can apply to for compensation in emergencies. And also there’s the irony that many businesses in town have not been here ten years so may not have known that the system could/should work better for them.

Part I – Cm Pennington’s Report

The Mayor then turned the meeting over to Cm Pennington who the Council had voted to act as a liaison with Water District 54 and then prepare a Water District 54 After Action Report. The following takes nothing away from his effort, which seemed to me to be sincere and very thoughtfully executed and I thank him for it. I don’t want that to get lost but it’s simply the case that I disagreed with pretty much the entire process.

Part II – Economic Impacts

There was a presentation, based on a report created by a consulting firm, which we were told would be on the City web site after the meeting. We saw one slide show on the ‘economic impacts’, and another slideshow one summarising the grants (in emergency red no less) but not the report.

So both portions of the meeting were driven by reports that were ready to go far in advance. Since this happens so frequently, it has to be accepted that one is not show the information until the meeting.

Ya know what other business doesn’t give people the information ahead of time? Show Business. That’s the one business where you want to keep the ‘ending’ a secret. You know, to keep the suspense going. And show biz is a performance, not a decision making process.

OK, here’s one page from the actual report: Economic Impact Analysis – The Concord Group. We didn’t have access to any of that.

Again, I know some of the public really like those Powerpoints. I get it. A Powerpoint looks very impressive. But a Powerpoint is not the thing you want adults making decisions from.

As I often say, a public meeting is not for ‘the public’. It’s open to the public so you can see the decisions being made out in the open. But it’s not your meeting. Whenever possible the relevant information can and should be presented ahead of time so the decision makers can prepare, ask intelligent questions and get detailed answers.

The ‘meeting’ is meant to make decisions. And a meeting where you cannot prepare and where there are no decisions to be made is not a meeting. It’s a performance.

My ‘after action comments’

• The City and/or WD should have a user-friendly blurb explaining what’s going on with the pipes and the gray water and the swimming pool smell.
• In case of any emergency, the City should have a map where someone can simply type in their address and instantly know if they are in the affected area. This is such a trivial web development task I don’t know what else to say.
• The City and/or WD could have done a better job of communicating with business owners concerning insurance. In fact, our priorities may have been backwards. We gave out small emergency grants super fast (good), but as the public commenter pointed out, at least some businesses might have benefited far more by having expedited insurance money.
• And last but not least, this was one of those times where I think to myself, “am I in the right meeting?” Because if you look at the timeline, the WD got the ‘go’ to issue a boil water advisory at 10:15PM on Saturday. And to my mind, someone should have been able to hit a button and automatically send a mandatory alert to every phone and television set in the affected area.

Because in my opinion, the people in that room were focusing on the wrong thing. Even if everyone did absolutely the right things and nothing had gone wrong, we still would have missed the majority of the population. It still would have taken at least a day to get the word out.

Now, let’s assume there was a for realz emergency. Not just coliform bacteria, but something really awful. You don’t have 24 hours, you may not have 24 minutes.

And it struck me as almost unbelievable that no one else in the room seemed to find this in any way troubling.

Closing Comments

I asked where the $175,000 was coming from. Our $9MM ARPA fund of 2021.

Cm Achziger followed up with another question: from where was that money re-allocated? In other words, here is the original allocation, which the Council voted for as a single slate on September 16, 2021. The Council insisted that time was of the essence!

But since then we’ve moved that money around so many times, it probably needs a green card. 😀 The municipal code says that the City Manager needs approval from the Council to spend more than $50,000–unless there is an official ‘state of emergency’. There is no state of emergency.

Mr. Achziger made a comment that he had some issues over ‘process’ and I would call that an understatement. It’s not just that the City Manager spent $175,000 using the term ’emergency’ as an excuse to skirt the process. It’s that the $175,000 has to come from somewhere and the City Manager didn’t bother asking about that. The City Manager has learned from this majority that he can simply put very large purchases on the credit card–and come back later with a ‘suggestion’ on how to pay for it. That’s not how budgeting is supposed to work and if you call that a ‘detail’ I have some swamp land in Florida I think you’d be interested in.

To make a very simple example, when I had a business partner, if I wanted to make a purchase over $500, I had to get his approval, including a fund from which the money would be drawn. I couldn’t say “we’ll figure out how to pay for it later.” This scenario did not happen often because, like most of you, we did not make a habit of asking for large impulse spends. But when it did, those discussions often took no more than five minutes. In fact, we had a set of unwritten rules, we called “for the good of the marriage” rules. If we anticipated that a spending decision like that might be contentious, we usually would not even go there. For the good of the marriage.

Everyone on the Council wanted an emergency business grant program. But the way the program was implemented was very far from the verbal agreement. And it was not right to spend that money without having a discussion of where the money was coming from. It was not only the right thing to do legally and ethically, it was also the right thing to do for the good of the marriage.

In my opinion, it’s just not good business to steamroll people. Even if you have the votes, you should always address your colleagues’ concerns whenever possible–and certainly you never want to unecessarily take advantage of your position. When you do that, you’re not only showing contempt for the process, but also the people you work with.

My concern is that some people will watch and all they’ll hear is “How great that our businesses got paid!”

¹L’esprit d’escalier

The thing I neglected to say about the whole Economic Impact Study thing is this: What was the point? Obviously, every person in the room understood that shutting down businesses for six days was a big deal. But as a decision maker I didn’t need to pay someone for specific numbers, because again, there was no decision to be made based on that info. Maybe WD54 enjoyed hearing it–and if so they shoulda paid for their own economic impact study, not the general taxpayers of the City of Des Moines.

Now, one could start a discussion as to the ongoing strategic relationship with WD54. But one could do the same at any time regarding all five of our special purpose districts. What could we and all our partners do to make the entire grid more efficient? As we’ve seen over the past few years there are no shortage of water, sewer and storm water issues across Des Moines. So that’s a good discussion to have. But this meeting was not a healthy way to begin such a discussion.

¹The wit of the staircase. The incredibly clever thing you think of the moment after you leave the party.