Public Service Announcements
This Week
Monday: Destination Des Moines Meeting.
Tuesday: South County Transportation Board Meeting (SCATBD) There will be an update on all regional transportation. I’d like to say that there are bus route improvements coming to DM, but probably not.
Tuesday: King County Clean Water Workshop. This is a venue for regional stakeholders to discuss system-wide challenges. Many cities are experiencing the same kinds of challenges we’ve had here with Midway Sewer and older systems that need updates.
Tuesday: Meeting with Tina Orwall and FAA “regarding the health impacts of aviation and how the knowledge of these impacts is influencing FAA actions and policies”
Wednesday: 5:00PM. Southside Seattle Chamber Of Commerce Candidates Night. I’m not sure it will be live-streamed, but a video will be available. This is likely one of the only chances you’ll be able to see all the candidates speak publicly (how sad is that, right?)
Friday: South King County Housing and Homelessness Partnership Executive Board Meeting (Agenda)
Saturday: Farmers Market. Last Saturday of the year! I’ll be there wandering around. (Actually, I’m usually skulking somewhere at the Marina. 😀 )
Last Week
Wednesday: Reach Out Des Moines. The main topic was the growing realisation that schools and medical systems are planning on living with the pandemic for the entire school year. Here is a plug for one of the great groups they sponsor Phenomenal She –which provides activities and mentoring for young women of colour.
Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) (Video)
- There was an update on the Parks and Rec Master Plan which was helpful for me in that the consultant indicated that 2020 Census Data would be used in the analysis. As you know, there is an absence of parks in the south end of town. A lot of grant money is based on ‘unmet need’ and I’d like to get a much better assessment of who we are as a City neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
- We also voted on HB1220–the new law insisting that we develop zoning to allow for homeless shelters and develop a more aggressive approach towards Affordable Housing and Emergency Shelters.Nobody cares more about property values and public safety than me. The whole reason I started going to City Council meetings twelve years ago was to defend my neighbourhood. But zoning is designed to make it as tough as hell to provide any sort of housing below ‘full market rate single family’. It basically paints every low income person with the same brush. If we want people to have shelter and realistically have a chance to get back on their feet we can’t just push it off into some corner of town. The ordinance is very restrictive on the where but leaves the management piece completely vague. That seems backwards to me. The important thing is to make sure that these buildings are accountable.If you watched the meeting, the issue is deeply personal for me. I am very happy to say that the battered women’s shelter (they don’t call it that any more, of course) my wife helped found is still in business to this day. It worked because it was convenient for clients and their children and did not make them feel like pariahs in the community.
- But the highlight of the show, of course, was where we spent our $9M of ARPA Stimulus Funds. Councilmember Buxton described it as ‘incredible’ and we agree on that, for sure. 😀 Here is the City’s Press Release. I’ll be addressing the in a separate post. But for now I want to mention but one item on that Press Release to give you a sense of my feelings about the whole thing:
- There is not $1,000,000 new money for parks. That money is to make up for a $934,000 loss in income due to COVID-19.
- There is actually only $66,000 in new spending–for a new Parks employee. And that is for one year.
- That new hire is categorized under “Revenue Loss”. And when I asked the City Manager how he could justified new spending as lost revenue loss, he said “It is possible, that if we’d had the revenue we would have created this position.” Sure. Anything is possible.
- The specific justification for that employee was to respond to very legitimate requests by a bunch of parents who wanted to be able to park at Steven J. Underwood Park–which is currently locked except for rented events. However, there was no correspondence from the City indicating that the problem was about staffing. All the correspondence indicated that the parks were being kept locked in response to COVID-19. So… what happened to all the safety concerns?
- I just want to point out that the parking gate for Steven J. Underwood Park is located about 500 feet from the Senior Activity Center. I would further note that there are employees already on the payroll, at that location, five days a week. And I would also note that those employees have a key to that gate.
I went through that little exercise because there is something like that on every line. Either it’s not new spending or the rationale sounds great, but when you dig down it’s like, “Wait a minute…” But when the mission is to spend $9,000,000 in 3 hours nobody quibbles over a ‘mere’ $66,000. That is why government spending is the way it is. And this is not me being cranky or some abstraction. $66,000 is three decent sized small business grants. It’s enough money to pay the utility bills for over 250 homes. It’s accounting software. A new web site. Playground equipment. Get it?
Friday: Meeting with Aclima. Aclima is a company that makes portable/mobile air quality monitoring gear. What I have wanted for years has been to obtain for air quality what you consider standard operating procedure with water quality: ie. ongoing measurements. Your drinking water is tested for purity at least four times a year. The air in Des Moines? Almost never. Seriously. With the help of Rep. Tina Orwall and partnerships with other Cities we have been able to hire UW DEOHS to do various ad hoc studies, but those only occur every few years. There is never anything that gets down to a neighbourhood by neighbourhood monitoring of how the airport is changing Des Moines over time.
Friday: A week ago I gave testimony before the JLARC to maintain a local journalism tax credit. And an editor from the Seattle Times called me about it and mentioned me in this article : https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/public-wants-state-to-help-struggling-newspapers/. (And after last Thursday’s City Council Meeting, I want a local newspaper even more now.)
Testimony in support of retaining the Newspaper Tax Preference
This is my public testimony today before the State Of Washington Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC) in support of retaining the Newspaper Tax Preference. This is a tax credit benefiting local newspapers. Here is a background editorial by Seattle Times Editor Brier Dudley.
Good morning.
Sadly, I have no dog in this fight. There has been no local paper in Des Moines for almost a decade. We used to have two and both provided legitimate coverage of City Hall. I can vouch for many instances where they improved local governance.
But given the rapid decline of newspapers, those facts seems so unbelievable to me now that I may as well be telling you we used to have Space Monkeys.
Some stats…
Our City’s population has turned over by almost two thirds since the Great Recession. The average age of our residents is 39 and trending downward and 45% brown and trending upwards. However the average voter is about 58 and only getting older. And they continue to be overwhelmingly white.
Interestingly the number of voters stays relatively flat. The population changes, but it’s mostly the same type of voters from back in the day when we had newspapers. They just keep getting older.
Yes, we have a ‘Community Facebook page’ with over 5,000 members. But when it comes to local government, we are as uninformed a bunch of people as I’ve seen in my 26 years in the area. The sheer volume of posts about schools, lost animals, stolen cars and beautiful sunsets seem to make a certain percentage of residents feel ‘informed’ somehow. It’s as though what we used to call the Entertainment Section of a newspaper now is ‘the newspaper’.
For example…
- Sea-Tac Airport is beginning a massive expansion–and though the airport impacts drive our residents nuts, at least 95% of them are completely unaware that waaaaaaay more flights might be on the way or what our government may or may not be doing about it.
- Our City is embarking on a $50,000,000 Marina Redevelopment project–the largest capital project in our history. And again, almost no one in town has a clue, despite numerous City Council meeting where no one showed up.
Usually nobody attends our public meetings anymore unless I (and I mean I personally) gin up some small demand. And frankly, governments in general don’t mind that one bit because meetings move a whole lot faster without a lot of pesky residents putting in their two cents.
The small town problem…
Functionally, that lack of public participation leads to an ever shrinking circle residents driving all decision making. By that I mean maybe forty or so. These are almost all extremely well-meaning and civic-minded folks, often who have been at it now for decades, and many of them do incredible work that the City would be lost without. But whether they understand it or not, they all have an outsize role in our City’s affairs and all have self-interests. And, not to put too fine a point on it, they are also overwhelmingly old and white.
In many ways, those elites (it sounds funny to put it that way, but that really is what we’re really talking about) conjure images of the best of small town volunteerism. However, in truth we are now a $100,000,000 corporation with 32,000 other residents. We are not a small town. And at a certain point, many issues that would be routinely discussed in an objective manner at a similar-size for-profit corporation become impossible when everybody knows everybody.
And there’s the rub:Â nobody, especially local politicians, has an incentive to address (or even acknowledge) any of this as problematic. Even if one is willing to pay lip service to “transparency”, all the real incentives lean towards getting along and away from calling attention to it. It’s just not in your interest to promote any changes that might lead to a reduction in your influence.
If by chance one of those forty heard my remarks, they could (or perhaps should) see themselves and may well take offense. But anyone who does not live here would recognize that this state of affairs, for all its good points, has some issues.
The Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval…
Our City publishes a very nice, four-color newsletter which is distributed to every address. That is, for the vast majority of the public, the only source of information they receive about Des Moines. And in fact, many people refer to it as ‘news’ even though it is City-generated content and almost always contains only the good news.
Also, every year your State auditors review our books and we often get very high marks. Like all cities, we advertise this loudly as some sort of Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval. Residents understandably find this reassuring. But, not to downplay the great work of our Finance Department, what the public does not understand is that the State is not auditing the quality of our governance. The purpose is to protect your money, not ours.
In short, the only story the public tends to hear about the City is the story the City itself wants to tell.
The cure…
The combination of an uninformed population, (mostly) benign elitism and few but highly biased information sources have been significant factors in creating a lack of equitable representation in towns like Des Moines. Those same factors also make the problems resistant to self-correction.
A local newspaper is the only cure I can think of. It does far more than inform the public. By being the only actor that stays truly above the fray, a newspaper makes it possible to address some embarrassing realities we cannot seem to do on our own.
The only way to make a small town with big money functionally democratic is to give everyone a reasonable chance to participate. And the only way to do that is by giving everyone a reasonable shot at being informed. And the only way to do that is with independent and objective local journalism. In short: good government requires a newspaper.
Who knew, right?
Again, I have no dog in this fight. I’m speaking today simply to keep that possibility alive for the future of my city and for all small towns. I urge you to retain this tax credit and to do even more to make it feasible for cities like Des Moines to provide independent and objective coverage of City Hall.
Thank you.
Postscript: Honestly, I thought when I testified that my comments would be just gilding the lily. I assumed that the committee members would be “Journalism! Fantastic! Approved!” Not so much. In fact, they were surprisingly hard-nosed about extending it. They expressed what seems some very reasonable notions when considering spending public money. If they weren’t at least questioning the idea, newspapers would come to expect it and get lazy in their efforts to help themselves. They applied rigor to the task and as a taxpayer I appreciated that.
Heh JC
Thanks for all you do! Can you tell me there latest on the Redondo pier projec thank
Waiting on some permits and engineering work. All I’ve seen so far are some potential renderings.
JC thanks for the article to the newspaper .It was an excellent Summary in The times You over whelm me with information .
Can anyone explain to me why many buildings in Europe are still being used after hundreds of years and here in this country beautiful, historic buildings are being torn down? Does it have to do with how buildings were built, are being built, just another example of our throw away society?
It’s a West Coast thing. As you head East, towns become more and more interested in historic preservation. Most of the people in Des Moines who care about historic preservation seem to have come from back east. People who grew up here consider a forty year old building ‘old’.
I would just point out that every building we have put in the effort to preserve (Fieldhouse, Beach Park) has been a total winner.