Campaign Info
King County has published the contents of the campaign brochures you will receive in a few weeks. But why wait, right? Here they are now. Campaign Statements
News
Traffic
Note that 216th near Military Road will be closing soon for the next year. as part of the SR-509/Link Light Rail project. One. Year. But in exchange, when complete, you’ll get an entirely new bridge with bike lanes and everything. 🙂
SCORE Jail
Recently the Seattle Times published the following article:
Highline Schools
The State recently published a set of comparative stats on all school districts. The results for Highline Schools is extremely disappointing. All schools suffered during the pandemic, but we were in trouble before then and we’re not recovering. I urge you to read the following: Data-from-OPSI-Data-Portal.
Said it before, say it again, Des Moines was built for families. We used to have good to great public schools and we cannot thrive into the future without them. This should be a five-alarm fire for policy makers–including our City Council.
This Week
Wednesday: Seattle South Side Chamber of Commerce Candidate Forum. Candidates for all the local city council races will be there to answer questions. It mentions something about cocktails, which means–I’m there. 🙂 They usually post a video, which I’ll try to share next week.
Thursday: 4:00PM Economic Development Committee (Economic Development – 28 Sep 2023 – Agenda – Pdf)
Thursday: 5:00PM Municipal Facilities Committee (Municipal Facilities Committee – 28 Sep 2023 – Agenda – Pdf)
Both meetings will feature an ‘update’ from our Ferry Consultant Peter Philips on something called Navier Boat/Hydrofoil. Which sounds like this: https://www.navierboat.com/mobility
I used the air quotes because this is the first mention I can find of the thing in Council records. Mr. Philips is also the publisher of the City Currents Newsletter. He is also the organiser of a thing called the Ferry Conference–a for-profit event which promotes the commercial ferry service. If I ever sound stroppy about ferries, I have never thought it was ethical to have a paid consultant, whose works in parallel to promotet ferry service.
Thursday: 6:00PM City Council Meeting (Agenda) Some highlights:
- There will be presentations from Genesis Now and Lighthouse Northwest
- A vote on a rate increase with Recology, which I mentioned last week from the Ad Hoc Franchise Committee. Customers with 32-gallon garbage service may expected to see a new $1.00 – $2.00 FAC on their bill.
- A vote to adopt the 2024 2029 Capital Improvements Plan (CIP), which is a list of items like roads and building projects that have been actually budgeted. I mention that because people will often comment on various ‘plans’ the City publishes, such as the TIP (Transportation Improvement Plan) or various Marina ‘plans’. But until it’s on the CIP? It’s simply aspirational.
I also want to point out that there are over eighty projects. This Thursday will be the first meeting of the Municipal Facilities Committee this year and only the third meeting of any other committee–which would usually vet these items. So I would expect a ton of questions. But regardless, this is exactly the kind of item that should have a second reading.
Last Week
Thursday: I met with new police chief Tim Gately. I ran down a list of my priorities. Many of these things are policy issues…
- Pacific Highway, Pacific Highway, Pacific Highway. We can’t simply surrender the area, ie. become complacent. It has to be solved for a very simple reason: It generates a ton of revenue for the City. Or at least, it should. When people avoid shopping at major stores simply out of fear, it creates a race to the bottom. We need people to feel safe, and we need that money.
- Stats. I would like to see more of them. Former Chief Thomas would present a report of calls for service which combined both the Marina and Redondo. I’d like to see them broken out by neighbourhood. And just to be clear, this requires no added work for officers–who are already required to enter the data into computer on every call for service so this is not more work.
- Head count. In 2007, the City of Des Moines had about a dozen more patrol officers. What made them possible was a dedicated tax of a few hundred dollars a year, which you got to vote for. I believe that most residents want more police officers, full stop, mainly because they want a neighbourhood presence, something that is impossible with the current staffing levels.
- Code Enforcement. When properties are not kept up, at a minimum it makes streets less welcoming. But it’s also a warning light that something not great is going on and (I have personal experience on this) one bad house can destroy an entire block.
- Calm. There have been some notable upticks in violent crime in the past few years–including that hair raising (literal!) testimony from a Marina District resident at our last meeting. And I’ve been saying for years that we need to do something real about that (and property crime, which many people have also seem to have raised the white flag on.) However, there can be a tendency to try to see who can talk toughest on crime, rather than focusing on what actually works. Fact: Des Moines is one of the nicest places to live in Puget Sound, which makes it one of the nicest places to live on planet earth and I will not catastrophise the current situation.
It’s hard to sum up this topic in one sentence. But what I’ve heard from residents, over and over, is that they want a friendly and humane police presence–just a lot more of it on their street.
I received a letter questioning my vote against moving the Redondo restroom across the street. So on the last nice day this week I took a few hours to (once again) look at the Redondo waterfront; this time by boat.
It’s hard to see now what those structures were. But the Betts family owned most of the area along both sides of the boardwalk. Before there was a MAST Center or a Salty’s there was this (photos courtesy of ‘Redondo Rick’ Johnson.)
Anyhoo. Agree, disagree, that’s fine. I just want people to know that I’ve seen that waterfront from above, below, in front, and behind, a whole bunch of times over the course of almost 30 years here. So it’s not like I’m unaware of the various structural failings–or the technical challenges. I favoured a different solution–keep the tourists on one side and the residents on the other whenever possible.
Two years of ARPA 2021 – 2023
For those of you who read along, the most common comment I get is “Dude, you repeat yourself allllll the time.” Point taken. I hate it. Unfortunately, most readers are not following along. So one has to ‘tell the entire story’ over and over and over. And over. What kills me about this story is that it was only two years ago.
If you recall, during the pandemic, most everyone got free money (stimulus checks) from the Federal government. In the Summer of 2021, the Federal government announced a similar give-away for cities called ARPA. I wrote an article on it called Christmas In July.
We were given $9,000,000 dollars with a 600 page book of rules. One rule was that we had to decide on how to spend it by 2024. Another was that we had to actually spend it by 2026. We were also told we needed to be very careful–you couldn’t spend it on just anything.
We held a spending discussion on September 16,2021. Before the meeting, the City Manager gave us a suggested budget for spending $8MM of it, which had been vetted to pass those legal tests and left $1MM for the Council to debate over.
Over my strong objections, the Council voted to budget all of it, at once, using the City Manager’s template. I voted ‘no’, saying that we should only budget money on the most urgent items–ones we actually could spend money on now, and put off discussing the majority of the items to give us time to decide in a thoughtful manner. That is what most cities did.
Since then, the City Manager has come back to the Council several times to Re-allocate large portions of the money because many of the items in his original budget were not spent. That left money for new things like the Ferry.
September 2021
April 2022
January 2023
January-12-2023-ARPA-update-and-reallocation
September 2023
As I discussed last week, at our Budget Meeting, the City Manager discussed re-re-allocating this $1.2MM of ARPA money in order to fill expected shortfalls in the budget. But despite this, the Mayor said that he still hoped to keep $400,000 for a ferry next year.
The process…
IÂ have always objected to the entire process.
- Use of one-time money for ongoing expenses. One-time money is money that is unpredictable. It’s the opposite of structural revenue. Permit revenue is one-time money. Property taxes are the opposite; you know it’s coming every month–like a paycheck. ARPA money was the ultimate one-time money, which is why I referred to it as Christmas in July. The rule of thumb for budgeting is: never use one-time money to pay for ongoing expenses. An ongoing expense is a salary. Â That’s why police officers are generally funded with property taxes and not permit revenue. But we used $1.75MM to fund police officer salaries with ARPA money. Which is fine for those two years. OK, now how do we keep paying them?
- Unnecessary haste. We allocated money for programs we literally could not spend money on at the time, because there was no infrastructure in place to do so. Take a look at the money that is up for re-allocation, there’s a whole lot of ’emergency’ stuff in there. By ‘allocating’ it all in one night, we got a chance to look like we were doing a whole bunch of very noble stuff with great urgency.
- Lack of discipline. If that September 2021 vote had been realistic, the money would have been spent and there would be no money left to play with. That’s what a budget means. If we had wanted the ability to change direction so many times, we should not have voted to spend it all in one night. In reality, we simply gave full discretion to the City Manager to spend (or not spend) bits and then repeatedly come back to the City Council to re-allocate the unspent parts. And that is exactly what has happened over and over. The net effect being to use a great deal of the money simply to plug budget holes in an ad hoc manner.
My colleagues obviously disagree. They believe this is simply being ‘flexible’.
I find it interesting that WSDOT can put the spans in place for the 509 truck lanes crossing I-5 over several weekends, yet Des Moines residents are effectively devoid of good options for leaving the city. I’ve been in the traffic after 3PM crossing east on the 216th bridge and a detour will only make this traffic back up throughout the local area.
Another example of Des Moines residents getting crapped on by regional politicos. But why should the local politicians care…it benefits the goal of the do-nothing spendthrift city administration and council to encourage frustrated long term residents to flee in order to circumvent the property tax cap by encouraging property turnover.
I feel like I’ve moved to a third world country with the regional assaults on our local environment.
Highline School District performance should not surprise anyone. The major thrust of Highline School District in the last 30 years is building costly new schools rather than spending on upkeep of current school infrastructure. A buildings being old does not make them non-functioning when competent Facility Management practices are followed. But running efficiently does not generate ego flattering headlines in the media as building Taj Mahal schools with wasted square footage and poorly designed infrastructure as some of these Taj Mahals are already failing… Why waste energy on educational improvement when ribbon cutting media events is the REAL goal of past Highline Administration.
Your comments in the last several email reports about projected budget shortfalls are ironic in light of your excellent due diligence of wasteful spending by the City Manager and his cronies.. aided by our spendthrift rubber-stamping mayor… on pet projects like the 2022 excursion boat.
And the transfer of funds to cover these shortfalls are sleazy nd should be illegal. But it just verifies my opinion that the SWM is just another slushfund. But hey city admins…keep pushing out long term residents with your biased use of funds to circumvent the property tax increase cap…