Weekly Update: 10/15/2023

News

Campaigning

As you can… er… not see… I’ve taken down the nag screen on the web site. Which means that TA DA! I’ve covered my campaign expenses!

Well, almost. Actually a few of you have pledged, but either not hit the button, or forgot to send in your check. Not to be awkward here, but if you can do that now…

The address to send your donations is:

JC Harris For Des Moines
PO Box 13094 Des Moines, Washington 98198

Thanks!

ICYMI Waterland Blog

In case you missed it, the Waterland Blog is posting several articles on this campaign:

• Here are my responses to their Ten Questions.
• Here is my opponent’s Candidate Statement

Flyer flap

I got several concerned phone calls from residents who got my opponent’s flyer in the mail and flipped over the negativity. To which I have two words: THANKS! and CHILL!

When I ran, my whole proposition was that the Council needed an independent voice.

This is Rob’s sixth run for Council. His sales pitch is that during his one term he was a part of a Council which voted unanimously on basically everything, including the hiring and job performance of Michael Mathias.

I’m doing the same stuff I did before. He’s doing the same stuff he’s done before. If you’re genuinely concerned? Tell somebody to vote for me.

This Week

Monday 7:00pm: Wesley Candidate Forum 816 S 216th St, Des Moines, WA 98198. This is open to the public! You know I’ll be there, and I hope you will as well. If you miss it, there will be video available later.

Thursday: It’s The Great Shakeout! Sign up to test your readiness for the big one. It’s a comin’! (I don’t want it to come. But it’s a comin’. 😀 )

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) Highlights:

Blueberry Lane

We’ll vote to approve an expansion of Blueberry Lane. I will vote no because… wait for it… we still don’t require sound insulation in our building code. And in fact, the Blueberry Lane development was the trigger for the City Council to remove that sound code in 2012. Every living space built for the past eleven years has had no sound reduction requirement. The majority has scolded me for continuing to raise the issue, since they agreed to ‘look at it’ in 2024. But this is the second project we’ve been asked to approve since then. It would be (literally) a one paragraph ordinance to fix this: simply re-instate the code we used to have. Done.

North Hill Elementary STREET IMPROVEMENTS/Sidewalks

There is a $3,000,000 Safe Routes To School grant for North Hill Elementary, which is great. However…

I cannot remember the last time we actually under-grounded utilities–which is what we’re supposed to do. We have to intentionally vote to opt-out of under-grounding–which (now) we always do. Get it? We have a policy which makes us look like we’re doing the enlightened thing. But in fact, we always then vote to do the wrong thing. And that is because we don’t have the money to do the thing we were supposed to  discipline ourselves to do to improve the City long term.

Actually I lied. I do remember the last time we under-grounded utilities. It was for the alley behind the theater renovation. Apparently a commercial alley we’ll pay for. School children along 24th Ave or North Hill? Nope.

216th – 24th Ave Rezone

We’ll have the second reading on the 216th – 24th Ave Rezone. It is a lotta reading–and that is why having a second reading is always good. This is a bit like the road project.

Last Week

Monday: Indigenous People’s Day/Columbus Day

Monday: Stay-Grounded Committee Meeting (STNI) Stay-Grounded is an international organisation that campaigns for reductions in commercial aviation and fair treatment of airport communities. They have had success in Europe and my group Sea-TacNoise.Info has joined with them to see if some of their ideas could be helpful here.

Tuesday: Another meeting with Patty Murray’s office to discuss air quality monitoring. What I try to do is give people a little tour.

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Study Session and Regular Meeting (Agenda) The Commission tends to have a few biggee all-day events every year and this was one of them, covering their budget in three of the Empire’s four divisions. This one was vaguely contentious, which is never a bad thing in my opinion, when it comes to airport issues.

Spoiler alerts: The accounting phrase that best describes the Port’s current revenue position: “Ladies and gentlemen, We’re rolling in it.” 😀 Flight operations and revenue are (despite all the sky is falling jazz during the pandemic) are actually passing 2019 record levels. They will continue going up, Up, UP! Just as I’ve been saying all along. And that’s before they complete their $4.5B renovations, and before they re-shape the airfield to further increase processing speed (that’s referred to as the SAMP.)

The contentiousness is not only because the current Port Commission has been far more comfortable dealing with issues of diversity/equity/inclusion ($62M for a gender neutral bathroom) than the old school problems of airport expansion. The fact is that, despite all the Sturm und Drang about how tiny the airport is, they continue to make money hand over fist. And there is no longer any easy way to paper over the fact that they give back far less than they take.

• The Port is finally getting round to doing sound insulation projects in houses of worship. This is not ‘new’ work. Just keeping promises going back to… wait for it… 1996. This made clear how profitable it can be to not keep your promises. A few commissioners noted that only half of the houses of worship agreed to have their buildings sound insulated. Why on earth would anyone not agree? Well, if they die, leave town or go out of business. Get it? All the Port had to do was wait for these institutions to fade away and thus save itself millions. One commissioner asked if somehow couldn’t we re-purpose that money to helping another organisation? Of course you can’t. The FAA takes a dim view of fraud–even do-gooder fraud.
• The South King County Fund–this is basically all the ‘grants’ the Port dishes out for economic and environmental development. The bad news is that the fund comes from your property taxes. The worse news is that the Port has been unable to get organisations to apply for this money in great numbers. In other words: they get to say how much ‘good’ they’re doing by making the money available. But availability is not the same thing as doing good.

Tuesday: North Hill Community Club Candidate Forum. The NHCC is the oldest neighbourhood organisation in Des Moines–with an asterisk since North Hill did not join the City of Des Moines until 1992. See below…

Wednesday: I was interviewed on Wesley TV. These are great interviews and basically every local politician, including our State Reps and the Port of Seattle get coverage. Unfortunately, if you don’t live at Wesley you won’t see them. I keep trying to get Wesley and the City to work together to

Friday the 13th: Evening shift Ride-Along with Des Moines Police. This was very cool, first of all because I’m used to working nights and it’s rare that I get to interact with anyone who stays up after 9:00PM these days. So afterwards, I celebrated by going acting like I was twenty five and went out for Huevos Rancheros. 😀

All kidding aside, I feel a speech coming on…

Police Staffing

Dealing with a couple of members of the PD, the leadership of the Guild (the police union) is a bit awkward for me. Because in both my campaigns they endorsed my opponent. Awkward. 😀 And I never quite get it because, it’s like this: some of my colleagues do a lot of events to show their appreciation of our police. Bake sales and so on. I on the other hand, don’t bake cookies for anyone. I just want to hire more police officers–which is something I used to think was an idea that everyone would love. Residents certainly want it. And I thought the rank and file would be down as well. One of those mysteries of life, atm. 😀

I want them because we used to have many more police officers than we have today and I liked seeing a police car in my neighbourhood from time to time.

 

However, the 2019 version of our City Council declared, “We are fully staffed!” I have always felt that was misleading. It created an impression with the public that we were where we used to be, which is not true. Or that ‘this is as good as it gets’. If we’re ‘fully staffed’ that means that, when crime increases, the only possible approach is ‘tech’, or blaming the State or the County or someone else. And I am not down with blaming other people.

Des Moines has always had a good recruiting proposition for officers–namely that the vast majority of our residents are amazingly supportive. I am pleased to see that we are now offering better compensation–and that comes down to hard negotiations by the Police Guild. Good on ya.

But what I want to stress is that we’ve funded the current staff levels, which remember are already lower than they used to be, with one-time ARPA money, money which runs out at the end of 2023. Using one-time money of any kind was considered the budgeting evil that got is into financial hot water in the 2010’s. And yet we’ve been doing exactly that same thing for several years now. I am not down.

Salaries should be funded out of good ol’ fashioned structural revenue, as a given, so that neither our residents our our employees even have to have worry about staffing levels from year to year.

My concern is not merely finding a way to maintain current staffing levels. My desire is to return to the staffing we had, in 2007,  in a truly sustainable fashion.

I have another sustainability concern: the officers. I know many residents view policing in terms of guns, badges, arrests and so on. And in fact, that is what our own recruiting videos look like. However, a large part of a typical shift looks to me like a lot of the customer service people my company used to work with. A 12 hour shift might consist of monitoring for stolen vehicles, while driving, while operating a computer, while handling a cell phone, while getting calls on the radio, while, while, while… That constant vigilance and multi-tasking alone can wear people out. Now add having to interact with people having the worst day of their lives, several times a day.

A good officer is a massive investment. It’s amazing how hard they are to replace. Another reason to increase staffing levels is to provide more head room; to make sure that they are efficient and effective assets, right up to that 25 year mark.

North Hill Community Club Candidate Night

Last week I said, “I’d like to salute the NHCC in advance for being the only neighbourhood organisation in this election cycle to organise such a public event.” Well, to use that old showbiz punchline: I’d like to, but I can’t, because the meeting would be many candidates’ worst nightmare. 😀

The format was billed as fifteen minutes per candidate: as much speechifyin’ as one wants, then the remainder for questions. I suppose I coulda simply gassed on for the entire time, but I purposely shortened my text in order to give people more time to fire away.

So the first question was from? Why it’s my opponent Rob Back. It is extremely unusual for events to allow that without agreement before the event.  I certainly would have looooved to ask Mr. Back a few choice questions of my own. 😀 But, what-ehvs. His question was (verbatim)

I have a question, JC. So before you started getting people all worked up about this hotel, were you aware that when a fishing pier was built in 1990, it was constructed with the RCO grant, or Recreation Conservation Office grant? And that grant specifically required that parking lot needs to stay intact and belongs with the pier. It cannot be built on. So, were you aware that it wasn’t even a possibility to put a hotel there before you got everybody all worked up? I confirmed this information with the former harbormaster today, just to make sure the fact that you know, the South parking lot can’t even be built on based on RCO’s phrase for the grant that went into building that year.

And here was my answer:

Actually it was 1978. The project is 78-27, and it’s on my website. But it’s simply a fact that it (the hotel) was proposed out of the blue on September 27th, 2022, at a community meeting at the Senior Center. Nobody was more surprised than me to have the Mayor, the City Manager and Skylab all start talking about this thing. And you know, if they talk about it? And that’s like, literally on video? People can say whether it’s appropriate or not. But it’s like. Great. Did either the Mayor or the City Manager read the RCO grant? I guess that would be my question.

Next? Matt Pina (Mayor during Rob’s tenure, and a person who lives nowhere near North Hill) with his five-part question.

I think you get the idea.

Never apologise, never explain

One reason I like doing these Weekly Updates–and recording events like that community meeting where Mahoney, Matthias and Skylab unveil the hotel proposal in the north parking lot for the first time) is that documenting everything prevents re-writing history. But there’s another value.

I keep hearing my colleagues (and now Mr. Back) say that “a hotel in the north parking lot was never going to happen.” And my reply is not only the above, but also, “Then why the heck did we pay designers, architects and consultants to come up with an idea that was never gonna happen?” It’s a terrible waste of money. And as my father-in-law always said, “When you waste a dollar, you waste two. The dollar you misspent, and the dollar you don’t have to do something good.”

We gotta find a way to educate the public that the money we waste is the reason we can’t do all the other stuff that never happens here.

There is simply no way to walk back that kind of blather.

What I’ve tried to get across to my colleagues and the public is that saying “I was wrong” once in a while will not cause your head to explode. Self-confidence is one thing. But when we are never willing to admit mistakes, all it does is deepen public mistrust.