Weekly Update: 10/19/2020

PSA: You may have heard that there is an election coming. There was a Candidate’s Forum October 14th and it wouldn’t hurt to watch it. Write me if you need a Voter’s Pamphlet: I have extras! And if you don’t get your ballot?  please email elections@kingcounty.gov or give them a call at 206-296-VOTE (8683).

This Week

Monday: Meeting with Finance Director Beth Anne Wroe. Since this is literally the only contact I’ve been allowed with staff in the past seven months (every time I write or say that it sounds even more insane that a Councilmember can’t talk to staff) Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, I need to make my fifteen minutes count, baby. 😀 Hopefully, I can asking one or two questions which will point me in the right direction for self-study. My personal needs/wants/desires include an improved web site like this (click on the Calendar. See how easy it is to find out when things are and then drill down to Agendas and basically find whatever you want?) Something like that is maybe a couple of grand. A big spender I am not. 🙂

Tuesday: South County Area Transportation Board (SCATbd).

Tuesday: Burien Airport Committee. (On their web site I got to the meeting info in two clicks. Which made me happy. 🙂 )

Wednesday: have lunch with me at the Senior Center. Get an EATS voucher!

Thursday: Economic Development Committee Meeting. (Agenda) It’s not my meeting, but hey why not attend? And since it’s a public meeting, why don’t you attend? (Homework: To understand why I want to improve our City’s web site, don’t use the link I posted. Try to find out what/where/when about this meeting. I dare ya.) To attend Committee Meetings, please contact the City Clerk’s Office at cityclerk@desmoineswa.gov for a link no later than 12:00 p.m. the day of the meeting.

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda). As has become typical, the Consent Agenda is jam-packed with items that probably should be discussed, but hey, I’m a lover, Paul, not a fighter. (That joke was probably a lot funnier back when Michael was alive and not… you know. 😀 ) But this will also be the first Public Hearing On The 2021 Annual Budget. Which means that you the public (theoretically, anyhoo) should be showing up to make your needs/wants/desires known. Seriously. That is what is supposed to happen. If ‘municipal government’ were working as expected, back in… oh… say 1911… this would be the best attended meeting of the year for a WA City.

Saturday: McSorley Creek with Trout Unlimited. Yes, it’s that time of the year again: Counting the Salmon! Show up at 10:00AM if you want to be a counter. 🙂

Last Week

Tuesday: Port Of Seattle Aviation Budget Meeting. I was hoping to hear that, after all the COVID-19 delays, the Commission would finally start funding Port Packages again (do I sound enough like a petulant teenager? 😀 ). Still not there yet, but there’s still time.

Tuesday: I, along with Councilmembers from Burien and SeaTac, met with Congressman Adam Smith. Short version: under a 2018 law (which is super-vague) the FAA is supposed to have some sort of ‘community engagement’ now to discuss our concerns. And in other major airport communities, this has been an improvement in relations. But at Sea-Tac? Nooooooooooooooooooooooo. Our specific local FAA leadership have about zero interest in changing anything. That is not what Congress intended with the 2018 law. So we’re trying to figure out what Mr. Smith can do to help bring us in line with other airport communities.

Wednesday: Des Moines Marina Association meeting (Agenda). I was disappointed to hear that we still haven’t gotten permits to dredge the entrance. It’s not the end of the world but we got a ‘discount’ contingent on doing it this year. On a happier note, Harbormaster Wilkins is actively checking out Wi-Fi options which is something a lot of us have wanted for a long time (I dunno about you, but my cell reception in various parts of DM has never been great and this sort of amenity would be very attractive for visitors with money. 🙂 ) Also, we will likely be getting a huge rate reduction (over $50k) from the Department Of Natural Resources on rent review thanks to the advocacy of the City’s legal department.

Wednesday: Lunch at the Senior Center. We draw Seniors from all of South King County so I always learn something.

Thursday: I, along with Councilmembers from Burien and SeaTac, met with Snohomish  Congressman Rick Larsen (it’s like deja vu all over again.) As we say back home, “different bread, same sandwich.” Except that this bread… er… Legislator… happens to be the Chairman of the House Aviation Sub-Committee. So he has pull and we should at least be on his radar. Because the detail I left out is that most FAA law is designed around the premise that a City or County will own the airport. So if residents are bugged about noise and pollution, they have some recourse. But because the Port Of Seattle owns Sea-Tac, they always have this loophole that leave us out in the cold. And the Congressman can do something about that.

History

I had a conversation today with Councilmember *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.   We discussed a bit why I bother with this whole Weekly Update business. What they reported to me is that these things are, for a certain set of people, annoying. Which is shocking, right? 😀 But if I seem cavalier it’s because I honestly do not get that. Really. Which made me feel like I should give y’all some background on why I do these Weekly Updates. Because I think there is some real misunderstanding.

Cue the harp music

(You always use harp arpeggios to go back in time.) When my friends and I started SeatacNoise.Info four years ago, it was because I felt, very strongly, that something was wrong with the activism associated around Sea-Tac Airport. My kid had studied citizen activism in college and so we would talk about what we could do to succeed here. He pointed out that activists here had not followed many of the strategies and tactics that had proven successful for other issue groups across America. Specifically, he pointed out that when it’s David v. Goliath, you can win, but it’s a very long game–it will cross generations so you can’t worry about specific battles. People get burnt out, move, etc. Some things succeed, others fail. But successful movements keep going. Each generation learns from the past, corrects mistakes, tries new things. But you need to have a continuity of information.

We haven’t done that with the airport. Basically, after every airport expansion, people just kinda give up–until the next expansion. In fact, most people, including decision makers, had then and still have a very poor overview of the facts as to what had happened with the Third Runway. (Some of those people will get upset at reading that.) But the fact is that all movements fail… until they succeed. And you have to look at what worked and didn’t in order to move forward. There’s also the fact that human memory stinks. We all forget what happened in very short order. That’s why you need newspapers and historians.

There truth may not be out there

The problem is that a lot of information is rapidly disappearing. (One of my standard quizzes is this: Go on-line and tell me who were the candidates for City Council in Des Moines in 1997. Good luck with that. And unless you’re someone like our City Clerk you probably don’t know.) This is completely counter-intuitive. Most of us think that ‘everything’ has already been ‘digitized’. But nothing could be further from the truth.

So SeatacNoise.Info started creating a library of basically everything having to do with the airport since about 1959 (when Des Moines was incorporated). We got a big-ass scanner and servers and started inhaling as much data as we could. We did this simply so we could say, “It’s all in one place”. We figured that people could use it for research and analysis and planning future strategies to slow down airport expansions. That includes thousands of hours of unbelievably boring videos of Port Commission meetings, City Council Meetings, Court proceedings, RCAA meetings, public documents and newspapers like the Highline Times.

The importance of news

See that handsome fella in the picture at far right? Why that’s a younger version of our Mayor Matt Pina from back in 2007 when he was a School Board member. See all those other articles? We’ve scanned a gazillion of those newspapers because, when there were newspapers here, people were discussing the airport and other civic issues all the time. And the one thing I’ve learned from all those old newspapers is this: people here had far greater access to what was going on in government than they do today. I cannot over-state how many more opportunities the public had to learn about local politics ten years ago. And it was the newspaper and actual journalism that drove that.

Real journalism

I got yelled at last year by the nice people at the Waterland Blog (WB) for somewhat insensitively (I know yer shocked again) saying that the Waterland Blog was not ‘real journalism’. I’ve spoken to reporter Jack Mayne about this a few times since then and I appreciate the fact that he has been willing to engage with me. We’ve had some good conversations.

But I kinda gotta stick with what I said: a City Council is a for realz beat, meaning that it’s a ton of work to report. You can’t actually cover City politics without understanding what’s going on ‘under the hood’. And that takes a lot more sustained effort than the WB can make. To get an idea of what it does take to do ‘real local journalism’, check out the Seattle City Council Insight blog. That guy is either a Saint or somewhat deranged for all the work he must put into that thing–which means you should read it. He gets City politics way better than anyone else in the region.) So it’s a bit unfair of me to ask the WB to do something they aren’t equipped to do.

Why?

I write this thing to give the public some context. It’s my take on what’s going on ‘under the hood’. The press releases that the City puts out are just that: press releases. They will always tell you how wonderful things are. They are not objective and  no one should expect them to be. And neither can any coverage by places like The Waterland Blog. Because they can’t give you the context.

And of course, the other reason I feel qualified to b ‘opinionated’ is because I am surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of pieces of recent DM history. Pieces on everything from water mains to police brutality to parades to you name it. (The more things change, right?) When I as doorbelling last summer it tickled me to talk to a resident who I had already read about from an article ten years ago. I already had at least one thing I knew we could talk about.

The thing I worry about now is this: with no news coverage, is history even occurring?

Master strategy?

I do not do this as part of some grand ‘strategy’. It’s a stupid amount of effort and if the object of politics is to maximise popularity, it’s even stupider. If I were not elected, I would likely still do this. But if someone else was doing ‘real journalism–investigative journalism like the SCC Insight Blog–I would not do this. But there’s not.

There have been attempts on Facebook and Twitter to create forums to discuss local politics, but they don’t work simply because the people doing the discussing don’t have enough background to even know what to talk about. So they tend to devolve into the typical national shit show in which I have almost no interest. For better or worse, I ended up being that one idiot who goes to every City Council meeting.

If there is some ‘master strategy’ it’s only this: I wanted everyone to have a place to refer back to for information on what happened during my time in office, along with one fairly informed devil’s advocate. If at some point  that makes it easier change hearts and minds of the existing Council (or to elect new people I support)? That means that my faith in ‘news’ has been rewarded and yeah for me. If it doesn’t? Oops! 😀

I wonder how much my colleagues would object to a blog like this if it were some independent guy writing. Is it because I’m on the Council? Or is it simply because I’m being ‘critical’ of the City and they don’t think that is a Councilmember’s role? I honestly don’t know.

I think it’s perfectly fine that the seven of us disagree on issues–in public. Because I don’t think it does any good to only disagree in private. Government should be a (mostly) public process. I just don’t think we’ve figured out a way to disagree in public in a respectful fashion like legislators higher up the food chain.

My suspicion is that this is because at least some of us don’t feel like ‘real’ legislators. I think some people view this gig as some sort of public service opportunity and feel like it is the administration that should lead and plan. But some of us are definitely real politicians–actually trying to wield power. Muwhahahahaha! (kidding.) That just means that some of us see our role as to be the ones doing the leading and the planning. I’m one of them. And that is because you voted for me and I see my job as being to try to make happen what you told me you want for the future of the City.

News and decision making

My positions on issues are conditioned a bit by all the City history I’ve been marinating in for the past four years. So when I talk about something controversial like ‘Paid Parking At The Marina’, I’m not just thinking about the fifty people who live near the Marina who felt strongly enough about it to write the City Council last month. (Good job, by the way.) I’m also thinking about all the hearings I went to and all the old newspapers I read where hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of people repeatedly said not just “no” but “Hell no!” to Paid Parking. Over and over and over for a solid decade. And that doesn’t include all the people I doorbelled last summer who also had strong opinions. They all deserve a place in my thinking on this issue.

Having access to history gives me a perspective that, sadly, most of you cannot access. At some point, I hope to have the full contents of all these old Highline Times, Des Moines News, Seattle PI and Seattle Times articles available for all residents to look at.

In spite of the Interwebs, we have far less public engagement now than we used to. Fewer people attend public meetings or volunteer for various committees and organizations. My hope is that providing more information–or at least an alternative POV, helps the community in some small way to engage more on the issues and events I don’t think get enough attention.

Whether you agree or disagree with that POV, if I can get a few more people to show up to meetings or challenge the City to do more in some way then this thing is doing its job.

The Loyal opposition

Even better would be if my colleagues and people in the government who dislike these Weekly Updates would see them (and all public critiques) as a healthy part of local government. Sure it’s great to get all positive reinforcement all the time, but that’s not how it works at the Federal, State or County levels. So why should things be any different here? People in those governments understand and accept routine criticism. My goal would be for everyone to understand that our government is no different in this way. We do some things well; other things not so well. And fair-minded criticism from a loyal opposition is nothing to get upset about.

*UPDATE 10-19-20 20:54 : I have redacted this person’s name at their request.