Weekly Update: 10/22/2023

Campaigning

Web Site Changes! (The Issues)

You will also have noticed that the home page on this here web site no longer points to the Weekly Updates. Instead, it points to my top ten issues. You can still get to the Weekly Updates by going to… er… the Weekly Updates. 😀

Wesley Video!

Here is video from last week’s Candidate Forum at Wesley. Please watch. Share. Vote. (Hopefully in that order. 😀 )

Keep it Positive!

I often hear people make comments like, Dude, why aren’t you more positive. And my reply is, “Here. Happy now?” 😀 Sorry. It’s a disease.

I’ve always had a positive agenda. With the current Council system, ideas from the minority don’t have a chance to be heard.

Look, I ran for office with major differences on issues, including strong concerns about the airport and economic development (both managed by the City Manager.) Openly running to change anything was unheard of at the time. And that meant that from day one it was never gonna be a smooth ride on a hydrofoil ferry (see what I did there? 😀 )

In fact, this is my opponent’s value proposition: his ability to get along with the majority, and his support for the current system. Why shouldn’t he? He helped hire the current City Manager and believes he did and is doing a fine job.

So this election is a clear decision point. If he wins, my election will be seen an aberration. If I win, hopefully the next Council will hear the message voters have been sending and insist that the Council be more accepting of different points of view, instead of constantly fighting against them.

If you value the ideas I’ve presented over the past four years, the path forward should be to encourage the entire Council (including moi, of course) to compromise. We actually do agree on many things. It’s just that the current system encourages all or nothing thinking (majority rule!)

As a Council, we just need a willingness to give each other 15% (100/7) and that is what I’ll keep working towards.

This Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting (Agenda) For us, the highlight will be the discussion of the Tax Levy. For new people, about $88,000,000 of your property taxes go to the Port of Seattle. More than half of it always goes to lower their borrowing costs on major capital projects. In other words, your taxes make it cheaper for them to expand the airport. Another thing they use that money for is community grants. People often don’t believe me when I say this but every frickin’ dollar the Port provides to Des Moines for either economic or environmental benefit is actually your tax dollars being redistributed back to you. It’s weird to use the word ‘socialism’ in the same sentence as ‘Port of Seattle’ but that’s what it is. The simplest form of mitigation those commies (..er.. ‘the Port’ 😀 ) could provide the residents of Des Moines would be to rebate our portion of the Tax Levy.

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) The highlight will be the First Reading of our 2024 Budget. I will hold off on details for a bit but some general comments:

• Your property taxes will go up a bit. For the first time since COVID, we are taking the annual 1% increase we’re allowed by law, and also adding in the ‘banked’ tax increases we did not take during those years. As I’ve tried to say each year, these were not freebies. There was always the possibility that they would be used when we needed to plug a gap. Gap plugged.
• This is one of those ‘back seat driver’ comments, but we are in the third year of our new accounting software and I’m still not entirely thrilled with the reporting. It’s OK, but the big problem for anyone who reads budgets is apples to oranges. If you look at our budgets, the presentation changes almost every frickin’ year. That not only makes it tough to see how things are changing, it also makes it hard to explain to the public where we are now vs. 20,15,10, or even five years ago.
• For example, I rant a certain amount about the difference in police officers between now and yesteryear. My beef has merit, but it’s hard to see from our presentation, because even the way we count heads changes over the years.
• Also, we still can’t drill down. For example, we have various, very significant services such as Animal Control or Wesley or whatever and there’s no way to get there from the high level statement. In other words, there’s no direct way to see where each of these spends come from.
• For example, getting back to police, the docs say we have two more officers for 2024. Great. But it should be easier to see where is the money coming from.
• In there is also a new Enterprise Fund to control event planning. I am not averse to the idea, however as with so many things, this does not thrill me as it is not being run through committee first. A major change to the structure of our government should be vetted by committee. Full stop. But guess what, the Economic Development Committee has met only three times over the entire year. This centralisation of power is not great.
• Last but not least, and this has been my beef since I got elected, you get grand totals out to 2028, but the specifics stop at 2024. In this case, the 2024 numbers are good news, but the 2028 numbers seem to indicate storms coming in. OK, fine. Why can’t we see all the assumptions that go into that forecast? Where do those 2028 numbers come from?

Last Week

Monday 7:00pm: Wesley Candidate Forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of South King County. See the video at the top of this article!

Thursday: Was the 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) (Video) Highlights below.

October 19, 2023 Council Meeting Recap

Public Comment

There were two especially notable comments.

• Former Cm Luisa Bang (my opponent in 2019.) She found it insulting that people bring up the ‘The 7-0 Club’ slogan. I think she misses the point. I want people to understand: I find great value in all my colleagues, especially her. However, the decisions made by the group were unanimous. And often unanimously wrong. The unanimity seemed (to me) to reflect a steady handing over of power and oversight to the City Manager.
• A resident of Adriana Senior Apartments on 7th Ave. She complained that her building is unhealthy. I’ve heard similar complaints about other buildings and I applaud her for speaking up so publicly. 🙂

Mayor’s Opening Remarks

In an event that is becoming so common as to be routine the Mayor took it upon himself to chastise me for more misinformation about the electric ferry demo. And I’m like, dude, Dude, DUDE. Enough! The information I passed on was echoed by both KIRO News and KOMO News. And when the City Manager says (on camera) that he was surprised to see news outlets show up, I find that surprising. Look, if we’re paying a ferry consultant $5,000 a month to promote a ferry in Des Moines, I would expect there to be media coverage. 😀

Let’s make this simple: We set aside $985,000 two years ago for a ‘ferry’. We pay $5,000 a month to ferry guy. I want to stop all of that. I don’t care if it’s powered by bunker fuel, electricity, hydrogen, or Chanel #5. I want to take that money and spend it on something the City needs now. And at some point, if/when other cities figure out (like Kitsap) how to make it pay? Then do it.

City Manager’s Report

Bond Sale

The $25,000,000 bond we voted for last month were sold, apparently in a single issue, at 4.9% and is now in the bank. Which means I’m about 50% happy. 🙂 Because about half of that is stuff I approve of (dock replacement, Redondo Fishing Pier), and the other half (Marina Steps, Redondo bathrooms) is not. So I’m glad we got the dough fast, and probably at the lowest cost we could given inflation, but I’m less jazzed to be taking on debt for that other stuff. As my father-in-law always said, “The dollar you misspend is the dollar you don’t have to do something good.”

Marina Steps

The Director of Public Works revealed a new Marina Steps web site.

A couple of comments:

• The City is getting much better at basic web stuff. Good.
• This drawing will look impressive to the public. But frankly, these kinds of sites cost about $20 a month and were never rocket surgery.  And that makes it even clearer how not transparent this whole process has been. In other words, this design is obviously something the City has had in a drawer for several years and it should have been brought out a very long time ago.
• So my first reaction to the drawing was the same as with ‘Soundview Park’ and the recent Marina lighthouse thingee. “OK, so why even bother with community input?” I don’t care if it’s a freakin’ work of art, the City is handing the public a finished design and not giving you any real choice. Your ‘input’ is simply a courtesy on a decision that’s already made. I object to that entire ethos.

Public Planning Commission, Public Planning Commission, Public Planning Commission.

Consent Agenda

Blueberry Lane

We voted to approve an expansion of Blueberry Lane. I pulled the item in protest 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.

That said, in one of the most tortured votes I’ve ever taken, I voted ‘yes’. As I explained from the dais, this vote was to determine whether or not the developer had complied with our code as is. It would be unethical to vote against any developer who was found to be in compliance with the rules.

216th – 24th Ave Rezone

We had the second reading on the 216th – 24th Ave Rezone. I was all prepared to show up and vote ‘yes’. But nooooooooooooooooo (I’m hoping people still remember John Belushi.)

And this matters: I know almost no one shows up for meetings. And so one can adopt the approach of “Well, tough noogies for them.” But I don’t. I run into residents all the time who share concerns with me and I can either exhort them to show up, Show Up, SHOW UP! (which usually does not happen) or I can ask staff or the Council to take their feelings into account.

The day of the meeting, of course two residents run into me on the street who are affected by this ordinance. So I asked the Council to delay the vote for a week. And of course, no dice. Why? Scheduling. We scheduled the second reading so that there was no way to

This matters. We’re constantly put into situations where we have to make decisions that night or else.

A mayor by any other name…

There has been a certain amount of kerfuffle on social media over the past week concerning the fact that Cm Achziger holds two elected offices and is up for re-election to that second office.

What none of the social media objecters seem to know, or wish to discuss, is that the Council approved a new 2023 City Council Protocol Manual, which explicitly bars councilmembers from holding multiple offices. This is a rule which many cities, including SeaTac have in place, by the way. Just between us girls, I’m not certain the issue with the Council was ever that Mr. Achziger held two offices at the time of his election to City Council. The issue now might be that he ran for re-election to that second office. So, you can either say that he is defying the will of the Council, or you could say that he is ignoring an unenforceable (and thus ill-considered) rule. You make the call. 🙂

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. 😀 What concerned me was something else. Earlier in the week, I wrote an email to City Attorney Tim George, asking the following question:

 

Here’s the thing. Our government is called Council/Manager. It consists of a CEO (City Manager) and a Council of seven equals. Cities like Kent or Federal Way have a very different form of government, known as Council/Mayor. In Council/Mayor, the mayor is the CEO. So for example, Kent Mayor Dana Ralph is the functional equivalent of City Manager Michael Matthias here. The main difference is that she was elected by voters and Michael Matthias was hired by our City Council. In both cases, the executive is kept apart from the legislature. Make sense?

But Matt Mahoney is not the executive. He is a part of the legislature and simply one of seven. He runs the meetings, but off the dais he has no more authority to ‘direct’ anyone to do anything than any other member of the City Council. That’s not a slam, I’m just giving you some names to make it clearer rather than using pronouns. A key aspect of both Council/Manager or Council/Mayor government is to keep the executive separate from the legislature and not have any member of the Council perform executive functions. The Council is meant to make decisions as a group and provide oversight of the executive.

Most of the public thinks all ‘mayors’ are the same. ie. that Matt Mahoney’s job is the same as Dana Ralph’s. You can see this on social media whenever there is a regional letter signed by various executives. The letters will bear the signatures of Dana Ralph, Jim Ferrell, etc. but not the mayor of Des Moines–and immediately the public thinks that ‘Des Moines doesn’t care’. No, that’s just the difference in types of government.

The real problem is that because the public thinks the Des Moines Mayor is like the Kent mayor, that encourages the Des Moines Mayor to act like a Kent Mayor–taking executive action. And if no one objects? They get to keep on acting like Kent Mayor.

As I wrote earlier, it’s also the case that another new rule explicitly bans Cms from holding multiple public offices. So apart from anything else, it points a flaw in so many of our processes—we passed a rule before knowing whether or not it was enforceable. We install a speed camera before we get permission from PSE. We promise all kinds of things we cannot deliver on.

We spent (4) committee meetings and then (3) full council meetings on that thing and as with any 1.0 it has some real flaws, which I wish the public had spoken on. People show up when it’s the Marina. But it’s hard to get people to put energy into arcane things like ‘rules’. For example, here’s another new rule…

Apparently the Mayor and Deputy Mayor are now in charge of enforcing these here rules of conduct? 😀

It is my fervent wish that there are three votes in January to re-visit our new Protocol Manual and apply fixes asap. Not via any complicated ad hoc committee. Just two simple meetings. Because every good law should have two readings. See what I did there? 😀

Cm Steinmetz said that the reason it took four meetings to alter our rules of procedure was because of my constant input. Not true. The four meetings I referred to were the pcommittee meetings of which I was not a part. He also said he had no control over the process. Not true. He was on the rules writing committee. I did have a bunch of questions during those three full Council meetings–because this was the first complete re-write of our rules of procedure since 1959. It was the most labour intensive deal I can recall in fifteen years of watching the Council.

Deputy Mayor Buxton responsed to me by suggesting that I had my timelines muddled. Also not true. The mayor took action before we started the rules re-write. Why would we put a rule into effect until we knew whether or not it would be enforceable?

The mayor responded in his closing comments by saying:

a) That any Cm can get advice from the City attorney. Actually, that is untrue. I never get replies to my emails to the City attorney. Including the above letter. As with so many things, if either the City Manager or attorney don’t want to reply? They ghost me. Not. Cool.

b) He also said that he had only two choices in the manner: either to direct the City Attorney, or do nothing. In other words the constitution of the United States backed him into a corner on this one. 😀  Not exactly. He had a third choice. He could asked the full Council for permission to then direct the City to get a ruling from the County Prosecutor. His third choice, the right choice would have been to bring it to a public vote–just like any other policy discussion.

In his closing remarks, the Mayor also said that being mayor is a heavy lift. It is. But what makes it especially heavy for him, is that he so often chooses to take things upon himself which should be the burden of seven people. And the public lets him get away with it. Because for most of you, a mayor is a mayor.

Therefore, I want to end with a positive suggestion. We could hire an independent facilitator to bang the gavel and call on people at every meeting. Or, we chould rename the office of mayor. Not kidding. There is nothing special about the term. We could call it Moderator. Or Presiderer. Or Betty Lou for all I care.  But until we do, every person who holds the position will be subject to the allure of the title. It’s the title which convinces everyone to make ‘mayor’ into far more than what it’s supposed to be.