Some bits of business…
Future Agendas
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not dynamic, ie. you have to click it every time you want to see a new version. And it’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be very useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
City Manager Stuff
I’m publishing a replica of the report. Until recently, the Interim City Manager was publishing a separate PDF for each article. Now, he’s just publishing the current week. So, there’s no way to look back on previous articles. Until this is resolved, I will be providing these replicas
city-manager-weekly-report-october-25-2024
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. The highlight this week are several Halloween events, one on October 28 at Steven J. Underwood Park (5:00 – 6:30pm) and another on October 31 on Marine View Drive (4:30 – 6:30pm). This just lends support to my idea that Halloween should be declared the Official Des Moines City Holiday.
SR-509 Stage 2
The virtual open house for SR-509 Stage 2 is open. If yer short on time, here is a direct link to the info most Des Moines residents will want to see: SR 509/24th Avenue South to South 188th Street – I live in, work in, or travel through Des Moines, SeaTac, and southern Burien
If you have questions or concerns about construction at any time, you can contact their 24-hour hotline, 206-225-0674, or SR509Construction@wsdot.wa.gov.
The SAMP
I’m borrowing a flyer from our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info because it really sums it up. The Sustainable Area Master Plan (aka ‘the SAMP’) Public Comment period has opened. The SAMP is the environmental review for the airport’s next major expansion–which has already begun and will increase flight operations as much in the next ten years as they have in the last ten years.
Learn how this process works and how YOU can comment!
Last Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission Meeting Agenda. Four and a half hours. Highlights:
- The SAMP Draft EA
- The Property Tax Levy (See the massive 1footnote below.)
Tuesday 6:00-8:00pm Budget Town Hall at Beach Park Auditorium. More below.
Wednesday: Sea-Tac Airport Roundtable (StART) Highlights: the SAMP.
Thursday: Municipal Facilities Committee Agenda
Marina staff provided an update on building a Dry Stack Facility. They confirmed that such a facility would generate $1,000,000 a year in revenue. Cost is $5-6M with a 1-2 year build time. Basically, it clears an additional $250,000 a year. Woo hoo! However, before we get too excited, we blew it in two ways:
- By not adding this onto the original permitting for dock replacement, we missed a critical permitting window. That alone may add another two years of delay.
- Of course, it doesn’t matter because we maxed out the credit card with the Marina Steps, so even if we had the permit we have no dough.
- Calling this a ‘missed opportunity’ is something of an understatement IMHO. If we had embarked on this when the idea was first possible (in the 2000’s) we would now have (almost) 1all the money we would ever need to replace the docks–without borrowing. And by not having the money to proceed now, every year we not only miss out on new revenue, we make the future build cost more expensive and have less money to repay the other Marina work we will need to do. What I keep trying to tell people is that there are at least $50M in future Dock Replacement costs that we do not have money for. And for those on the Council who have criticised me for crying over spilt milk, not recognising how monumental errors like this are is the reason we keep making them.
Thursday: Economic Development Committee Agenda
Highlight: SB5290 (Updating local project review requirements.) This is complicated, but to over-simplify, over the past few years the State has been leaning on cities like Des Moines in several ways to to build more housing. State Bill 5290 requires cities to speed the permitting process. One way to do this is by making pre-permitting meetings optional. Permitting is one of the most frustrating things for residents and builders. If I had a nickel for every complaint I’ve heard over the years I’d probably overwhelm the CoinStar machine. I can also see why overworked cities would not be entirely thrilled about this. If the applicant knows what they’re doing, this could help. If not, it could add cost and delay and even more frustration. In short, this is an experiment. 😀 But the fact is: the bill passed 98-0 and almost nothing passes 98-0 these days. So, it’s an experiment worth trying, even if REV1.0 has issues, because everyone recognises that we need to try something to get projects built faster.
October 24, 2024 City Council Meeting Recap
Public Comment
As has become common there were several excellent comments. I want to note two which I’ll discuss at the end of this article.
- One resident commented on the City’s Public Safety Levy Lid Lift flyer. This was paid for by the City but it is not only highly inaccurate, it is highly political. This is yet another unforced error. Shame.
- Another resident, a member of the Human Services Advisory Committee, begged the Council not to cut our HSAC budget this year.
City Manager’s Report
FAREWELL TIM GEORGE!
JK. This was Tim George’s last meeting as Interim City Manager. Actually, he’s just moving back to his old office as City Attorney. In fact, the staff gave him a super-cool gift. Free golf ! Lucky so and so. 😀
My feelings are a bit more complex. On the one hand, he has performed so far above his predecessor it’s ridonculous and I want to acknowledge that. For example he started doing a Weekly Report and he does them very well. On the other hand, every other City already does stuff like that and has done since forever. We were simply outliers by not doing something. How much praise should one heap on anyone, not for going above and beyond their peers, but for simply acting normal?
Airport Committee
He asked us to decide on Cm Mahoney’s item from two weeks ago to reinstate the Ad Hoc Aviation Committee we had from 2018-2019. Frankly, for reasons having nothing to do with the great residents who put in a ton of effort, it was a disaster. It takes months for any new committee to get organised, so I was reluctant to reinstate it during this critical (45 day!) SAMP Comment Period. This comes down to looking good vs. doing the right thing in the time you have. He described my last presentation on the SAMP at the Environment Committee as a ‘word salad’. Ouch. 😀 I try to turn the other cheek in these circumstances, but frankly, any subject one does not understand will likely be perceived as ‘word salad’. Watch that meeting for yourself and judge.
The City has been absolutely negligent on airport issues for many years. It will take a long time to get up to speed.
The Council decided (wisely) in my opinion, to re-instate the Aviation Committee next year, but specified no implementation.
In the meantime, the Council agreed to work on a community meeting to help residents understand the SAMP and provide good comments before the December 5, 2024 deadline.
Consent Agenda
I pulled Item #5, accepting a $160,000 grant to study ‘the economic benefits of a passenger ferry’ just to vote ‘no’. Who votes no on free money? Me. We actually did a similar (cough) ‘study’ in 2020. Here it is. I object to taking staff time to apply for a grant, which does nothing for us. As I keep saying, every not useful grant you get is another grant you won’t get. Get it? My fear goes much deeper. The 2020 (double cough) ‘study’ was no study. It was basically an excuse to embark on the whole ‘pilot ferry program’. In fact, the Council never saw the study before voting to approve the program. I obtained it via public records request (that’s why the file name says ‘legal’.
Diedrich Passenger Ferry Demand Study Research Report Final – Legal Version
So even if this grant is free money, it could be (and has been) used by the City to further a lot of really bad future spending.
New Business: Water District #54 Utility Tax
We’re going to approve a utility tax change for WD54 to bring their rate payers into parity with the other special purpose districts in Des Moines (eg. Highline Water District.) WD54 objected and the Council directed the City to complete a negotiation with them before we vote on any permanent change.
Public Hearing 2025-2026 Biennial Budget First Reading
There are two official ‘readings’ of any budget and this was the first. Technically speaking, since we shifted to a biennial budget, the Council will not have to approve a new budget until 2027. I know this shift has caused a lot of heart burn for residents. I supported it then, and still do, for practical purposes. I’ve probably already irritated our CFO enough for a lifetime, but this was me trying to show some love in my limited ‘guy’ fashion.
I’m highly biased because I used to get paid a fairly obscene amount of dough to produce bespoke systems for much wealthier organisations. So this is not a critique of our staff. It’s a Catch-22. It takes a ton of money to create the kinds of systems I’m so snobbish about. But it’s totally worth it because it saves a bajillion hours of time and effort. For example, Seattle and the Port of Seattle do some extremely useful reports because they have a bajillion dollars. (Ironically, that’s the reason I can often speak more intelligently about their finances. They put it right out there. 😀 )
Since we’re not ginormous, almost all the reports our staff generate are ‘cut n paste’ from spreadsheets and Word documents. And again, all cities our size will have the same challenges. Thes reports often take far too long, can be error-prone. And if you want to ask ad hoc management questions you can’t just type in “Hey Siri…” You have to ask staff to take even more time to do more of that hand-generated fol-de-rol. It makes me cringe.
In a perfect world, all software would talk to one another, reports would not require any ‘formatting’ and you’d just press a button any time you wanted to see whatever valuable management information you wanted.
Back on Planet Earth, that is not the case.
One of the cost savings proposed by our Finance Director is to end a $40,000 a year subscription to a piece of software meant to help do the above. It doesn’t. It’s actually easier, and less error-prone to go back to ‘doing it by hand’. His comment was that he could not wait to ‘fire them’. Oy.
I don’t know how to square that circle. I can’t find a ‘grant’ to provide really great municipal software. So the only thing I can think of to support the Finance Director is to give him more time. That means going through this ‘process’ less often. I have never known the ‘annual’ process to provide any more ‘safety’ or produce better Council decisions. Frankly? All I’ve ever seen it do is take a lot of time on very redundant presentations.
In practice, the CFO produces various corrections and amendments during the year, which the Council simply approves. And any time there is a special need? There’s nothing holding the Council back to making further changes. In short, ‘the budget’, has never been a ‘cast in stone’ document. It’s been more like a very lengthy ceremony, meant to comply with state law, rather than being a useful tool for management and financial discipline.
My hope and prayer has always been to free up his time from a lot of this stuff, which is hard to read, so he can focus on reports that I think would be more useful.
I’m an outlier. To be honest, almost no electeds really read the budget. Even when we do, we miss things. Unless we find some way to get to easier to grok this stuff, we’ll keep making the same mistakes.
We’ll also keep missing opportunities. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. ‘Accounting’ like in our budget book just tells you that what you’re seeing is in order. I don’t care if it’s 300 or 3,000 pages. Accounting is neither strategy or management. It doesn’t tell you what you’re missing. It doesn’t tell you that how catastrophic it was that we did not invest in Dry Stack in 2007 and instead borrowed several times more in 2023 to build Marina Steps.
Budget Town Hall Meeting
This is awkward. I attended the Budget Town Hall at the Beach Park. It was not recorded. There were 40 people in attendance–including the rest of the Council. And then an equal amount of staff, truth be told. Almost all attendees live near the Marina. There were exactly three attendees under the age of AARP. One was a school board director (kudos!) but she doesn’t really count as a ‘civilian’, right? 😀
The event was a lovely thing for those 40 people. But I question the public outreach value of having all our top staff spend their evening in this manner. With my management hat on, if we insist on making our staff stay late, I’d prefer they be working to find more money under the cushions as the saying goes. And I’d prefer that we have our CFO record a value neutral Budget 101 video once, make it available to the entirety of Des Moines, then get a good night’s sleep.
Unfortunately it was not value-neutral. Every presentation I have seen starts out as very nice ‘municipal bookkeeping for dummies’ overview. Love it. But about ten minutes in they inevitably move into highly selective comparisons with other cities–transparently designed to sell the tax levy, or at least, not provide any acknowledgment of past mistakes as driving our current issues. Not loving it. I do not believe our CFO should be out front on what are, in fact, political issues.
As Tolstoy wrote (who doesn’t love a Tolstoy quote?), every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Many cities are having issues. But comparing revenue sources in that manner is not helpful because we are all completely different in that regard. Expense categories? Sure. Processes? Absolutely. We can all learn from one another. But revenue? That’s politics.
With all our budget challenges, mid-year, Interim City Manager George arbitrarily staffed a full-time communications director. Having done so, and now seeing that only 40 people ever show up for these Beach Park deals, I’d prefer that we either:
- Figure out how to bring more people to the Beach Park or
- Adopt a better public outreach strategy.
Perhaps we’ve reached a point where the only way to actually reach a broad range of residents is virtually. And if so, we should acknowledge and embrace that reality rather than putting out cookies for the same 40 people over and over.
Again, if you were one of those 40, feel free to disagree. 😃 But I think you may be slightly biased.
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I just don’t think ‘democracy’ works like this. We have an obligation to reach people where they are rather than continuing to insist that we are still living in pre-internet world.
And no matter how many people are in the audience, we should only use these meetings to provide value-neutral information, never to sell policy.
PS. Since I’ve lived here, I’ve seen not one, but several Budget 101 video presentations. Here is one from 2017 by then Finance Director Dunyele Mason which I thought was pretty good. Every CFO likes to put their take on this idea, and I think our current CFO can do an even better version of it. But a lot of the basic information has been presented. We just don’t get it out to people. If you missed the Beach Park thing, I encourage you to watch this. (Actually, I encourage you to watch it either way because one thing Dunyele did very well was to explain the limits of ‘auditing’, ie. what these reports won’t tell you.)
1Boy do I get push back on statements like this. I stand by it. Please read carefully: the Port of Seattle gets $88M a year in property tax from us. They deposit between 55-60% every year into an interest bearing investment portfolio we’ll call an ‘accelerated bond repayment account’. Think of it like yer IRA account–it grows every year and you try not to touch it. With me so far?
When they borrow money for a big capital project (a building or the SR99 tunnel) they have debt service payments, just like you do for your mortgage (or we do for dock replacement.) However, when they need to make one of those monthly payments, they don’t write a check out of their ‘bank account’. They write it out of that ACR, which is constantly growing with our tax payments and accrued interest. Get it?
Every November, when the Port Commission votes to approve the following year’s tax levy, they have a little celebration (not kidding), on how many hundreds of millions of dollars they are saving over time. Why the celebration? As big as they are, they could never afford to finance many of the mega-projects they do without that tax levy. Even though it seems tiny relative to their other revenue sources, that’s why they’re so loath to give up any of it for community benefit.
How is this possible? Again, think about yer mortgage. Imagine if you had a magical fund off somewhere that made most or all of your mortgage payment for you, or sometimes even allowed you to make double-payments!? Instead of taking 30 years to pay off yer mortgage you might get ‘er done in ten. And, you’d might save as much money in interest payments as the entire purchase price of the house!! That’s the accelerated, baby. If we had a similar revenue source (like Dry Stack) bringing in even modest fees 15 years ago, we coulda invested in a similar manner, it woulda been a game changer for Marina Redevelopment.
Thanks JC. Always enlightening. How many committees reinvented over and over and over and over again which have produced few results if any. Reinstate the planning commission. That would be good. I hope the new CM looks at these things and once she has a chance to absorb all this some productive changes will happen in Des Moines.
And why was the town hall budget meeting not recorded?? I would totally love to hear the comments.