Weekly Update: 11/27/2022

Get get that 3rd COVID Booster (the new ‘bivalent’ model.) Now. Deaths are slowly rising. Again, again, it takes about a month to achieve full efficacy. And the number of people who have had all four injections is now below fifty percent. Football, Thanksgiving. Christmas. I think you know where I’m going here. They’re doing walk-ins now pretty much everywhere. 🙂

This Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle (Agenda) The Commission will give final approval to their 2023 budget.

Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) Highlights include:

• The City Manager Report will include the long-awaited Ferry Update.
• The Consent Agenda will consider contract renewals of three more consultants, including the Ferry guy, the Marina consultant guy, and the engineer guy who helped us with the Des Moines Creek Business Park.
• Executive Session (to review a public employee.) Spoiler alert: there is only one employee the Council is allowed to review. I can’t tell ya who it is, but the job title may or may not rhyme with Scarlet Tanager. 😀

On the Consent Agenda will also a bunch of sidewalk repairs. If you’ve seen the white chalk around town that’s them. I want to point out that the City tries hard to inventory all those cracks and so on, but you have to report them!!! Using the handy Fix-It Form. 🙂

Last Week

Monday: We handed in our annual City Manager Evaluation (which is supposed to be a semi-annual evaluation, but hey, whatever.)

Thursday: The turkey was dry. Not. For which I was (and am) extremely thankful. This is the first time in over two years I felt un-self-conscious about being at a ‘gathering’.  Even watching that ridiculous game you all call (cough) ‘football’ was a total blast. (And besides, by watching that one game a year, I always collect just enough buzzwords to sound credible for the rest of the year. That Prevent Defense? Amazing! 😀 )

City Currents Magazine

The Winter City Currents Magazine is out and, as always, I encourage you to read it carefully. And when you do, please take another minute and look through at least one of the back issues.

Even though most of them are strictly black and white, I much prefer most of those older City newsletters, for several reasons.

First of all, the older ones just tended to be more informative. You take away all the advertisements from the ..er… ‘current’ version (which are fine, by the way) and there’s just less there there.

Also, the lack of ‘there’ reflects the fact that we’re just not doing as many programs as we used to. A decade ago there was a whole other ‘Rec and Roll’ magazine-inside-a-magazine (which was upside down and backwards to drive that point home for some reason) chock full of activities for kids and seniors.

But the biggest difference in recent years? Politics. Over the past 2-3 years, the magazine has been used by the Mayor not simply to recount various activities, but more and more for the explicit purpose of selling a particular vision. And you definitely should not want this.

Imagine…

Last year, Deputy Mayor Mahoney did a two-page article in the Spring 2021 City Currents to shill for a Ferry Pilot program. He asked residents to “imagine” a ferry program which had not been voted on or financed and in fact bore only a passing resemblance to the sixty day ‘pilot’ the City put into place this past summer at a loss of several hundred thousand dollars meant for long-term capital projects.

This year, Mayor Mahoney again asks the public to use their imagination, telling the public that we need to show “leadership and courage”, embrace “public/private partnerships” and make the Marina and City “more attractive to private developers.” I have absolutely no idea what any of that means or why it would be to your benefit to support those statements, because they are not proposals. Rather, they again describe a dream and a philosophy. I was elected to propose, and vote for, real things, not support dreams–or ideologies.

(Ironically, the most successful project the City has ever undertaken had no private investment whatsoever. You may have heard of it, it’s called The Des Moines Marina.)

We have indeed spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money on ‘planning’ the Marina Redevelopment ($225,000 alone in grants from the Port of Seattle.) It’s been five years now and I have to ask, do you see anything that looks like a for realz plan?

• In November 2021, the Council voted to enter into an ‘exclusive negotiation’ on Parcel A–a hotel at the foot of 223rd.
• Yet everyone gets blind sided September 27, 2022 with a totally new proposal for a hotel blocking the north end of the Marina.
• And then at a presentation before the Des Moines Marina Association only one month later, the story changes again.

Beyond the tiny problem of (almost) no one seeming to know what is actually going on (including yours truly) it seems to me that all of us are being asked to sign on, not to a specific plan, but rather to a particular philosophy and a totally unsupported dream. And whether or not you buy into that dream, it is simply inappropriate for the Mayor or the City Manager to use the City Currents to try to sell that dream.

What makes a proper city publication?

The City Currents is undoubtedly the most powerful public platform in the City of Des Moines. Despite living in the age of “the interwebs” it is still, by far the most widely distributed piece of ‘news’ about Des Moines–because it is the only print piece that is sent to every address–residential and commercial. Every address receives one, not just the 5,000 or so people who are active on various social media platforms. And a four-colour magazine sent to over 15,000 addresses expensive to produce–which means we only get to do it 3-4 times a year. For those reasons alone its contents should be chosen with great care, both in what we choose to include, but also in what we choose to leave out.

• We have the practical obligation to fill every issue with as much useful information as we can.
• But even more importantly, we have an obligation to avoid using any inch of it to promote any political agenda–and certainly not to try to sell the public empty dreams.

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