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. They’re doing walk-ins now pretty much everywhere. 🙂
This Week
Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda)
Barring that lahar we’ve been expecting here for about 300 years, this should be our last meeting of the year. As has become the norm, almost everything is on the Consent Agenda. Highlights?
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- City Manager 5% increase
- 223rd Street project
- Massey Creek Pocket Estuary
- Court Room Audio system
There will also be a Public Hearing on that 216th zoning moratorium so many people are puzzled by (including moi.)
Last Week
Tuesday: Port of Seattle (Agenda) The Commission gave final approval to their 2023 budget. Here is a letter I wrote to the Commissioners summarising my feelings on their first year together.
Thursday: City Council Meeting (Agenda) (Video) Highlights included:
City Manager Report
The City Manager Report featured three items of note. All had elements of ‘surprise!’… Have I made it clear yet how much I am not a fan of ‘surprises’ in local government? 😀 The Mayor sets the final agenda for every meeting. So if you take away nothing else from what I write, it is this:
This is tactical. Everyone knows that ‘the element of surprise’ gives one an overwhelming advantage in many situations.
JAN 26 Marina STUDY SESSION Announced
The City Manager announced a Council Study Session on January 26th to continue the discussion about the Marina. A Study Session is a Council Meeting and not the Town Hall so many of you have requested. Surprise! 😀 Also, no information was provided as to the format. Recognise that there have been exactly three public meetings on the Marina in five years and they’ve all been terrible. There’s no other accurate way to describe them. I take grief from my colleagues about comments like this and my reply is this:
The City has never acknowledged any problems with public engagement on the Marina, quite the contrary, they have insisted that there has been ‘extensive’ public engagement. And when you’re that consistently stubborn, harsh treatment is fair treatment. I continue to urge residents to write the Council and demand we execute on the Virtual Marina Town Hall the Council voted for in September, 2021.
Bond Retirement
The Finance Director reported that the City had just paid off the last tranche of Marina GO Bonds from 2012, which is a good thing because it improves our credit rating slightly so that we can… get out there and grab us some more Marina debt! 😀 But seriously, I was not quite as “standing-o” as my colleagues for two reasons:
- Bonds are (or should be) a routine part of the City’s business. You don’t have a party when you pay your mortgage. It’s time to move past celebrating when we do something normal.
- Also, it took the City a decade to pay off that $2.5MM. Get it? Even two million is a heavy lift for us. Aaaannnnd… the docks will cost about $50MM.
In other words, it’s nice. Truly. But save the champagne.
Ferry Update
Our Ferry Consultant (who is also the publisher of the City Currents) gave the long-awaited Ferry Update. We were given a presentation which again declared the program a complete success.
To which I have the following short reply. Page #21.
That is one page from a report from the firm the City hired to do the actual program setup, delivered to the City Manager over a year ago. Over a year ago, it provided some (but not all) the answers the Council should have received before we voted to begin this entire process. (Let that sink in for a moment.)
It projects that a six month trial will lose between $1-1.5MM dollars. That is why we did not see it until after the trial. And after my colleagues voted for a second round in Spring 2022. More below.
Consent Agenda
The Consent Agenda included a contract renewal and pay increase for three more consultants:
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- A City engineer who retired in 2013 and has been kept on as a private contractor for 10 years. I am not using his name because I have no issue with his work. I voted no because, I was a consultant. 😀 And I don’t like long term contractors unless I get to see the contractor and ask them about their projects every once in a while. For a decade this person has played a lead role on several very controversial/high profile jobs including:
- Sound Transit
- Des Moines Creek Business Park
- SR-509
- The transfer of WSDOT surplus property (the ‘forest’ along 216th) to the Port of Seattle.
- Peter Philips, the above ferry guy. I think you can assume that I would not favour raising his monthly fee from $3,000 to $5,000 a month.
- The Marina consultant guy. His resume includes the Harbor Steps in Seattle, which is very nice. But again, the Council has not bothered to discuss the cancellation of last year’s aborted RFQ or this year’s surprise hotel. We need to stop everything Marina-related until we have a better plan.
- A City engineer who retired in 2013 and has been kept on as a private contractor for 10 years. I am not using his name because I have no issue with his work. I voted no because, I was a consultant. 😀 And I don’t like long term contractors unless I get to see the contractor and ask them about their projects every once in a while. For a decade this person has played a lead role on several very controversial/high profile jobs including:
New Items For Consideration
I proposed to restore the Public Comment Form and put a clear public comment policy on the City web site. Voted down 5-2. The Clerk insists that one can find all correspondence from the public in every packet. I asked for a procedure and was told “It’s all there.” Great. Show me.
Executive Session
Regular readers will note that I get bitched at for ‘loose lips’ about ES. But once again it was my colleagues who ‘spilled the beans’ from the dais that it was the City Manager’s Review. But not me, nope. 😀
‘In the room’ was, as usual, a little ugly, and a whole lot of pointless. And I feel bad for the staff members who have to endure it. Councilmember Achziger proposed limiting the participants to just the seven CMs. I seconded it only to make a point: I have never done an employee review where the employee was in the room for the entire deal. Yes, the employee is present for ‘feedback’, but there is always (at least on the planet I inhabit) a section where management has a chance to discuss the performance of the employee alone. In my time on the Council I have never been at a table with my six colleagues without the City Manager.
A couple more details to express the pointlessness:
- The City Manager’s contract provides for two reviews every year. We only ever do one. The mid-year one just never gets put on the Agenda. That’s the Mayor’s call and that’s #327 on my list of reforms.
- The City Manager provides a public Accomplishments document. The Council provides their review notes, which are also public documents. But this year, we did not see each other’s comments until we got into the room. Just like that ferry report, we go in blind. That is also the Mayor’s choice and it is also by design. #328.
It predicts that a six month ferry program will lose between $997,000 and $1,450,000. But that small bit of information was not included in the information the Council had before voting on any point of the Ferry Pilot program. And for that reason alone you should not be happy.
Same thing happened with the Diedrich RPM Demand Study in 2019. We paid for it, but it took me doing a public records request in 2021 to see the results. The Council voted to approve the project without seeing those results. (We also did not see the 2015 King County and 2021 PSRC Studies–both of which see no future in ferry commuter service here.)
I cannot say for certain, but in this case, it looks as those the City did not want to have to explain why it wanted to move forward with such a dire forecast and simply avoided that problem by simply not mentioning that the report even existed.
And the City Manager made it clear that the report was available. He chose to provide the report after the meeting. And I’m glad that cat is finally out of the bag. Not providing data to the Council until after the meeting is a strategy.
As soon as the presentation ended, and even before taking questions from the Council, the City Manager asked the Council to move to create a second ferry ‘trial’ in the Spring, with no budget. And my colleagues seemed more than eager to act on that. They just want it.
Some specifics…
And we were also given a lot more information we had never received.
- We were told that the program had come in at less than 50% of the original contract, woo hoo! But in my world that is not a good thing. If one’s cost estimate is that far wrong, explanations are warranted. We received none. (Seriously, if you contract with a company for a new roof at $20,000 and then they hand you a bill for $10,000 wouldn’t you have questions?)
- We were also told (silly!) that the Ferry was never intended to be sustainable (ie. to cover its own costs.)
- In fact, we were told that covering 40% of costs was better than expected performance. (Not to beat a dead horse, but we were never informed that 20% was considered ‘normal’.)
- We were told that the overwhelming number of riders arrived at the dock by automobile.
- We were told that the ridership was mostly seniors so there was no way to know how well it would do with commuters–which is another reason why we need that second trial! (Actually, there’s a very good way to know–just look at the previous for realz studies done by both King County Water Taxi 2015 and the PSRC in 2021. They both indicate that commuter demand will not be great–if it were, they would have considered adding Des Moines to their list of stops. Again: we already know that there is no great demand for commuters in DM.)
At Crazy Eddie’s, how do we keep prices so low?
Circling back to that final cost. How did the City get such a deal, a steal, the sale of the century? I asked. Got nothing. But here is a slide from the Presentation compared to the contract we approved in July:
Ta da!
| Original Contract July | Final Report 12/01/22 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vessel | 174,000 | 74,840 |
| Fuel | 93,600 | 83,532 |
| Moorage | 14,300 | 35,030 |
| Ops Management | 47,840 | ? |
| Marketing | 70,600 | ? |
| Mobilization | 60,500 | ? |
| Project Report | 9,200 | ? |
| Total Costs | 470,040 | 220,402 |
| Revenues | 89,345 | 89,345 |
| Profit (Loss) | (380,695) | (131,507) |
Since the Council didn’t actually see, you know, the books, here’s what it looks like to me at the moment.
- Somehow we got two months for the price of one. (Is that a one-off, was the estimate crazy-wrong or will we continue to get that kind of a ‘bargain’ going forward?
- Annnnnnnnnnd… we simply did not include all those (very real) marketing/management charges on the presentation (note the little asterisk.)
- Also, nowhere do we include any ferry consultant fees ($5,000/mo) and our various advertising and other ferry consultant fees (yes, we’ve had multiple consultants.)
But no matter how you present it, the thing is a big money loser. The only question is how much. And the fact that we have chronically felt the need to hide information, dissemble, and even fiddle the numbers to make it look better than it is, should be alarming. One thing you can take to the bank is this: it loses money. And the longer we run it, the more money it will lose.
It’s not a puppy!
If one reviews the mountain of PDFs the consultant provided, most of it involves how happy people are about having a ferry. They like riding it. They like seeing it come and go. I get it. But only one or two pages are concerned with the finances. And that is because that part of the story is simply not very much fun. Yeah, you can spin it as ‘better than expected’, but that’s like saying a D+ is not as bad as an F-. Neither are passing grades.
I have to admit that I’ve been as frustrated by residents who support the ferry as by my colleagues.
That over-eagerness feels to me a whole lot like when yer kids bring home that stray puppy. They want it. And so their strategy is to, by hook or by crook, keeping it around as long as possible, whether it makes sense or not, so that little Barkley becomes a part of the family.
Aside from the fact that I’m an extremely fun person, this has nothing to do with the fun in riding a ferry. Cruel truth: The money we’re spending on this ferry is money that we’re taking from core functions (public safety, parks, roads, programs for kids, seniors, etc.) Sorry, Brenda, but if we keep that St. Bernard, we can’t fund your college fund. Awwww, gee whiz, Daaaaaaad. 😀
The dream that makes it all OK…
The only way one might justify this spend would be if one could demonstrate that it will eventually bring in more revenue long term. But read carefully: neither the City or the highly paid consultant has provided any evidence to support that notion. It is all a dream.
The City claimed that ‘many’ businesses had received a noticeable uptick in business. But the Council only received one letter to that effect. And of the 111 Passenger Ferry Comments included with the report, none are from businesses.
However, I’ll leave you with one small stat…
Over seventy percent of the riders originated in Des Moines, headed to Seattle and took a return trip. Which means (duh) that less than thirty percent of the ridership will be coming to spend money here. And the vast majority of riders originating here are discount fares, who will take up parking we do not have and spend money at very nice places in Seattle.
Get it? The ferry can never be a revenue driver for Des Moines. It is impossible. (However, it can compete for scarce parking resources.)
Still insane, man…
I wrote back in June, This is insane. The City Manager asked me to reconsider that assessment in light of the final report and my reply is: Still insane, man.
Frankly, we don’t seem to care–on multiple levels. We don’t seem to care whether a program like this was evaluated in a transparent fashion, we don’t care whether it works or not, and we don’t seem to care what the long term consequences will likely be. It really does strike me like that puppy your kids want you to keep. They just want it.