Weekly Update: 07/21/2024 - JC Harris For Des Moines, Washington (2024)

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.

A quick reminder that Summer Road Paving is beginning in Redondo and then McSorley Creek.

For those of you unaware, development of the open space west of Des Moines Creek Business Park was approved by the Port of Seattle last week. The public, especially those living nearby can and should comment on the environmental impact through a process called SEPA. But you only have until July 2023 so get on it! Instructions on how to comment and full coverage of the issue from our friends at Sea-Tac Noise.Info. (look at the Action Items!)

People often do not understand what the Council (or I) can and cannot do on issues like this. By all means do anything and everything to advocate for what you want. But I also know you only have so much time, and I want you to spend it on things that will get you where you want to go.

What I propose may sometimes appear counter-intuitive, or less direct than, say a petition. But it’s your best shot given the state of local politics. The legal decisions the Council will make will be to allow or deny permitting based on the SEPA process. That is the only thing we can/will respond to. And yes or no will boil down to two questions: 1. “Has the SEPA process as described by the City fairly considered the impact to the area.” 2. “Has the developer sincerely complied with that checklist.” If there are reasonable concerns about those two questions? Absolutely, the Council can take action. But we are not the ‘commenters’. In fact we’re supposed to remain above the fray and impartially decide on whether or not everyone played by the rules.

Worst case scenario for me? Residents show up at a City Council meeting and somberly unroll a ginormous scroll of petition signatures– but with no SEPA comments on the record. Because that would not give the Council any legal basis to do anything other than say ‘yes’. I’ve had that happen during my tenure on other projects. It infuriates residents (¹and more importantly) breaks my heart.

City Manager Stuff

Interim City Manager George returned from holidays fully rested. Not. 😀 As usual, his Weekly Report featured a lot of good info, including a very nice profile of our Court Administrator.

City Manager’s Report July 19, 2024

Tax Levy Lid Lift

As many of you know, I am against the tax levy lid lift. As much as I disagreed with the Council vote, I had hoped to leave it at the dais. But despite the narrow 4-3 vote, my colleagues on the other side have made several campaigny things. So as a private citizen I made a video of talking points, and offered it to the ‘con committee’. If someone asks me my opinion, as a private citizen, I will offer it. But I am not a part of any organised group, have not, will not ‘donate’ to such things, nor do I even necessarily agree with any part of the arguments made by the con (or pro) committees.

And, I will not use this, or any other platform to engage in a debate. I am conscious of not wanting to conflate my role as elected with my personal opinions. In my view, as much as possible, this issue should be debated by the pro/con committee and not electeds.

My concern was that the City (and the majority) have a much bigger ‘reach’. And no matter how hard the City or my colleagues try to be unbiased, they cannot be. After all, they dearly want the initiative to pass and thus cannot be truly ‘objective’. For me, this issue is not about the tax. It’s about the poor management of the past eight years which got us here. This is such a complicated story to tell, I felt there needed to be some way for the other side to push back more effectively–at least once. If you disagree, please let me know.

This Week

Tuesday: Port of Seattle Commission (Agenda)

Wednesday: Adam Smith’s Office on various airport issues, including Port Package Updates and air quality monitors.

Wednesday: Highline Forum at Highline College Highline Forum Agenda FINAL – 24jul2024

Thursday: Municipal Facilities Committee – 25 Jul 2024 – Agenda – Pdf Highlight: There have been some changes to the Marina Steps project. But (sigh) no piccies.

Thursday: Economic Development – 25 Jul 2024 – Agenda – Pdf Highlights:

Middle Housing. If you are interesting in ADUs or duplex/triplex/quadplexes? This is the meeting for you!

One grouse I have is that the new State requirement is to allow for 4 units per lot only within 1/4 mile of a transit stop. I am hoping we can expand this to the entire City. Why? Because Metro has shut down so many stop in Des Moines! Tons of places that were eligible are not. We should zone for these places as if bus service was here. So that when it returns, we’re not behind the curve.

Comp Plan #12 ‘Healthy Des Moines’.

Goal HD-3 Support the efforts of the Port of Seattle to study the impacts of noise and air pollution from SeaTac Airport on surrounding communities

Asking the Port to study the impacts of noise and air pollution is like asking Exxon to study the health impacts of leaded gasoline.

This week I was asked a question along the lines of “You supported the Port’s studies on trees, so why not this? Silly.” (I added the ‘silly’ because I was having a fragile moment. :D)

But the question is a good one, so at the risk of my delicate sensibilities.

Some Port sponsored studies (like the Green Des Moines Tree Inventory Forterra did in 2017) are great. Because they present absolutely no threat to the airport. There is nothing that could ever impact their regulatory authority on operations, ie. money.

Studying air quality around airports, on the other hand cannot be left to the airport operator. It must be conducted by an independent agency, so that it can lead to regulatory authority.

And if you don’t believe me, here is the working example: water. For decades, the airport was improperly discharging toxic materials into Des Moines Creek and Puget Sound. They were required to build a $110,000,000 processing facility because they hadnone. They now spin this as how environmentally conscious they are. But in fact, it was a tooth and nail series of water quality law suits pushed by private citizens which restored Des Moines Creek, Miller Creek and generally improved the health of Des Moines residents.

There are many areas where we can partner productively with the Port of Seattle. But air quality isnot one of them. And, I’m sorry for how this sounds, but it’s this ‘nuance’ that allows the Port to constantly confuse us.

Thursday: Regular Meeting Agenda Highlights:

Update on City Manager Recruitment. We have eleven (11) applicants, for which we’ve received detailed resumes. We must now whittle down to a final 3-4. The idea is for us to score them 1, 2 or 3 and then move forward on the highest ranked people. This begs the question of how does one rank them? So I asked if the HR Director might prepare a list of ‘most important values’ for us to select from. My hope would be that the Council could agree that our scores are based on 4-5 key values that we all agree on. That way the public understands why we chose who we did. And just to be clear: we actually do agree on a lot of stuff. We may not always be able to bring ourselves to cooperate as constructively as we might, but we do agree on more things than we disagree. Hopefully this scoring system will bring that out. 🙂
Marina Float Charging Grant. I will vote no. The City continues to move forward on an expensive passenger ferry program. We’re still spending over $8,500 a month on lobbying and grant writing fees to plow ahead on this. And this is on top of the fact that wealready spend another $6,000 on general lobbying fees. Especially with the State out of session that should be more than enough to lobby King County to help us. If not? Let’s wait until we actually have some money to move forward. I don’t think the public or my colleagues understand just how totally not-baked this technology is. There is literallyno working model I can find for an electric hydrofoil passenger ferry or a floating charging platform. I mean anywhere. A City as strapped as Des Moines has absolutely no business being in the R&D business on tech that isn’t even at the Alpha stage.
The Council will vote to support South King Fire and Rescue’s upcoming ballot initiative. I will vote yes because although it’s a tax (despite what you’ve read, it’s a bill you have to pay connected to your property so you say potato, I say tax-o…) Anyhoo, it’s fairer to the average taxpayer than the current system, which (sadly) our own ballot initiative is not.

Friday: JURY DUTY!?! Moi!?! I often tell people “I can’t fix your parking tickets” as a jokey way to indicate how little ‘power’ a member of the City Council has… and here’s yer proof. I can’t even get outta jury duty! 😀 Seriously, I’ve done this before and it’s actually very interesting to see how the system actually works vs. how you think it works.

Last Week

Tuesday: Burien Airport Committee. Back in 2017, the BAC was the nexus for community advocacy on airport issues–it spurred Des Moines to create its own airport committee. To be blunt, it fell apart due to personalities. What they (and we) need are people who see the ongoing need to respond to airport issues–which will last as long as the airport does. Des Moines Creek West is a perfect example. Like all of the 216th and 24th Ave area, it’s really an airport issue.

Wednesday: Regional Transit Committee. (Agenda) We voted to approve the King County rejiggering of the bus system, specifically the RapidRide (like our A Line.) What is so frustrating is that it’s all basically about improvements to the north/south big ‘pipe’, with no consideration for the east/west ‘feeders’. ie. that last mile. It’s of no help to someone living in Woodmont to have better service on Pacific Highway if you have to walk 45 minutes to get there!

This is what is so infuriating to me about our current transportation strategy. When King County evaluated passenger ferry service in 2015, it shot down the concept of passenger ferry here because of low demand. Instead it helped us develop the 635 Shuttle along 216th, which is fantastic. The 635 makes it easy for people from the Marina District all the way up to Pacific Highway to get to Light Rail! But there is nothing like that for anyone south of Kent Des Moines Road. And until we get serious about making it easy for people along 240th and points south to get to the new Light Rail, we will never get where we want to go.

Wednesday: Along with many of you I attended the memorial service for long time community member and senior services advisory committee member Kaylene Moon. And as weird as this will sound, it was the best damned funeral I’ve been to in years! 😀 And given who she was, I expected nothing less.

The Big Picture

In reviewing the eleven semi-finalists for City Manager, a couple of things stand out. We are watching them. But they are also watching us. In their applications, they are asked to provide three questions they want to ask us in their final interview. More than one put down, “Where is your strategic plan?” Spoiler alert: we do not have one.

My career was spent studying systems. Accounting systems, Customer service systems, Environmental systems, Assembly lines. Basically everything can be thought of like a machine–a series of processes–in the sense that everything affects everything. That’s why biologists call Puget Sound or a wetland an ‘eco-system’.

So far, I think my worst failure as an elected is not my sparkling personality, but rather my inability to get people, residents, colleagues, staff to think more like that. People just assume that the machine (ie. the City) is working OK. Instead, they ask about their specific issue. They wantthat fixed in isolation. I get it. Nobody wants to take a course in auto mechanics to fix a broken light on the dashboard.

But everything really does affect everything. That blinking light may be one tiny broken wire–or it may mean the computer controlling your engine is on the fritz. Or, it may mean that the designer should stop and look at why the wire broke, which caused the light to blink, which caused the computer to malfunction…

The pace of activity over the past twelve months…

We had a City Manager Performance Review which the Council overwhelming rated as positive (well, with a few exceptions. 😉 )
We voted on $25M in bonds.
We changed police chiefs.
We had a plan to create a new Event Planner Enterprise Fund.
And then we didn’t.
We changed City Managers, with no notice. But left him as Economic Development Director.
We assigned an Interim City Manager who was supposed to last six months. That will now be more like a year.
We had multiple ‘Communications Study Sessions’. But none of the issues concerning transparency have been addressed. The focus has been entirely on promotion.
We voted to move from Annual Budgeting to Biennial Budgeting.
We went from being (according to our 2017-2023 police chief) ‘fully staffed’ on police to having an emergency situation?
We debuted a Marina Steps project, the largest City project in 50 years, with only one community meeting.
We proposed a property tax levy lid lift.
And then, a month later, we replaced the police chief who proposed it; who lasted only nine months in the job.
We also lost our IT Director, our Planning Director, we changed out our third (or fourth) Public Works Director, moved our Parks Director over to Communications, hired a new Events Planner. (And by the way, this is our six year Comprehensive Plan update year!)
We said we were putting a pause on the Ferry thing. Apparently, we’re still spending a ton of money on it.

We were told explicitly that, as much as possible, this would be a ‘care-taker’ year. But it’s been nothing but change. And I’ve had enough. The only reason I supported biennial budgeting was because I (naively) thought it would be a caretaker year.

Whether intentional or not, the City has just kept plowing ahead with the last City Manager’s agenda without taking a breath or doing some form of lessons learned.

We paused nothing. And we need to find a way to do that. Even if it’sreally painful to get off the hamster wheel for a while.

What some of these applicants seem to recognise is the need to have a plan. I think many of you either don’t realise how badly we need a strategy, or have gotten so used to this ad hoc way of working, you think it’s normal. It’s not. It’s not how great organisations work.

But to be fair, I want people to understand that, when the City points to various successes, they’re real. Your car can have an absolutely amazing (x,y,z) but still not run like it should.

My hope is that when our next City Manager takes office, one of the first things they do is to take the time to learn the City, and really work with the Council to develop that strategic plan. Stop jumping from one thing to another.

¹jk 🙂