City Council - Regular Meeting

At this time, I'd like to call the 04/09/2026 Des Moines City Council meeting to order. Council member assignments will lead us in the pledge. Please stand if you are able. With that, please let the record show that all council members are present. We are starting here today with a proclamation. Is there a motion?

So moved, mayor.

Okay. Is there a second, for thank you. Seconded by council member Stimitz. All in favor, please raise your right hand. And that's unanimous. Thank you very much. Motion passes. I'm going to now read the proclamation. Whereas the tradition of Booker T. Washington's Negro Health Week has historically spotlighted health disparities in black communities, fostering advocacy and education, whereas holistic well-being encompassing physical, mental, and emotional and social health is a priority for all communities.

And whereas addressing health disparities in Washington State, especially within black communities, calls for initiatives that are both inclusive and community driven. And whereas a community driven approach focusing on leveraging existing resources and capacities is essential for the effective implementation of Black Wellness Week. Now therefore, the Des Moines City Council hereby proclaims April 2026 as Black Wellness Week and urges all residents to join them in this special observance signed this day. I understand we have a guest who's coming up to receive the proclamation. We'll say a couple words.

Alright.

Good evening, everyone. First, thank you so much, mayor and council members, for this opportunity to be here tonight to receive this proclamation. I have just a few comments to share. This is Des Moines' third year recognizing Black Wellness Week, and we are so grateful for this community's steady commitment. Three years says something.

This is our third year, and it says that this is in a moment. And it really says that this is part of Des Moines' values, and we really appreciate that. Black Wellness Week is rooted in targeted a targeted universalism approach, and that is we all want healthy, communities. And this proclamation reflects that Des Moines is willing to be intentional about making sure that everyone can get there. When a city names this week year after year, it gives people permission to show up.

It gives people permission to gather, to heal, and to celebrate wellness together. This tradition goes back over a hundred and ten years to Booker T. Washington's National Negro Health Week as you heard in the proclamation, and it was born from the understanding that health equity requires intentional action. Black wellness week does that too through centering what's strong in black communities, traditions, resilience, joy, healing, and culturally responsive approaches to wellness. I also wanna share that Des Moines joins governor Ferguson and and a growing coalition of cities and counties across Washington.

Elevate Black Wellness, which is the initiative that works to work with works with cities on Black Wellness lead proclamations, partners with the Washington State Department of Health to connect health systems and communities through trusted and culturally responsive, resources. So, again, I wanna thank everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to receive this proclamation for the very third year. And I also wanna share that we have a free community event that's coming up next week, Friday, and it's open to everyone. And the reason why I say that is please come bring a friend.

We're gonna be giving out free groceries. We'll be having free colon cancer screenings, alongside dental health support, folks if they're looking for rental, assistance support. We're gonna have a whole bunch of providers there. That is gonna take place in Tacoma. So we're gonna work with the city to make sure we do the next one in Des Moines. So that will be on one of our priorities for next year. But this one will take place in Tacoma at the People Center next week, Friday from twelve to three. So it is free. It's welcome for everyone. Like I said, although this is Black Wellness Week, this is really a week to celebrate wellness for all of us and recognize that it takes different ways to get there for all of us.

So thank you again. We appreciate you, and thank you for this recognition.

Thank you very much, missus Blocker. Alright. At this time, we're gonna move to correspondents correspondence from the public. Is there any correspondence that was not previously received by the council? No, ma'am.

Okay. Thank you. Next, I have comments from the public. It's now time for comments from the public. We ask that you keep your comments respectful. When I call your name, please come to the podium. You will have three minutes to speak. And I've been asked to remind folks that the amber light means there's thirty seconds remaining. Is that right? Okay. It goes from green then amber. Thirty seconds remaining. When I call your name, please state your name and the city of residence. So first, I have Christie.

Hello. My name is Chris Della Rosa. I do live in Des Moines, Washington. March 30, governor Ferguson signed the s p 602 into law. This is just not just not another policy. It's a law with teeth. Excessively prohibits the use of licensed place reader. It's a sense sensitive locations. Pierce County already deactivated their systems last week right after this law went into place because they admitted they couldn't follow the law if they had their cameras up. I personally audited all our 15 cameras in the area.

And to my knowledge, we have four that are falling, possibly five that are illegal right now. One is at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on South 2 60th. One is at the Highland College, South 2 40th, and right at the school. Trinity is also point and right at the parking lot at the school. The PAC Highway and South Kent Des Moines Road, south of that, is pointing down south toward the college and the transit center. Sorry. I got a cold. Well, I'm over get over cold. And I also know found this new one on the south entrance of Safeway, which it wasn't even on the D Flock Me. If you wanna see where all the cameras are, go to dflock.me, and you could find all the cameras in Des Moines and throughout this whole area, and you could see how you retract.

Surveillance 24 by seven. Anytime you go from your house to anywhere, they know where you're going, and they know when you're coming back. And you know and they know what you're doing where you're going. Also, have we audited to make sure that we're we set the twenty one day limit? I know Flock Safety have not put implemented that into their software yet. And that way, one of the cities had to decommission their cameras because of that. So we have to verify that the twenty one day purge is already installed. If a Des Moines officer uses the data to track someone near a school or food bank, the city is liable. We are already seeing cities across the state pausing. Oh, I'm Amber.

I'm asking the council tonight to follow the league to follow the lead of the other, of the other neighbors and suspend the flock hammers immediately because they're they're not they're not legal. They're violating laws right now.

Thank you. Next, I have Judy Grandy.

Good evening. Oops. Good evening. My name is Judy Grandy, and I'm a resident of Des Moines. I'm here to talk about two topics, flock safety cameras and fiscal responsibility. I submitted a public records request to the city of Des Moines on 01/05/2026 for flock safety camera information. I would like to thank Sarah Lee, the deputy city clerk, for the time she has spent responding to my request. She is still sending me information, over three months later. Sarah told me that she has to put in the same kind of request that I did to get this information from flock safety. Neither the police department nor the city of Des Moines are in control of the flock safety camera data for the 15 come 15 cameras that the police department is paying for.

I don't know how familiar you are with Peter Thiel. He funded J. D. Vance's, senate campaign. Peter Thiel is more well known for being the chairman of Palantir, which has government contracts to take all the data that DOGE took from the many federal departments and compile it into one database so it is now possible to get any personal information the federal government has on you in one convenient location.

Peter Thiel has also invested in flock safety. In addition to all your federal government information they have, are they now going to track your movements? In addition to the harm being done to my neighbors with ICE assessing accessing flocks flock safety camera data, another major concern with flock safety cameras is mass surveillance. Our freedoms are disappearing quickly in the land of the free. The flock safety cameras are doing more harm than good.

I'm asking the city council to take a vote to decommission the 15 Des Moines Police Department flock cameras. Brinton is the latest city to decide to turn off their flock cameras. Cameras. On a different topic, I wanted to thank the council members Blase, Harris, and Ochsager for voting no on the funds for the anchor for the artificial Christmas tree that has not been approved yet. It does not make sense to buy an artificial tree when there is a live tree nearby. I would urge the city to be fiscally responsible in all financial matters, and I'm thanking the city council members who are who are striving for that goal. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Christine friend Friedrichs? Friedrichs?

Oh, you're not speaking?

Okay. Thank you. Margo Lindsey? Nope. Okay. Thank you. Corine, did we wanna put you last? Okay. Great. Thank you. Okay. Great. And then I have David Wetzel.

Thank you, council members, for letting me talk to you today. I have a ongoing problem, not only myself. I live I'm a Des Moines resident. Me and my wife purchased a home in beautiful Des Moines. I really love the city. Always loved it when I was a child. Came down here, went fishing. We bought the house in, 2011. And now starting the probably around the end of, February, our backyard started flooding. You know, the mayor, she knows about it. She was kind enough to respond. It's affecting me. I also found out the other day that another neighbor, which will make number seven, has issues. She she actually, here's her house, like, popping and cracking at night, which leads me to believe processional structural problems. These are all mid sixties houses.

They're fragile. Right? We have that issue. But the for me, the water is the main thing that's going on is it's actually coming our house is all adjoined right against the new Pacific Middle School construction site. Huge $92,000,000 building, three stories, gonna have 900 kids running around in it. That's fine. That's progress. But as far as I'm concerned, they're a terrible neighbor. There's three players in this whole thing. There's Skanska, which is a huge multibillion dollar construction company that's doing the building. There's a city of Des Moines who I feel is on our side. I've been talking with them. They've been very kind. And the ones I have all my anger directed towards is a Highline School District. They basically say, hey.

It's it's nature. It happens. Right? Or it's coincidence. I'm not stupid. I've never been stupid in my entire life, and I don't like being played as a stupid person. And I told her so. There's a woman, forget her name now, she's running defense for the Highline School District along with a ton of lawyers behind her. That's the way things are. Highline School District is a huge organization.

But I have an investment in my home and my property, So my backyard is being flooded in a section that's at a certain level. I can see the water coming through my rockery because what's going on, from my belief and everybody's belief in the neighborhood that's having this impact on them, is all their preliminary work. They're drilling. They were drilling 350 feet holes in the ground to put in some sort of gizmo to heat the building, a a thermal generator of some sort. Great concept. Great technology. Trouble is they're they're disturbing that land. That land hasn't been disturbed in forty years since the old middle school existed. So they come in there, and they started doing that. They bang stuff.

We've had our house vibrating before the water problems. One time, I woke my wife out of bed. The windows were shaking. They don't give a crap. The Highline School District doesn't give a damn about us. And so I don't have the money to hire a lawyer to get lawsuits against them. Hopefully, my neighbors who have more disposable income will do that. I don't do that. I've started a picket program. I'm sorry. I'm almost on time. I've started a picketing program. I'm walking on the public sidewalk in front of the construction site. I will probably go to the interim Pacific School too to pick it over there. And I've been recently given a document by one of the neighbors. It's it's called a risk management from the High School District. It's a document to fill out and, notarized and will give to the city. I can tell you this has been going on for months now.

If you could wrap up here.

Anyway, appreciate your time, counsel. You can see I'm wound up about this whole thing terribly. And my house is gonna eventually, over a period of time, is gonna be condemned along with the other houses. That's what I believe. Thank you very much for your time.

Okay. Moving on to regional committee reports. So we're currently running as a committee of the whole, which means that we do not meet with our regular committees, but our council members do serve regionally on committees of note. Do any council members have any items that are of interest to the public or the council? Alright. With that, I'm going to pass the baton over to Catherine Cavalry. No introduction needed. No water spilled. For our city manager's report.

The first we have three items tonight. The first item is the NPDES, which I was informed does not have a more fun way to say that presentation. And Tyler Beekley from our stormwater utility is here. Thanks, Tyler.

Thank you. Good evening, mayor. Good evening, council. As our city manager said, it's the NPDES phase two stormwater permit annual update. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System is that acronym. I like to just say that it's a system to reduce national pollutants, if you wanted to phrase that differently. So to get into the presentation, tonight, we're gonna be discussing our summary of what we did last year to meet this program and what we're planning to do this year to meet this program. Essentially, what this program is, it's, started in 1972 with the Clean Water Act. It mandated that, all US waters be clean. That went to the states and eventually the cities.

In 2007, City Of Des Moines received its first permit to discharge its storm water, what's in our pipes, into the creeks and eventually into the Butte Sound waters of the state. So we need to make sure what we're discharging is clean, and to do that, we have a permit. The document just on the screen there, that's our storm water management program. We prepare one of those each year, and that's a forward looking document explaining what we plan to do for the year. And we invite the public, to go to our website and comment on that under our stormwater page.

And then there are nine requirements within the latest edition of our permit that we have to meet annually, which I'll cover. So the first of these requirements is all about stormwater planning. I'll just cover the highlights of each of these programs. It would take all night to go through everything we do. So within stormwater planning, we need to make sure we're promoting low impact development.

That's when people build in our city, we wanna make sure the first and foremost thing they're doing is sending the water and managing it on-site, either infiltrating it or dispersing it on-site rather than connecting to the stormwater system. We're just making sure that's an ongoing requirement in our development code. Next, in stormwater planning, we have our tree canopy program, which you're well aware of as we're giving many presentations as we work through that. We have a requirement by 2027 to implement a new tree canopy program. We're currently looking at protecting public lands and canopy on public lands.

We we began that process in 2025, and we look to continue it. Lastly, we have our watershed program. The first phase of this was in 2003 where we assessed all the city's watersheds. We prioritized them by a variety of metrics from water quality to densities to urban canopy to demographics, low income, and and we ended up selecting Lower Massey and Barnes Creek as the priority watershed, which developed a plan of actions for the watershed anywhere from projects to enhanced inspections to O and M that would take place in the watershed. Our permit is having us select a new watershed, that we need to be have selected by March 2027.

This year, we're getting a consultant on board, which you'll see a later council task assignment for your approval to get a consultant to help us develop the next stormwater action plan for a new basin. Next, we have our public education outreach, and that's just informing the public of ways they can help impact water quality throughout the city in various ways. So we have various means by which we use general awareness in either in our city currents, just promoting, like, what to do with household waste, what to do with pest pesticides and fertilizers, what to do with pet waste, how to dispose of that properly, a variety of things we we put out each year as well as putting it on our social media feed. We also contract with VA Environmental each year to deliver spill kits for free and educate our businesses throughout the city, and we do that on a rotation. So by the we're probably on our seventh year of doing that.

So we're now we're returning to businesses, and they they've either been replaced at that address, and we're delivering a new spill kit to a new business, or we're replacing that spill kit and refilling it for them. Behavior changes in the next program, and we do this primarily through Highline Stormwater Festival, which we partner with King County, Berrien, and Normandy Park on, as well as SeaTac, where we have Highline students come to our beach park each year, and and they go through a bunch of fun stations where they will get to learn about water quality, watershed science, stream health, what they could do in their schoolyard, what how to recycle and reduce waste. Last year, we had 1,200 students come by the beach park. This year, we're hoping it's around the same number. Feel free to stop by if you're a member of the council.

June, we'll be there all three days. And then lastly, our stewardship program. So that's ways the community can actually get boots on the grounds and help us. So we have a few programs there with one, our storm drain marker program. You've probably seen the Puget Sound Starts Here buttons that are next to catch basins throughout the city.

We have a program where that anyone you've seen in the city that's been done by a volunteer from our community. If there's gonna be a car wash done by volunteers, we offer free kits to make sure that that soapy water from that car wash activity doesn't get to our system. And then we have an adopt a drain program that was launched last year. We have a total of 58 storm drains that have been adopted currently, and we're gonna actively promote that going through 2026. It's a way for a community member to adopt a drain, keep it clean, monitor it, report if there's been any discharges to it, etcetera.

Public involvement and participation is another requirement. This is just making sure we're communicating with the public and offering them to comment on the plan and all these actions that we're going through and that we're listening. So that's where we can invite them through our website. We can offer it through social media as well and let them know we're always seeking comment on this plan and looking for feedback. We have a mapping requirement too.

We have a public facing GIS map that shows all of the stormwater infrastructure that's known in the city. On the bottom left there is a a snippet of our current map. Pink pipes are are private. Black pipes are public. And then every square circular you saw on there is a is a catchment point where water is received into the system.

We have an ongoing requirement that we just keep that map up to date as possible, and then we get feedback from our crews in the field as they go and do their inspections. Also, a new mapping requirement is that we map tree canopy. We we did this last year well ahead in the 2027 requirement, and that's a snapshot of kind of a heat map of tree canopy in our city. Next, we have illicit discharge detection and elimination. This all this means is preventing spills in the city and cleaning spills up and preventing future spills and if there's even a direct connection.

So, like, a a sewer pipe is connected to the storm water system for some reason and making sure that's eliminated. Last year, we had 37 spills reported and responded to by our staff. I'm happy to note that this trend is is going down. Back when I was leading the program hands on, it was in the fifty, sixty. So I think overall, that's a good metric in in in just saying there's less spills in the city that were being acknowledged of.

On the bottom left there, you see a photo of this is a recent spill we had last year in the Redondo community of just gasoline caners, paints. Any chemical you get a name was dumped on the road there that we responded to and cleaned up. So I just like to highlight that we're actively out there really responding to these and cleaning them up as quickly as we can. Our field crews also screen just looking in basins, looking for evidence, indicators, smell, color, stains of past spills, and they'll report that to us. They looked at 41% of the catchments, publicly owned catchments in the city last year for field screening.

And then we're constantly training any staff that's in the field, whether it's in our development, our police officers, anyone who's has eyes in the field that they can be able to report spills to us. Construction sites are another permit requirement for us. Last year, we reviewed 97 projects for pollution prevention, looking, making sure they had an adequate spill plan and erosion control plan. Last year, our stormwater inspector went to 49 different unique sites. He went to those sites multiple times, but forty nights nine sites across the city to inspect for erosion control.

Within those 49 sites, he had 70 enforcement actions. This is like your silt fence needs to be repaired. This drain needs inlet protection. Add a straw waddle here. We track enforcement actions. Typically, those are minor and and and responded to the next day by the contractor. Lastly is the manual in which we review our codes to for development review is getting an update in 2026. Currently, our code is written that this is an automatic manual adoption. We may be coming later in a committee later in the year to highlight what changes are in that stormwater manual and how that will impact developers. Operations and maintenance is another requirement.

Last year, we inspected 243 total stormwater facilities. So these are our ponds, tanks, vaults, bioswales. The list goes on and on of all our different facilities. We of those, 44 failed inspection. We maintain those 44.

We have a requirement to inspect half of our public catch basins each year. So we inspected 2,155 last year, and of those, 257 failed and needed to be cleaned, in which we did. Lastly is, as we move into next year, we're hoping to launch our new asset management program, OpenGov, which is gonna increase our crew's ability to track these inspections across the board and let engineering know live data as they're tracking and assigning work. Almost to the end here. Source control for existing development.

So this is all about, businesses and doing business inspections to make sure our business owners have the tools and the knowledge to, actively protect water quality and the water leaving their site. So last year, we brought this program in house. The first year, we had a consultant helping us and training our staff. This year, we did it in house, and I'm happy to say that it went well. We inspected 28 businesses, and there was 12 corrective actions, meaning you need a spill kit here or stop dumping your mop water out your back of your building or etcetera, etcetera.

Our staff helped those businesses, through those corrective actions. Going into next year, we're gonna be looking at PCBs. There's a specific requirement to look at city owned buildings that are historically built, fifties to seventies. PCBs were a construction material, so we're gonna be looking at policy related to pressure washing or cleaning these buildings to not let PCBs enter the stormwater system. And lastly, we have stormwater management for existing development.

And this is all about projects and tracking water quality capital projects that the city is doing. So I highlighted two of the projects we're gonna get credit on here for. One is the Marina Steps. We're doing the bioretention cells with the steps. We get seven acres of treatment credit for doing that project and be a part of the steps project. And then also by preserving the, 16 acres adjacent to Wooten Park, we get credit for maintaining water quality forest canopy as well. There's a a metric on how much we have to meet both these projects together. We meet the ecology permit threshold. And that concludes my presentation and update. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Council? Councilmember Harris.

So my memory is like a sieve, but I seem to recall several years ago, you were working on some, for lack of a better term, bioswale type things. You were replacing material in a couple of areas. And yeah. Yeah. Darn if I can't remember the addresses, but I just wondered how that has gone and if you can or did I just completely

Was it on Marine View Drive?

What's that? Was it on Marine View?

No. I'm gonna say it was on know what? Never I just I thought it would come to your mind because we had these presentations about just how you have to recharge the material every so often because it runs out.

And

Yes. That is true, and that's within our our normal maintenance plan. That might have just been on the radar that year to replace the media. Yeah. I variety of our facilities.

Okay. And the other thing is, so, we have a surprising amount of, junk that will turn that will, you know, be in the different stormwater areas, and I'll still find, campaign signs from years ago and so forth. Who, does one do you fill out a fix it form, or do you do they contact you directly?

Area, it would be filling out a fix it form on our website, and that would notify our public works crews to go out and address that specific litter. We we we do have a it wasn't in this slide, but just part of our public works parks and streets and stormwater program is we have a litter program where we go out to different ditches and just do a general cleanup.

Okay. Good. I get asked about that a surprising amount of the time, but people it's kinda dangerous. People don't wanna get into the thing themselves. So thank you so much. Yeah.

Please let us know. Especially those signs can actually be a flooding hazard because they're they're big enough to clog a pipe. Indeed. Thanks.

Councilmember Bloss. Thank you.

How do you determine which businesses to inspect, and what's your target of how many businesses to inspect this year?

Yeah. So we have a list of all the businesses that qualify as a high generator of waste. So Ecology puts out a list of those business types, gas stations, restaurants, automotive shops. I think those are the core. And then and then, like, grocery stores. Yeah. Like, dental ops offices, legal lawyer offices, they wouldn't qualify. So that that's the core of them. So we we got a list of from our business license register, all those businesses in the whole city that qualify as those types. And then we just, it's my staff selects some.

I think they do it by just geographies to put them in a zone. They have to do 28 a year. That's the requirement for every city. And then we cycle that list through until we hit them all, and then we'll go back to the beginning. Thank you.

Deputy Mayor Oksicker.

Yes. Thank you for the presentation. Are with regard to the tree canopy, are we doing anything to improve the tree canopy that we have? We have a we have a lot of instances of trash trees and that sort of thing. Are we replacing them with, you know, more efficient

Yeah. So I'll I'll speak to this program. In this program, the first phase is to preserve, acquire and preserve in perpetuity so no development can come in and remove the trees. That that is what it is presented to you at at at is current. Now there there is, depending on funding and staff availability, the desire to proactively manage these canopies, do plantings, do invasive species removal, be proactive in our maintenance. That's still to be determined on how much of that we can do based on resources.

Also, I'd just like to note that the May 7 CAL, the Committee of the Whole, will be talking about a draft update to our current regulations when it comes to when trees are replaced as part of the development code. So that's coming up soon. Rebecca has been working on that with via a grant we received. And and we do currently under our existing program through our

parks department. We we are reactively addressing hazard trees and all that and managing those.

I had one for you. Thank you very much for the presentation. When you're talking about the kits that go out to businesses, if if I used one, can we come and request it?

Yeah. No one ever has, so we would have to figure out what that would look like. Uh-huh. I'm sure that would wouldn't be an issue. Yeah.

Okay. But it does it doesn't come with, like, a thing that says, hey. If you use this, you can go get another one?

Because we do we contract through a company. It's it's a little more rigid than that, but it it is something we offer. So we we would find a way to make that happen. Yeah.

Thank you. And then I also wanted to check about no, that was it. I had it. Any other questions before we go? Thank you very much for your presentation.

Item number two is our human services funding criteria discussion.

Mayor and council, this is gonna be a joint presentation. So, Corinne, if you wanna come up, but I'll start doing the first couple slides and then hand it over to you. As you all know, as part of the biennial budget process, the council for many years has set aside a portion of the city's general fund to go to kind of grants that are distributed to various human services providers. As we are kicking off the 2728 budget process, our human services committee, which is part of CAB, will soon begin reviewing applications that are coming in. I think the application date ended on Tuesday.

So we've received applications. Staff are gonna go through those over the next few weeks, and then the committee, they will go through these applications and make recommendations that come to the council as part of the budget process. We have realized as we were sort of preparing this that it doesn't look like in recent years, although council member Nutting may remember since he's got the most tenure up here, but it's been quite a few years since the city council actually provided feedback to this committee as to what the priorities are or what particular kind of philosophy you would like the CAB committee to have as they're reviewing these applications. So before these volunteers do a tremendous amount of work, we wanted to make sure the council had an opportunity to hear from the committee, but also provide feedback to them as to how you would like them to approach the funding review. So, historically, the last biennial budget, a $150,000 annually was budgeted for these purposes.

So $300,000 in the last biennial budget. Prior to 2025, that amount was $250,000 a year. A lot of that was due to ARPA federal funds being used to supplement this. And so the requirement is once an agency is determined to get funding for, you know, x dollars, they provide to staff quarterly performance reports where they say, you know, the number of people they're serving, there's different metrics they provide, and staff ensures that they're complying with the funding agreement. If they're not, there's a conversation about if there's something unusual going on.

This was in your packet, so I'm not gonna go through this whole thing, but we can pull it back up later if you have questions. As you will see, this last budget, we had, I think, about 15 or 16 agencies on there, and you can see the funding amounts range from a pretty, you know, small amount of money of $1,600 up to $30,000 for the food bank. So what we're looking for tonight is there really is no existing council action that provides guidance to this committee, and so it's good for us to check-in from you all and get that. What we're really looking to hear from you is what are the priorities, and is there a certain philosophy you would like this group to take? So for example, do you want them to prioritize programs that directly benefit Des Moines, or is a regional impact sufficient?

Do you want them to continue their approach of broad funding? Meaning, they fund in they fund many organizations, but there's relatively small awards in many cases. Or would you rather them maybe fund fewer organizations, but truly larger awards that actually maybe make more of a significant impact? And then if there's any specifics on, like, what you wanna see from the results and performance, that'd be great to hear. So we'll I'm gonna hand this over to Karine.

She's gonna go through kind of the committee's perspective on this, and then we'll just be looking for some direction before this group begins reviewing those applications. And, again, they will come back to you as part of the budget process. So, Corrine, do you wanna take hand it over to you? It's a really great volunteer when you say to them, I need you to make me a PowerPoint for the packet, and they do it. So thank you for doing this.

Within a very short period of time. So I'm Corine Anderson Ketchmark, and I'm the volunteer chair of this committee. In the past, we've always had a staff, and so we've never had a chair before other than than the the staff. The committee members are here, Victoria, Mary Ellen, and Diane. And we're all in this together.

Lisa France was not able to be here tonight. And then, of course, Jean is the council rep and helps provide a lot of guidance for us, which we're very grateful for. We have operated go go ahead and go to the next slide. We have operated, from this, guidance that we were given when I started about five years ago. And to understand why human services are needed, to be provided by the city, in the allocation of grants.

And bottom line is it supports the well-being of its residents by addressing basic needs. Promoting social stability, supporting vulnerable populations will improve the quality quality of life for the community as a whole. And then we partner with nonprofit agencies to do that. Go ahead. The next one.

And then this is how it happens. This has been going on for a number of years, probably before I came here. And we are we do this in collaboration with 16 city councils, city city county cities, and, they have to meet this criteria in order to be funded. And then as Catherine said, to report back on the different services and a number of people, provided services. And, overall, there have been, in the last funding cycle, 73 applications, of over $800,000.

Of course, we weren't able to do that. We'd only do what we can do. And I my it's my opinion that Des Moines has the ability to make a contribution, not to fully fund. And it's where we wanna make that contribution that's important and that we get guidance for.

Okay.

So funding priorities have been secure affordable housing and food adequate to to their needs, be safe from violence within their families, neighborhoods, and communities, be healthy physically and mentally, have the education and job skills that lead to employment and living wage jobs, have early childhood education and youth success. And this was a question, what's missing, was done by the previous present presentation done by staff. And I put in there, we need a comprehensive needs assessment for the greater Des Moines community. We don't have enough information about what the gaps are, what the services service needs are. So we can talk about that.

And then this is the of the past, present, and future for funding as Catherine was referring to. And you can see what we have done over the years and where we are now. I think is the 2728 funding is about the same as the 100 and

That hasn't been determined yet, but I think what I told the committee is they should assume a 150,000 each year again this cycle, but we haven't finalized that yet.

Okay. Great. And at any point in time, committee, join chime in if I'm not getting everything. So that's been the funding that's gone on. So you can do the next slide.

And these are the lists, this slide and the next slide are the lists of the agencies that have received funding. Go ahead to the next slide. Now, from where I sit, my experience, because I didn't tell you that I was a retired school social worker and I have brokered services throughout the years in different different communities. And I know that there are different funding funding levels for different services. And some of these get multiple money from multiple places.

And so I think it's important that we know that information as well before we decide where to fund. So go ahead to the next. So this just kinda gives you a visual of how the the money was distributed. Go ahead to the next. So this is the justification for human needs assess, human services needs assessment.

Again, it identifies the gaps in services, provides data and guidance for making decisions about how to invest its resources to meet identified needs. And it needs to really survey a diverse cross section of the community in forums, interviews, to include voices for of those who support and those who utilize or need human services. And we we get some of that information from the agencies that we, fund, but it's not in enough detail and it's not in enough, diverse cross section. And I think we just need to get more into the community about what the actual needs are so we're making the best decisions that we possibly can. So this is this is for you to decide.

Give us our marching orders. Anything you guys wanna add?

Nope? Alright. So, council, there are some questions here, but also some discussion. So council member Simons, would you like to start?

Yeah. I I I think I know the answer, but I wanna make sure everybody does. This is funding that comes directly out of the general fund. Correct?

Correct.

And

in order to do this needs assessment, would the funding for the needs assessment come out of that chunk of money, or is there another chunk of money that could be found to pay for the needs assessment

I would take give us the data?

I would take counsel direction on that. I mean, again, we have we've just begun kinda getting organized for the 2728 budget process. And so whatever feedback we'd get from the council would be included as a 2027 expenditure. So if the council's interested in a needs assessment, I would say let us work to get a better cost estimate for that, and then we could take that back for consideration. I would try to be able to just find supplemental money for it rather than take out of the $1.50, but it's too early for me to know.

Yeah. I mean, as I understand the needs assessment, I think it's a really good idea to figure out where the gaps are. So, you know, from my perspective, that's a great starting place. And then to focus on, you know, the agencies that are directly serving people in Des Moines, not that are broad based, but try to get them more focused on Des Moines specific. But, you know, to try to get into what kind of services, I think that's why we have to have a needs assessment.

Thank you. I saw council member Netting first, and then I'll go to

Thank you, mayor, and thank you for the presentation. I I agree with council member Steinmetz on needs assessment and and and focusing more on Des Moines. I mean, we we used to get presentations, most notably from the Genesis Project, the Lighthouse Northwest, the backpack brigade, and the Des Moines Area Food Bank, which are four very near and dear human services that need to be met. And we haven't had that in quite some time. And I think not only human services being briefed by these agencies.

The council needs to be briefed by these agencies too. Because councilmember Desmonia and I had a conversation, and, you know, that we're spread out over 19 agencies. Mhmm. And I I what good does $5 do to one agency? Mhmm. You know? I'm not saying we need to narrow it down to 10 or 11 or five or six, but a needs assessment would do that for us.

So It would definitely do that.

And I I do understand that there are agencies like the Lighthouse Northwest that is outside of the Des Moines area, but they serve a lot of Des Moines residents. Yeah. Sorry.

And that that's been sort of a point of discussion for our group over the course of the a few years, especially when we had to back off of some of the funding, two years ago, is that so many of our residents here work and their children go to school in other communities. And so that's where they're going to go for services. And so I think that's your the lighthouse is one of a prime example. And I think that that's what we have to really look at too is where are they seeking services and how many services can actually be located here in Des Moines and what can we do to help make that happen. So we have to look at what our population is doing, you know, in terms of their lives, their daily lives.

Council member Harris?

Thank you. That was really good.

Thank you. So

how long have you been at this with, like, Human Services Advisory Committee and

Oh, the Advisory Committee? Yeah.

And it's years. I'm

sorry.

I I moved here six years ago, and I started with the human services five years ago.

Okay. So can you describe sort of the outreach process? Is it do you is it passive in the sense that you, you know, people apply, or do you do active work to try to, you know

Recruit? Yeah. So ShareOne is the ShareOne app is the process that's used by the 16 different King County cities. And so and we're part of the consortium, and I think Alex attends that those meetings. And so there is a process in place and has been in place for quite some time.

And they they do all of the hard work about the the grants. And then they are, selected by staff here, the ones that we wanna look at. And then they come to us, and there is a I have a a flowchart of what we actually do. And so we can get that to you if you don't have that, and how we go through and decide which of the grant applications, should be funded. And we just make the recommendations because we are advisory, and so we just recommend to to the council or to actually CAB now, and then CAB brings it to the council.

So since I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to No.

Go ahead. So since you have been at this a while, and it sounds like you have a background professionally, what is your sense of what a needs assessment might no. Don't do that. Come on. You you have an opinion. You know? Yeah. What what

I I definitely have an opinion. Please. I have knowledge about needs assessments. I was trained in it Yeah. In in my graduate work. And it it is something that actually goes into the community to find out exactly what people need in terms of human services that will help them become self sufficient. Mhmm. And that is the ultimate goal is to help people to become self sufficient. And, so you ask questions, surveys. You know, you look at the data, and it's very data driven so that we have some good information to to work from.

And so, I could I have several examples, that I could

Yeah. No. But but for the sake of time, at the risk of oversimplifying, it sounds like it takes a while to do it correctly. Yes. Thank you. That's really kinda

And and I'm not sure what you mean by a while, but that's something that Catherine and I have talked about is how quickly can it be done. And it depends on how many agencies and surveys and individuals, community area of the community you want to you you want to survey.

Okay. Awesome. Okay. What Green and I talked about was if the council's interested in doing a needs assessment, what I would recommend is we work the cost of doing that into the '27 budget. And so what I would recommend is we get counsel feedback tonight on how you want them to approach the kind of funding philosophy for the applications they review for 2027. And let's have the committee make recommendations for '27. And in the calendar year 2027, we do the needs assessment so it informs them for the 2028 recommendations.

Got it.

That will give you a great deal of information so that you know that we're making the best decisions possible.

Thank you. Councilmember Des Mone?

I also wanted to applaud you for this presentation, especially having apparently little to no help in the past. I I in in the past. In the past.

In the past. Here's the date. Do it. That is not true. There was that is not true. There was a please and thank you in a very short time frame. It was. Staff are like, yeah. That's how she talks to us. That's not true. I have witnesses.

Go on with the rest of your question.

No. This subject is actually near and dear to me as well. I have personally had experiences with these types of situations. I have worked personally with service workers, and I have watched people be offered services and turn them down. And I have watched people be offered different services and say yes.

It's a very slippery slope that we're describing. I also am aware of, someone who's willing to do this assessment for us for free at no cost. That could be something we could speak about at a later date, But I also do believe you would want some of the service people's feedback as well. Besides serving residents, there are people that are out in the field that experience this every single day. And so I would I would recommend we get that perspective as well.

But we already have a list of the people we have already funded, and they can give us a lot of data already. It's an existing data. And so that would be a good place to start and then to go from there. But, again, there are there are companies and consultants and all of that that know how to do this, and I would just leave it to them so that we are getting the best possible information that we can.

Okay. And then I also I read the list as well. I do see a few areas that may be considered redundant, or I do know there's some of these organizations that receive other funding besides just from Des Moines, some state funding, things like that.

Yes.

So I guess my opinion, so we're going with right now tonight, my suggestion would be to narrow this down to create more impact in a in fewer organizations than to spread it as thin as it has been done here. But with that research as to what benefits the citizens of Des Moines and what our survey results find, I do believe it needs to be narrowed down. Mhmm. But I do believe we need to research it as we narrow it down.

So an example of that is the Meals on Wheels. Mackenzie Scott just gave $70,000,000 to Meals on Wheels. I don't think we need to put any money into that. Agreed. So I think we need to be much more knowledgeable of where where money is coming and going to so that we know our dollars can be utilized in a very, effective way.

I also I'm sorry. One more. Sorry.

I Three is the limit. Yeah.

I also wanted to ask, are we also looking towards future human service needs, things that are pending or that are more relevant than others right now, things like the fentanyl crisis, things like that, things that maybe our city doesn't have issues with necessarily right now but could be coming down the pike so we're more prepared for that. I wanna make sure that was part of our assessment. Future cast Mhmm.

In terms of yeah. A good news assessment would do that.

Correct. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. Right.

Folks who haven't spoken yet before we go back, council member Bloss.

Thank you, Gurin, for this presentation. Thank you for all the work you do in the committee, everyone. I agree with your funding priorities, and I agree that needs assessment would be nice to have as long as it doesn't take too much from the overall

Oh, I agree.

Human services budget. I think that geographically, we should prioritize Des Moines and Des Moines residents, and we should try to fund less organization, a lot more money to fewer organization than a little sprinkled throughout. Mhmm. Also, I know we don't have the budget for this now, but a lot of cities in this country, instead of having a dollar amount for human services, they do a percentage of the general fund, and that's kind of the target every year, say 1% of the general fund. For us, it'd be $260,000 a year, which we can't afford right now. But someday, I think it'd be good to have a percent gold target instead of a a dollar amount.

Just a second. Yeah. Deputy Mayor Oksager.

Yes. Thank you. And thank you for the presentation. I have the I have the pleasure of working with this incredible committee, and these people are all extremely well versed in what's going on. And I they're truly an asset to the to the community. So I thank

you all for your work.

I would point you know, the thing about human services and and needs, and this is where the assessment, I think, comes in, is that it doesn't know municipal boundaries. A lot of the same problems we have and also the the service agencies that we're relying on don't necessarily have boundaries. For example, the Des Moines Area Food Bank Mhmm. Serves not just Des Moines but also Sea Tac. And, I believe some areas, on Kent West Hill.

So we have we have various funding agencies that are either or funding sources that are coming in. CTAC is contributing better, I believe, better way. Kent are contributing to various aspects. And I believe having a senior moment, I can't remember if it's Burien or CTAC is in the midst of a needs assessment right now for their community.

CTAC just finished one.

Well, they finished one in 18, so which was very comprehensive. I don't know if they're doing another one or not, but that's what I found online. Believe it was CTAC.

Okay.

Alright. That the mayor just recently said that, yes, they are doing a needs assessment. So I think, yeah, outreach to those cities might be, you know, very beneficial so that we're not we're not necessarily, you know, reinventing the wheel on this. But, also, we would have the aspect of what they perceive the problems to be as versus ours and that we can then take a much more comprehensive, look at this. And I do agree with the philosophy of a little bit of money to a lot of people, you know, doesn't do a lot of good, but, you know, if we can concentrate and try and make some impact on as many people as possible, that I think is the ultimate goal.

So, again, thank you all for your service.

Thank you. Thank you for helping us out, giving us some direction. Yeah.

Council member Harris, I saw your hand again.

Thank you. And this is more for the council, but, I'll just note that, you know, the port is the, as with everything, is the 900 pound creature, and they do seriously deep dive studies into all of this stuff. And because they fund a bazillion dollars, $1,314,000,000 for various stuff, and over two thirds of it with the original funding was meant for airport communities, but over two thirds of it now radiates to the rest of King County. And as such, since 8083% of their revenue comes from the airport right around here, it should be part of the discussion to leverage both their expertise in identifying these issues, but also in obtaining that, you know, the relevant amount of funding for us. It it should always have been the case that we'd be able to get to I recall when we talked about doing 2% literally, every year and the fact that we can't get to one, But the port, given all of the, impacts and the funding and the research that they do, should be part of this discussion.

You

know,

when we do the needs assessment, we should figure out what can these other partners contribute to this. You know? And so think about what we really need and not be limited by just I'm always concerned that people don't do the magic wand, that they just go, oh, I've only got a 150,000 to play with, and they don't really think about, okay. What is really, you know, the dream?

Wanna give me a magic wand. I'll use it.

No. I I I I personally do. I really want to know what is, like, the three sixty needs. Because I I think we too often, with people in, you know, any organization, you're so conditioned. You just you don't even think about it. You're just, like, you just think about what your budget was and maybe plus five or something like that, and you don't think about what the real thing is. So please

think globally. I think broadly. Mhmm. Think what could be, and then I take a look at what I can do. Mhmm. So if some of that comes into the can do, great.

Mhmm. Thank you. Thank you. One more thing. I just wanna try and summarize for for some of us here to make sure that you we all know where we stand on the same page or reading from the same page on the same page while reading it.

So I heard pretty clearly that folks like the priorities. No one said any anything about negative about the priorities, but I also recognize that's a huge list. It's such a huge list. And would it be helpful for you if we said, this is the order, let's say? That is 123456. Or counsel, do you think it should just be one bucket with those five things in it? Five? Yes. Thank you. So I wanna make sure that you, walk away feeling like you're confident in those priorities and how you use that.

And it sound like, I also heard, second part here, that more targeted approach, a more significant investment in a smaller number of organizations. Yes. Okay. I heard that part correctly. Anything else you needed from us as a direction?

I think I heard overall a preference for organizations that really have a demonstrated benefit to Des Moines, but I did not hear that exclusively. Like, I mentioned lighthouse and things like that.

Mhmm. Yeah. I wanna recognize that in a in a world where you could say, I'm only gonna fund the ones that serve here and to our residents, but that's probably just not the the perfect world. And I think deputy mayor Ochsider said that quite well. Thank you.

And I also wanna acknowledge that the the needs assessment is desperately needed, and I think it would provide data for us to move forward. But I do want to make sure that it won't come out of your funding source this year, and we need to look at, like, how comprehensive it needs to be and things like that. But I think we can agree that access to housing, food security, and safety from violence, we know those are prevalent within our community and issues that we can address along with those top three. Is that a good enough summary for now? Okay.

I like it. Thank you very much. Yes. Okay. Item number three is our economic development update for the twenty twenty six first quarter. That's about right now.

Mayor, deputy mayor, council members, I'm happy to be here to give an quarterly update on economic development efforts. My name is Dan Urnessy, and I'm a consultant working with economic development work here. Am I advancing this with the no. There. I am. Oh,

thank you.

So the support that I was contracted to give is outlined here in these five bullet points. And largely, the first two have been taking my time in the first quarter of really working with the council and the staff to come up with a to help inform, I should say, a comprehensive city strategy and then to have an economic strategy that dovetails into that and complements that. So that's been, I think, really encouraging work to me to see the council and the staff really united in in in fundamentals. You know, there's specifics that are maybe divergent, but it's it's in it's allowing me to see where the economic development efforts surface from that. Sorry.

I jumped ahead. Now the two grants that I'll be managing as part of my work are the Port of Seattle downtown grant, and this was one that that we applied for specifically and were able to have a lot of influence on on how it was spent. This is just really launching at this time. We wanted to get through the strategic planning effort before we really worked on this because, again, it needs to dovetail with the overall city goals. So we're working on those first two, the second one first.

Actually, I should have reordered these, the database first, and then using that to do outreach to the about 225 businesses that we've identified in the downtown area and along with those who are interested in development and so forth. So there's also place making, convening of the businesses downtown, and really working on a identity strategy going forward. The commerce grant has been the, really, the lion's share of the effort first quarter. We've we're hoping that this grant could provide really unbiased decision making fodder for you all so you can know how to go forward with this. I think the thing that everybody recognized was that public transportation and economic development can go hand in hand.

And one of the ways that we could possibly do this is with a ferry service, and there was a pilot program run-in 2022. And so the grant helped analyze that and helped us think through, or at least it will help you think through what place might that have in the future. And the hope for this was it would be not only the people that were enthusiastic about the ferry program or rode the ferry, but a real broad based perspective on from the whole city. The fifth two thousand twenty two ferry pilot, I'm gonna share some of the draft findings so far. We hope to have expert in here next month to give you a final report of this study, so I don't want to steal his thunder.

But generated a lot of enthusiasm at about 15,000 riders in 2022. 93% of that rode for leisure, not commutes. Now that was partly because of the schedule. It wasn't really set up to be a commuter boat. It was ten to four kind of time frames rather than, you know, 6AM or whatever to to after work.

And the we're finding that the operational costs exceeded the fares by about 10 times. The market analysis that we have done, this is a really interesting graphic. Hopefully, it's not too much for this. Obviously, we'll have this in the final report, and it looks like maybe advantageously part of Seattle has fallen off onto the wall. But oh, well.

So you can see the darker it is, the more commuters go there. And the little dash line going through the sound is where the commuter ran commuter ferry I'm sorry. The twenty twenty two ferry went. And as far as commuter goes, the the demand study that was done, very few go to that Seattle Waterfront where they would get off the boat and walk to work, and even fewer who come back the other way. The Kent Valley, So To, Sea Tac, Auburn were the real kind of big hitters when it came to commute.

Noncommute, similar. Very few nonwork trips that went to the Seattle Waterfront area. And when I say waterfront, I'm, you know, talking Downtown Seattle in that in that, you know, quarter mile, half mile area around. There were really a lot of trips to South Center, Camp Valley, and SeaTac in the nonworker trips. So the summary we're really finding is that they're really a key regional travel markets represent the opportunities for expanded transit service, and there's really limited potential for meaningful ferry connections between the Des Moines and Seattle only.

You know, there might be the the really as the transportation expert will say, you know, the the kind of the gold standard would be if there was a big built in commuter traffic just because those people travel day after day after day. And so if you can capture that, that's great, or if there's a really obvious nonwork route. There was established, I think, during that time a lot of enthusiasm for more, like, pleasure trips, and so that might be something to look into the for the future. Community engagement, number one is already completed. We did about 19 interviews.

We did exactly 19 interviews. Online survey, it says launching today. Today launches the countdown to the start of the survey, which I don't know how long the countdown is. It should be any day. You'll be informed. We'll push out that. That'll stay open toward the May, and that's my timer saying I took too long. I'm close, though.

You can keep going.

Okay. Good. I as long as I push the right button. And focus groups, I'm excited about this. We were able to commerce had some extra money from other grant grantees that couldn't spend all their money, and we captured enough money to run a few focus groups.

And we hope to build this into it, not so much to talk about ferry service alone, but economic development and public transportation. How do you capture, especially those services that are already present that the city of Des Moines doesn't have to spend a dollar to to run? How do you capture that for economic development and and really maybe with very small investments or maybe just changes in focus or changes in some of the routes, how do you amplify the impacts of that? So wrapping up, Burke is another part of the study. They will do an economic development impact analysis.

Again, they'll be analyzing the the 02/2022 study. But then because that was a fairly brief study and the findings of the of the Nelson Nygard team, we're we're asking them also to do some case study analysis of of the marina as a destination and what kind of economic impacts other communities have had on that just to give us an idea of of some of the alternatives with the final report done on the entire project in June 2026. And that's my report.

Questions? I saw council member Dizmoni first.

Thank you. Coming in fresh on this discussion of the ferries, I'm told historically that this has been discussed as a form of transportation for commuters, and that's what we've been studying. Correct? The commuter value of that. Or as we're talking about the economic development, are we discussing this as an addition, as a fun, shiny thing for the summer season as a tourist thing? I'm

Yeah. I think what I would say is the the passenger ferry in particular is a is a project or initiative that, at least on a staff level, definitely comes from my predecessor. And so I've sort of inherited it. And, you know, Dan and I are trying sort of wrap up a grant that was actually awarded right before he left. I would invite the counsel that's been here when I wasn't here to answer that, but kinda my understanding is initially, it was explored as an economic development tool.

There was a pilot that was funded, I believe, using ARPA dollars, and then there was some excitement about whether or not we could make that service permanent. During the time I've been here, the the real, I feel like, consensus I've gotten from the council is there was not a desire to allocate Des Moines resources to this. And so there was a discussion from the council of, you know, gosh, a ferry would be great, but we don't really have the funding to pay for it. So then what that means is King County Metro would pay for it. King County Metro is only interested in reducing commuter traffic.

Traffic. Like, that is their mission. So then it became very crystal clear that if we're going to explore this ferry possibility, it really has to make sense from a commuter perspective. So to tie that to this grant, because it is this, like, long, windy story, the city was awarded this grant in 2024 that, again, was applied for prior to me, so I sort of inherited this this grant application. And the feedback I got from the council was that they really wanted a very objective analysis on what is the impact of a ferry service on our local economy.

And so to do that, that is why we brought in Dan to manage that project. Nelson Nygard, who's the consultant that did the work, is a national company that is very well regarded in the transportation space. So, again, to wrap up this long story for you, unfortunately, I think that it started as one thing as an idea, but then I heard sort of majority of counsel was like, we don't wanna put our limited resources towards this. So, therefore, if you're gonna look for a regional partner to, quote, unquote, pay for it, it has to meet their goals. So this study that Dan's been managing, we've done in partnership with King County Metro.

So they have been along the whole time. Dan talks to them probably every other week to update them on things because they wanna see these results. So when they saw the initial results that really the passenger ferry just didn't make sense as a real commuter impact, you know, that's gonna inform where a ferry here falls on their priority list. Alright. Does that make sense? That was a long story.

That's okay. I needed to hear it so that I can get you to where we are. Thank you again.

Council member Harris, I believe you're next.

Thank you. Yeah. So what would a marketing campaign look like just in the broadest sense? That was you you said about doing sort of a campaign. Seattle grant.

Yeah.

For the downtown. Yeah. For, like, developers and so forth. I mean, just was that what you were referring to, like, attracting yeah. I I'm just curious. Just I I don't wanna Yeah.

It's a it's a it's a great question. And, obviously, I could throw out

I could

think of Carmel by the sea.

I'm thinking of it, man.

What's the impression that you have of that? This

40 foot glass thing. Yeah.

Mean, it's it's kind the idea. Identity at first Clint Eastwood as mayor.

No. I'm just kidding. No. I've been there many times. Yeah. Yeah. No. I I have

So I I throw that out just because a lot of people have vacationed there. They've seen it. They've done things. There's a real clear identity to it. I I think marketing is sometimes a negative word, but, you know, the the hope is that it emerges from what Des Moines already is, and it's something that is authentic. And it's a way of talking about Des Moines that is is punchy and it resonates. And so when you talk about when people talk about the downtown area or the marina, there's a real clear identity of what it is. Your backdrop here, which I think is very nice. I don't remember it. Oops.

I did that again. The sailboat, the Waterland City tagline, that's all part of it. Yeah. Forget I I

didn't I didn't think of it negatively at all. I was just thinking, like, you know, four color spread in Puget Sound Business Journal, YouTube.

Have money for that. I'm I'm I I would say it's much more like social media posts featuring business owners, not so much the food as the restaurateur or the waitress or the, you know, the bartender or the people because a lot of especially what I I've already heard that people like about Des Moines businesses are the people that work there more than I go to Des Moines because it has the very best filet mignon in the whole region. No. They're not saying that so much. They're going there because of the relationships.

And so probably your marketing campaign would should reflect and build on something like that, that authentic relationship.

I just asked because I'm now seeing on my TV, like, marketing ads for, like, Issaquah Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Stuff. And I'm just wondering, like, wow. You know, how much does that kind of thing Yeah.

Well and and certainly, I, you know, I think you could attract third parties that run events that they would then market at a regional level if they're trying to attract regionally. But I think at this point, that's not probably what we'll end up with here.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you very much. But, you know, you're nine months ahead.

Yeah. Any other questions at this point? And knowing that he's gonna that we will have folks come in and give more detail about the FARIES study in which month again?

We're looking at May or June, I'm hoping

for May. Hoping for May. Deputy Mayor Oksager.

So just for clarification. In the marketing, are you talking about marketing to the general public? Are you talking about marketing to potential developers?

I mean, are we Both. Both, really. I think I think there will be a couple different messages. So, yeah, it'll be there'll be a the message to the developer will be much more about how do you make a profit in Des Moines. But it'll dovetail with with the message to the the best people to people marketing people are the the Des Moines people who love living here.

So, you know, encouraging them, giving them words to use, to push out, giving them post to repost and so forth. So, I mean, again, that's we're a long ways away, and and hopefully, that'll that'll become clear. But

Well, I I guess we're in the process of doing a strategic plan. Mhmm. We're going to have to be looking then, you know, at what, you know, our vision really is for the I mean, get down to the nitty gritty of of and so, basically, it's what do we have to offer. And so to me, I think it's premature to be offering to the public. It's we gotta get we gotta get developers here that are going to, you know, really create the atmosphere that is going to attract the people.

I'm I'm a little sensitive to understanding the project timeline that you can see the enthusiasm that we have for you to get started on some of this. But like he he said, we're about nine months out from having any sort of product to look like. And so I would hesitate to try and put him on the spot to say, what's our tagline and how are you selling us when the work he was contracted to do hasn't been completed. And I wanna say thanks to Dan for coming to our strategic planning, first initial retreat so that he could hear about our feelings and very passionate ones, I believe they were, about economic development. And and we were able to have a conversation with him in the room about why this is, like, the number one item, economic vitality on our strategic plan.

So I just don't wanna get too far ahead of ourselves knowing that he's gonna come back and that you'll have many times to talk to him. Council member Boss.

Hi, Dan. The Port of Seattle grant that's solely focused on downtown, the small geographic area of downtown. Is that it? Okay. So no Pac Highway, no Redondo. Our two of their largest business in the city, the two Safeways, I don't think they're doing great. It'd be nice to know what's going on there, but that's not gonna be

Well, I've contracted to do general economic development

as Dan, we have a little bit of money for Dan to work on kind of general things, but the grant application wanted us to be narrow in order to increase our odds of getting funding. Although, I mean, it's kind of anyways, you had to be narrow. And the number one thing we hear about is downtown. So Downtown Marino? Sure. That kind of general area. And so that's where we're focusing this. But, you know, as things evolve, we can look at other areas as well. But I just for capacity, I'd say let's focus on one and do it right and then go to the next step. Alright.

Council member Des Mone. Unless council member Nattie you had. Okay. Go ahead. Desmoting. Mhmm.

I did I did hear you, Mary, when you were speaking about the timeline and that there's more to come. I hear that. But I I currently feel more urgency in a timeline. I know, Dan, you and I spoke at the retreat, and you spoke about coming to speak to me. I'm a brick and mortar business owner, one of the only perspectives that's like that.

But I also haven't met with you yet. As my neighbors put up for lease signs in their windows, I'm feeling the urgency of the timeline. And so I think that might be some of the passion you hear up here. So thinking that in nine months, I'll get answers to questions that I have today is maybe making me a little nervous about that we make sure that the nine months are spent on what we're looking for, not just, you know, well, this is what we talked about in February, and now it's October. And now there's seven for lease signs, and we didn't get any data on that or why they left or who's coming in.

So I think maybe I I am feeling that urgency in that timeline. So I just wanted to recognize what the mayor said, but I'm gonna push my urgency on you tonight. Yeah.

Council member Simons.

Yeah. Dan, thank you very much for everything that you're doing. And and, I mean, you're hearing urgency, but I also want the public at large and everybody up here to understand, you don't wear a cape. You're not gonna save us. You're gonna help us. And I think that's a good thing. And and the economic development process takes a long time. We're not going to, even in nine months, have a bunch of developers knocking on our doors. That would be a very unrealistic expectation, wouldn't it?

Well, yes. As far as, you know, new businesses, as as council member Desimone knows, I mean, it might take a year to identify a property and to negotiate and to get in and get open, and that's if everything goes right. So, yeah, it can take it can take a lot of time, and that's not even a ground up building. I I typically and I hate to say this, but I will. I've had two jobs as economic development manager, and it's been five years before I've really seen significant progress because it's much more of a establishing things like communities that do well economically, believe in their downtown core businesses, and the need to actually shop there and to invest in it.

And so I don't typically talk about developers. I talk about investors. And I want investors to be at many levels, not only the, you know, the multifamily builder who comes in and builds a $100,000,000 project, but also the people in Des Moines who believe in the, you know, the restaurant or the flower shop or the whatever and will take their business there and invest in their downtown and in the marina and in the in the community. And so that's why you have to market to your own community as well as outside because that it's like exercise habit. You know?

Sometimes it takes a little while to to start really being effective and seeing results.

Yeah. I just wanna add something real quick on that.

Not only does Dan not work, but he's also not the only person working on this overall effort. Yep. Rebecca and I had a meeting today talking about downtown zoning, which I know is of extreme interest to this group, and we are gearing up to be prepared with really to show you some first steps on that as well as really the strategic plan cementing that. So this is not a one person effort.

Yeah. And I I hearken back to what I said earlier when we got together as a council and staff to talk about strategic planning. And when I the staff followed up, a lot of people are already working to achieve those goals. And, you know, you see a lot of developments that are in keeping with with positive behavior. I mean, the Des Moines Theater One is a, you know, one of many examples.

Yeah. I mean, it's just kind of important to understand. We've this city has lived with the word potential for a long time. It has a lot of potential, and there have been a lot of fits and starts. There have been a lot of restaurants that started off well and tailed off. You know, it's tough. And then we need to I agree with you. We need to market to the community to support our community, to start believing in our downtown, and that will bring more to our downtown. So but it's not you're not gonna wear a cape.

Well, I I do I do feel the urgency, though, too. And and I I appreciate that, you know, we're getting out of the hibernation season and into the time when when people really are ready to talk.

Council member Harris.

Thank you. So thank you for doing some, you know, very necessary work on the ferry. And in regard to the economic development thing, I hope that your work will provide the same unbiased rigor regarding the downtown. I personally I mean, when I look at the numbers, the actual revenue that the city derives, I mean, there's always been this notion of devoting most of our energy to this one small area as being this big economic thing. And I think that's just putting maybe that's putting too much, pressure.

In other words, people go to the downtown for the amenity aspect. There are lovely things to have to, keep residents here and so forth. But, maybe that's not where the actual moneymaker is in terms of keeping the municipal corporation in business. And I keep coming back to that ferry and other things that we've tried in the past where you put pressure on this thing that I've we've been through enough cycles of magical thinking, frankly. And I almost think it works backwards if you just so whatever you do, as long as it's based on, you know, hard numbers, here's what we really can come to expect from the outcomes, you know, that would definitely be a good thing.

I I just don't wanna overpromise to people because I've just watched that happen since I've been here. It's just, you know, man, this thing is gonna be the greatest thing. And it's just better to have realistic expectations. I think that's what kinda keeps businesses chugging along. David, that's just me. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Alright.

Will the clerk please read the consent agenda? Item one, approval of vouchers. Item two, approval of minutes. Item three, sexual assault awareness and prevention month proclamation. Item four, draft ordinance 26 dash zero zero nine, adoptive code and citizen Citizens Advisory Board code update second reading. And that concludes this consent agenda, mayor.

Is there a motion to approve the consent agenda? Council member Netting.

I move to approve the consent calendar as read, mayor.

Thank you. Second, council member assignments. Is there any, item that a council member wishes to pull? Hearing none. Let's go ahead. All those in favor of the consent agenda as read, please raise your hand until I call your name. Deputy mayor Oksager, council member Steinmetz, council member Harris, council member Desmoni, council member Nutting, council member Bloss, and myself. That passes seven zero. Hopefully, I called everybody by the right name tonight, so that's an improvement. Alright.

Now is the time for new business. And the first item I have is new agenda items for consideration. Now is the time, and the purpose for proposing new business for discussion on a future agenda. Any recommendation will simply need a hand raise from three council members. Do any council members have a new business item they'd like to propose? Council member Simons.

Yes. And this is kind of a reconsideration. The discussion that we had on the 2 23rd Street got totally off sideways, and we had a lot of information that that was available that we didn't get during that discussion. I would like to bring that back with and have the staff give us some alternatives

Do I

revisit that.

Do I have two others who would like to? Okay. Thank you very much. That will come back to a new agenda. Any other items for consideration?

Hearing none, I'm gonna move to council member reports. First, I have council member Harry Steinmetz.

I attended the Sound Cities Association PIC meeting last night with mayor Grace Metzui. And, you know, there's just an enormous tension going on between the cities and the county and how funds are going to be distributed in a number of ways. And lot of the costs that are gonna be assessed coming up, you know, it it's just it's staggering the amount of money that it's taking to run government. And, well, I think there are a lot of room for improvements, it's nice to see that we belong to an organization that gets us at the table. Sound Cities Association has just done a really great job with staff providing the right information, with their executive director getting us to the table, and allowing that the cities around King County really are able to form a counterweight or a different voice in terms of all the things that are happening with the county and well as a counterweight to the city of Seattle, which obviously is an Asian pound gorilla in there.

So it it was a very good a very good kind of frightening meeting, but great discussion. Other than that, I really don't have much to report. Thank you.

Councilmember Des Moines. Oh, wait. No. Wait. This is out of order again. Sorry. Councilmember Harris.

Thank you. I only wanted to, well, I wanted to thank the city and appreciate the council for the black wellness proclamation. I just there's this concept of weathering that I'm very familiar with in my family where it's just it just adds that one or two points to your blood pressure. And let's see here. I wanted to compliment the public commenters.

I you know, the thing about the flock cameras for me is just that I have watched since I've we have this ongoing thing of move fast and break things. We're seeing it with the airport, with all sorts of expansion, with social media and so forth. And it's, I'm seeing it now at the federal level, and I am always just just there there needs to be some sort of reconsideration because the ability to surveil human beings has become really profound, and I'm a bit willing to under I'm I'm I'm always willing to just side a little bit more on the side of personal liberty than the ability to monitor. Last, I just wanted to appreciate mister Wetzel for showing up regarding the Highline School, the water problems. I, you know, don't wanna comment on anything regarding the, you know, geoengineering business, but I believe in the concept profoundly.

But, boy, that project has to go well because it's it has to be a model for future engineering in this town. And, I understand we have, you know, different agencies and so forth, but something must be done for that to be successful. I I I just cringe at the notion that that leave a bad taste in people's mouths, moving forward. It has to be done well because that kind of thing is the future. And that's it. Thank you very much for showing

Councilmember Jasmonem.

Thank you. Last week, I took a tour with councilmember Bloss and Catherine of the SCORE jail. Very educational. Learned a lot about that. It's an exceptional program being run-in our backyard. I was actually unaware of its actual location. Seemed very secretive to me, but I found out it is actually in Des Moines. So that was fantastic. Asked a lot of questions and got a lot of answers. I also had a fabulous tour of the marina today and asked more questions and got more answers.

But I do look forward to learning more. As I said earlier, it's hard to come in at the end of many of these conversations. I know Pierre and I have been like, okay. But how do we get here? How'd that happen? So I apologize for the sometimes redundant questions, but I feel it's important that we get all of that history together and put forward for us. So, I am enjoying catching up to the rest of you, especially councilmember Brunetting. I'll never be able to catch up to that. But so I I did educate myself a little bit, and I just wanted to speak on that.

Councilmember Nutting.

Thank you, mayor. No comments. Thank you.

Council member Bloss.

Last Thursday was my tour day, so I visited the court jail with council member Desmoni and also went and toured all the public works facilities with the city manager and the public works director. There is a lot of trucks and tractors and equipment that the city owns that people don't I didn't know about, so it was nice to see. Went to the extravaganza this weekend. Really well attended. There was, I think, 220 sign ups. Kids everywhere. It was beautiful, gorgeous day. Thank you for the city staff for putting this together. And that's it.

Deputy mayor Oxiger.

You know, storm of thunder. Yeah. I too attended the extravaganza with councilman Bloss and also councilmember Steinmetz. And it was really great because, you know, basically, what we had there were kids under five years old, a few older ones, but it it is a great reminder of who we're working for. Ultimately, what we've gotta do, it's what we pass on when our time is up here and stuff.

But these are the these are the these are the people that are gonna be the the heart and soul of future Des Moines. And so it was great to see a very very well run event on their behalf, and it's just inspiring to know that we've got some great kids coming up. So appreciate that.

Thank you. I'll try and not repeat everything, but I wanted to say thanks so much to the staff. I was unable to go to Eggstravaganza, but I did hear it was marvelous back at the beach park this year, and it seemed like there was quite a bit of participation and and happy egg hunters that were out there participating today or not today, but that weekend. I hosted a chat with the mayor at local business a couple of Mondays ago, or was that this week? No.

It was last week. Oh, thank goodness. I wanna say thank you again to the staff, to Catherine, and to Bonnie Wilkins for helping me set those up. And there were some folks that came by, that I, know and had the chance to have a more intimate and in-depth conversation. But I wanna recognize that not everyone has free time on a Monday morning at 9AM.

So the next couple of sessions will be either on a Saturday or I think more like in the happy hour kind of time. So we did wisely avoid and I would have done it because I go to anything that's on my Outlook calendar, but I wisely avoided having a chat with the mayor on Cinco de Mayo at a Mexican restaurant. I think that's for the best. But if someone wants to propose that in the future, we could we could give it a try. So do stay tuned in the city manager's report and other places for those upcoming dates.

Just this week, I think council member Harris and I were also just missed each other at the ribbon cutting for the new Blue Sushi restaurant downtown. If you have a chance to go check them out, that would be excellent. Like council member Simon said, we went to the Sound Cities Association public interest committees meeting. And it is I think sometimes you really have to be like a policy or government nerd to really like this stuff. But it to me, it's like how the world works, and you kind of get to draw back the curtain on what are those conversations at those different layers of government.

And it helps you understand who is in charge of what, how is our life organized. I've always said that sometimes we forget that there's someone in charge of anything until you flip the light switch, and the light switch doesn't go on. And then you're like, what is going on? I need help right now. But there is a whole electrical grid that runs our light system that some person is in charge of watching and saying, are we getting enough electricity to all the people in this area?

And once you open that curtain, I think it becomes super interesting. So if you do wanna learn more about Skorje Jail or if you wanna come over and and learn more about what the city is up to, learn where the Find It Fix It app lives or not app, but website lives. I recently was reminded that you can report a stolen accordion on our police, like, report. It gives you a list of the things that you could have stolen, and accordion is right at the top. But once but once you go in, I think, you know, there is something really interesting about getting more involved.

And that's what happens when I see folks like Corrine, like Mary Ellen. You get that curtain and you get actually more involved. And so thank you so much for your renewed interest and commitment in a purely volunteer role to helping others in your community. I wanna echo a little bit about what Dan said about how to activate our town. If I had a choice between a million dollar ad in the Super Bowl or 20,000 adults who live in Des Moines telling everybody they knew that Des Moines was an excellent place to live.

It was a great place to raise your family, a great place to open a business, a great place to come hang out and have friends and that they encourage people to move here, I would choose the 20,000 cheerleaders. Because those are the people that are gonna influence their friends, and it is gonna be authentic. It is gonna be genuine. And you can't pay for that. You can only really have it when you have a government that listens to your folks, spending folks spending our money wisely on priorities that are important to the people.

And if they are not if we are not listening to the folks and how we should be spending, then they will not go out and cheerlead for us and say it's a great place. Instead, they will say things like, the city council doesn't listen. They do whatever they want. I need this in my life. This is what I care about, but this is what I'm being offered.

And so million dollar ad or $6,000,000 ad in the Super Bowl or 20,000 cheerleaders that say come to Des Moines, I'm gonna choose the 20,000 cheerleaders. And that's my job is to turn our population into those folks who will go downtown, spend their dollars locally, that will encourage their friends to come here on the weekends, that will encourage a business partner to come in here. And we all need to take that mantle up. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it. We are going to meet again. Whether we are doing it oh, council committee as a whole and study session on April 23. That's not right?

No. Regular council meeting.

Sorry. Regular council meeting on the twenty third. We'll be here at the same bat time. Do I have a motion to adjourn? I'm going to

So moved. Second.

And I have a first motion a and a second. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Alright. It's unanimous. Thank you. We gotta fix that up.