City Council - Regular Meeting

At this time, I would like to call the June 25th, 2026 Des Moines City Council meeting to order. Councilmember J.C. Harris 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. Are there any correspondence not previously received by the council? No, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you. Now it's 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'll have three minutes to speak. Please state your name and city of residence. First, I have Pam Cooper.

Thank you. Melissa Folletti, is that right?

THANK YOU. We're currently running a committee of the whole and structure. However, council members do serve regionally on other committees. Do any council members have any items of interest to the public or the council? Council Member Harris.

Thank you. The Regional Transit Committee met last week and a couple of items of note. We review the changes in service and there are a number of things coming. There will be 12.5% added capacity if the unconstrained budget is approved. Unconstrained is a funny word, that just means 100% of the plan that the council has seen which cut service, especially to the south end. And the comment was, if this is unconstrained, I'd hate to see constrained. There will be a 0.1%, it's not in stone, but the likelihood is there will be another 0.1% councilmanic sales tax increase next year. This year was to

Thank you, Mayor. I'm now a member of the King County Board of Health. The role of the board is to advocate for the preservation, promotion, and protection of public health, prevent the spread of disease, set local public health regulations, and enforced it in local public health laws. I was nominated by the Sound Cities Association as an alternate member. That means that I attend and I participate in all meetings, but I only vote if one of the members is not present, which was the case last week for my first meeting. So I was actually a full voting member for my first meeting. We heard from l

Thank you. All right. Now we'll turn over to the city manager for the city manager reports. And Catherine Caffrey will be presenting.

Questions or discussion? Councilmember Harris.

So the most important thing is, is the tie indicating support for Brazil, or is it just something totally unrelated?

Okay, so I won't – I asked a vague question via email, and I apologize. But my real question about accrual versus cash is does it – is it usually – Do you get surprised? In other words, is it a reasonable thing to make the assumption that you're going to get paid with those things? I mean, does it usually? Yeah. Or is that still too vague? I'm sorry.

So my last but not least, on utilities, do they – They, meaning the utilities, do they report out the number of units? Because I'm just, you keep seeing this increase in both natural gas and electricity, which I would assume means that there are more homes or there are, I mean, in other words, is there a way to account for, because it's pretty large.

I mean, do they explain why? Because I guess I was just assuming that over time I've been a little concerned that maybe some of these would go down, but they're going up double digits.

Okay, but they don't give you any kind of demographics or anything? No.

Thank you. Very nice presentation, laying things out pretty clearly. But there's one thing that I think the public and maybe up here you can help us understand a little bit better, and that's the situation with Wesley. You've stated that they are exempt from property taxes because they're a nonprofit, and yet they have a dispute with the state that is now saying, well, maybe you're not entirely exempt. And yet our share of the property tax that we're used to getting from Wesley has not been paid. How do you reconcile Wesley as a nonprofit not normally paying, but we get something? AND I DON'T

IN FACT, WHEN WE WERE TALKING WITH THE COUNTY, I WAS GETTING FRUSTRATED BECAUSE THE DATA THEY WERE GIVING ME INCLUDED WESLEY.

Yeah, and I understand that's the current dispute, but what you have indicated is that our overall property tax bill is down because Wesley's not paying anything to the state, and yet that implies that something was being previously paid by Wesley. Right. I'm trying to get at the past.

So the county had sent us data not specifying that Wesley was included, so we didn't realize that Wesley was included because we've assumed they are not included.

All right. That makes a lot of sense, and I understand it much better. Hopefully, everybody who's watching can do it. Thank you. Nice presentation.

Yeah, just one thing that caught my eye is the regular sales tax that appears to be declining. Is there a relationship between the number of businesses that are revenue or retail? Has that declined as well? Or have you had any chance to do any analysis to see if there's a connection there.

Thanks, Jeff. How is the collection for the warehouse square footage tax going? I think in the first quarter,

I remember we had issues with some warehouses not paying before it's going better now.

And then those new warehouses that are being built, that's going to increase our revenue that way, too. It's our hope that they are considered taxable.

Yeah, I usually don't like to be rhetorical or whatever, but thank you for your attention, legal, on the whole business park thing. I just spent years at the corner of 24th, and I would look to the east and I would see that one thing and then I'd look to the west and I'd see another thing and the population sees these shiny buildings and they thought it was something else. Your work will, you know, people always focus on restaurants and ribbon cuttings and everything like that, but that's like the meat and potatoes that the city is going to They, yeah, it will be wonderful as long as this city

Yes, thank you for the presentation, Jeff. So in anticipation of the West Business Park coming online, I take it that we're in a position where we're not going to see the same confusion that's happened in the past.

Do we have any idea when the West Business Park is going to come online?

Okay. Will we be including that in our projections for 27-28?

I think we all appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.

Council Member Harris for your second time.

I actually had a follow-up on the Wesley thing. I don't know if in your last position, did you say that the taxable portion was the lodging and the non-taxable is the...

Maybe Washington is different, but it was a thing in Michigan where you'd have these mega hospital complexes that were run by the Catholic Church or something like that. And at a certain point, the state said, no, you're a bajillion dollar corporation and started doing collections. So what you said kind of struck me as backwards. I thought it would be more that the medical facilities would be. I'm asking you, is there any like precedent for this throughout Washington with hospital systems? And if that's not your experience, that's fine.

Well, thank you again. I want to reiterate what I heard Councilmember Nutting say, what I heard Councilmember Harris say. Thank you to Legal and to Finance Director Friend for tracking down the mystery of whether or not those parcels should be taxable and added to the rolls. I appreciate your due diligence and your work on that. I know it must be... a highlight that we can all put in the books to say that you accomplished that and hopefully are setting a precedence for the other properties that are coming online in the future. So I appreciate that very, very much. I do wonder how much just eco

And my additional question is, I know we are working very hard in terms of our accounting discipline to not use so many one-time or non-recurring revenues for recurring expenses, but I'm wondering if there is a level that we should aspire to to say we should get 10% in a big new monies from building or from one time to help our budget on a regular basis? And how do we grow to that? So not that we can bank on it, let's say, but so that we can have it be a healthy part of our ongoing regular, not reoccurring, but regular income.

Okay. Well, looking forward to a recommendation then in the future. Anything else? Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

So with that said, Eddie, I'm going to humiliate you a little bit. I won't be too mean.

You're not going to come give a speech? I thought you were going prepared.

Thank you very much, and congratulations.

COUNCIL, QUESTIONS OR DISCUSSION? COUNCIL MEMBER NUTTING.

THANK YOU, MAYOR, AND THANK YOU, CITY MANAGER, FOR THE PRESENTATION. I'LL HOLD ALL OF MY COMMENTS. I JUST WANT TO SAY THAT PRIOR TO ME BEING ON COUNCIL almost 13 years ago. We did have a multifamily tax exemption. It didn't work. Nobody used it. I don't want you spending a ton of time on it. So that's just my comments and my personal feeling about it. We repealed it, I don't know, probably the fourth year I was on council. So that's where I'm at. Thank you.

Yeah, I want to say thank you for the presentation. I think you're putting some meat on the bones at this point, and that's really, really appreciated. This is obviously going to bring us in some good data that is going to allow us to make smart decisions. I especially like the idea of looking at why hasn't development happened, figuring out what those barriers are, because, frankly, it's been a lot of sort of ad hoc, we think this is the problem, let's do it, without necessarily knowing the data to support that. And so I think this is an excellent approach, and it is painstakingly slow for th

Thank you. And you can put your earmuffs on now. The Port of Seattle has invested about $170 million into this city through sound insulation and various stuff. To have one sentence about the impacts and so on, it is hard to overstate what impact THE EFFECT THEY HAVE ON THIS CITY, HAVE HAD ON THIS CITY SINCE THE 70s, THIS THING CALLED THE CTAC COMMUNITIES PLAN. AND MY COMMENT IS THAT THE COUNCIL HAS, THE THING THAT YOU HEAR FROM RESIDENTS IS I LOVE OUR LITTLE TOWN, AND WE DO NOT, WE'RE IN THIS CONSTANT DENIAL THAT THE small amount of regular sales tax we get every year and everything, that some

Thank you for the presentation, I did ask for some of this information being brought up and I appreciate all the work that's got into that. I actually speak to residents on the daily I speak to people often and I am actually hearing. That people are excited for the potential, the city has I know that when I got here all I heard was the potential, the potential, the potential. This is how we figure that out, and I appreciate the work that you're going to put into this I appreciate the historical information as well that's how we're going to take this educated guess at what we're going to do, an

Thank you. I did have a question about the Opportunity Zones. Do you know if first-time applicants or folks who do not currently have one get any sort of priority and designation? I didn't see that in the list.

Well, I know we have no control over that. I wish that that could be part of their consideration if there's some other way we can say, hey, this town already has two, and if we have zero, can ours be approved? So thank you for that information. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. Deputy Mayor Oxiger.

I'm sorry. I waited because I didn't have a question. I had a comment. Is that appropriate now?

OKAY. I JUST WANT TO SAY THAT I APPRECIATE THE DELIBERATIVE PROCESS AND THAT I THINK NOT ONLY THE CITIZENS, BUT I THINK UP HERE ON THE DIAS, TOO, SOME OF US ARE IMPATIENT TO GET, YOU KNOW, SOMETHING GOING, AND SO, BUT I REALLY DO APPRECIATE THE DELIBERATIVE PROCESS, SO THANK YOU. APPRECIATE THAT FEEDBACK.

Any questions about that? Yes. Council Member Simons.

THANK YOU. I DO WANT TO ADD TO THAT THAT SEVERAL OF YOU COMMENTED THAT THIS WAS NOT WHAT WE WERE ENVISIONING WHEN WE SAID WE WANTED A RESPONSE TO AN OP-ED, AND SO I'M VERY EXCITED THAT WE DID AGREE THAT WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A SECOND LETTER THAT IS MORE INTENDED TO PUBLIC CONSUMPTION AND TO TALK ABOUT POTENTIAL IMPACTS. AND THIS IS ABSOLUTELY AN INTERNAL TYPE OF DOCUMENT THAT WILL GO TO THE REPORT ON BEHALF OF THE MAYORS BUT THERE WILL BE ANOTHER ONE COMING. THANK YOU. AND I SPOKE TO BOTH MAYOR MOORE AND CETAC AND MAYOR IGAL AND I'M SORRY THE OTHER WAY AROUND MAYOR IGAL AND CETAC AND MAYOR MOOR

I move to approve the consent agenda as read, Mayor.

I see a second by Councilmember Steinmetz. Does any Councilmember wish to pull an item? Seeing none, all in favor of the consent agenda as read, please raise your right hand until I call your name. Deputy Mayor Oskar, Councilmember Steinmetz, Councilmember Harris, Councilmember Desmona, Councilmember Nutting, Councilmember Voss, and myself passes 7-0. Thank you very much.

And our first item is the speed camera ordinance first reading by Assistant City Attorney Matt Hutchins.

Council, do you have any questions? And this is questions only. So I'm going to go to Council Member Netting first.

Thank you very much for the presentation. My question comes to the one new camera per 10,000 population. Currently, there's a construction project in my neighborhood that's lasted quite a while, and it hasn't really slown anybody down. And the The replacement on 16th really didn't slow anybody down. Does that preclude any kind of extra temporary cameras for construction zones? Is that something that we've looked at?

Outstanding presentation. Really good job of justifying these locations for these cameras. And I appreciate that. My question revolves around the school walk zones. Kids aren't walking to school 24 hours a day. It seems incongruous that you are using the school walk zone to cite somebody at midnight or during summer vacation when the kids might not be going to school or on weekends. How does all that play? Is it just the definition says if it's there, you can use it 24 hours?

to their home so I guess that would be my my two-part answer councilmember Harris just to be clear this is authorizing any school zone to be extended to 24 hours yes but if we yes potentially if we have

As an administrative matter, that would not require a council vote?

THANK YOU FOR THE PRESENTATION. THE TICKETING WOULD HAPPEN FIVE MILES OVER THE POSTED SPEED LIMIT, IS THAT CORRECT? CORRECT. AND THAT'S WHAT WE'RE DOING SO FAR WITH OTHER CAMERAS?

Just for clarification, the cameras, the speed limit would adjust at the Woodmont site depending upon the hours. So anyway, so all we're doing is really enforcing the speed limit, using the camera there to enforce the speed limit.

Let's go to Councilmember Nutting for your second time.

Thank you, Mayor. Just for clarification, how many Speed Zone cameras do we have? We have Woodmont and Pacific Middle School. Is there one up there? Is it just Woodmont?

Okay, but there's only two school speed zones in the city.

Back to Council Member Harris for your second time.

Maybe I missed it, but are you... You're authorizing, like, this range of anywhere along Kent-Des Moines within this set of blocks? I mean, there's not, like, a specific... I'm just, it's a pretty windy bit of territory.

Okay, and a quick, I asked last time, I mean, is there any clarity now as to what the signage would be in a school zone? Because it is a thing when it shifts from one speed limit to another. I'd be very curious to know what it's going to look like to people visually.

Could we get that before the second reading, maybe something pretty please?

Yes, thank you. So as far as implementation, can we implement these as it's available to come online, or will we be doing it on a one-time basis? We're just suddenly going to turn all the cameras on at once? Or for example, if we're having delays in having to deal with Puget Power, Puget Sound Energy, to site have the power to a location, as opposed to, say, Woodmont. I assume that it's just a matter with Woodmont of coming up with the proper software that would allow it to happen. So these could be staggered. It's not going to be a single implementation date.

All right, all my questions were answered. Thank you very much for your presentation. Is there a motion? Council Member Nutting.

I move to pass Draft Ordinance 26-049, to a second reading on the next regular council meeting agenda.

I hear a second from Councilmember Steinmetz. Any discussion? Councilmember Boss.

I support the new cameras. I'm a little uneasy with the 24-7 Woodmont camera. Like Councilmember Steinmetz said, using the authority of a school walk zone to have tickets at 2 a.m., I think it goes a little against the spirit of what the law is, even though it is allowed. I think it could be confusing to drivers to have two different sets of speeds that are enforced at a different time of the day. So I'm a little uneasy about it. I kinda wanna hear from my colleagues maybe on that, if you have some thoughts.

I do have some thoughts. The speed limit is 35. We're not changing the speed limit. All we're doing is reminding you that when it's not 20, it's 35. So we're encouraging better behavior, I believe. We're not changing anything. We're just encouraging better behavior. So if you did want to... do 80 at 2 a.m., we're discouraging that behavior at that time. So the speed limit isn't changing. We're just changing the consequences, which I will be for it.

Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Council Member Vos, for your concerns. I do believe with the... SHORTAGE OF HAVING OFFICERS THAT CAN SIT ON PATROL AND THE CALLS FOR SERVICE IN THE CITY. I THINK THIS IS A FORCE MULTIPLIER IN AN AREA THAT CONSISTENTLY WHEN I'VE BEEN ON A RIDE ALONG, WE'VE SEEN SEVERAL VEHICLES TRAVELING AT A HIGH RATE OF SPEED IN THAT LOCATION. AND TO AGREE WITH COUNCILMEMBER DESMONI, IT IS ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO SLOW DOWN IN THAT AREA It becomes a pass-through in the early to late evening and early morning hours. And so I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Thank you.

As someone who has made a contribution to the city coffers from those particular cameras, I can tell you they do change behavior. They really do. And that was a long time before I was on council. I just want to clarify that. But I agree with Councilmember Desmoni's. It's just enforcing an existing speed limit. And yes, we're using the rationale for the school walk zone. I was wondering whether or not that might change or limit what we can do, but apparently not right now. So I think it's OK to enforce the speed limit. And to Councilmember Nutting's point, We hear often from people, speeders, s

Yes, thank you. And I would just remind everybody that, you know, as we saw earlier with the red light cameras, I mean, we looked at it as, okay, there's decline in revenue and stuff. That's a success. We're actually changing people's habits and we're actually educating the public that, hey, you need to go to speed limit. So I think all of this is indicative of trying to change behavior to make our roads safer. And I think it's commendable. Thank you.

Surprise. I have concerns. This is, I was thinking how delightful it would be if you could flip a switch and get all four online online. at the same day. I think that it will come across as very expansive to people, and I agree, you know, red light cameras are just a very different thing behavior-wise from speed cameras, and I understand everybody should go the speed limit, but we tend to conflate things like the noise at Redondo there's just a certain point where people will feel micromanaged. And we talk about this small town vibe and so on. But I'm nervous about, you know, people should def

YES. I'D JUST LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT THE PARK ZONE CAMERAS IN RODONDO HAVE RESULTED IN A SIGNIFICANT LOWERING OF THE SPEED. THE PROBLEM IN RODONDO There is still the speed element. That's not going to go away. We have people that are actually, the scofflaws are there, and they know exactly where the cameras are, and they will play their games on trying to not get caught on the thing. But there has been a definite effect on the amount of speeding down there. Noise is another problem. We're working to address that separately. I think it does go a long way towards educating people that we don't n

All right. The only thing I wanted to add is that imagining someone going over 40 on 16th Avenue is frightening. And we know that people routinely go more than that. And if I could drop the speed limit on 16th, I think that would even be more helpful. where I work in the city the speed limit was dropped around almost all streets by five miles after an entire family was hit by a car outside of middle school and I think it does make a difference to sort of say hey you need to slow down and there are consequences because that that corner was notoriously People sped. People didn't look. It was on

Thank you, Mayor. The city recently decided to discontinue the long long running after school program club chaos. We've heard from a lot of frustrated parents about this decision. I think it'd be good to bring this up to the next council meeting to have the city staff explain the decision explain what comes next. I think it'd be good to have that publicly to kind of explain that to the whole community.

All right. Thank you. Any other new business items. All right, let's move on to Councilmember reports, which are limited to four minutes. We'll start with Councilmember Harris.

Thank you. I was a bit stroppy, I guess, about the whole strategic thing, and I want to use my time to just mention that the single most effective airport mitigation program in the history of any airport around America was called the Sea-Tac Communities Plan from 1973 to 1976. And you know it as North Sea-Tac Park, Des Moines Creek Business Park, $350 million in sound insulation, roads, noise monitoring system. It was supposed to be an air quality monitoring system. It was a land use plan between King County and, yeah, And the Port of Seattle, because back then the entirety of the area, Des Mo

Thank you. I had a jam-packed, super-duper fun weekend this weekend, but I did want to talk about going to the MIBBB, Men in Black Birthday Bash. I had a hoot of a time there. It was my first time there. It will not be my last time there. And quite honestly, it was a pretty good Saturday night. Thank you.

I attended the USA-Australia World Cup game at the theater on Friday. I showed up with my son right after kickoff, and it was packed. We walk in there. There's about 100 seats on the floor, and that was all taken. Even the standing room on the top floor, that was kind of hard to find a space to watch the game. So great attendance. I think close to, what, 400 people were there. The bar was open. There was steamed food for the U.S. team, the Australian team. So, yeah, great event, and it's a great preview of what the theater is going to be. Everyone's excited to all the new events that are going

So not to be redundant, because all of these things went on and everything, but I will expand on we do not have a meeting until July 9. And so July 4 is going to be the big celebration at the marina. It's star-striped sunshine. And I believe it's 10 to 4. And so a lot of festivities going on down there. in conjunction with what's going on at the farmer's market. And it should be a hoot. But I understand that there are four members of the dais that if anybody doesn't care for what we do up here or anything, that we will be in the dunk tank. But I do want to point out that we're and I'm not quit

Thank you. I will say ditto to all of the activities. It really feels like when summer comes along and the end of spring that things come alive here and we pack as much into June, July, August as we possibly can. I attended many of the things that were already... I want to call out, thank you so much to the staff in Community Enrichment Services who worked on their day off to put on the Soccer Clinic for Youth. We know that they came in to not only support the first 50 young people who signed up, but the extra, I believe, 60 more that came on top of it. So I think we were closer to 120 folks w

Council Member Simons, you have the second. All those in favor, please raise your right hand and say aye. Aye. We are adjourned.