1. PubliCola’s standing room-only campaign postmortem—held at the Del Rey bar in Belltown last night—gave voters the unprecedented chance to hear directly from, and ask questions directly to, the strategists closest to this year’s competing mayoral campaigns.
Mallahan consultant Jason Bennett gets candid in Belltown
We’ll have video of the event soon. In the meantime, both the PI (on this morning’s front page) and Seattle Times filed reports from the forum.
2. Mary’s Place, the city’s only day center for homeless women with children, received $250,000 in the King County budget adopted yesterday—enough to pay for a new building for the shelter.
The funding resolves a longstanding conflict between Mary’s Place and its former landlord, the downtown First United Methodist Church, which joined the shelter in advocating for funding from the county earlier this year.
3. Yesterday, we published a 4,000-word essay on the long term fallout from 1999′s WTO protests—the historic Battle in Seattle. The fallout? Your First Amendment rights have been eroded.
It’s a must-read.
4. Delaying the completion of the waterfront deep-bore tunnel by two years would cost the state about $37 million in tolling revenues, a memo from a tunnel consultant to state Department of Transportation (WSDOT) staff reveals.
The memo, dated September 16, “examines the impact of a two-year delay on completion of the Alaska [sic] Way Bored Tunnel, specifically the delay of revenue dedicated to the repayment of outstanding toll bonds.”
WSDOT urban corridors office deputy director Ron Paananen says the memo —prepared as part of the risk assessment process leading up to tunnel construction—doesn’t represent the full impact of putting off construction two years, because the state would also be saving money (by not building) during that time.
5. Chris Leman, the all-purpose city government gadfly (issues include: lobbyist disclosure; records disclosure; limits on growth, even in the center city) is back—this time, imploring incoming city council members Mike O’Brien and Sally Bagshaw in a PostGlobe op/ed to overturn revisions to the noise ordinance passed earlier this year. Leman also blasts council member Tim Burgess—a frequent Leman adversary—for taking noise out of the list of reasons the city can shut a “nuisance property” down. (The nuisance property law, which passed a council committee last week, is aimed at shutting down problem motels on Aurora.)
The changes to the noise ordinance Leman opposes simplified the process for agencies like Sound Transit and companies doing long-term construction projects to apply for variances to the city’s noise ordinance if, for example, their project is noisier than the ordinance allows. Under the old rules, a company might have to apply for dozens of two-week variances over the course of a long project; the new rules only require one application per year.
