Correction: This post originally said Goldman Sachs lobbyist Dick Gephardt (yes, that Dick Gephardt) contributed $240,000 to Sen. Patty Murray. That was a typo. The correct dollar amount is $2,400.
1. Yesterday, writing up U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s press conference on financial reform, the PI’s Joel Connelly reported that after Murray was asked if President Obama should return nearly $1 million in contributions from Wall Street bad guy Goldman Sachs, she said:
“I can’t speak for the president,” said Murray, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership. She added: “I can tell you, in my campaign cycle, I have not taken any money from Goldman Sachs.”
Reporting 101 says you follow up on that one. But beyond reporting that Open Secrets, a web site that tracks Federal Elections Commission campaign finance reports, shows Sen. Murray getting $154,000 from the generic securities and investment industry, Connelly’s report doesn’t test Murray’s claim.
PubliCola looked at Murray’s FEC reports, and here’s what we found: Brian Griffin, a consultant with the Duberstein Group, Goldman Sachs’ top lobbyist firm in 2010 with a $100,000 contract, has contributed $2,000 to Murray this cycle; and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt, who has a $50,000 lobbying contract with Goldman Sachs—he was their lobbyist on the bailout specifically—gave Murray $2,400 last summer.
2. The council’s waterfront planning committee got a sneak peak at the designs for two massive ventilation buildings planned for the north and south ends of the downtown Alaskan Way tunnel yesterday, and—well, yikes:
Council members interrogated planners from the city and state transportation departments about the buildings, which will be the equivalent of two six-story apartment buildings. Specifically, they wondered: How will two largely vacant buildings with no retail or other street-level uses—buildings whose only purpose will be to house huge fans and maintenance trucks—not create massive dead zones at both ends of the tunnel?
The planners’ answer? Windows.
“[The southern ventilation building] will have vertical windows that allow you to see in,” said Ron Paananen, the city’s chief tunnel planner. “The garage door would be glass, so that you could actually see the vehicles, so that really helps activate the pedestrian environment along Railroad Way.”
Council member Nick Licata pressed back. “What kind of activation will you have to complement the pedestrian promenade?”
Paananen responded: “We will be revealing the working nature of the building—the vehicles that are there as well as the operations of the building.”
“So it’s windows.”
“It’s windows.”
3. As expected, the city council voted yesterday to endorse extending the First Hill streetcar north to Aloha Street on Capitol Hill and to ask the Sound Transit board to approve funds to study and ultimately build the extension. Studying the route would cost around $750,000—”a drop in the bucket,” according to Bill LaBorde, policy director for the Transportation Choices Coalition. Studying the extension now would make it easier to build it later, in part because the same engineering team would work on both the approved streetcar line and the extension.
However, as we reported last week, the Sound Transit board seems unlikely to fund a streetcar extension unless the city can figure out a way to pay for it. Fred Butler, head of the Sound Transit board’s capitol committee, called it “unlikely … that you would see us looking to add a lot of scope” to the streetcar project; yesterday, when we asked whether the Sound Transit board was likely to fund the study, Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick said he “would refer you back to Fred Butler’s comments.”
