1. Seattle Public Utilities will discuss the details of its “preferred alternative” to reduce waste from yellow-pages phone books at a meeting of the council’s Regional Development and Sustainability Committee meeting tomorrow, along with six other alternatives. (The state requires phone companies to deliver white pages, which list residential addresses.)
Under SPU’s “preferred” option, the city would contract with a nonprofit called CatalogChoice, which provides options for customers to opt out of receiving phone books, catalogs, and junk mail at home. The preferred option could also require that phone-book publishers like Qwest honor a customer’s desire to opt out of receiving yellow-pages phone books, assuming the City Attorney’s office decides it’s legal to force them to do so. (State law requires phone companies to deliver white pages to every resident).
The CatalogChoice option doesn’t go as far as some of the other alternatives, such as an option that would require that yellow-page phone books be distributed “solely on an opt-in basis,” meaning that customers would have to request phone books in order to receive them. Another option would impose a disposal fee on phone companies between 25 and 50 cents per yellow-pages phone book.
2. Environmentalists are getting nervous. The governor is currently negotiating with TransAlta—the Canadian company that owns a coal-powered steam plant in Centralia—to lower its CO2 emissions. The plant is the biggest single source of greenhouse gases in the state.
Yesterday, the details were released on separate negotiations between the state and TransAlta over its mercury pollution. They were asked for a 50 percent voluntary annual reduction. “The agreement is very weak,” says Doug Howell, spokesman for the Sierra Club. “We are very disappointed about this low level of reductions for such a toxic pollutant that is a major threat to public health. It is only a 50 percent voluntary reduction when some states are mandating 90 percent reductions.”
The agreement comes on the heels of another disappointment for the Sierra Club, the National Parks Service, and the U.S. Forest Service—the state’s limp mandate on TransAlta to reduce nitrogen oxide (which causes haze) at the TransAlta plant (some plant … which also gets a $4 to $5 million tax break every year).
Says Howell:
“This is a bad trend. The state defends the tax subsidy. The state cuts a bad deal on haze and pisses off the National Park Service. Now this crappy deal on mercury. Strike three. This does not bode well for the uber agreement on climate which is now pending. Ouch.”
3. At long last, King County Council member Larry Phillips rolled out a proposal—which he first told us about in early May—to do an audit of the King County Sheriff’s department. Referring to an audit of King County Metro that found enough savings to offset cuts to transit service for two years, Phillips said in a statement, “we don’t anticipate similar monetary results through this audit, but every efficiency counts.” The county council approved the audit unanimously yesterday.
4. Winpower Strategies—the political consulting firm started by former Moxie Media partner John Wyble—had a blog post yesterday suggesting that several city council members could fail to win reelection next year. (Tim Burgess, Sally Clark, Jean Godden, Bruce Harrell, and Tom Rasmussen are up next year.) Titled, “How Many City Councilmembers Will Lose Their Jobs in 2011?”, the post spells out four potential reasons city council members may be vulnerable next year: The possibility of tunnel cost overruns; issues with the police department; budget cuts; and the ongoing economic recession. Guess we know what Wyble will be up to next year.
5. The Cola site upgrade we pulled off late last week includes our new PubliCalendar. If you’ve got fundraisers, community meetings, forums, protests, and any other do-gooder stuff that the people need to know about, let us know, and we’ll list it in the Cola Calendar. Email info@publicola.net.
