1. This afternoon, the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission will discuss the city’s approach to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook—namely, whether city officials’ posts on such sites are subject to public disclosure law, like emails and other correspondence.
Check out onetime county prosecutor candidate Bill Sherman’s take—which argues, basically, that they are—here.
(PubliCola looked into this issue several times last year and also did a public records request for Seattle City Council Member Tim Burgess’ texts to test out public records law in the wi-fi age.)
2. A curious sign showed up in the corridor between city council member Mike O’Brien’s and Nick Licata’s offices yesterday:
Huh? Fizz asked Licata (whose office is the one behind that door). He invited us to open the door and stand in the corridor and, indeed, the wind started swirling all over the place. “It gets worse when you leave it open longer,” Licata said.
3. Perhaps the mysterious cyclone at city hall between Licata and O’Brien is the aftershock from their blustery encounter on C.R. Douglas’ Seattle Channel Show “City Inside/Out” this week where the pair went at it over the tunnel.
Licata, a longtime supporter of rebuilding the viaduct, said he considers the tunnel an “in between” solution that’s superior to the surface option, which he said would put 110,000 cars—the number that currently use the viaduct—on surface streets. “The worst solution would be the surface, by far,” Licata said. “You’d end up with more cars, higher public safety problems, more cost overruns, because [the city of Seattle would] take the entire bill, not the state.”
O’Brien countered that the tunnel itself, according to the state’s own environmental analysis, would put nearly 80,000 cars on city streets, because people will balk at the prospect of paying steep tolls to bypass downtown. “We’re building a tunnel that’s four lanes, but only 41,000 cars are going to use it,” he said. “We’ve got to address [traffic] diversion onto city streets.”
Licata shot back: “That is not an accurate figure. If you take the worst case scenario you end up with 45,000 [cars], whereas if you build a surface [street], you’re going to end up with 110,000 cars on the streets. You’re saying you want all those cars on the surface downtown.”
Transportation chair Tom Rasmussen, also on the show, did occasionally get a word in edgewise. Calling O’Brien’s efforts to delay signing contracts with the state until the cost overruns language is removed from state legislation a “ploy,” Rasmussen said, “He wants to stop the project. He wants all these conditions to be met. … A lot of these issues can be worked out during the course of the project,” Rasmussen said, including the $300 million the Port of Seattle has pledged toward the project, as well as the cost overruns provision.
“I see three things happening. One is, we build the tunnel. Secondly, we close the viaduct, just like the South Park Bridge was closed because people couldn’t make a decision—they dithered and delayed and were in disagreement. Or, the viaduct collapses and we have to pull people out of the rubble.”
4. Speaking of “City Inside/Out” (and mysterious phenomena at city hall), on a separate segment featuring Gov. Chris Gregoire, Douglas’ show was unexpectedly interrupted by a sudden burst of flashing lights and alarms.
It was the vestiges of a fire-alarm drill from earlier in the day. (After a fire drill, city staffers apparently re-test the fire alarms to make sure they’re working.) If you watch the video, you can see the lights flash briefly in the background (Seattle Channel staffers scrambled quickly to cover them up) while Gregoire—who only had 40 minutes to spare—doesn’t miss a beat. Channel editors deftly cut the sounds of sirens from the video as Gregoire’s security team scrambled to get Seattle Fire Department brass on the line to make sure there wasn’t a real emergency.
5. A major priority for Seattle and King County in the upcoming legislative session is to find money for bus service; thanks to a major decline in revenue for sales taxes, Metro is looking at losing 600,000 hours of service over the next few years.
The state, facing a $4.6 billion short fall, doesn’t have any money either. So, where are transit advocates going to find the money? They are pushing a temporary $20 per car “congestion fee” for immediate help, and then for a longer term fix—upping the voter vehicle excise tax.
