Caffeinated News & Gossip. Your daily Morning Fizz.
1. City departments give presentations to the city council every year about their upcoming plans for the year. However, this year’s are a little unusual: They’re modeled on the nationwide Ignite presentations, where presenters have five minutes to run through a series of slides that tell a story.
We haven’t heard the departments’ talks yet (those are coming in tomorrow’s government performance and finance committee meeting, at 9:30), but the slides they’ve chosen to illustrate their goals for the coming year are pretty … interesting. Here are a few representative examples.
The Department of Finance and Administrative Services:
The Personnel Department:
And the Central Budget Office, on its strategy for budgeting in harsh economic times:
Should be a fun meeting.
2. We expect Seattle Transit Blog will have a full account of last week’s City Neighborhood Council meeting soon (we were at the First Congressional District debate and couldn’t attend), but here’s the takeaway from the meeting, which featured a square-off between council member (and Roosevelt density proponent) Richard Conlin and neighborhood activists, from STB’s Adam Bejean Parast:
Conlin blames the city for “botching” the upzone process, the neighborhood isn’t united in their opposition to density on the blocks across from Roosevelt High School; and Conlin says residents will look back in a few years and think 65-foot buildings were the right way to go on the currently blighted “high school blocks.”
3. The state house’s labor committee discussed two proposals yesterday to require political campaigns working for or against ballot measures to disclose their top five contributors on their ads (as candidates for office are already required to do) and to limit contributions to initiative campaigns to $1,600, the same as the limit for candidates.
Last year, Costco spent $22 million promoting a successful initiative to privatize liquor sales in Washington State. Both measures are sponsored by Rep. Andy Billig (D-3).
4. Representatives from the city of Seattle’s Department of Finance met with the state Department of Revenue yesterday. The city is seeking a compromise with the state on Gov. Chris Gregoire’s proposed business and occupation (B&O) tax “streamlining” bill, which the city has argued would cost Seattle as much as $43 million a year.
No word yet on whether the two sides have reached a detente on the proposal, which city staffers have said is “unacceptable” in its current form.
5. King County Council members Bob Ferguson and Larry Gossett, both Democrats, argued unsuccessfully yesterday for a proposal that would have preserved King County Metro’s little-used bus Route 42, on the grounds that eliminating the route—which serves only a handful of people daily—would violate the county’s commitment to social justice. In a statement, Ferguson said he was “disappointed a majority of my colleagues did not support our proposal to preserve service.”
6. Rob McKenna, who bailed on a meeting with the Washington Education Association (the teachers’ union) in December (understandable given that the union was poised to endorse McKenna’s gubernatorial rival and National Education Association beneficiary Jay Inslee), cancelled on another education group this weekend: The Washington State School Directors’ Association, the umbrella group for school board members statewide.
McKenna is running as the education candidate.
Unlike the WEA, which is opposed to McKenna’s pro-charter schools and teacher evaluations agenda, the Directors’ Association is all over the board when it comes to ed reform (Seattle’s own school board, for example, is sharply split).
McKenna was at the Roanoke Conference, a Republican networking conference in Ocean Shores (where the GOP voted against marijuana legalization, by the way).
In his place, McKenna sent Republican State Rep. Bruce Dammeier (R-25, Puyallup) arguably the leader of the ed reform agenda in Olympia. Marie Sullivan, the WSSDA’s director of government relations, said Dammeier “is very articulate about education” and had “clearly talked to McKenna before he spoke.”
Inslee spoke and Sullivan said members “were pleased to hear his remarks.”
