1. Last year, many people attending (or hoping to attend) the Bite of Seattle were dismayed to discover that the annual food festival’s new owner, payment processing company Cheq, was forcing people to view menus and purchase food from vendors using a clunky app that slowed down orders, eliminated interaction between local vendors and the public, and effectively barred anyone without a working smartphone or credit card from attending. (It also required vendors to adopt Cheq’s payment platform instead of using their own systems or accepting cash.) Local Reddit threads chronicled attendees’ complaints in real time, and a followup article on Eater detailed the difficulty vendors had using the new system.

The Puget Sound Business Journal reported last week that Cheq sold the Bite of Seattle to a Bay Area-based food-festival producer called FoodieLand, which produces branded events around the country.

On Tuesday, Seattle Center director Marshall Foster confirmed that Cheq will still be the payment system for the event, “but it won’t be your only choice.” In theory, that was true last year as well; Cheq set up a separate line where people who couldn’t use the app could buy tickets to exchange for food, but it was reportedly far away from vendors and added an extra step to an already cumbersome process.

Cheq “took on Bite of Seattle as an opportunity to really beta test its new software platform” last year, Foster said. “The company had a good experience. They learned a lot. They decided, ‘We’re not in the event business.’ And they found an organization … [whose] sole mission as an organization is to create local food focused events.”

2. On Friday, City Attorney Ann Davison announced the city will resume enforcing its law against graffiti, after a panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling by a US district judge in an ongoing case brought by protesters who were arrested for writing slogans on a barricade outside SPD’s East Precinct during protests against police brutality in 2020.

In a statement, Davison called the ruling an “important victory” for “the people of Seattle.”

“Graffiti is a massive problem for our City, costing taxpayers, businesses, and residents millions of dollars while creating widespread visual blight. We must have as many tools as possible to protect neighbors and residents impacted by graffiti,” Davison said.

Davison has asked for a jury trial in the case. The protesters’ defense rests, in part, on the argument that the city’s graffiti ordinance is so overbroad that, if interpreted literally, it would ban children from using chalk on sidewalks; the defendants also argued that the city violated their freedom of speech, by selectively enforcing a supposed prohibition on chalk writing while explicitly encouraging chalk writing in other contexts.