State of Seattle

Mayor Greg Nickels delivered a State of the City speech on Monday that hit on a bunch of Seattlest's favorite talking points, but failed to mention the growing divide between the mayor's office and the parks department and various neighborhood groups in the city. That's gotta be a tough one to swallow for neighborhoods whose primary complaint seems to be the lack of acknowledgement of their complaints.

Nickels spent some time discussing the walkability of the city and how pedestrian accidents are down this year, but he devotes more words to the insidious threat to our city's security from graffiti. Safe neighborhoods, "broken windows" theory (not Microsoft related) blah blah blah and then a big segment on public schools. The heading of the segment on public schools is "The best public schools in America," in the speech text. Maybe that's a bit optimistic, Greg? Maybe, "Not the worst public schools in America" might be something to shoot for.

Then there's some time devoted to affordable housing which sounds great until you dive into it. He's not talking about affordable housing like "we want to stop renting and would like a $300K home this side of the Cascades" affordable housing. He's talking about "we'd like to stop sleeping on the streets" affordable housing. Both are important, of course, and both need to be addressed in the city, but Seattlest isn't sleeping on the street. This week.

Finally, transportation. Blah blah blah, tunnel, blah blah blah. Thank you, god bless.

Here's the full text of the speech and a video courtesy of the Seattle Channel is available at the city's site.