Soon we'll remember fondly the days when we could send a package from Seattle to Bellingham and have it arrive overnight at a reasonable cost. more ›

State Democrats stand alone, a proposal to lightly infuse our air with carbon is floated, local homeless are about to be cruelly hit again, and apparently construction workers name their boring machines. more ›

News, tidbits and other items as written by the blogs of the neighborhoods they take place in. more ›

It's Crusty Capitol Hill Month here at the Re:Take column. We start off our tour inside Volunteer Park Conservatory, where the wild oats are on display. more ›

Eight years after planning began and $30 million later, Lake Union Park is scheduled to open on Saturday with a free and open-to-the-public ‘sunrise ‘til sundown’ celebration. They’ll be music (including the Seattle Opera), canoes, paddleboats, seaplanes, toy boat buildings, a fitness field jam-packed with yoga, dancing, Tai Chi - you name it - it's there. For food they’ve got Ivar’s and Molly Moon’s - even a root beer garden for the adults! more ›

We’ve been hearing about it for months and today it finally happened: Governor Gregoire signed an executive order issuing across the board cuts to cover a budget shortfall from falling tax revenue. She soon after fled to Asia on a trade mission. The executive order will mean cutbacks at every single state agency in Washington - effective October 1st. The specific level of cuts won’t be known until Thursday, after a new state revenue forecast is completed. more ›

SPL estimates that the closure will save them $650,000--over half of the budget cuts they're making this fiscal year. Impressive, and if it keeps the library afloat, we're all for it--but where else are we going to get our free media? more ›

Today, the University of Washington announced that due to large budget cuts, they will be discontinuing its men's and women's swimming programs effective immediately. The UW talking heads say the cut comes because the $1.2 million swimming program is the priciest ticket in the department (for real?) and is nearly half of the $2.8 million UW athletics needs to cut from its budget. The UW will honor the scholarships of those swimmers who stay. In March, the men's swim team (est.1932) finished 16th in the NCAA Championships, their best finish in 30 years. more ›

Man, why does the state gotta hate on education? First 6,000 newbie teachers get axed and now UW unveils the $73 million worth of university budget cuts. How it looks: admin is screwed, but to help academic units, UW will dip into its $10 million "rainy day" reserve fund. Academic priority went to the university's money-making programs, surprisingly, that do the most teaching. Buh-bye law, hello psychology! Now for the five or six remaining faculty and handful of students, it's not great news. Especially for the 300+ freshman not getting into UW this fall. (Curse you, algebra!) Here are the big cuts that academic programs will leave at the guillotine: Arts and Sciences ($10.5 million), Medicine ($5.3 million), Engineering ($4 million), Business ($1.9 million), Law ($1.6 million), and Ocean and Fishery Sciences, Nursing, and UW Graduate School ($0.9 million each). more ›

In times of economic need, one must shoulder certain new responsibilities, such as crockpotting. Reduce, re-use, make things at home; if the world can't magically provide you with luxuries like, say, law enforcement anymore, then buy a gun and take matters into your own hands. And we have reached that point, so get thee to your nearest pawn shop. At least, that's what Mason County's commissioner Tim Sheldon seems to recommend, given recent Sheriff's Department budget cuts. Great, the Northwest definitely needs more people waving guns around in fear because they feel the government doesn't have the resources to take care of them. more ›

Gregoire's planned announcement on budget cuts may be delayed by a check-in for jury duty. But she'll make 'em eventually. They don't call her Judge Hatchett for nothing. Meanwhile, in the Dept. of Duh, some Seattle Times staffers are now openly griping about managers' pay, including the salary of the big man Frank Blethen. more ›

Everyone knew it was going to be harsh. For weeks, arts orgs around Seattle have been struggling with the fallout of the recession and its impact on their projected budgets for 2009. Now hard figures are coming out, and they're not pretty. Over on the Slog, Brendan Kiley has a report on the budget cuts at some of Seattle's largest theatres. ACT Theatre, following the wildly successful run of their annual Christmas show, , is in better shape than some others: It only had to chop 20% out of its budget. The Rep, by contrast, may be looking at up to a 40% cut to make ends meet, though there's no hard numbers yet. No information was available from the Intiman. more ›

The state ferry system could float two ways in the next chunk of the future: either stay pretty much as is, full steam ahead with plans to build ten ferries, or slim way down and increase fares. It's hard for us to get too worked up about this, maybe because we can't even imagine leaving the house, let alone driving to Mukilteo, this week. Or maybe because we've been reporting on the multi-millions of dollars cut from Washington state health and human services, for God's sake, and we'd rather see the ferry system build only five new ferries and kick up the fares than to see more cutbacks in health care for kids and poor people.
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This morning, Gregoire released her proposal for the state's next three-year budget. The damage in terms of cuts is to the tune of $3.5 billion, the bulk of which is in Health and Human Services. Highlights from the budget can be found on the Washington State Office of Financial Management website, but be prepared: it's pretty brutal as is, and even so, it counts on a heavy chunk of change from the upcoming federal economic stimulus package and dips $600 million into Washington state's rainy day fund. Yeesh. more ›

Mayor Greg Nickels thinks so! But a City Council committee--and thank God for this--shut him down immediately, saying, "WTF R U thinking Nickels?" Nickels' intentions were to make the city's executive salaries competitive, but Councilman Licata smacked that one down. "It's bad timing," he told the Times. Damn right, it's bad timing; it's worse timing this year than it was both years previous, when Nickels made the same request for raises. During a year when the President-elect tells Barbara Walters on national television that in his opinion CEOs should forgo their Christmas bonuses, what kind of reasonable man thinks it's a great time to ask for executive raises? more ›

Washington Basic Health, the state's health care plan available on a sliding scale to people making under $22,800 a year, is feeling the budget squeeze already; the program will stop filling half of the slots that open up for new applicants starting December 5th, this Friday. The aim is to reduce the number of people covered by 7,700. We'd usually be worried about this, as several of our friends are covered by Basic Health and we expect to need the program ourselves in the near future, but our radical left buddy tells us health insurance is all a big scam anyway and even if it weren't, Obama probably came up with a great plan to fix this problem before anyone knew it was even an issue. Our president-elect is just that good. more ›

• West Seattle Blog and CHS documented yesterday especially carefully. To celebrate the anniversary of the first Denny Party landing on Alki forever ago, the Southwest Seattle Historical Society is putting together a time capsule that will include print-outs of Thursday's blog entries, among other various and sundry detritus.
• For every headline about county budget cuts, there are hundreds of people who will have their day-to-day lives affected by the loss of the eliminated programs. Rainier Valley Post asked Public Health spokesman James Apa about the projected impacts on their specific community.
• Aarwenn's CHS post about catching a glimpse into others' private lives, both beautiful and thought-provoking, breathes new life into the idea that one neighborhood could be the heart of a city. Even if you don't live in Capitol Hill (and we know many of you don't), this one's worth the read for poetic value alone.

• The Slog brings the sad news that The Cascade People's Center is set to close after the City Council cut funding. The People's Center has been a bastion for the neighborhood that we once called Cascade before Paul Allen took over the place and decided to call it South Lake Union. The CPC will close its doors on December 31st if it cannot come up with $75,000 in funding.
• Capitol Hill Seattle is excited that CNN decided to show a little love to Seattle and their neighborhood, recommending hill hangouts like the Cha Cha and Elysian Brewery. Even more exciting to all of us neighborhood bloggers, it was one of our very own, Scott of Central District News, who helped CNN with the list.
• Speaking of Central District News, they are recommending you secure your Obama yard signs and such, as the now 'commemorative memorabilia' is being stolen from yards all over to be sold on eBay.