A plastics manufacturers' trade group has now spent over $180,625 in its attempts to prevent the City Council's $0.20 plastic bag fee from going into effect this January, the P-I reports. Thanks for caring about how much that $0.20 bag tax will impact our debit card balance, American Chemistry Council! We feel like you're really on our side, even though you're over there in Virginia, because you're throwing all this money at the cause.......

The horsemen of change are upon us! Yesterday the City Council approved a $567 million master plan to transform Seattle Center into more of an open, public park. That means the Fun Forest is out when their lease ends January 2010. The master plan proposes to replace the pay-to-play carnival with a skating rink, sculptural jungle gym, and something called a splash fountain. Of course, no specific funding mechanisms have been established in okaying the......

Something related to the City Council's recent bag fee and Styrofoam container ban legislation strikes Seattlest as deeply weird and uneven, and actually it's been bugging us since way before the council took action this week. It very odd, to us, that there has been zero movement on the part of diners to deal with Styrofoam containers personally, whereas a lot of shoppers already bring their own bags to the grocery store with or without......

From the Seattlest Flickr Pool, courtesy of Scarequotes The Seattle City Council has overwhelmingly passed a measure to charge a 20-cent fee for every disposable bag--paper or plastic--starting January 1st, 2009. Yesterday, the council voted 6-1 in favor of the bag fee and to ban plastic foam food and drink containers. While the City Council is calling this a euphemistic "green fee," which they hope edges people towards environmentally sustainable practices, it's really just another......

After a committee vote yesterday, the full City Council is set to decide on Monday if Seattle will adopt a 20-cent fee for plastic bags at grocery, drug, and convenience stores, as well as a ban on polystyrene food and drink containers. If passed, the fee and ban will go into effect on January 1, 2009. Stores that use the plastic foam containers to package meat will have a year to figure out an alternative......

If there's one thing we're sick of, it's the ignorant attitude every pseudo-populist commentator in Seattle has taken on regarding the SLUT. (And yes, we've had more than our fair share of fun at its expense, replete with lame puns, etc.) But Aimee Curl's report in this week's Seattle Weekly on the City Council's discussions for SLUT expansion leaves us just a little ticked. After characterizing service expansion as "daydreams," Curl gives plenty of space......

In one of those mysterious black-is-white, up-is-down occurrences, Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council's Richard Conlin have in unison agreed to push for a $0.20 per paper-or-plastic bag fee at grocery and convenience stores and drugstores. While we're still trying to figure out what the vision is, we're aware that paying for bags bugs the hell out of a lot of people. Unsurprisingly, a new fee isn't popular except with people who already share......

Capitol Hill's hardest working man in show business, CHAC's Matthew Kwatinetz, has been devoting long hours to the survival of Odd Fellows Hall as an arts space, ever since he found out about the planned sale. A pragmatist, Kwatinetz isn't tying all his hopes to keeping the Hall for arts use; he's more interested in it as evidence of the arts being forced out of Capitol Hill, an area they once defined. After hosting an......

We spend a lot of time at the Seattlest newsroom talking about the problems bicycle riders in this city have and how the city should make it easier for us since we reduce congestion and emissions at the same time. Now we realize we’ve been ignoring the good our our two-wheeled motorized brethren (and sistern) on scooters. According to the PI, Vince Rowley and Eric Pravitz are regular scooter riders who want the City Council......

Photo by Andy Sternberg/LAist A posthumous tribute wall dedicated to singer/songwriter Elliot Smith sat defaced by graffiti for months on end -- LAist said enough, so did the fans and city council.SFist was surprised to learn that chronic presidential candidate Ralph Nader picked former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez as his running mate.Phillyist explored the possibilities of green cleaning.In the latest edition of Reel Toronto, a bi-weekly feature looking at films shot in Toronto......

Image Courtesy of the dualy talented, Jay Cox of The Sea Navy and Our Seattlest Flickr Pool Long spoken of and rarely acted upon, the renovation and remodeling of The Seattle Center was again on the docket for Monday's City Council meeting. Center officials presented a number of new design ideas for the redevelopment of the Center. Central to these are the demolishing of Memorial Stadium and The Fun Forest. Proposed uses for the......

photo by Flickr Contributor lachance This weekend the Washington State Senate narrowly passed a bill approving remote cameras to take photos of speeding drivers. A single one of these cameras, so-called "photo cops," can issue as many citations as 25 police officers. Washington State is eager to approve more uses for police cameras, as the installation of four red-light cameras in Seattle have brought in more than a million dollars of revenue in their......

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels either loves condos or he hates renters. The Mayor's Office has indefinitely frozen a $350,000 fund created to compensate Seattle area renters who'd been forced out of housing due to condo-conversions. Mayor Nickels wants to wait and see if the legislature passes a statewide bail-out funded by developers this winter. Because it makes perfect sense to rely on the people who are profiting most off of Seattle renter's misery. If......

Two things struck us as we were sitting in the Council chambers: One, everyone who got there early, without exception, sat at the aisle-ends of the rows, so everyone else had to squeeze past them to sit down. It's really tempting to use this pinheadedness as an analogy for the narrow-minded public interests that show up at council meetings, so we will. Two, our city council is old -- like, they were excited about seeing......

One of the oldest jokes in the book is at the expense of the Sixth Amendment: how can twelve people who couldn't get out of jury duty be counted as your peers? Juries, after all, are populated by the unemployed and retirees--people who don't have to actually work for a living. But alas, should you find yourself accused of knocking over a liquor store, defrauding a bank, or killing your significant other, retirees and the......

Photo by lachance Yet another greasy Seattle landmark has fallen victim to the mass character exodus currently enveloping this city of heartless opportunists. Andy’s Diner, otherwise known as the “train car café" on Fourth Avenue South is closing. Mozzarella sticks will be a rare commodity in Ballard with the closing of Sunset Lanes and Denny’s, and now SODO will be deprived of the Prime Steak and booze that Andy’s so graciously offered this city for......

Originally ran on January 3, 2007, and updated for January 2008. Since 2002 Seattleites have spent the first week of January asking themselves if this is the year a decision will finally be made on the Viaduct. When the governor announced last in March of 2006 that she would be making a decision by December, it looked like 2006 might finally be the year. Well, it took ten months for her to announce that we......

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle......

From the PI this morning: "Three shot inside Capitol Hill club." Apparently, a fight broke out on Sugar's dance floor around 1:30am; three people were injured, and police aren't saying much more than that. Someone was firing a gun inside the club, so this isn't one of those ambiguous cases of violence within fifty feet of the club doors. The night's event was Sin Sunday, an 18/21+ weekly event featuring a DJ spinning hip-hop and......

We really don't feel it's the day after an election until we overhear people talking about how they forgot to vote, didn't know there was an election, and how they'll definitely vote next time. If they had been paying attention from August through this morning, they would have learned that Seattle voters will not let you drive 50mph down Market Street after a few drinks, but they will let you work for an anti-gay organization,......

And it fucking sucked! Proposition 1, the roads and transit thing, was stabbed in the eye with a hot needle. It was closest in King County where it wasn't close (55%-44%), with Snohomish and Pierce counties pwning it 57%-42%. Money quote: "There is no Plan B." Tim Eyman's anti-tax initiative sucker punched almost every county except King, Jefferson, San Juan and Whitman. Resolution 4204, which would have allowed school district levies to pass with a......

Why is it important to vote? Let Dan Quayle explain: “Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.” Um, wait, what? My God, Dan Quayle is a nitwit. Yet he was elected to the Vice-Presidency--and was just one George H.W. Bush infarction away from leading the free world--because thousands of......

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library are trying to get people to write to members of the City Council in support of funding collections before the council meets to discuss the budget Tuesday, October, 30. Seriously, a $2.5 million shortfall this year, and a shortfall every year since 2000 when Libraries For All funded a bunch of building upgrades (including the Central Library)? That's really lame, particularly here where we get all proud......

One way not to get Seattlest's vote is to endanger our life, like city council candidate Venus Velazquez did on Wednesday night while she was giving a whole new meaning to "Ballard drivers." We, like Velazquez, were driving in Ballard that night. After leaving a show at the Tractor, we got in our trusty Saturn and rolled up 20th N.W. to Market, where we hung a right. Thank Jesus, we hung our right about 15......

City Council candidate Venus Velazquez was charged with a DUI the other night, which is odd because Bruce Harell was the athlete [slide-whistle], and with that we start our Seattlest General Election Civic Election Coverage 2007. We’ve been ignoring the city council races over here, mainly because they’re really f-ing dull. We understand why there aren’t better candidates out there, spending eight months begging for money and pandering to NIMBYs look like terrible way to......

City Council candidate Venus Velázquez was arrested for a DUI last night which can't be good for her campaign for Peter Steinbrueck's seat. Apparently, she had "two drinks with her meal" and then hung around for a while to ensure she wasn't impaired. If that's what really happened, bummer. It sounds like she made a better effort than the guys we see "sobering up" at the end of the night by switching to light beer......

Peter Steinbrueck, a soon-to-be--former City Council member, announced legislation today that would require all city departments that review the environmental impacts of projects to take greenhouse gas emissions into account. Besides the fact that it's kind of crazy that they don't already do that, we think this is a great idea. It's great because it's an attempt to take into account and limit all of those emissions that are usually ignored as too hard to......

We failed to notice yesterday, among all the hubub over Councilman Richard McIver's arrest on domestic violence charges, a post from Seattle Weekly political reporter Aimee Curl. McIver remains in jail and has claimed he'll be pleading "not guilty" to the charges. Columnist Robert Jamieson Jr. is taking him to task in today's P-I stating, "For his sake, that stance had better just be a legal formality before coming clean -- or a typo. Otherwise,......

This afternoon at two o'clock the city council will vote on proposed new nightclub regulations, bitterly opposed by Seattle's entertainment industry. Yet even as the council prepares for the vote, controversy continues to swirl over SPD's nightclub sting op from Saturday, Sept. 8. This morning, The Seattle Times reported on inaccuracies in its article from a week age today on elements of the sting operation, including the disputed claim that a gun made it......

Position 3 is the most anticipated city council race. It's an open seat, and that seems to be the only way to get new blood on the council. Bruce Harrell and Venus Velazquez will end up in the general, with Tuesday's primary serving as a chance trim the fat (Al Runte, Scott Feldman, John Manning) and give both sides a platform to claim victory. Before we make our November decision, we'll be voting for Scott......