Results tagged “gregnickels”

'CAUSE SARAH VOWELL'S INCREDIBLE: Much-loved favorite author, humorist, journalist, and sometimes Pixar character Sarah Vowell will be in town tonight to read from her latest novel, The Wordy Shipmates. For anyone who has yet to have read Vowell's work, we promise this will be an excellent opportunity to get acquainted not only with her latest, but as well with Vowell herself. To ensure a seat or standing spot we highly recommend getting there early--there's definitely a reason why this book has been on the bestseller's list for practically forever.

Well, there you have it. Mayor Nickels conceded the race--well, he never actually said the word "conceded"--but he wished primary election leaders Mallahan and McGinn a good mayoral race during this morning's press conference. As for the candidate he plans to vote for and endorse? He said he's undecided. But knowing his 22 years of public office, we say just go ahead and write your name in, Greg, we understand.

Early primary results show a Seattle mayoral race three-way, with incumbent Greg Nickels on the bottom and the Seattle Times still stabbing viciously. But for the Times, it's a bittersweet used-to-be-friends assassination: Anti-tunnel crusader Mike McGinn leads Joe "T-Mobile" Mallahan by less than a percentage point.

Mayoral candidate Mike McGinn is starting to mix it up with Greg Nickels over the deep-bore tunnel. (McGinn has been campaigning as anti-tunnel for a while, but Nickels has only now started to respond.) Now McGinn says that since the Seattle share of tunnel costs would nearly equal the total of every other voter-approved levy in the city, it's worth a vote.

Every journalist grew up with fuzzy memories of old movies in his or her head, of chain-smoking beat reporters with arm-garters and press passes stuck in the bands of their fedoras, always going on and on about how they've got "the big scoop, chief!" Alas, real life is rarely so exciting, but it's cute (and pathetic) when they grow up and try to realize those misty, water-colored memories of the way it never was. Witness KIRO 7's attempt at muckraking yesterday by digging into the mayor's "no more bottled water!" plan.

Seattle City Light will be bumping up rates by 2.3 percent, due to an increase in wholesale costs. Just back in April, the mayor promised no new rate increases in 2009; as City Light's long-term budget woes increased earlier this month, Nickels's $40K bonus to Jorge Carrasco, the director of City Light, became yet another embarrassment to the mayor. The new rate increase takes effect Oct. 1.

Mike McGinn, local enviro and an increasing threat to Greg Nickels's re-election effort, is doing his damnedest to make Nickels pay for lobbying so hard for a waterfront tunnel. The Times has a report on McGinn's strategy today, while Publicola points out McGinn supporters have launched a new anti-tunnel website.

Erica C. Barnett over at Publicola has an interesting tidbit this morning: apparently, a local lobbyist has filed an ethics complaints against Mayor Greg Nickels for the above ad. The shot that's causing the trouble is at 40 seconds in. Apparently, that shot of the new Link Light Rail line wasn't filmed from a public area (or so the complaint maintains), raising the question of how the crew got access. It would be a violation for Nickels to use his power as mayor or other public resources to help his election campaign. UPDATE: As comments suggested, it turns out it was pulled from earlier footage, according to Publicola.

Starting today, the Sound Transit Link Light Rail line from Westlake to Tukwila is officially open. This weekend, everyone rides for free. (As of noon, that's been about 13,000 people.) Paid service starts on Monday. Transit officials said yesterday that the system is ready to go. Fourteen two-car trains are operating all weekend. On Monday, 14 trains will be operating during peak hours and 12 trains at all other times.

• Techflash, via the magic of Glassdoor.com's ratings, has the skinny on the best and worst CEOs and companies to work for in Seattle. The results? None too shocking.
• Cliff Mass tells you all about noctilucent clouds, which are very, very high. Up. Man, that joke could write itself.

The Seattle Department of Transportation failed to properly oversee almost $200,000 in roadwork, the reports, all of which will now be replaced at the city's cost. In the midst of the ongoing budget crisis at City Hall, this does nothing to help Greg Nickels' re-election campaign, who some pollsters show losing in head-to-head races with virtually all his potential opponents.

             

The trains will open with service from Westlake to Tukwila on July 18. It will be free to ride on the 18th and 19th with paid service starting on Monday, July 20. The base ticket price will be $1.75 with a .05-cent increase with every mile. When the Tukwila to SeaTac section opens in December, it will cost $2.25 from Westlake to the airport. Trains come about every 7.5 minutes during peak times, and every 15 minutes otherwise.

Sworn in yesterday, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels earned the profiled position as the 67th President of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). What that means: Nickels will lead the assembly of mayors from cities with populations of 30,000 or more to discuss and debate policy issues impacting urban America and metropolitan areas. This is one of the organizations that has encouraged his environmental gun-ho attitude and projects. And now in his first full day on the job, Nickels will be schmoozing with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He'll be chatting her up about the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, where he'll push for Congress to consider the mayors' recommendations to save the world.

Anti-tunnel mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, who just picked up endorsements from the 37th District Ds and the Sierra Club (Nickels snagged the Washington Conservation voters' love), claims a new poll shows him winning handily if only everyone in Seattle knew he was against that $4.2-billion boondoggle tunnel. The poll his campaign commissioned shows 64 percent of Seattle voters are against building a tunnel, just like Mike "Tunnel Over My Dead Body" McGinn. The rest live in West Seattle, and just don't realize their transportation needs have already been met.

Yesterday Sound Transit invited "news media" to take a preview of the 14-mile light rail trip to Tukwila and back--the last segment to the airport won't open until next January. We weren't invited, so we're poaching the Seattle Times video of the big moment.

Ken Griffey Jr. remains the Mariners' designated hitter, despite being one of the ten worst hitters in the major leagues. Why isn't Junior's job in jeopardy? Primarily because the M's don't have anyone better. Ken Griffey Jr. is the Greg Nickels of Seattle sports.

Mayor Nickels, speaking of the tunnel for which no cost overruns can be foreseen, noted that, "The design work and engineering on the 'mile in the middle,' which has been the controversial part, will go forward in about two years." Does that mean what it sounds like? Is the most controversial part really undesigned? (The Weekly's Damon Agnos has some terrific quotes from someone who looked like the Mayor speaking out strongly against a tunnel a little while ago.)

Yesterday, after Publicola was reporting that mayoral hopeful Joe Mallahan had donated $200,000 to his own campaign, Sandeep Kaushik, Nickels' spokesperson, sent out a response: "The voters of Seattle are going to see through what is an obvious attempt by a wealthy individual with little experience in public service to buy their way into elected office. In contrast to our opponent putting hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money into his campaign, we have raised our campaign funds from over 1,000 donors across the city of Seattle." Greg Nickels, defender of the little guy. Or course this is also the same Nickels whose $300,000+ campaign war chest was keeping people from even bothering to run against him. Even funnier? About 26 percent is from donors outside Seattle. Keep on keepin' it real, Mr. Mayor.

A friend of ours was at the Washington Conservation Voters auction fundraiser last night, where Mayor Greg Nickels was being applauded for his greenery. But when Nickels got to the part about the deep-bore tunnel, the response was noticeably tepid. Perhaps thinking people needed a little push, Nickels mentioned his excitement about the tunnel again, only to hear some back-of-the-hall derision. Did his staff not tell Hizzoner that real greens don't buy into tunnel-vision?

For a while we were nursing the small hope that Peter Steinbrueck might make Mayor Nickels' rerun election interesting, but Joni Balter at the Times has snatched that from us: "Steinbrueck will be spending the first of the next four years in Cambridge, Mass. He landed a prestigious urban design fellowship at Harvard University, as he says, 'researching the politics, principles and plan for urban sustainability of U.S. cities.''' What is it with Harvard stealing our mayors, anyway? (H/t to Publicola)

Newly minted mayoral candidate Mike McGinn has already provoked an awkward situation. While McGinn didn't want to get into Nickels-bashing at his press conference, his campaign fired off an email critical of mayor Nickels' green credentials today, so Publicola's Josh Feit got Nickels' man on the horn for a response. Only thing is, Nickels' man is Publicola's Sandeep Kaushik. Kaushik responded, “Nickels has an excellent environmental record,” and “I’m surprised Mike McGinn is going negative so early in this race," and did not say, "This is an untenable position, and I can clearly have no comment."

According to Publicola, James Donaldson has officially entered the mayoral race alongside Dan Savage, Mike McGinn, and the incumbent, Greg Nickels. The former Sonics player's press release reads a little like a locker room halftime speech, or at least what we'd imagine a locker room speech would sound like if we ever have occasion to hear one, but it leaves us lukewarm. Gotta do better than that, Donaldson.

In announcing his run for mayor of Seattle [video], Michael McGinn wanted to say three things: schools, broadband, buses. But staying on message isn't easy when you have a whole press conference to fill, and McGinn, despite his Greenwood Community Council and Sierra Club past, looked like a rookie early on. He whiffed on what should have been softball questions in the Q&A: "Why are you running against Greg Nickels?" and and had no public safety plank.

According to the Daily Weekly, Nickels is "moving forward" with his decision to ban guns on city-owned property despite opposition from citizens and state government leaders alike, and the ban could go into effect as soon as May. As the Weekly's Don Ward points out, the constitutionality of Nickels' ban will almost certainly be tested in court; critics of the mayor's executive order (including Seattlest) are looking to state law regarding legal possession of firearms to soundly trump any city law forbidding someone with a license to carry a gun on city property. We predict (read: profoundly hope) the ban will in fact be found unconstitutional. It would also be nice if all this uproar provokes productive dialogue about how to effectively counter and prevent gun violence in Seattle without blatant disregard for state law.

As you recall, there's a Facebook fan page for Peter Steinbrueck urging him to run for mayor. Guess what? Steinbrueck wrote its founder and asked for some feedback: "I'm overwhelmed by the outpouring of people interested in new leadership in the mayor's office! Well, it's gotten me thinking... political leadership should always be about change. I am in a listening mode, and I would like to ask ask a simple question of those who are urging me to run. That is: Besides a new mayor, what three things, 'For the Love of Seattle' would people like to see changed?" We feel like we're writing Santa a letter but okay: 1) affordable housing for the full spectrum of those making less than 60 percent of the median income, 2) a waterfront Central Park, and 3) city-funded start-up incubators (for profit and nonprofit) in partnership with the SBA. Drop your suggestions in the comments--we'll find a way to forward them--or over here.

We've been following the news releases--cleverly disguised as Slog posts--issued by Peter Steinbrueck's stealth campaign manager, ECB, and she's gotten us fired up. Now if they just work on Steinbrueck himself, we'll be all set. Yesterday ECB was publicizing green golden boy Steinbrueck via a "RUN FOR MAYOR" Facebook group that has sprung up--it had 41 members then and this morning we became 99, just like in Get Smart. Today ECB has hit the e-bricks early, quoting an unnamed "recent poll" in which "Steinbrueck wallops Nickels 46.6 percent to 24.1 percent, with 29.4 percent undecided" in a head-to-head match-up. (ECB doesn't mention our equally scientific 5-way poll in which Nickels just edged out Steinbrueck 38 percent to 36.) So all we've really learned so far is that ECB would vote for Peter in a heartbeat--but maybe...just maybe...that's enough?

A longshot? On Friday afternoon, you'll recall, freshman Councilman Tim Burgess took himself out of the running to challenge Greg Nickels. Savage, whose current position is editorial director of The Stranger, posted an excerpt from the email Burgess sent to his constituents (the same excerpt published on Seattlest, in fact), with a one-word comment: "Coward," and the observation, "I may have to run." No fewer than 72 comments on that post so far, almost all saying, "Yeah, Dan, do it." Now, if Licata or Steinbrueck get in the race, that's another story. But if it's Savage, as one commenter writes, "I think that the combined resources of every single left of center blog will more than outweigh whatever Nickels has in his coffer. Do it, Dan."

A girl in trouble is a temporary thing, but what about a troubled mayor? The Rainier Valley Post has some complaints for Mayor Nickels who will be on the hot seat tomorrow at 6 p.m. at NewHolly Traffic, Parks and Safety Committee meeting at NewHolly Gathering Hall. HorsesAss wants the P-I's Joel Connelly to run against Nickels for Mayor after Connelly lamented the lack of challengers. And crooks broke-in to Neptune Coffee over the weekend, the latest in a string of burglaries in PhinneyWood.

We can't help but laugh at the news from snowed-in London, especially this bit: "As London ground to a virtual standstill Mayor Boris Johnson also faced questions over the inability of the capital's infrastructure to cope with six inches of snow. Mr Johnson admitted London did not have enough snow ploughs to keep the roads clear and defended the decision to suspend all bus services, which left thousands of angry commuters stranded." Seems like Seattle's Mayor Nickels could provide some detailed messaging help for Boris Johnson on 6-inch snowfalls, a paucity of snow plows, and suspended transit.