If Mayor Greg Nickels can cut youth crime in half, as long as we give him $9 million, shouldn't we just give him $18 million and get rid of youth crime all together?......

No really. It's true. According to the League of American Bikes (via the Cascade Bicycle Alliance in our case), Washington is the most bicycle friendly state in the union. According to the LAB, "Washington’s model bike laws, signed and mapped statewide bike route network, dedicated funding from the state for bicycle related programs and projects, and an active statewide bicycle advisory committee" are reasons that the state earned top honors above Wisconsin, Arizona, Oregon (numbers......

Maybe it's the recession like it was in the early 90s, but as a city, we're recycling more than ever before. Mayor Greg Nickels announced today that Seattle set a new city record for recycling rates in 2006, with 47.5 percent of the city's residential, commercial and self-haul waste heading to recycling bins instead of the landfills. That’s a good thing. Did you know that every single day, we send a mile-long train filled with......

In the "State of the City" address on Tuesday, Mayor Greg Nickels introduced his new plan to make housing more affordable in Seattle. Definitely something Seattle needs to tackle with verve and determination, we just don't think anyone is going to take the "Affordable Seattle Strategy" (ASS) that seriously. Then again, partially thanks to Mayor Nickels a few Seattlites do ride the S.L.U.T., so maybe it's right on par. The State of the City address......

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......

Seattlest just got done attending the press conference for the re-opening of the Downtown Bus Tunnel. After two years of work, it's set to reopen next Monday. That's exactly two years (as King County Exec. Ron Sims was fond of repeating over and over today) after it closed. We have to say, we're pretty impressed with what they've done. Needless to say, it's a pretty big achievement in a region not exactly known for making......

According to a report in this morning's Seattle Times, Mayor Nickels has decided to play hardball in his attempt to get all Stasi on Seattle's nightlife. In what appears to be a blatant attempt to politicize Seattle's police force, according to the Times, "Seventeen bouncers, bartenders and other nightclub employees were arrested Saturday night for allegedly violating state liquor laws." Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske and City Attorney Tom Carr used the sting to push for......

Mayor Greg Nickels told reporters yesterday he thought Key Arena was a great place for basketball, and if the Sonics would just pony up $100 million, the city would be willing to renovate it to match the team's needs. Sonics owner Clay Bennett's response was swift and unequivocal.We have been clear since July 18, 2006, the day the sale of the Sonics and Storm was announced, that KeyArena is not an option as a future......

The Seattle Transit Blog reported (and Seattlest echoed) the fact that 3rd Avenue Downtown is going to remain a transit-only corridor during rush hour way back in June, but since the press release just came out and it'll probably be in the papers tomorrow maybe we should revisit it. Based on the outstanding success in moving buses quickly and efficiently through downtown, Mayor Greg Nickels today announced that local transit agencies will continue to use......

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos." Funny how homo liberals, choose not to see the real enemy in North America and they opt for hating America. Mexico has no culture except being forced into the Catholic......

South Lake Union is currently under water after a 20" main was broken by contractors this morning. Some businesses in the area aren't getting water and the area around Harrison and Dexter is flooded. "I just took my dog for a walk, and when I came back I saw a river coming down Harrison," said Nic Roussouw, who is working on opening a coffee shop at 404 Dexter Ave. N. "I imagine the city must......

Recently Governor Gregoire's been taking a lot of heat for her ambivalent handling of the Viaduct sitchyation we got here. Today, the Seattle Times rides to her rescue. The blame-reallocating story by David Postman and Andrew Garber begins: Gov. Christine Gregoire got so frustrated trying to broker a compromise between Mayor Greg Nickels and House Speaker Frank Chopp on the Alaskan Way Viaduct that she turned to a Republican wise man for advice. "She......

Wednesday, December 13 >>>Hugo House, 7:30pm. Screenwriters Salon: Geoff Miller and Mark Handley invite you to bring your questions about format, technique, structure, dialogue, writing characters, and how to use your catering gig to hand your script to celebs. $5 general/$2 students. Free to members. >>>Seattle Public Central Library, 5:30-7:00pm. Mayor Greg Nickels and City Council President Nick Licata rochambeau to see who gets to salute Seattle author Tim Egan. His book, The Worst......

Which is it, newsmedia types? Safe or not safe? Earlier this week there were 18 billion articles on the freshly-released City Crime Rankings report that listed Seattle as the 262nd safest city in America. 262nd? That's not safe at all! Used to be a time when Seattle was safer than Portland, at least. No longer true, according to this report. Portland is the 249th safest city in the Union. Our region's safest city is Bellevue......

Strip club owners got their wish: The referendum to overturn Nanny Nickels' anti-ecdysiast laws will be on the ballot in November, not September. At least, so says the PI: The City Council settled the question Monday of when the proposal should go to voters -- not whether it should. That was decided for politicians some time ago when the strip-club industry collected sufficient petition signatures to challenge new rules banning lap dances and dim lighting......

As of today, you may now receive a $101 ticket in the mail if one of the city's newly installed traffic cameras catches you running a red light. The cameras are being placed in four intersections with the highest number of red-light related crashes throughout Seattle. The locations are as follows: -Roosevelt Way NE & 45th St. NE. -Denny Way & Fairview Ave. N. -5th Ave. & Spring St. -Rainier Ave. S. & Orcas St.......

We were dithering outside Town Hall last night, trying to decide whether to attend the Science Lecture -- Harvard's Daniel Gilbert talking about our ability to predict what will make us happy -- or the convention of transportation nerds upstairs. Both were $5. Both started at 7:30pm. In the end, we chose Gilbert. He was only going to be speaking the one night (true, he does have a blog), and we are fairly certain the......

Seattlest got invited to the screening of the new Al Gore flick, An Inconvenient Truth, at Pacific Place last night. (It opens Friday, June 2 in Seattle.) For an Al Gore flick, Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims show up. (And they pretend to make nice, because columnist Brodeur scolded them about not playing well together.) Then after the film, Chris Gregoire comes out and introduces surprise guest Al Gore and......

You've heard of Gawker Stalker, right? When someone spots a celeb walking around Manhattan they notify the Gawker website of the identity and location of said star and a bunch of weirdos can track them on a map. Celebrities hate it and stalkers and people who think it's funny to piss of celebrities love it. Well today and tomorrow Seattlest is adapting the stalker game for use here, except in our version there's only one......

The P-I shows what a sensible newspaper operation can do in the wake of a tragedy today by publishing a number of pieces that don't directly admonish the Seattle Times (because fancy dailys don't play like that), but could be seen as a reaction to yesterday's idiocy in the Times. One is headlined "No rave crackdown coming," and contains passages like the following: "Some tragedies defy any sort of rational response in terms of regulation......

Ever since Mayor Greg Nickels sent out a letter back in mid-February about Viaduct replacement financing, everyone who pays attention has been trying to figure out the math. We're all used to spin from City Hall, but there was a huge, crucial problem. In the letter, Nickels claimed that, "Today, with $3.2 billion already committed to the project, we have the resources needed to start building the tunnel." That was an interesting claim, because as......

Seattlest had avoided reading our favorite national papers over the past few days because we feared what stupid conclusions they might reach about Saturday's shootings, especially since the stupidity was so present from the beginning with our own damn local papers. However, the New York Times, of all places, instead recently printed a short article wondering what we're going to do with our homeless Wonder Bread sign, now that the property is slated for......

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......

Seattlest isn't going to stand here in front of you and pretend we know anything about architecture or urban planning or design or anything like that, because we don't. It just doesn't seem intuitive to us that the results of a City Council commisioned study suggest that the way to encourage high-rise structures downtown is to make them more expensive to build. High-rise buildings (or higher-rise buildings) are a part of Mayor Density's plan......

In the days leading up to the election, we will amalgamate what the four newspapers had to say about the races into one combined blurb for each candidate or initiative because we do not purport to follow city politics closely enough to advise anyone, even ourselves, how to vote. That's why God invented local politics writers. Mayor of Seattle (non-partisan) Greg Nickels: The incumbent was “a doer in his first term” who “focused on basics”......

Seattle planners have a crush on Vancouver. So tall, so slender, so mixed-use. That's why Councilman Peter Steinbrueck talked the Seattle City Council into hiring two of Vancouver's lead planners to look over Mayor Greg Nickels' "Center City Strategy" for development downtown. As the Seattle Times reports, their study reveals the Mayor's adoring relationship with tall, dark, and handsome development has boundary issues: simply building taller buildings won't attract enough new housing to deal with......

To growth critics, Mayor Greg Nickels' developer-friendly stances smack of a deal with the dark side. Yet he's also responsible for what's shaping up to be of the most embarrassing domestic-policy confrontations the Bush administration has seen. As NEW's blog Cascadia Scorecard puts it: Major props to Seattle mayor Greg Nickels who recently started the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. It is becoming something of a smackdown to federal leadership that refuses to take global......

It looks like we can celebrate some resolution on the waterfront trolley issue today. Gov. Gregoire, speaking at a press conference this morning, surprised administrators and reporters alike with a sweeping plan to preserve the streetcar that has been threatend by plans for a sculpture park and the impending razing of the viaduct. Work will begin in late 2005 to extended the tracks through Myrtle Edwards Park and into the Seattle Center, where a privately......

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels delivered his State of the City speech Monday in the midst of a political climate that sees him more or less untouchable in the next election. Nickels has so far been the chief political benefactor of a city repairing itself after the tumultuous reign of Paul Schell and appears set to ride his position far into the future, for better or for worse. The speech, which can be watched here, was......