Seattlest is still digesting the unsavory news of the loss of our beloved basketball team, the Supersonics. But rather than dwell on the downside, we are trying to keep our chin up and look for some positives. After all, it's not every day that we wake up to find $75 million in the front pocket of our well-worn jeans. We've been wondering all week about how the city might spend that big ol' chunk......

Before last night's screening of SIFF's opening film Battle in Seattle, amidst all the self-congratulatory speeches, Mayor Nickels remarked that the 1999 WTO riots are "strongly rooted in the fabric of our city" and that every Seattleite would be well-served to have their feelings of the events "validated by an outside perspective." We'd be apt to agree---if only the outside perspective that followed wasn't such ham-handed dreck. Battle in Seattle isn't as bad as......

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......

This morning, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced a proposed ban on foam food containers and a fee for disposable bags at grocery stores. The ban on polystyrene foam products would outlaw common items like plates, meat trays, eggshell containers, and cups from both restaurants and grocery stores. The so-called "green fee" would apply to both paper and plastic bags at your local grocery store. The fee would impose a 20-cent charge for each disposable......

Mayors hate potholes. In fact, today Mayor Greg Nickels announced an "aggressive" pothole-filling campaign to fix more than 1,300 potholes this week. You can visit the online form or just call (206) 684-ROAD. Says KING 5: Six crews are ready to get to work with two on standby. The city promises if you report a pothole, they will fill it within 48 hours. In addition to pothole patrol, crews will also be resurfacing 30 miles......

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......

The UK's Guardian Unlimited spoke to Seattle's Fleet Foxes (thanks, CHS) ("a group whose unique sound is hymnal and baroque, with mandolins and banjos and extraordinary vocal harmonies") and got the scoop on Seattle's development opportunity. Lead singer Pecknold says something like, "Go Sodo, young bands," saying that Georgetown "is probably a bit like SoHo in New York in the 1970s, with a lot of industrial space." But what got our attention is this nugget,......

Today Mayor Nickels announced a new Seattle motorcycle medic team that will be patrolling the streets in 2008. They can weave in and out of traffic and get to incident sites faster than an ambulance (although we've seen motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic, and...who's going to come out when the motorcycle EMTs go down?) and other cities are doing it, so why shouldn't we? Of course, they're not going to give you a......

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......

The Mariners announced that they're calling the M's Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday series with the first-place Angels "Lolla-Blue-za." They're encouraging fans to wear blue on game day, and they'll have marketing folks wandering downtown, rewarding fans in blue. One lucky blue-wearer will get to throw out the first pitch! (For those of you who weren't high schoolers in the early 90s, "Lolla-Blue-Za" is a play on "Lollapalooza," a touring music festival that was a huge deal in 1991......

End of May, we posted about how the city sold the Alaska Building to a developer, with the understanding that it would be turned into affordable "workforce" housing. The city took a loss of somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million because of that stipulation, Mayor Nickels was able to gesture grandly at his affordable housing gesture, and then Kauri Investments Ltd. and Ariel Development got to thinking and they were all, "Hey, you know what......

No longer do harried Capitol Hill denizens have to brave the typically non-working escalator to get to Bartell's above the QFC, a block south. A Walgreens is the "Now Open" tenant of the first-floor retail space in the 44-unit apartment complex Broadway Crossing at Broadway and Pine, across the street from Seattle Central Community College. Yes, apartments, not condominiums. Broadway Crossing is a Capitol Hill Housing project, a tax credit-financed property for renters earning from......

"If I were still mayor, and I knew I was coming to an event like this," Charley Royer told us before last night's political fundraiser pub quiz, "I'd make sure there wasn't a question about Seattle that I didn't know the answer to." Nice in theory. Mayor Nickels' team won the night (we swear we didn't rig it!), but he was only able to get 6 out of 10 on our Seattle round. Can you......

Over at newbie blog Crosscut, Knute "Mossback" Berger has slipped right back into his prickly, contrarian stream of things with a post about "density (the horror, the horror)." In it he calls out Sightline, Mayor Nickels, greens and progressives, and San Francisco as skipping merrily toward a density Rapture. We're a little freaked out to admit this, but he's got a point when he asks what's the rush. (Some statements, like "We know that......

A few years ago Mayor Nickels had an idea to make himself a hero among Seattle's driving masses: he would build us a tunnel. Then we thought about it and replied, are you out of your mind? Mayor Nickels response--You don't want my tunnel, fine, I'm gonna give bicyclists $240 million dollars. Have fun watching them zoom through red lights while you stew in traffic, ride defiantly just far enough out in the street to......

In an unplanned part two to our previous post, How Scientists Talk About Science, we're now covering how the press talks about science because the fricking Seattle Times has an article titled Heated Debate About Global Warming. Apparently, two local researchers are engaged in statistical fisticuffs about the degree to which the snowpack in our Cascades has melted over the past 50 years. The possibility that the often-touted decrease of 50% -- a figure......

Tomorrow is fake Viaduct Vote Day, and your meaningless ballots must be postmarked by then. The election is all mail, so you will not have the option to vote at the polls. If you want to skip the middle man and have your ballot lost directly you can drop it off at the following locations: King County Administration Building-- 500 4th Ave., Room 553, Seattle 98104 High Point Community Center-- 6920 34th Ave SW, Seattle......

With ballots for the fake Viaduct election due next Tuesday others around the country are starting to take notice, and tease us. The Economist (which hasn’t been the same since it stopped running box scores) covered the story and summed up the situation thusly, “Seattle’s tunnel has become a trip to political hell. All aboard.” They also quote U-Dub professor and expert of public policy Bryan Jones on the area’s leadership, “[Mayor Nickels and Governor......

There's a Seattle Times editorial today that indicates that Mayor Nickels is going to deliver a State of the City speech that calls for additional police resources; 105 new cops over the next five years, which seems a little ridiculous in the World's Safest City. The editorial hints that it shares that viewpoint, but it's not enough to satisfy some who accuse the Times of supporting the mayor's new policing plan. Here's a clip from......

Sightline's Eric de Place celebrated his own private Kyoto on Friday by congratulating the region for their collective environmental work. British Columbia, which has been slow to catch up with even the rest of Canada, has finally been pushed in the right direction by the Prime Minister's recent green initiative talk. Oregon's governor Ted Kulongoski has recently said that he wants the state to become the "clean energy capital of the nation" and released an......

As we have documented before our local politicians enjoy wagering on sportsball games with politicians from other cities. However, for some reason our guys keep picking the Seattle team and losing the best. The latest of these bets was between Mayor Nickels and Chicago Mayor Daley over the recent Seahawks-Bears playoff game. Once the Bears won Nickels owed Daley some microbrew, coffee, and other Northwest goodies. However, much like his plan for a waterfront tunnel,......

Seattle will vote February 13th on whether to vote on whether to build a replacement Viaduct or a tunnel, the City Council announced today. "The special Viaduct election will cost the city $1 million," Council President Jan Drago said. "We should find out if Seattleites want this election before we spend the money." Drago announced future special elections on what brand of hand soap to use in the City Hall bathroom, whether to install a......

Gov. Gregoire told Mayor Nickels Wednesday afternoon that the tunnel option for replacing the Viaduct is dead. Mayor Nickels sees this as an Olympia vs. Seattle issue, and has released a defiant statement that, reflecting the overwhelming city support for the tunnel, is co-signed by the entire city council a majority of the city council several members of the city council Jan Drago.We are deeply disappointed with the announcement today by the Governor and legislative......

--The bet is on - If the Bears win on Sunday Mayor Nickels will cough up some salmon and coffee to Chicago's Mayor Daley. If the Seahawks win Daley has promised not to kick his ass. --The Huffington Post found out about Federal Way's Inconvenient Young Earther who got the Al Gore film banned from schools down there. --Local online real estate site Redfin is teaming with local software manufacturer Microsoft for their new......

It looks like Guv Gregoire was stung by all those comments about her punting on Seattle's favorite watercooler topic: the Viaduct. She's now issued what KIRO-TV is calling an "ultimatum" that if no city vote is held before April 22, the State will issue us a replacement viaduct. Or maybe she's heard about that rumored poll that doesn't show the tunnel gaining 50% of the vote, and is eager to make Mayor Nickels her......

The Seattle Public Library hosted 'A Salute to Tim Egan' last night at the inconvenient hour of 5:30 PM. Tim Egan is a Seattle native who won the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 2001. He's most well known for writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago he was awarded the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Stories of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Seattle is......

So KEXP runs these PSA-style ads pretty regularly, about what You can do to help stop global warming. Good stuff, we like. Then yesterday, Mayor Nickels joined in on the campaign with a few tips of his own. You know, set your thermostat to "freezing" at night and don't run your hot water heater too hot, and blah blah blah. Seriously, all fine suggestions and most of them we checked off on our mental list......

City results County results State results National results Democrats assume majority in House, need two more seats to take Senate and lead in bo th. Mike obliterated by Cantwell. 200,000 vote loss means he's stripped of exclamation point. Reichert leads Burner (who Nancy Pelosi called "Burnerman" on CNN last evening, securing the anti-Semitic vote for Reichert). Voters say no to tax breaks for the greedy, and property "rights" for the confused, but yes to......

The Viaduct is closing this weekend for a semi-annual inspection, which we like to imagine as Mayor Nickels walking up to and attempting to shake a support column. Thumbs-up, DOT, looks like we're set for another year or until such time as a replacement tunnel is funded! While the official inspecting is going on, there is an opportunity for some private citizen-types to get a close-up look at the Viaduct decks. The Alaskan Way......