Results tagged “mayornickels”

You can view this as more evidence of the City’s financial woes or as a positive move in Seattle’s history of organized labor: the Coalition of City Unions voted for the leave rather than cut staff.

The latest numbers from Tuesday's primary are up, and Joe Mallahan is still on top. The current figures in the three-way race: Joe Mallahan with 28126 votes (27.22%), Mike McGinn with 27586 votes (26.69%), and Greg Nickels still coming in third with 26416 votes (25.56%). The next update on the King County site comes tomorrow at approximately 4:30 p.m. (results schedule here), along with the first stats on primary results broken down by legislative district. SQUEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

King County Elections just refreshed their tallies from yesterday's primary, and--lookie here, lookie here--Mayor Nickels is still coming in third. The current figures in the three-way race: Mike McGinn with 20880 votes (26.48%), Greg Nickels with 19864 votes (25.19%), and Joe Mallahan now has the lead with 21101 votes (26.76%). Tomorrow there'll be another update at approximately the same time; stay tuned by constantly checking the King County site (results schedule here).

Ballots for the primary and special election are due today, so get 'em in, folks. For reals: only 16.67 percent of all King County ballots have been returned as of last night. If you don't want to use a stamp, feel free to drop off your ballot at any of these drop boxes by 8 p.m.

• Urban farming--Sightline has a nifty article with mock-up photos about what it would be like to really green up our cities. Because, you know, it would be totally cool to have cows on the roads.
• Publicola has its own problems with recent KING5/SurveyUSA polls, offering the hope we could have both a bag tax and a not-Mayor Nickels! Oh, and Erica C. Barnett scratches back at Joel Connelly for flaming her in his column today.

Not so fast on the Mayor Nickels-bashing, claims the P-I. Turns out charges that he costs the city by not playing well with Olympia may be overblown, because Seattle’s legislators aren’t very good at helping Seattle themselves.

With swine flu defeated, it’s time to turn our attention to the killer bear loose on our streets.

And if so, win what? Yesterday we got this terse message: "Michael McGinn will be making an announcement tomorrow at Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill. Please join him at 11:30 a.m." Which we are planning to do in case there is free lunch pizza.

UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.

We can't get enough stimulus, and still we're exhausted. We feel like Richard McIver, who just announced his retirement from Seattle City Council, saying "I want to go home and sit down." Should we ever be up for a walk, West Seattle Blog has info on the plans for Alki Point's sidewalks and Mayor Nickels asks you to volunteer in his State of the City, which is a good thing since few of us still have paying jobs. Maybe we'll find work at Costco or Target, two stores that will stock the soon-to-be wildly popular Starbucks instant coffee-flavored product.

• 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.

Seattlest was at Democratic Party Headquarters on the fourth floor of the Westin last night, surrounded by all the festivities you probably saw on the news. We were a little surprised to see people attempting to cut in the booze lines, considering we were all Democrats, so no excuse for elitism.

City of Seattle Proposition 1: Seattle Prop. 1 would enact a six-year levy to raise money to do some much-needed safety maintenance on the Pike Place Market. Pretty much everyone in town supports the levy. With uncharacteristically weird grammar, the Times says, "It's not fun or fancy improvements, but you have to do it."

Past jefe of the Seattle City Council Nick Licata just wrote us a note about sidewalks and the Mercer Mess. "I thought your blog readers would be interested in knowing about this coming Monday's Forum on Providing Sidewalks and Scaling Down The Mercer Project," says Nick, all helpful-like. Oh, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth!

Under the cover of darkness and secrecy, a Seattle homeless encampment named "Nickelsville" in mockery of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels moved to a new location early this morning. The residents of the new Nickelsville pitched 155 neon pink tents in a field off West Marginal Way. The residents of Nickelsville hope the encampment can become a permanent location for their tent town, while Mayor Nickels says that like any illegal encampment in the city, Nickelsville faces ousting by police in 72 hours. It would seem Mayor Nickels is trying especially hard to live up to the honor of the shantytown being named after him. While he's eager to get rid of homeless encampments with the explanation that it's not proper housing, he doesn't seem to have any bright ideas or funding for finding an answer that helps Seattle's homeless population now rather than the far-off future. It's raining now, Greg.

• If you got your car towed or ticketed during the uber-failure that was Mayor Nickels' first car-free Sunday, fear not. According to Seattle 911, the city has decided to void the tickets and refund some towing fees.
• Want to know what the view from a nearly $16 million condo (complete with staff quarters) looks like? Follow the links on The Belltowner and prepare to feel very, very poor.
• Speaking of condos, we've found some sick enjoyment in the new local website cheapshitcondos.com. Thanks to Capitol Hill Seattle for reminding us to keep checking it regularly.

As has been reported elsewhere, and in this morning's Neighborhood News Roundup, Capitol Hill's Cafe Presse has a new sidewalk deck. While we applaud outdoor seating long and often, this deck takes a big bite of the available sidewalk. What with curb parking (and car doors opening suddenly) and Presse's curb signs, you now have to curve all the way to the curb and pass single file.

• The Slog, with the help of the McLeod Residence, is debating if grilled cheese will be what brings foodies around to American cheese. The McLeods assert that American cheese is the unquestionable king of grilled cheese--we're not so sure. Sure, American cheese melts like plastic, but we've always actually found that a bit telling. Give us Tillamook sharp cheddar any day of the week.
• The Kirkland Weblog complains that an outbreak of local graffiti is making Kirkland look like something straight out of The Wire. We highly doubt that. Highly. In reality, Kirkland looks a bit more like Agrestic from Weeds, if we're going for cable show comparisons.
• Capitol Hill Seattle is feeling a wee bit concerned about the increased number of both abandonded buildings and panhandlers on Broadway.

          

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.

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.

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 bag.

We became a pothole snitch this morning. We turned in the huge holes alongside Cal Anderson, in front of Vivace, thanks to "encouragement" from a commenter on an earlier pothole post:

instead of complaining about the potholes in a blog posting maybe you should fill out the online form and report them so they get fixed. but that might be too easy and would give you nothing to whine about.

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 also featured other great Mayor Nickels acronyms like SNAP (Seattle Neighborhoods Actively Prepare), SCAN (Seattle Climate Action Now), and while it's not an acronym ... "carbon taxes." Emphasis added, we assure you, by Mayor Nickels.

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.

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.

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 lift to Harborview.

, "Seventeen bouncers, bartenders and other nightclub employees were arrested Saturday night for allegedly violating state liquor laws."

The Mariners announced that they're calling the M's Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday series with the first-place Angels "Lolla-Blue-za."

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 would be better than affordable housing is a 250-unit Marriott hotel! People who work stay in hotels a lot, so it's not even a big difference when you look at it."