UNDER DA SEA: If, like Seattlest, you are fascinated with underwater life, tonight's your night to revel in the glories of the deep ocean. Seattle Symphony will be playing as a giant screen shows you images from the BBC series The Blue Planet. 7:30 // Benaroya Hall // $17-75 B.Y.O.B. (BRING YOUR OWN BAG): City Council will be discussing this whole bag tax thing tonight at their meeting, and you should go help them discuss......

Seattle City Hall by the amazing Seattlest Flickr Contributor--Grundlepuck Seattle City Hall was evacuated this morning because of a minor fire. A fluorescent light on the second floor caught on fire, causing embers to shower on nearby desks. City Hall employees tried to quell the fire with an extinguisher to no avail, so firefighters were called. This is the first fire in the new City Hall building, there was no damage reported. Employees returned to......

Another classic shot from Seattlest Flickr Contributor pdgibson In 2006, in hopes of decreasing public drunkenness, the Seattle City Council passed a ban on certain "highly fortified" alcoholic beverages in a number of Seattle neighborhoods. The controversial bans created "Alcohol Impact Areas" (AIA) in neighborhoods including Capitol Hill, the Central Area, Lower Queen Anne, SoDo, and the University District. As specified in the original ordinance, in these neighborhoods and these neighborhoods only stores were restricted......

Photo Courtesy of Seattlest Flickr Contributor, Kables Yesterday, Mayor Greg Nickels announced his plan for a six-year, $75 million levy to renovate Seattle's historic Pike Place Market. If passed by voters, the money would go toward renovating the Market's bathrooms, electric, ventilation, and heating systems, as well as seismic upgrades and new elevators. The century-old Pike Place Market has not undergone major renovations since the 1970s. Funding for the renovations would come from 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......

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......

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......

The story so far: Two years ago, amid trumpets and fanfare, the City of Seattle sold the 15-story Alaska Building to developer Kent Angier, to be used for "affordable workforce housing." The selling price was $8.5 million dollars -- $500,000 to $1 million less than offers from developers interested in turning it into office space. The City says it had an unwritten understanding with Angier that the building would be used for housing. Recently, Angier......

Laser Rocket Arms hates it when we call them "the new Husker Don't." Then again, they keep winning, so our motivation to stop doing so is minimal. 16 teams played the quiz, and the mighty Arms overcame a second-place finish at halftime to take the lead in the end. The loudest groan of the night came during the Nudity category, when Seattlest asked this question: Janet Jackson had a famous breast-exposing wardrobe malfunction during......

"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......

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......

--Seattle: slightly less drug use than San Francisco, slightly more than Detroit. --Six books we've never heard of are winning awards from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. --The Gates Foundation invests heavily in companies that undermine it's philanthropy says the Seattle Los Angeles Times. --Timothy Burgess wants onto the Seattle City Council and the only thing Seattlest knows about him is that Sound Politics seems to be in favor of him. --Lake City experiences......

Bellevue officials tell King County Journal reporter David Grant that the old Safeway distribution center, considered an ideal arena site, will be sold in days--but not to the new Sonics ownership group. If the Sonics do move to the Eastside, many have suggested this site because it's just east of downtown Bellevue and near the intersection of 405 and 520. But the new owners, proving that never-ending process isn't only for the Seattle City Council,......

Something needs to be said about Erica Barnett's article in La Strangeur concerning the possibility that the City Council will make the final decision on the Viaduct without the requisite and meaningless public referendum, and that something is: "Hell Yeah!" Do we have to vote on every damn decision that's made around here? The City Council exists to make decisions on transportation infrastructure. That's what they do. Seattlest's job is to spend a little time......

Last night, Seattlest came in a humbling-but-deserved third in our regular trivia contest at the Old Pequliar. Ten teams were playing, so we won $10 (double our entry fee), but the first-place team raked in $70. Seattlest is there most Tuesday nights, so if you've ever got an urge to give us a run for our money, show up by 8:00. We had to let the rest of our team handle a round on their......

Someday the Viaduct is going to collapse and kill a bunch of not-so-unsuspecting Seattleites and maybe a few guys from Everett. Only the elevated highway nymphs and the guy deep in the earth who pulls the earthquake levers knows when, exactly, that will be, but we have a pretty good idea that it will happen "someday." So we busy ourselves fixing it, or, failing that, arguing about how to fix it. So far we've got......

-As if enough people weren't already shot this week, Puyallup suffered a shooting this morning and two suspects are in custody. -Kyle Huff's apology letter to a Montana artist for attacking his installation with a shotgun is really weird. -REI announced that 20% of their electrical demands will soon be met by green power. Utter bullshit. REI should be using 100% renewable energy. Nice start, guys. Finally. -A Federal Appeals Court decided that Jim......

At 2:30 p.m. today, March 13th, the Seattle City Council is holding a hearing with members of the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Seattle Department of Transportation concerning the controversial Alaskan Way Viaduct program. Grace Crunican and Bob Chandler of SDOT and Ron Paananen of WashDOT are expected to be questioned by council members about funding issues with regard to Team Nickels' increasingly questionable replacement choice for the earthquake damaged waterfront highway. The......

When the City Council's study came back last month recommending downtown zoning changes that would raise the ceiling on the business core while funding lower-income housing Seattlest was skeptical: It just doesn't seem intuitive to us that the results of a City Council commissioned study suggest that the way to encourage high-rise structures downtown is to make them more expensive to build. But it turns out that we were only tenuously attached to that......

Lost in the excitement over the Seattle City Council's big week was the Seahawks first trip to the Super Bowl. However, it's not like you can blame Seattleites for ignoring this triumph of footballity, not only have the candidates for Jim Compton's vacated seat been whittled down from twelve to six, but the race for council president took a surprising turn yesterday when Richard Conlin withdrew his name and Nick Licata was declared the winner.......

Sorry whitey, your days of running the city are over. The Seattle City Council has narrowed the list of contenders to replace retiring Jim Compton from 98 to 14, and there ain't a cracker among them. The candidates include former chair of the 43rd LD Dems Javier Valdez, King County Labor Council organizer Verlene Jones, and a real estate agent named Daryl Smith. Former executive director of Pacifica Radio Network and current HUD employee Sharon......

98 people have applied for the vacant seat on the Seattle City Council. There are former council members, former candidates, local activists, sportos, motor heads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, but sadly, no Richard Lee. Tomorrow the council will give each candidate three minutes to state their case. The meeting is expected to last six hours, so if you're TiVoing the Seattle Channel make sure you have allotted for extra time. The council will then......

If you’re like Seattlest, you hate the game, not the playa. If you’re a Seattle City Council member, you heart the homeless, but they tents the live in? Not so much. Councilmembers unanimously approved Harry Potter-esque District 2 council member Bill “Fergie” Ferguson’s proposal to turn closed motels into homeless housing. The “Jumpstart Initiative” is modeled on the Aloha Inn, the Aurora Avenue motel-turned-tent city remedy the city purchased in 1991. That earsplitting sound you......

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”......

At Seattlest, we read the candidate endorsements so you don't have to flip that far into your paper. In our thorough research, certain themes emerged. At the P-I, they wrote endorsements as if they were late for a meeting. For Seattle City Council--return all the incumbents, they say. Statewide Initiatives? Say no to everything! Port Commission? It's time for change! The Stranger used the dorky gimmick of asserting that they were drunk as they wrote......

Two not unrelated facts: 1. On a 5-4 vote, the Seattle City Council passed restrictive rules yesterday that may shut down strip clubs in this city. 2. There are three city councilmembers facing opponents for re-election in November. Here's the connection--the three councilmembers running for their seats all voted to impose the new rules. Coincidence? We think not. The mayor, also up for reelection this year, proposed the rules. Coincidence? Doubtful. You need not consult......

Q: Is the Monorail dead? A: Was Terry Schiavo? It depends on who you ask. The mayor and the city council both want the Monorail to die, and have done everything they can to kill it. The mayor cancelled an agreement that allowed the Monorail to build on city streets. The city council gracefully piled on, voting 9-0 to cancel the same agreement. But the Monorail board, in a Hail Mary effort that one local......

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......