Results tagged “mayorgregnickels”

If there is one thing you should never say in our dear city, it is "recycling is a hassle." (Gasp!) Without a doubt, muttering those words will earn you hundreds of dirty looks--we're passive-aggressive too, don't forget.

• This morning around 10:30 a.m. a woman found herself being rescued by rappelling firefighters and a city boat after her car plummeted 200 feet down a waterfront cliff in Edmonds.
• Two groups of car prowlers are making the rounds in Crown Hill. One group wielding a skeleton key seems to fancy cars with GPS units. In total, they've broken into 15 cars in five days.

Big day for filings, first GM deals with their mess and now Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels files for re-election. It's not like we didn't see (or hear) this coming, now it's just official. In order to get to his third term, he'll be facing down a former ally from City Council, a former Sonics player, and a T-Mobile executive in the August primary.

Seattle councilwoman Jan Drago has announced today (and via Facebook) that she will be lacing up her political shoes to run for mayor. The former preschool teacher has served on the city council for 16 years and has been a reliable ally (not anymore) for Mayor Greg Nickels over the years--who is seeking his third go-at-it as mayor. Having been around the "city" block before, Drago's bid makes her a serious contender against Nickels. The other mayoral candidates vying for the top job include: environmentalist Michael McGinn, corporate headhunter Norman Sigler, 82-year-old lefty grandma Dorli Rainey, former Sonic James Donaldson and T-Mobile executive Joe Mallahan.

Seattle is undeniably Barack Obama country. However, if for some reason, Mr. Obama would like to nip that affection and respect right in the bud, he should go forth with this unsubstantiated rumor: Greg Nickels for absolutely any position in his administration. A search for "Greg Nickels + Obama Cabinet" reveals these disturbing possibilities: Greg Nickels as Transportation Secretary, Greg Nickels at the new Office of Urban Policy, and Greg Nickels at the EPA.

• West Seattle Blog has the "final, FINAL" numbers on usage of the Elliott Bay Water Taxi. Our West Seattle compatriots promise these aren't fake final numbers and that they are larger than the previous final/unofficial numbers.
• We've always wondered how they built the Space Needle and Vintage Seattle has given us the answer, posting some truly jaw-dropping photos of the construction of The Needle.
• We don't know whether to laugh loudly or shake our heads and cry about the latest local blog--Capitol Hillebrities. Like the egos of Capitol Hill hipsters aren't big enough on they're own. Still, it was only a matter of time before someone started taking party photos on The Hill....apparently that time has come.

Mayor Greg Nickels will be voting no on Proposition 2, the parks levy that would raise something like $145 million over the next several years to improve city parks. According to the P-I, the Mayor thinks it would be nice to see property taxes decrease for once--and the parks improvement plan isn't that superlative, anyway. Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Parks Foundation disagrees, calling the parks levy a grassroots movement (haha, grass, get it? Like the grass they would maybe plant in a park with some of that $145 mil), strongly supported by "many people."

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 two, three and four respectively) and all the others.

Maybe it's the recession like it was in the early 90s, but as a city, we're recycling more than ever before.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Continue reading "The Tunnel Is On The Chopping Block"

>>>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.

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 at 56.

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 in clubs.

Continue reading "A Chicken in Every Pot, A Lap Dance in Every Strip Club"

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:

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.

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 the crowd goes wild. Especially when she says how a few years ago at a rally, she had the privilege of introducing Gore as the next president, "-- and I was right!"

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.

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:

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."

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 Nickel's-style urban assault development.

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.