An Office Complex Grows in Seatac

When was the last time you actually drove through Seatac? Looking for a way home from the airport avoiding the highways? Me too. But that was also when I saw signs that maybe this town was looking to be more than the sum of its runways. There's a community center, with a gym and meeting rooms, that's more akin to a small, but fancy, resort conference center than a city-sponsored equivalent to the YMCA. And indeed, the town that was named for nothing more impressive than being the hub of cross-country travel for two much bigger cities, is trying to reinvent itself as a destination in its own right.

Today Seatac unveiled it's new slogan: Everywhere's Possible. It's an obvious reference to the rapidly rising light-rail and talk of a third runway. Local carriers continue to add new flights, and now you can go straight to China for the smog-choked Olympics in Beijing. Hadley Green Creates was hired to handle the marketing.

The slogan sounds more like the beginning of a symbolic logic problem (for all you dorky philosophy majors out there) but if the community center is any indication, a less than stellar motto might not matter for this increasingly connected little 'burb.

Topics: Suburbs

Permalink | Comments (0)

Judges' Uncivil Actions

Chow

The state Commission on Judicial Conduct has had better years. Out of 548 complaints handled in 2007, the agency that polices our judges sustained charges against just four jurists last year, compared to 13 complaints sustained in 2006. The quick breakdown from the CJC's new annual report shows that, while about 150 complaints remain open, more than 385 were dismissed, mostly because they couldn't be substantiated or the CJC lacked jurisdiction.

Of the four judges who were disciplined, the most memorable may be King County District Judge Mark Chow, who, after a career criminal told the judge in court to suck his dick, shot back: "I would, if you pulled it out — but you can't find it." He also asked a Japanese defendant in mental health court "What flavor are you...No Chinese? See, I'm Chinese." Chow said the comment was meant as a form of "therapeutic jurisprudence."

Notably, the CJC also censured Clark County Superior Court Judge John Wulle for insulting or mocking gays, blacks,and Jews. He told one person to fuck off and gave another the finger. He was suspected of drinking at the time but said it was just cough syrup. This all unfolded at a five-day conference called "Planning Your Juvenile Drug Court."

Permalink | Comments (0)

Jake Snider Looks Like a Bum

When I saw Minus the Bear in spring 2006, they sucked.

But last night’s show at the Showbox was a completely different experience. Between their chatter with the audience and the guys running around in underwear and face masks, the on-stage energy really made the performance. They were playing hard for every minute ”� and it showed.

Minus the Bear uses guitar effects to create electronic textures. You’d think it would be hard to recreate this live, but they seem to have it down. The band has practiced the effects so much they’re able to recreate the sounds on their album almost flawlessly while on stage.

I think they rocked so hard last night because they were headlining and it was the last night of their tour (when I saw them in 2006, they were opening for Thursday). Moral of the story: Minus the Bear will only kick ass if it’s their show.

Topics: Music

Permalink | Comments (0)

Where's the Plan?

It’s a bit baffling to understand what the public is supposed to discuss when Seattle Schools Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson makes three presentations about her “strategic plan,”� beginning with a meeting on May 14th at Roosevelt High School. The documents she released yesterday to the press (see them here), and plans on presenting to the public, are so vague as to be beyond debate — or meaningful discussion. “Ensure excellence in every classroom,”� is one bullet point. Hey, I’m for that. The only thing approaching specifics is a chart outlining the progress the district hopes to make in measures like test scores and the graduation rate. The district, for instance, wants to jump from 53 percent of 7th graders passing the math WASL to 80 percent. When Goodloe-Johnson was asked how she planned to do that, she talked in her rapid-fire way about “interventions”� and “aligning curriculum”� but failed, with one exception, to identify new initiatives in the works. That exception is a planned new high school curriculum, perhaps a good idea but not one that will help middle schoolers, who already got a new math curriculum a couple years back.

She and her staff say a more detailed, 30-page report will be presented to the school board on May 21st. (In the mean time, you can see more details in a draft presented to the board at a retreat in March.)

Board members said little last night as Goodloe-Johnson presented the materials for the public at a work session following the press event. In prior work sessions and one-on-one meetings, however, the thorny issue of capacity has come up. District demographics have recently shifted. It used to be that the number of students was growing in the South End and shrinking in the North. The reverse is now true, and North End schools don’t have enough space for all the new students. Meanwhile, some South End schools — particularly high schools — have extra space. Witness Rainier Beach. New enrollment figures project another drop in students next year, down to a painfully small total of 300. This despite the superintendent’s “Southeast Education Initiative,”� which targets Rainier Beach and two other schools. So one issue to watch is whether the Superintendent will address the new demographics in her more detailed plan.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Afternoon Edition: Scary-Ass Squid-Photo Warning

Giant, predatory squid (possibly resembling the one seen above) invading Puget Sound!

Crazy guy on bike clogs I-5 traffic, fails to look for sharrow.

In unrelated bike news: Gig Harbor man with no legs and one arm to ride his bike across the United States. Will follow sharrows wherever possible.

This guy's the man when it comes to finding wicked awesome travel deals.

Larsen hitches his wagon to Obama.

Dire warnings of world-wide apocalyptic famine are good news for one Issaquah-based retailer.

Topics: Afternoon Edition

Permalink | Comments (0)

The City V. McIver

McIver

City council member Richard McIver will tell you he gets picked on. He didn’t assault his wife, he said, even if she told police otherwise. Political rainmaker and ex-governor Big Al Rosellini was just a longtime friend he had lunch with in the midst of the Strippergate scandal. And after he was charged yesterday for improperly steering a city contract to a firm whose employees include his own attorney, he called the claim "frivolous and totally without merit." The watchdog Ethics and Elections Commission had offered to settle the claim with a fine, as it did in the Rosellini case, McIver said, but he refused.

When he’s right he’s right, McIver feels; this could be his last term and he’ll leave swinging, as evidenced by the latest confrontation. In February last year, the P-I reported McIver had given a $37,000 city consulting job to Griffin, Hill & Associates. Because of loose city contracting rules, a contract worth up to almost a quarter-million-dollars can be doled out to pals without a competitive bid process, as long as the council’s leader also approves. The GHA contract is now the basis of the EEC case against McIver for violating conflict-of-interest rules.

Despite the appearance of an ethical violation even back in 2007, McIver saw nothing amiss. It came down to the fact the black councilman “wanted to use a minority firm," he told the P-I. The firm just happened to include steady contributors to his campaigns, Roy and Joann Francis. She and her husband have shared their Virgin Islands condo with McIver as a vacation retreat; she is also a onetime council candidate he backed as well as his personal attorney, helping successfully defend him against domestic violence charges last year.

It now turns out, according to the ethics complaint, that, despite the P-I exposure, McIver, three months after the story ran, added $5,000 more to the Francis firm’s contract. That could have been the tipping point for the ethics commission. In today’s P-I, McIver still complains about his “unfair" trial for assaulting his wife - he said he wound up paying lawyers $70,000 to defend him in that case. Presumably, some of that money went to his attorney Francis. But maybe that’s just picking on him again. As he insisted yesterday, she’s merely "a social acquaintance of mine." If contracting with her firm “were prohibited conduct, few, if any, local companies could do business with the city."

Permalink | Comments (0)

Afternoon Edition: Oil & Water

Mayor Nickels vows to parch the barons of bottled water.

Northwest political leaders much more accepting of Big Oil profits after learning basic arithmetic from president of Shell Oil.

Bill Gates notices his kids compulsively posting on this “Facebook”� thing, decides maybe he should buy it.

WSF closer to getting rid of their passenger-only boats. Then they'll really have no backups.

Did the Mariners trade the wrong closer to Baltimore? (Note absence of Putz)

Karl Malone's a deadbeat dad — and possibly a child rapist to boot.

Topics: Afternoon Edition

Permalink | Comments (0)

Audio Slideshow: Our Busey Talks

Photo by Steven Dewall.

Listen to Jeff Swanson — the subject of this week's cover story by Aimee Curl — talk about what it's like to be mistaken for Gary Busey.

Permalink | Comments (0)

County Delays Taxi Licenses -- Again

An irate cabbie

Three weeks have passed since the date King County was supposed to announce the winning bid for 50 new taxi licenses, and there’s still no word. “It is my understanding that [the evaluators] are trying to finalize their scoring,”� writes Roy Dodman, a county official charged with giving out news about the RFP process, in an-email. He adds that the county is “making sure that all of the evaluators read and interpreted the material in the same way. My guess is that we are still a week away from any formal decision.”� But the county keeps pushing back the date. Given the huge controversy attending the putatively eco- and labor-friendly RFP, which allowed bidders only a few weeks to prepare their submissions and which many taxi drivers felt was rigged, one has to wonder whether the county might be rethinking the whole thing.

Permalink | Comments (0)

Lindsey Probe Expanding To the Port of Seattle

The Los Angeles investigation into former Port of Seattle official Gina Marie Lindsey has now blossomed out to include questions about her tenure as SeaTac aviation director.

In particular, what was her involvement, if any, in the scandalous spending and contract abuses by the Port that surfaced in that bombshell December state auditor's report? That report has since led to an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

Lindsey, now executive director of LAX and other LA-area airports, was in charge at SeaTac from 1993 to August 2004 when a number of deals and contracts now being targeted by the feds were undertaken. After leaving here she went to work as a lobbyist for McBee Strategic Consulting in D.C. and eventually was hired as LA's airport chief last May.

McBee is among the firms whose dealings are questioned in the Seattle audit and could be a target of the current Justice Department probe. According to the audit, McBee's contract with the Port was increased from $200,000 to $600,000 in $200,000 increments while Lindsey worked here. By improperly parceling out the work, the Port may have skirted requirements to put the job out for competitive bid, assuring McBee of the deal. Among the questions: Did Lindsey, who accepted the McBee job months prior to leaving SeaTac, have any role in such practices?

She tells the Los Angeles Times she's been gone from Seattle too long to competently answer questions about the audit, but "If there was something I had done outside my authority, I would have been contacted as part of the audit. No one has ever contacted me."

Permalink | Comments (0)