KUOW’s Steve Scher just got done with a nearly hour-long interview with mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, and any non-English-speakers who were listening probably thought it was a relaxation tape. Scher and Mallahan look to out-drone and monotone one another, and the effect is SNL’s Delicious Dish, minus the laughs and the puns about Alec Baldwin’s testicles. And it isn’t much better for English speakers, either, as most of the conversation either covers platitudes about efficiencies in the city, Mallahan’s experiences with T-Mobile, or progressive values generally. There’s the occasional detail–for example, Mallahan notes that in his police ride along, he was aghast at how much time officers have to spend on data entry. So maybe there’s a more efficient way to do it. Mallahan gets more detailed (and thus the conversation gets more interesting) when he talks about funding the Mercer Corridor Project and scrapping or revising incentive zoning, as there he has some details. He suggests a local improvement district for the Mercer project–property taxes on the owners whose land is likely to rise in value–and argues that adding costs (i.e. contributions to the affordable housing fund) for builders to go to capacity will result in less-than-zoning-capacity housing, and fewer contributions to the fund, and that the city should require developers to contribute to the fund without making such contributions optional (and conditional for building as high or big as the city deems necessary.) These are arguments that Mallahan made at the Chamber of Commerce debate, so they’re nothing new. Which is generally true of the interview as a whole–Mallahan doesn’t appear to have gotten any more specific than he was two weeks ago, when he wasn’t very specific at all. (For example, since then, McGinn released a policy proposal for helping refugees and immigrants (though he didn’t say what the expansions would cost or how he’d pay for them); today, Mallahan just said we need to be “welcoming” and not ask about immigration status when providing services–the most obvious and innocuous starting points.) Mallahan’s obviously a smart guy, and has convinced some people of that, given his primary performance and endorsements, but he owes it to the rest of the voters to lay out some details and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, show that there’s some ‘there’ there.