West Seattle, Washington
19 Friday
During his budget speech this afternoon (video and documents linked here), Mayor Nickels mentioned West Seattle a few times, notably when talking about the budget including money for artificial turf at Delridge Playfield (see page 10 on his “budget highlights” document). This raised a question for us, as we had just told you on Saturday about the Parks Levy campaign stopping at the field and noting that the levy would raise $3 million for the Delridge turf project (see it on the levy “project list” here). So which is right – Delridge turf $ coming out of the mayor’s budget if passed, or coming from the new Parks Levy if passed? We talked to the mayor’s communications director Robert Mak, who believed it was from regular city $ – but that doesn’t explain why it’s on the levy list too, so we’re checking with levy supporters to see what they have to say. TUESDAY MORNING UPDATE: Heard back from Councilmember Tom Rasmussen (who chairs the council’s Parks Committee). He says, “If the playfield improvements are funded through the 2009-2010 Parks budget and capital improvement program as recommended by the Mayor, then funds earmarked in the levy for the field can be redirected to other parks or athletic fields projects.” TUESDAY EVENING UPDATE: Robert Mak’s answer to our followup question is along those same lines. He says the mayor included it in the budget proposal “trying to guarantee this project gets done” – levy or no levy. (The levy was proposed and sent to the ballot by the council, you may recall, despite the mayor’s stated desire to wait another couple years before asking voters for more parks $.)
Look closely and you’ll see the broken window glass around the edges of that photo, e-mailed to WSB by Paul, who wanted to warn people in the area about what happened to him:
My vehicle was broken into at the corner of Fauntleroy Way SW and 35th Ave. The thieves broke my front passenger window and stole a portable GPS that was installed in the car.
10:06 PM ADDITION: Shortly after we posted this, we got a separate short note about a different wave of car-window attacks: “9/28 around 3 am, 4 vehicles had windshields broken on 13th Ave between Holden & Kenyon.” TUESDAY MORNING ADDITION: And one more report, this one from Melody: “On Sat, 9/27 between the hours of 12 am-3 am my neighbors on 13th Ave SW (between Holden and Barton) had a brick thrown at the back of their car. It dented the exterior (they missed the windows).”
One week ago, we were first to break the news (outside the company, anyway) that Microsoft’s Connector employee bus service had picked the date to expand into West Seattle; today, a tip from Sue led us to signs like that one in the parking lot by the Masonic Hall on the east edge of The Junction, one of several pickup/dropoff spots with which the service will launch next Monday (and we’re told it’s already full up!). Now, a seagoing sight from Alki:
During the heart of the summer cruise season, you don’t usually see the big ships in Elliott Bay on Mondays. But now it’s shoulder season and schedules are different; late this afternoon, Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas (left) and Celebrity Cruises’ Mercury both headed out. Serenade was the last non-Celebrity ship scheduled to visit this year (according to the schedule on the Port of Seattle website); Celebrity’s Infinity stops in tomorrow, and Millennium on Wednesday, then Mercury is in four more times (running a schedule of short Northwest cruises) until its departure ends the cruise season on Wednesday, October 15.
West Seattle is actually served by two food banks with distinct boundaries – and the one that serves southern West Seattle, the White Center Food Bank, is in urgent, immediate need of help. Just got this note from executive director Rick Jump:
I don’t want to be like the boy who cried wolf so I don’t ask for anything unless the situation absolutely warrants it. Our numbers are up (way up) and donations are down. We are currently experiencing critical shortages of food which will begin to impact services in the next week or two. Our inventories are shrinking fast and we need almost all types of non-perishable food. Canned fruits and vegetables, soups, tuna, cereal, dry variety foods such as Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni and Mac & Cheese are especially needed at this time.
Information on where to go and how to donate can be found at whitecenterfoodbank.org — at this page in particular (which also includes a link to donate $ online). Meantime, we’ll be checking with West Seattle Food Bank to see if they have any immediate needs as well.
Today’s vote brings the formal approval of what was announced at an event we covered four weeks ago – read on for the official county news release:Read More
Thanks to Sarah for posting this in comments following our coverage of the huge (1,000-plus participants!) Alki Beach Run for Northwest Hope and Healing (a West Seattle-based organization that helps local breast-cancer patients) — run results are now posted online.
Alki Bike and Board actually joined the WSB sponsor lineup about a week ago but now that the shop’s annual Fall Sale is just days away – this Friday, Saturday, Sunday – we’re rolling out the red carpet today. Stu Hennessey (pictured at left presenting a demonstration at the last Sustainable West Seattle meeting) says he wants people to see Alki Bike and Board as a resource for people to find out everything about bicycles, particularly as a form of transportation – yes, they’re recreational, but with high gas prices and environmental concerns, he invites people not only to stop by and buy a bike but also to find out how it can be a useful transportation device. Stu hopes that this will lead customers to appreciate and enjoy the time they spend in Alki Bike and Board, seeing it not only as a shop, but also a place to learn about what they buy, so they can get better use out of their purchase. One more note – even though Alki Bike and Board is in the Admiral District, its name comes from the fact that the shop opened on Alki in the 1970s; it moved up to Admiral, at a location on the west side of California SW, then to its current location several years ago. Snowboards were added to the shop’s repertory in 1998 because Stu’s kids were snowboard fans and it seemed like a natural fit for his customers – if you’re into bikes, you’re often into boards. During the winter months, Alki Bike and Board sells boards and does ski tuneups. Back to bikes – if you go to the AB&B website, you can find out how to get one free bicycle-maintenance class; note that the classes are limited, and by appointment only. Alki Bike and Board is at 2606 California SW, less than a block south of Admiral. There’s more info about the Friday-Sunday fall sale – including the hours – on this page of the Alki B&B website, including “20%-50% STOREWIDE DISCOUNT on all Clothing, Shoes, Parts and Accessories.” We thank Alki Bike and Board for joining the WSB sponsor lineup; you can see the current list of sponsors – thank you for supporting them! – plus our latest traffic updates (September has already set a WSB pageview record with two days to go – 525,536, 9/1 through 9/28), by going to the WSB Advertise page.
With thousands of new West Seattleites on the way, the forthcoming Metro RapidRide line (dubbed the “C” Line as of June) to West Seattle gets mentioned a lot in development and transportation meetings. Between those meetings, though, a few questions keep surfacing. For one, in a few of those meetings, we’ve heard the year 2010 mentioned for RR’s start, rather than 2011. For two, some have wondered if the plan was still on to have the RR line end at Westwood Village, rather than Fauntleroy or even Morgan Junction, the other two options. We took those questions to Metro’s Jack Lattemann, and here are his answers:Read More
If you want to watch live as the mayor tells the city council what he wants to do with city $ for the next fiscal year, his speech will be live at 2 pm on Seattle Channel (online here; on TV, cable channel 21). The official reminder from his office makes a point of noting it will include the youth-violence-prevention proposal he announced a few weeks ago (which focuses on three areas of the city, including ours, with major involvement from West Seattle-based Southwest Youth and Family Services, whose director spoke with us for a followup).
According to letters posted on the official website for the West 
Marginal/Highland Park Way encampment this morning – after a weekend spent on the state-owned site adjacent to the city land from which campers were rousted Friday afternoon – they’re promising to move “after midnight Wednesday,” but asking the governor for permission to set up at another state-owned site described as “500 yards southeast.” We just checked Parcel Viewer; the site most closely resembling that description is adjacent to Highway 99, parcel #5367202516. We don’t know for sure that this is the site they’re targeting, but whatever site they have in mind, if the governor’s office tells them not to use it, the letter says, they won’t, but they “will move together as a group … to another location,” though they aren’t saying where that might be: “It could be anywhere” (here’s their open letter to “property owners”). The letter goes on to thank the governor for treating the campers “like human beings” and invites her and her staff to visit, ending “… we will always have an open tent there for you.” We just called the governor’s office to ask if Gov. Gregoire has an official response to the request yet; they’re checking. 2 PM UPDATE: Talked with Ron Judd on the Gregoire staff a short time ago. He visited the site over the weekend but had not officially received today’s request yet. He also noted that the Wednesday deadline is not one set by the state, but by the city.
2 quick notes as the week begins: With Election Day just five weeks from tomorrow, we’ve added the WSB Election page, featuring links to info on ballot measures (pop quiz! do you know what I-1029’s about?) and candidates, plus continuously updated digests of area political headlines and political blog updates (like the automated 
digests on our Blogs and More pages). Find the Election page here (or from the tabs on any WSB page). Also, the Twitter box is back in the right sidebar – it’s one way to track what we’re saying on Twitter without signing up for it (as explained here) yourself – it’s been gone a few days, since some systemwide technical instability on Thursday, but seems OK now.
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