COUNTY FURLOUGH: This is one of the 10 days this year that most of King County government is shutting down to save money. Metro service is normal, and a few essential services are open, all listed here.
I-5 WORK CLOSURES: State road crews, meantime, will be working around the clock this weekend on parts of the I-5 pavement repair project. Major lane closures start tonight and continue through early Monday morning; they’re listed here.
I wonder how much time and money the county will squander next week apologizing for its dumb move of closing most county offices for no predictable reason on a non-holiday.
Sorry, Alvis, but the county has nothing to apologize for. This is not a “dumb” move, it is a cost saving measure to help save some county positions that would otherwise have been cut Jan. 1, 2009, due to the budget deficit. The furlough has the carte blanche of the union coalition as well. If you look at the county website, you will see listed there a schedule of all furlough days (10) this year.
When will the furlough days be and how will we know he difference?
Beg to differ, D.j. I side with anyone who will be inconvenienced — and justifiably furious — if they’ve chosen today for going to pay their property taxes or conduct other in-person business with a King County agency that is unexpectedly closed, no matter whether that closure has been approved by the “union coalition.”
Except for checking on their Metro bus schedules, which will be running on regular hours today, it’s unlikely that many people would be surfing the county web site in their spare time to double check whether county agencies might happen to be closed on what is an average weekday for most everybody else.
These furlough days are hardly unexpected Alvis. They’ve been published everywhere for at least a month and a half.
Anyone who even half listens to the news on either TV or radio, or reads a paper will have heard of the furlough. The dates have been published weeks ago for the whole year.
Also if you look at when the furlough days are, they are typically associated with weekends that have gov’t holidays making them easy to remember (New Year’s, President’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor day, thanksgiving, Christmas)
Jimmy G –
Interesting, I just ran an advanced Google news search for the last 30 days and the only specific result for “King County furlough” was today’s West Seattle Blog. Where else have the King County furlough days been published everywhere for at least the last month and a half?
Funny, I just ran a “normal” Google search and found over 10 pages full of news articles about the King County furlough from every news organization in the city.
Both of the above are right ..
news search
http://is.gd/juM4
google regular search
http://is.gd/juMm
But you can’t sort the latter for date. You CAN sort Google News for date, and nobody in Seattle has mentioned it lately, apparently. The top result in the “regular” G-search is from October. This is why we published this little mention today … always helpful to issue reminders when something is actually here, or imminent.
TR
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