Video: What’s cut, what’s not? Mayor’s budget plan

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Click the image to play the video – our temporary fix for previous “autoplay” problem)

11:25 AM: Click the “play” button to watch Mayor McGinn‘s first of two budget-plan speeches, live. [UPDATED: The clip is now his archived speech, recorded live.] He’s at Seattle Central Community College (and will speak to the City Council inside City Hall at 2 pm), following introductions by people including community-college-system Chancellor Dr. Jill Wakefield, familiar to West Seattle as former South Seattle Community College president. According to his website, details won’t be available until 2 pm – here’s the link to watch; we’ll plan on a separate story then, but if any advance word emerges, we’ll add to this one first.

Sue September 26, 2011 (6:13 pm)

Any way to make this video not auto play? Everytime I refresh the page it starts playing. Same thing with the other video in the thread above this.

WSB September 26, 2011 (6:21 pm)

I just fixed it with a workaround. I started trying to reach city folks an hour ago and got no reply, unfortunately … their code for embedding video has never done this before, but there was nothing obvious that could be tweaked to fix it, so I’ve got screengrabs that now link to the video page on the Seattle Channel (which autoplays THERE but at least you clicked through, unlike the home-page access) – TR

Bounce September 27, 2011 (1:11 pm)

I know that McGinn’s emphasis on “outcome based” strategy, is supposed to inspire confidence in the city’s fiscal effectiveness. In practice, however, outcome-based strategies often manifest as regressive, myopic, and pound-foolish practices. Administrators accountable to performance quotas favor programs that produce quick, positive, and concrete metrics—incomplete, irrelevant, and inaccurate as they might be—while avoiding innovative and/or qualitative solutions ill-fit to quarterly, line-item calculation.
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In this light, merging Seattle’s Office of Housing (which serves economically marginal consumer stakeholders) with the Office of Economic Development (which serves economically powerful business stakeholders) seems at least dangerous. The former is a cost center, where the biggest wins are diffuse and qualitative—individual quality of life, quality of housing, community stability, etc. By contrast, economic development is a revenue generator, where wins are (relatively) focused and quantitative. Inherently, governance-by-metric favors concrete business strengths and priorities over “watery” community development and defense.
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But that sort of prioritization is how good things like the American Dream of home ownership end up catastrophically commercially perverted. It’s how we got into our current city/state/federal/global credit crisis to begin with.
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On the bright side, the mayor’s speech and its many “outcomes” make for a fine drinking game. So I guess there’s that.

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