First note on The Meeting (more later)
So the very last speaker at The Windstorm/Snowpocalypse/Disaster-Prep County Council Meeting in Fauntleroy tonight was a literal space cadet; yet his comment was the truest of the night. A onetime political candidate now best known as Goodspaceguy (name changed to reflect his interest in space colonization), said something along the lines of this: “Honorable Councilmembers, a whole lot of people got up and left, disgusted, because they waited and waited and didn’t get a chance to talk. I respectfully suggest that next time you let the PEOPLE talk first, so that if they have to leave after a while, they can do it when it’s the presenters’ turn, not theirs.” A-men. Not a single NON-politico/bureaucrat got a chance to open her/his mouth until well past an hour in. More in a bit.
The nightlife fight
As computer-glued homebodies, we haven’t followed the simmering fight over the Seattle “nightlife premises ordinance.” But perhaps we should. One WSB reader forwarded us an urgent e-mail from a club in another part of town and suggests several WS establishments have a lot at stake in this too; check the e-mail out (after the jump), take action if you are interested, and please let us know if there’s another point of view on this to spotlight as well:Read More
Gotta admire their guts
We have not yet watched last night’s “Lessons from the Windstorm” City Council hearing (should turn up today on the Seattle Channel site), but at least one WSB reader who saw it “live” describes it exactly the way the Times and P-I do today — mostly a ventstorm from City Light workers who bravely stood up in front of politicians and media to accuse their bosses of bungling things while tens of thousands of us spent days in the dark, in more ways than one. We heard some of this during the outage, of course; then we heard city management take the first opportunity to refute it. But what’s that old saying about “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”? So the real issue is … what now, when the hearings end, when the bad weather retreats for another year, will anyone really change anything?
“It’s not like anybody screwed up totally”
Quote of the day, from city councilman Richard Conlin, in the P-I, looking ahead to the hearing he’s leading tonight on “Lessons from the Windstorm.” He’s talking about how city agencies, especially Seattle City Light, handled the storm’s aftermath, including the outages that left so many of us without power for so long. And he appropriately spotlights the fact that so many of us didn’t and couldn’t get any information about HOW long we would be without power. Even information on who had their power back on and who was left to work on, would have been great; during that long dark week, we were reduced to driving around once it started getting dark, to get a take on things. Really, for those of us who were out of power for days, did you imagine, when it went out, that it would take so long to get it back? (By the way, if you can’t make it to City Hall to tell your story tonight, you can watch the hearing live on the Seattle Channel, ch. 21, or a replay Friday morning.)
Get ready to hear a lot about this
There’s a lot at stake for West Seattle in the school vote coming up five weeks from today. The measures are mentioned as part of this “year ahead for Seattle Public Schools” story in today’s Times. To find specifics, you have to scavenge through the SPS site; a no-frills doc outlines the half-billion dollar bond measure that we’ll be voting on, a large chunk of which would go toward combining the Denny Middle School & Chief Sealth HS campuses on this side of WS (new turf for the Denny/Sealth field is in the bond plan too). But when you go vote, keep in mind the bond measure is separate from the $400 million levy the district needs just to keep running. And neither will pass, no matter how many “yes” votes, if not enough voters (at least 40% of the # who voted last November) show up.
Now it all makes sense … in a way
Just watched our recording of the Seattle City Council briefing with key bureaucratic types talking about the storm response. (We’re STILL waiting to hear … where is the mayor? He wasn’t even at this event; nor was the deputy mayor; a woman “from [his] office” was their delegate.) The P-I has posted its article but it doesn’t mention the most surprising thing we heard: City Light does NOT automatically know who’s got power and who doesn’t … its customers don’t have automated meters, hooked up straight to HQ, though City Light boss Jorge Carrasco mentioned a “pilot project” along those lines in High Point right now. The briefing also revealed the councilmembers got a surprise during the storm aftermath, finding out they could have been getting info for constituents by accessing some sort of web page on the city system listing all known outages. “I didn’t know you didn’t know about it,” Carrasco said, “but … you do now.” Nervous laughter ensued. One council member tried to ask why members of the public couldn’t have been allowed access to that page too, so at least they’d know their outage area was on “the list”; Carrasco’s answer seemed to boil down to, well, that page is MANUALLY updated, and maybe not entirely up to the minute, so putting it out there might have done more harm than good. (What do you think? When is more information worse than less? If you want to tell the council yourself, their public hearing on all this is 5:30 pm January 3rd.)
Not exactly the calm after the storm
We were going to say that driving around WS tonight was “normal” — no major lights out, etc. — for the first time in more than a week, but the pre-Christmas craziness is making up for it. Crowds galore. Good for our local businesses, at least.
In post-storm notes … got e-mail from the office of local County Councilmember Dow Constantine (while Seattle City Councilmembers aren’t elected by district, King County Councilmembers are), saying he’s pushing for a “formal council review of the local response to (the) windstorm.” As for the city, haven’t seen anything yet about the outcome of today’s “briefing.” The video is now posted on the Seattle Channel site (with an ironic disclaimer about “diminished” audio quality because of an “unforeseen technical problem”).
Today’s storm-aftermath photo: proof some of the fallen trees in Lincoln Park are being cleared away; we spotted this pile in the central LP parking lot.
Midday updates, 1st Full Day o’ Winter
-The traffic light on Fauntleroy at the west edge of Gatewood Elementary is finally back on. Hope that’s good news for some of the pockets in that area.
-Lots of City Light crews on duty around WS today — could barely go half a mile without seeing more. Also interesting to pass City Light home base (on 4th just a bit north of Costco) and see the constant activity there.
-Update on the John’s Deli cow/bull/steer/bovine-whatever, courtesy of a comment on the original post: It did blow off during the storm but will be back. Hurray!
-Heard a good discussion on KUOW’s “Weekday” week-in-review hour while out and about (now available on the station’s site). One caller from the Eastside made the same point we and others had put forward: Yes, we know the mayor/governor/county exec can’t personally restore power, but having them out in the storm-disaster zones a lot sooner, doing the Clintonesque “I feel your pain” thing at the very least, would still have meant a lot. (The same caller also had the same observation about those leaders’ websites – not enough statements/info about the outages – suggesting their communications staffers might have been assuming, hey, if they’ve got no power, they’ve got no internet. We can testify to the fact that local coffeehouses were stuffed for days with folks who had no power at home but found a way to get online. Also keep in mind, those with power can call friends/relatives without power and tell them what they’re reading about what’s going on.)
Thought this was supposed to happen LAST night
Pounding rain, dark sky. Hours after a sunshine break. Only quarter till 4 and it’s almost dark enough to get a status check on the remaining WS pockets. No update on the City Light site since this morning. But another gov’t agency, the National Weather Service, wants your help … choosing a name for the storm. (Wind Wallop? Holiday Hell?) And in government-leader news, heard a radio report that Gov. Gregoire and County Exec Sims toured powerless Eastside spots today. Her home page currently headlines a “weather update”; his home page has one high up (but the headline story is still him getting an award); still waiting for word on the status of our mayor, whose page is topped with “emergency preparedness tips.”
And now for something completely different
The rain stopped. The voting’s over. I waited all the way up till what looks to be the very last vote-count update of the night morning, for one last pounding of proof that I voted out of the mainstream. (Go enjoy your lap dances with abandon, kids.) So now let’s talk about something cheerier. Thanksgiving is two weeks from tomorrow. If you can spare a turkey or two, the White Center Food Bank needs 1,500 of ’em. (We found this out at the Gathering of Neighbors last weekend; a nice lady from the 34th District Dems told a friend of ours that she volunteers at the WCFB and was sad to see last year that they only had turkey “quarters” to hand out to families in need.) Also, you can get some immediate return on your generosity at Southwest Pool tonight and tomorrow night, when Public Swim admission is only two bucks if you bring at least one can o’food for their food drive.
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