Speaking of cagey: Born-again monorail fan Peter Steinbrueck, whose repeated denials haven't quashed persistent rumors that he's positioning himself to run for mayor against Greg Nickels, has simultaneously launched a high-profile fight against a lousy set of conditions that Council Member Richard Conlin--taking his cues from Mayor Nickels' office--reportedly wants to tack onto the monorail's right-of-way agreement. (The mayor's conditions were scrapped in an earlier version of the agreement.) Steinbrueck, whose counterproposal would require the monorail agency to spend its mitigation dollars on better monorail design, instead of wasting the cash on skybridges and sidewalk improvements a half-mile away from stations, calls Conlin's so-called fixes "the kind of Christmas lights and bells and whistles" that could ultimately "kill the project."
The silence hung as thick as smoke in the low-slung conference room that housed this week's meeting of the city's Marijuana Policy Panel, as City Attorney (and pot-reform opponent) Tom Carr faced drug activist Dominic Holden across a wide wooden conference table. But it wasn't political tension that reduced the panel members to silence; it was the city attorney's announcement that, in what Holden calls a "180-degree reversal," he would hand over almost all of the case numbers panel members say they need to figure out if pot laws are being enforced selectively. "I almost had to scoop my jaw up off the table," Holden told me after the meeting. Holden's pro-pot posse didn't wait for an excuse to celebrate: At his 27th birthday party last week, more than a dozen revelers sparked up on Broadway and stood there, billowing clouds of smoke over the sidewalk, for half an hour in plain view of business patrons, cops, and passersby.
