Cary Moon, a trim young urban designer with a fair complexion, shaggy black hair, and a monochromatic, slightly goth wardrobe, looked a bit ill at ease as she took her place among the buttoned-down bureaucrats and besuited civil servants at the city council's long conference table on April 24, where she and several pro-transit activists had been invited to present the People's Waterfront Coalition's vision for a highway-free downtown waterfront. (Their plan, though clunkily titled—"Transit + Streets First"—is a modest proposal that could actually work: tear down the viaduct and replace its people-moving capacity with transit and improvements to surface streets downtown.) But Moon, armed with impressive stats (for example: Drivers use only 60 percent of the capacity of many downtown streets), quickly warmed to her role. Of the current 110,000 daily trips on the viaduct, she said, "20,000 to 30,000 could be shifted to transit," leaving 15,000 on Alaskan Way; the rest would move to surface streets or disappear—a claim that sounds optimistic, but has been borne out in other cities, such as Milwaukee, that have torn down waterfront highways.

Moon's calm demeanor was a stark contrast to the deceptively credulous presentation by WSDOT and city staffers, who derided the surface/transit option as a transportation disaster waiting to happen. Among other dubious assumptions, the WSDOT planners presumed that every current trip on the viaduct would continue to exist; that any surface alternative would require the Battery Street Tunnel to be reduced, arbitrarily, from four to two (!) lanes; and that the project could not get state funding unless it maintained or increased car capacity, a provision of last year's transportation funding package. But, as Richard Conlin pointed out, "It's not that the state can't fund it, it's that the state would have to take legislative action for that to be possible." The council will decide in the next few weeks whether to fund a study of the third alternative as preparation for putting it alongside the tunnel and rebuild options on the November ballot.

The Seattle Community Access Network (SCAN), the city's only public-access channel, is about to get a financial transfusion, but with strict conditions: In exchange for an average of $700,000 a year, paid for with a .2 percent increase in the city's cable-franchise fee, the financially struggling network will have to come up with a business plan, increase its non-city funding, and hire a full-time fundraiser, among other requirements. "My goal would be to move to [getting] at least half our total funds" from non-city sources, SCAN director Ann Suter says.

Council President Nick Licata—along with former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and goofy '70s pot icon Tommy Chong—spent part of the last week at the annual conference of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, where he spoke on a panel titled "Grassroots to Grasstops." Other panels at the NORML confab included "Reefer, Rhetoric, and Retorts" and "We're Pot Smokers and Damn Proud of It!"

barnett@thestranger.com