beware of bagshaw. she smiles at almost everything like dolores umbridge.

Actually Bagshaw is why you got a workable compromise on a lot of things.

The mayor doesn't have a plan. He plans to have a plan. If he had a plan its merits could be debated. Don't eat the yellow snowjob.

@1

She's actually pretty cool.

http://www.seattle.gov/council/bagshaw/

http://bagshaw.seattle.gov/

So... all the people who voted for Murray because he could work with the city council better than McGinn...

Murray actually wrote back to me. There was mention of a "temporary funding" to address "immediate needs". If his plan does something to stave off the cuts without any loss of service, that's a good feature. As I understand it, I-118 would involve at least a few months of severely reduced service including the loss of my beloved #8 bus.

@6, this seems to be Murray's modus operandus: say you're going to release a plan that's much better than what other people have proposed, which distracts the public from the first proposal. That gives him time to flail around and come up with something as weak and needlessly complicated as the $15/hr plan. It also allows him to just ignore the Council.

Mike McGinn was an anomaly. He was an activist mayor. Ed Murray is something more normal, a professional politician mayor. And if you want a professional politician to do something, you're going to have to pressure them. This is what activists normally do. (And I say this as someone who wishes we had more activists in elected office.)

The fact that Ed Murray hates Ben Sch's guts is only natural. You're not going to get Ed Murray to do something he's naturally disinclined to do by throwing roses at his feet.

I'm ambivalent about the initiative process. I'm not crazy about the use of property tax for transit operations. I'm not even so thrilled about how Metro spends money. And frankly, as a transit supporter, I loathe Ed Murray. My longstanding belief about Murray is, with friends like him, transit doesn't need enemies.

And yet, if the blunt instrument that is this "Plan C" initiative is the mechanism that forces this professional pol I loathe to come up with a better plan--and that plan succeeds--then I'll be happy with that result. I won't mind who delivered it or how.

Which gets me to the topic of this post. O'Brien, Rasmussen, and Bagshaw make a credible pro-transit coalition, and I think they're playing this just right. Instead of taking sides in the "pissing contest," see if something good might come out of it.