That's a great stock photo of a Karen.

All of Nelson's concerns seem well founded to me. I mean, for Christ's sake, a $1.5 million study?! Just use that money to build tiny houses or, better yet, permanent low-income housing.

On the eviction funding, lost in Hannah's spin is the fact the majority of evictions are from municipal housing operated by the city or county. Why on Earth are we paying millions for lawyers to fight our own evictions?! That makes no sense. Nelson is right, we should be paying up back rent, that is far more efficient.

Pretty sure the City Prosecuting Attorney can put on her own pants, doesn't need a councilmember to do it for them.

Just build housing.

It's that simple.

And if you're not actually filling cop spots, don't budget for it.

There, problem solved.

NEXT!

Reading Hannah’s columns is like reading the Twilight Zone. Up is down and right is left. Lost in all her spin is that there is absolutely no oversight of the money the city shells out to all these service companies that probably wouldn’t exist without the cities money. Our money. For someone like Hannah that is always after a good story why doesn’t she try one that documents where all this money is going. Then document where it goes after that. My guess is that some of it finds it’s way back into the reelection funding of the council members pushing the legislation,

Is that Kevin Bacon?

@4 it is very poor form to question the councils ability to budget properly for studies. It's not like they have had any issues in the past

https://sccinsight.com/2021/07/29/the-black-brilliance-research-project-beginning-to-end-part-1/

@8 Christ, I was unaware of that debacle.

I really miss SCC Insight. It was so nice to go have well-researched objective coverage of city government, as opposed to the opinionated poorly informed snark you get from the Stranger

Picking fights during City Council meetings?

Now do Kshama Sawant …

Portland is about to pass a camping ban in the city. I hope they do and all those people move here. Then for sure we’ll get all these far left nuts voted out. Even Sawant. I’m the farthest thing from a Republican.

@9 I know. I really miss Kevin's ability to break down what is going on to make it understandable while being impartial, especially during budget time. He always did a great job of summarizing the big items and walking through some of the ramifications of the councils decisions. It really is too bad the Times or one of the independent journalists in the city haven't filled the void. We are all worse off for it.

i just picture the writer of this piece sipping on some sort of fremont ale tallboy with a rainbow label while writing up this outrage

Good lord, a $1.5M study on something we already know to be a problem? Thanks for the flag, writing my CM now.

Those glasses have got to go, though...

I understand the entire point of this post is to whine, yet again, about how nasty Seattle voters elected Nelson over the Stranger’s endorsed candidate, but there actually are substantial issues to discuss. For example: “…pay for battery storage to deal with up to two weeks of power outages,”

Why on earth is anyone in Seattle planning for “two weeks of power outages”? Does City Light predict some imminent societal collapse, rendering it unable to function for that long?

Even if emergency power was needed for two whole weeks (!!), batteries are not the way to supply it. That situation calls for an emergency generator, not a huge amount of heavy, expensive batteries. It’s bizarre proposed expenditures like this which CMs should rightly question, and everyone should thank CM Nelson for so doing. (Does Nikkita Oliver now have some battery scam going?)

tensorna dear, a careful re-reading of the article will reveal that the battery storage is for a community center, not the entire city. That's just silly.

But now that you mention it, it is entirely possible that in the event of a large seismic event we would have large swaths of the region without power for weeks. That's why the city is making investments in community centers as emergency service centers.

As for a backup generator, if you have a solar array, you can replenish that battery bank indefinitely - yes, even in the winter. And supply chains for gas or the natural gas distribution infrastructure may be destroyed.

"Does City Light predict some imminent societal collapse, rendering it unable to function for that long?"

I hope they're smart enough to plan for that. We live right next to the Cascadian Subduction Zone, remember? It hasn't ripped loose in quite a while, so we could have a magnitude 8 to 9 earthquake, just like the Tohoku/Fukushima event, at pretty much any moment.

I suspect that could fuck shit up in all SORTS of exciting ways. Which reminds me that the emergency dried beans and rice in my basement are probably overdue for being discarded and replaced. I've been told that really old beans never finish cooking...

The trolling misogynist dipshits that spent the last decade obsessively detailing how "shrill" and unattractive they feel Savant is at every opportunity are suddenly very concerned about being superficial.

@19-21. 23: Yes, the context was community centers, not the entire city; I should have made that explicit in my comment. But understand it’s not the size of the load which matters here, but rather the length of time. Batteries simply don’t work well past eight hours of storage and use, and keeping them charged means a steady supply of electricity must always flow to them. Maintaining a two-week battery backup, even for a community center, would have both a huge capital and operational costs, even if no power failure ever happens. A generator with a large fuel tank makes for a better solution on all counts.

Again, this is exactly the type of thinking and expenditure which should be challenged, and I’m glad CM Nelson has done so.

Amateur hour has become 24/7 at the stranger. I'm thankful Nelson is asking questions rather than rubber stamping spending via acquiescence. This council bent too far ideologically...and no, I'm not a conservative, just one of those home owning Democrats the stranger likes to villify...oh, and I also own a townhouse we rent to young people so I guess I'm especially evil. Glad someone is recognizing landlords have rights, too. The moratorium was government seizure of property with zero recompense for one class of citizen who can barely afford to get by in favor of another.

“…big business killed the council’s head tax by accusing them of having no spending plan.”

Seattle’s citizens were very eager to put the EHT (‘head tax’) to a vote. For a proposed Referendum to repeal the EHT, No Tax on Jobs collected ~50k signatures so rapidly, they ceased collecting signatures well before the deadline expired. (I know of no other successful campaign which ever stopped collecting signatures ahead of their deadline.)

Some of the voters’ enthusiasm for a Referendum may have indeed been because the Council couldn’t even be bothered to allocate the projected revenue, which fed the popular perception (encouraged by the EHT’s prime spokesperson, CM Sawant) that the entire point was just to tax Amazon (and other employers).

Other factors in the repeal may have included the Council’s 9-0 vote, CM Sawant’s personal attacks on witnesses who opposed the tax, and the inherently regressive nature of the tax (it was a ‘flat tax’). Also the perception that their jobs would be taxed just to throw the resultant funds at a useless (or even counterproductive) homeless-industrial complex.

@22: While your comment does an admirable job of reminding us of exactly why you keep getting unceremoniously banned from the most tolerant blog in the history of ever, it rather fails to appreciate the context of this comment thread, viz. the Stranger’s oh-so-piously concerned civility-trolling of CM Nelson, for her heinous sin of daring to ask relevant questions about taxes and expenditures during budget negotiations. (Why, she’s obviously mistaken herself for a duly-elected legislator, and not for what the Stranger knows her to be: the disreputable usurper of a City Council seat rightfully owned by Nikkita Oliver.)

When it comes to civility on the Council, the Stranger always recognizes CM Sawant as the Council’s standard-bearer. The swift repeal of her signature legislation, the EHT, was met in Council chambers by a howling rent-a-mob, organized by CM Sawant's own Socialist Alternative. This crowd hurled insults and obscenities at the CMs as they voted, a practice the Stranger was careful not to criticize. When CM Sawant thirsted for payback over this defeat, she and Socialist Alternative led another rent-a-mob to then-Mayor Durkan’s family home, where CM Sawant’s hate-filled rant against Her Honor ensured the mob would vandalize the place. After the public response to this provocation was less, “Forward in glory, Comrade Sawant!” and more, “Well, CM, that was quite the dick move,” she immediately began lying about her involvement, which the Stranger duly supported by scrubbing all mention of Socialist Alternative from its coverage of this home assault. Incredibly, instead of just accepting all of this, her fellow citizens of District 3 then showed their unmitigated gall by calling her to account for her assault. The Stranger dutifully supported her refusal to engage her fellow voters, and faithfully regurgitated her hate-filled lies about her fellow citizens for their “racist, right-wing recall.”

So: asking questions about taxes and expenditures during budget negotiations was horribly uncivil, whilst repeated personal attacks upon critics was the absolute height of admirable behavior. Behold what the Stranger has become. (And yet, you still get banned! Ouch.)