One issue on which every single candidate in every single city
council race this year seems to agree is the need to put more police
officers on the street. The Seattle Police Department, which had a
sworn force of 1,285 officers at the beginning of 2007, had expected
to hire 80 new officers this year—24 in the first three
months. Those hiring goals would have brought the total number of
full-time SPD staffers to above 1,300—if SPD had managed to meet
them. Instead, according to a new report by city council staff, SPD
hired just nine new officers in the first quarter of 2007, “falling
short of… hiring goals” set as part of a massive hiring push last
year, according to a city council report issued last month. But not
only has SPD failed to hire as many new cops as expected, it’s actually
lost more than it’s gained, thanks to a “higher than normal rate of
separations,” the SPD term for officers leaving the force. “Positions
in service,” meanwhile—fully trained officers on active
duty—are expected to decline throughout 2007 to fewer than 1,200.
SPD says it will make up the shortfall with “more aggressive
recruiting”; however, given the long-term shortfall in police recruits
around the country, that prediction seems excessively
optimistic.
If you’re paid to lobby county, state, or federal officials on
behalf of a company, political group, or neighborhood organization,
state law requires you to register as a lobbyist in a statewide
database. The mandate is based on the principle of transparency:
Citizens have a right to know who’s lobbying their elected officials,
who they work for, and how much they’re getting paid.
Not so at the city council, where hired flacks can lobby your
elected officials without revealing anything about themselves or their
clients. Proposals to change this somewhat antiquated system have
failed in years past, bogging down in lengthy, byzantine debates over
who should be required to register. On August 7, council president Nick
Licata introduced a proposal to change that, requiring anyone who
lobbies the city council to register as a lobbyist and inform the
public about their clients, salaries, and expenditures.
Remember all those stories in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge
collapse highlighting the fact that the bridge received a ranking of
just 50 percent on a federal scale of 1 to 100, making it
“structurally deficient”?
The central portion of the Alaskan Way Viaduct was ranked on the
same scale. Its score: 9 percent. And if that doesn’t make you
want to stay away from the viaduct until they tear the damn thing down,
perhaps knowing that the National Bridge Inventory (which provided the
Minnesota number) considers it “basically intolerable, requiring high
priority of corrective action,” will. Says Bridge Inventory creator
Alexander Svirsky: “[The viaduct] is in desperate need of repair.”
