Mayor Nickels, hero to nightclubs?
The devil, as Nickels’s deputy Tim Ceis is fond of saying, is in the details. But a preliminary list of changes to Nickels’s proposed nightlife ordinance (which would have forced club owners to police nearby parking lots, required staffed phone lines whenever a club was open, and required club owners to prevent patrons from bringing weapons or drugs onto the premises) appears, in contrast, not too bad. According to the summary, club owners will now only be held responsible for areas under their direct control; a provision that banned any audible sound inside nearby residences has been brought into line with existing law; standards for weapons and drugs have been cut entirely; and the penalties for all violations have been reduced. Pete Hanning, co-chair of the mayor’s nightlife task force and owner of the Red Door bar in Fremont, calls the changes “a step in the right direction… Politically, I think they realized just what a big bag of poo they had on their hands, and they have a couple more important bags of poo to deal with.”
The biggest bag of poo of all is the Alaskan Way tunnel, a Nickels legacy project for which cost estimates just keep going up. Some tunnel supporters are now quietly admitting that they might support the much cheaper surface/transit option if the (now $4.6—$5.5 billion) tunnel proves infeasible. The other option is a rebuilt viaduct—a concrete monstrosity that would be much wider and bulkier than the current structure. Because no one (except Helen Sommers and maybe Christine Gregoire) wants that, a tenuous alliance is now forming between supporters of the tunnel and surface options. “There are a lot of areas of common ground,” Downtown Seattle Association spokesman John Taylor says. “We both have an overriding interest in connecting downtown to the waterfront.” People’s Waterfront Coalition director Cary Moon says her group won’t ally directly with pro-tunnel groups like the DSA, though she adds that the PWC will “say very clearly that we’re opposed to the rebuild in all our communications with the state.”
Last year, Seattle citizens reported 4,602 crimes. Of those, only 15 percent led to arrests. City Council Member Peter Steinbrueck believes that pitiful statistic can be linked directly to a lack of cops on the streets; to remedy the problem, he’s proposed spending tens of millions of dollars to increase the Seattle police force by 250 officers. “We have a budget large enough to easily accommodate 30 to 50 new officers,” Steinbrueck says. Other council members, however, are trying to rein in Steinbrueck’s proposal, in part by pushing a “package” of public-safety improvements, rather than focusing exclusively on patrol cops. (Statistics show that the number of cops per capita doesn’t correlate directly to crime rates anyway.) On Monday, Steinbrueck seemed unmoved by council members’ entreaties, insisting angrily that the mayor’s budget contains “any number of potential savings,” and brushing aside concerns that a massive budget increase in good economic times might not be sustainable in a recession. 