Unanimity on the $4 billion "tunnel option" for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct continues to crumble. In an opinion piece in the Sunday, December 25, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the local Sierra Club came out in favor of the People's Waterfront Coalition's "no-highway" alternative. The PWC option, which would improve traffic connections throughout downtown and leave just four lanes of traffic on the waterfront, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less than the city's "preferred" six-lane highway tunnel. City officials oppose the PWC option because they want to maintain the viaduct's freeway-level traffic capacity on the waterfront. "The local Sierra Club supports the [PWC's] work and calls on the mayor and city council to shelve the freeway options until the city has had a real debate about alternatives," the op-ed said. "A progressive city will realize that the real threat to its long-term health isn't the failure of the [viaduct]—it's the car dependency that such infrastructure feeds. Let's start solving that problem rather than waste resources on another highway our children will regret." ERICA C. BARNETT

Just two months after Mayor Greg Nickels and a divided Seattle City Council imposed tight new regulations on Seattle's strip clubs, backers of a referendum that would repeal the rules turned in enough signatures to secure a spot on the ballot sometime next year. The new rules, which opponents say will legislate adult entertainment venues out of existence, require strip clubs to install waist-high railings around their stages, prohibit dancers from getting closer than four feet to patrons, and mandate that all strip-club goings on occur under high-wattage lighting.

Tim Killian, manager of the referendum campaign, said his paid signature gatherers had turned in more than 35,000 signatures, showing a strong desire in the city to repeal rules he calls "prudish and out of step." The city council will now decide when the proposed repeal will go before voters—either in a special election in February (unlikely, given the extra cost) or at a regularly scheduled election in September or November. Killian said he would prefer the November 2006 ballot, in order to give the issue prominence and allow time for voters to bone up on the issue. ELI SANDERS

As King County Council members prepare to serve larger districts (voters shrank the council from 13 to 9 members in the 2004 election), there's no word yet on Republican member Kathy Lambert's bizarre suggestion that she have access to the sheriff department's helicopter, the Guardian 1, to help her get to meetings around her expansive district. (Lambert's district stretches from Woodinville to Snoqualmie to the foothills of the Cascades.)

"Her district takes up half of the county," a Lambert staffer says, adding that the council member only envisioned using the sheriff's copter in emergency situations. NANCY DREW