The monorail is dead, Casey Corr is looking for a job, and even smokers have given up bitching about the smoking ban, which goes into effect one week from Thursday. So, with an uneventful city council election out of the way, council members have turned their attention to replacing Jan Drago, the two-term council member who crushed former mayoral staffer Corr in November, as council president.
The job, which opens up every two years, has been filled by only two of the current council incumbents: Peter Steinbrueck and Drago, who during her second term as president was seen as a stabilizing force on a body that frequently foundered on petty squabbles with the mayor. The president, who makes committee assignments and controls the flow of legislation, is chosen after weeks of intense backroom lobbying by the top contenders. This year, those contenders have been narrowed to two: Jean Godden, the rookie City Light committee chair, and Richard Conlin, a three-term incumbent who just beat back a reelection challenge from Port Commissioner Paige Miller, a close friend of Drago's.
Godden, not surprisingly, was encouraged to seek the presidency by Drago, who says Godden "has [her fellow council members'] trust, and that's an important factor." Shortly after Godden agreed to seek the job, however, Conlin put his own name in the running, throwing two council members who'd been in Godden's campâSteinbrueck and Tom Rasmussenâinto the "undecided" column. The decision, insiders say, will likely be based on style, not substance: Seniority is far less important than it once was (Drago held the job in both her first and second terms); and most council members want to keep the committees they currently hold, so committee assignments won't be a major factor. (One notable exception is Drago, who wants to take over Conlin's transportation committee after two years as head of the low-profile Government Affairs and Labor Committee.)
If the council can't come to a consensus, it's possible that a third candidateâa long shot who isn't currently in the runningâmight take the lead. It happened in 2001, when the council deadlocked between two candidates, pushing Steinbrueck into the president's chair. This year's dark-horse candidate? Nick Licata.
Seattle's expanded Alcohol Impact Area, a vast, segmented corridor that takes in downtown, Capitol Hill, and part of the University District, was designed to limit sales of malt liquor, single cans of beer, and fortified wineâthe type of stuff street drunks, known in civic parlance as chronic public inebriates, like to imbibe. In practice, however, the voluntary effort has been a flop, with fewer than a third of the area's stores agreeing to limit sales of the verboten beverages. Next week, the council will consider asking the state liquor board to impose mandatory restrictions on liquor sales in the AIA that would ban specific brands and types of liquor, such as Mickey's Malt Liquor, Olde English 800, Thunderbird, and Steel Reserve. The exact scope of the restrictions remains up to the liquor board, which came under heavy lobbying from liquor distributors the last time it considered banning specific brands, back in 2002.
