Last week, shoehorned into a tiny booth in the dim dining room of Cafe Septieme on Broadway Avenue, Jan Drago made official what city insiders have known for weeks: The 11-year incumbent, whose political future was recently in question, is running for reelection. Drago was antsy to talk about her election bid--a campaign that will, assuming she stays on message, focus on red-meat civic issues like density, growth, and transportation--but we were, frankly, more interested in another topic that Drago herself had raised.

Namely: the brewing battle over the Seattle Fire Fighters Union's "Ready4Rescue" initiative, which would amend the city charter to require four-person teams on every Seattle fire truck. The initiative--a scary, unfunded mandate that would cost the cash-strapped city an additional $4 million a year--is opposed by Mayor Greg Nickels, who suggested that firefighters boost staffing by working an additional three hours a week. Seattle firefighters, Drago noted pointedly, work fewer hours--just over 42 a week, according to an SFD spokeswoman, including time to sleep--than those in any other West Coast city.

But taking on the firefighters may be politically risky--especially if, as rumor has it, the union plans to hire Republican Bruce Boram to run its initiative effort. Boram, recall, is the same guy who launched a cutthroat attack campaign against AG candidate Deborah Senn last September, accusing the former insurance commissioner of being in the pocket of big insurance companies. Union head Paul Atwater wouldn't reveal which consultants the firefighters were considering.

While the firefighters union was gearing up for its big November funding push, another public-safety agency--the King County Emergency Services Patrol, better known as the drunk tank--was facing major cuts: some $130,000, enough to force the patrol to reduce its hours of operation and slash the North End of the city from its service area. Without the city-funded vans, which scoop up public inebriates and transport them to sobering and detox centers, huge swaths of the city--including Aurora Avenue and the U-District, two areas in dire need of the ESP's services--will have no resources for the 300 public drunks the agency ordinarily serves in the north end every month. Jean Robertson, an assistant division director at the county, says that without the vans, "The community is going to feel the impact. Instead of sending people to get services, we're going to be sending them to the hospital."

The Seattle Monorail Project's reappointment of monorail board member Paul Toliver--the only minority member of the board, and the only one with significant transit experience--remained mysteriously in limbo last week, as Nickels and his staff pored over other candidates for the position, which was supposed to be filled by the end of 2004.

barnett@thestranger.com