Knowing how to do my job is haaaaaaard. Fucking wankers. Districts suck.

Why don't we just ask the well-informed Seattle voters--all of whom vote for these measures, all of whom have comprehensive understandings of local government and public policy, and all of whom vote in an objective and rational manner--decide this stuff? We let them decide lots of other important things, like taxes, infrastructure changes, transit funding, and such like, so why not this as well? Actually, y'know, let's just get rid of the government and have voters make ALL of our decisions.

"Direct democracy" is a joke. It undermines the government, represents nothing except the special interest groups who mobilize for specific votes, assumes a level of understanding well-beyond the average voter (no one should be expected to understanding the complexities of public policy outside of those who implement public policy), and actively makes the jobs of our elected "representatives" way, way harder than they need to be by over-complicating every single governmental process. But, hey, Tim Eyman loves it, so it must be okay!

#1 Agreed way too hard. How about this jump into it city council members and figure some of this out yourself, you might learn something.

At least that money won't be wasted on another fucking trolley.

Heidi have you talked to them about how the plan to pay for all of this? I have heard that they are looking at raising the taxes on small businesses. Seems a little absurd to me considering that's a lot of small businesses are still trying to figure out how to pay for the increased wages that they have to pay their staffs since a lot of them have not raise their prices yet. Surprising that city Council would do that after we just increased minimum wage. Love to hear what you know.

Hooray for Districts, more people are engaging our elected officials on the issues and Council members now think it is in their best interest to be more responsive. The questions people should be blogging about is why is was not this way for the last hundred years.

@2 and @6, did you not get that this was not about 1) having district representation, or 2) who decides what? Read the article again.

They're doing this while ignoring the need for additional people in the departments that actually do things for the citizens (and contribute to the general fund).

The town, like it or not, is growing by leaps and bounds, but the budget office - which operates in some sort of political dream world, and for some strange reason thinks it knows what's best for the revenue-generating departments who's operations they only dimly understand - won't increase the number of "pockets" they are allowing to accommodate all this growth. Maybe when they're done "streamlining" IT and personnel, we'll see some "pockets" released, but my prediction is that the "streamlining" will turn into Empire Building, and that it is all just a way to further bilk the citizens by charging the revenue-generating departments fees for providing "services" to them that they previously did themselves (thus putting upward pressure on rates, while not providing for additional labor resources)

But as long as their nests are being feathered, all is well. After all, they'll need those additional staffers to handle complaints about lack of response from city departments.

Burgess' office by his own admission doesn't need more staffing, so in the interest of collegiality, I recommend that he give this fourth staffer to Herbold, Sawant or Juarez, who are getting shit done. Harrell is often a no show, so he may have two positions to offload to the more productive CMs.

Every once in a while I stop and look at our budget pie chart. It is nice to remember that the city spends more on admin than it does on public protection. In other words the city spends more our garbage like council aids than it does on police, fire departments, and hospitals. disgusting.

Sawant is public on almost every vote. She never misses a chance to grandstand. Where is she at to talk about government waste?

A lot of what council-members' staff are responsible for is constituent outreach and response, but with most council-members now representing districts rather than the whole city this part of the job should require less staff time rather than more.

Here's the difference - previously when a city agency fucked up (and boy, do they fuck up a lot) and complaining to them did no good, we'd beg members of Council and we'd be ignored.

Now when a city agency fucks up, we complain to our district councilmember and he (I'm in D4) actually responds, meet with us, and pressures the city agency into fixing their shit.

That's huge. However, the root problem - that our city agencies are so dysfunctional - isn't being addressed. It sure would be nice to fix that, so that we don't have to treat council like fleshy versions of FindItFixIt.