Vision! Pragmatism! Love it.

Could we just get someone to hold criminals accountable for their actions?

Bye stranger. Print is already gone and with “journalism” like this online, the nails are being pounded in the coffin. Hannah, you are a {f/t}ool. God speed ( look that up before you make any hateful,comments)

Support the Mayor and change.

The people who have taken over our parks and public spaces and are literally shitting on the people who pay for it are not “neighbors”. My neighbors treat the area with respect. These people are takers and addicts. They contribute nothing. They add no value to society, pay no taxes, and rely on the compassion of others for everything. They have destroyed compassion and replaced it with disdain. In the history of the world there has never been so much opportunity with so many leaches unwilling to work an honest day. Seriously, there are help wanted signs Everywhere! Walk any block. Jobs abound. The problem is enablement and tolerance of bad behavior. You Hannah are the problem.

The city spends over $!00MM per year from taken from (mind you regressive) its citizens to let 10,000 people shit all over them and their quality of life (do the math, and look up the king county numbers). Why? It’s not compassionate. It’s dumb. The other million people in the greater area are tired of the 10,000 who chose not to make a change. Give the money to the schools and then there is at least hope of change in a generation.

The city got and additional 1/4 of a Billion dollars taken from productive people in the city with the new tax ON TOP of the money already spent. You are rewarding shit and punishing positive. Feckless. Spineless and lacking backbone. It’s getting worse on every metric over the last 3 years as spending has increased on homelessness.

I wish everyone success and happiness in their lives. Sometimes that means being direct and telling truth. The stranger promotes fail.

I post this here In the hopes of changing a single person’s mind on this story.

@4: Bastards on Wall Street at least have the courtesy to not start fires from cooking meth, steal catalytic converters, trash parks, steal, rob, kill, etc.

"Harrell affirmed that he will make good on one of his chief duties as mayor and present a balanced budget. It’s harder than it sounds. Mayor Jenny Durkan fumbled the bag this year, and then Budget Chair Teresa Mosqueda brought the overly optimistic budget back down to earth."

Of course, that's not true at all:

"The City Budget Office makes three forecasts: baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic. During most of the COVID pandemic, it has been using the pessimistic forecast to guide spending, but this past August when the economy was showing strong signs of recovery it switched back to the baseline forecast. [...] If the city had continued to use the pessimistic forecast through the fall, Mayor Durkan’s proposed balanced budget would have had lower spending, and the November revised forecast would have come in much higher than August’s. But because the August revenue forecast was close to the mark, Mosqueda got no extra money to spread around. That means that if she and her colleagues want to spend more, they need to create new revenues, cut spending on other items, or both. Mosqueda’s complaint is not that the August revenue forecast was wrong; it’s that the forecast was very accurate when she wanted it to be wrong."
(https://sccinsight.com/2021/11/10/2022-budget-balancing-package-released/)

So, then-Mayor Durkan followed the City Budget Office's lead, producing a balanced budget to the baseline forecast. But the pessimistic forecast turned out to be correct, and so the then-Mayor and Council had to make up the (small) shortfall. Mosqueda's budget was just as "overly optimistic" as Durkan's, because it had followed exactly the same guidance as had Mayor Durkan's budget.

In reality, everyone was equally wrong (and for exactly the same underlying reason), but then-Mayor Durkan is always said to be wrong by the Stranger, and CM Mosqueda just gets a free pass because shut up, that's why.

this could have been much shorter.
state of the city: hey, at least we aren't Portland.

Finally.... A Law & Order Mayor, Centrist Democrat, Practical and Sees The Needs of the average, TAX PAYING Citizen and business folks of this town and not ....just placating the "liberal flavor of the day" and the needs of the Down & Outers.... what we used to call dipso, druggies, losers and lazy people.

Good. Seattle's direction toward shithole has been an embarrassment. I'm a progressive. What's been happening in Seattle has not been progress.

Fun to see the Stranger's writers still simply Not Getting It:

"Harrell made himself abundantly clear during his campaign: He is not an abolitionist."

Voters made that abundantly clear during his election: All abolitionist/defund candidates lost in massive, city-wide landslides.

"Harrell promised to make it easier for NextDoor types to complain to the city about encampments."

Again "NextDoor types" here stands as code for the doubleplus unallowed term, "voters."

shhh - there are NextDoor types living on Capitol Hill!

It's absolutely mind-boggling how some people, who enjoy the privilege of having regular, weekly or bi-weekly trash, compost and recycling pickup services, indoor plumbing, and walls to prevent their neighbors from seeing all the depraved (and in some cases certainly illegal) things they do in the privacy of their homes, absolutely freak the fuck out when people who don't have access to any of those services or amenities for some inexplicable reason still continue to generate trash, bodily waste, and do nasty things - but in public, because they literally don't have anywhere else to perform these entirely universal human activities.

It's almost as if they don't even think of the unhoused as even being humans at all, but some sort of Morlock-like subspecies entirely separate from whatever they consider themselves...

@16: So, can I eliminate my trash-hauling fees by simply dumping all of my trash in your yard? I mean, you have "the privilege of having regular, weekly or bi-weekly trash, compost and recycling pickup services," so you can't complain if I just decide not to pay, right? Or are you too hung up on your privilege?

Look, if you don't want my trash filling your yard, then you'll just have to move away.

@16: eye roll to the max

Translation: more taxes for everyone except the rich.

@16 -- people don't "enjoy the privilege" of having regular trash pickup, indoor plumbing, and walls where they live. They pay for those things, which provides the funding for these services. And most people pay for those things by being employed, and receiving compensation for their work.

Reality is in fact the opposite of what you say. The people who are privileged and entitled are those who think they should be able to not work, do drugs, and steal from others while making a public nuisance of themselves and receiving services for free that everybody else has to pay for.

Tbh I kinda get off reading all the whining in the comments. Some sort of schadenfreude thing. Too blessed to be stressed, myself. The chicken littles of Seattle used to frustrate me... Now I just think they are funny. Just imagining them fuming on the way to yoga class. A delight.

@6 yes! Let's be hopeful for Seattle's future and supportive of our elected representatives. Hannah aren't you tired of throwing rocks? Or is that just your whole deal? Your desire to find flaws is greater than your desire to spread optimism and hope for our city. And you know, people are tired, especially after the last two years. Give people something to be hopeful about and give the new Mayor the benefit of the doubt. We need to work together at this time.