Posted Wed, Aug 25, 2:42 p.m.

Mayor Flashinthepan is more like it.

Posted Thu, Jul 29, 8:54 a.m.

Knute: I could agree with you at face value but this is a situation where McGinn has two faces, one of which you are choosing to ignore. While the cost overrun issue has merit, it is clear that this is a wedge issue that McGinn is surgically using to further ...

Posted Wed, Jul 28, 8:03 p.m.

Thank you Jean. McGinn is playing the same divisive game that turned California into such a political quagmire. We don't need this kind of cynical fear monger in this city.

Posted Thu, Jul 15, 12:15 p.m.

If the vote doesn't turn out the way you/he/she/I want, could we have another vote later? Or another if that one fails? McGinn was one of the big endorsers of a stakeholder process after the last grid-locked vote, he can't just keep asking for a new process each time his ...

Posted Thu, Jul 15, 7:32 a.m.

Frank Chopp has a backup plan for the bored tunnel, and it ain't pretty.

Posted Thu, Jun 24, 9:15 a.m.

Wells is still smoking his pipe, I see. Somehow he thinks that McGinn will make his cut and cover tunnel the replacement for the bored tunnel plan. Although I can understand his rationale for the C&C;, I absolutely cannot see how he can be so deluded to think that McGinn ...

Posted Thu, May 6, 3:21 p.m.

It is the norm for failed leaders to start wars to deflect from their own weaknesses. Case in point.

Posted Thu, Feb 25, 1:36 p.m.

Ouch. This guy is dangerous. We need a reboot at City Hall.

Posted Thu, Feb 11, 9 a.m.

David, you underestimate to what degree McGinn is an ideologue. Comparing him to Obama is an insult to our President, who was and continues to be a pragmatist.

Posted Mon, Jan 25, 9:46 a.m.

Haiti earthquake: Jan 12th. McGinn announcement: Jan 14th Knee-jerk reaction (Patellar reflex): "Striking the tendon below the patella gives rise to a sudden extension of the leg, known as the knee-jerk." (Sir Michael Foster in his Text-book of physiology, 1877)

Posted Mon, Dec 28, 9 a.m.

Silly Cary. Her opposition to the one solution that works undermines the efforts of the community to turn the waterfront into the kind of place she claims she wants it to be.

Posted Thu, Nov 12, 8:43 a.m.

SDOT seems to get discussed a great deal, but I think that DPD is by far the most dysfunctional department. When you have both neighborhoods and developers saying the department is really screwed up, you should pay attention. We need a major bowel cleanse at City Hall. OPM is a ...

Posted Wed, Nov 11, 1:17 p.m.

"I told you so" Sorry, I had to say that, fellas. The dam was never in any great danger and the fix was nothing special. Routine. This whole fiasco was a big political stunt.

Posted Mon, Nov 9, 11:45 a.m.

Seriously Knute, McGinn as Lincoln? That is too much.

Posted Mon, Nov 2, 9:11 a.m.

I see McGinn differently. As an attorney who played the green card for his own benefit, he has dicredited much of the good and legitimate work that true progressives have done for this city. His followers tend to be cult-like people in search of a religion rather than a rational ...

Posted Fri, Oct 30, 10:50 p.m.

It is easy to trash the Mercer project, but the fact is that it will serve an area of the city that will be entirely redeveloped at a very high density. We need to invest in infrastructure, or we can kiss the future goodbye.

Posted Fri, Oct 30, 3:11 p.m.

I remember seeing a bunch of Eugene anarchists doing some serious damage to buildings during the Seattle WTO riots while us Seattle civil types just watched passively. Eugene is the hometown of radical action types but personally, I'm glad I'm a Seattleite.

Posted Wed, Oct 28, 9:46 a.m.

Good article, Knute. Both candidates are equally inexperienced and they respond to that inexperience in completely opposite ways. Mallahan often stumbles and admits he has lots to learn, while McGinn talks like he knows the answer to everything, despite some incredibly naive ideas on how he will save the city ...

Posted Mon, Oct 26, 8:09 p.m.

McGinn's projections of overruns might well be a self-fulfilling prophecy if he is elected, which is one more reason not to vote for him and to vote for someone with a can-do attitude instead.

Posted Tue, Oct 20, 1:47 p.m.

afreeman: I hope you aren't suggesting that we stop building jets and writing software, but I think you have a point. There is some kind of logic gap in how we do things, or at least a lack of common sense. However, I do think this tunnel is the most ...

Posted Tue, Oct 20, 1:10 p.m.

Knute: My perspective on McGinn's changing position on the bored tunnel is that before he was aggressively against the tunnel, and now he is passive aggressively against the tunnel. Culturally you could say that he has moved from his aggressive New York native roots to the passive aggressive traditions of ...

Posted Tue, Oct 20, 9:15 a.m.

Jan has it right. The obscure but suddenly now vocal Sightline Institute has a bunch of McGinn hacks in it. Read between the lines, this was a strategically timed release. The Great Northern (bored) tunnel was built by a few hundred burely men with pickaxes and wheelbarrows a century ago. ...

Posted Wed, Oct 14, 8:16 a.m.

"...he needs to resign from the race and join calls for the prosecution of the most evil of his supporters..." Douglas, I hope that other McGinn supporters aren't as extreme as you are. Mallahan has his faults, but he is just your basic Joe, when it comes down to it.

Posted Tue, Sep 29, 6:13 p.m.

So McGinn's gut is eggplant. Looks like one big eggplant.

Posted Fri, Sep 25, 8:22 a.m.

Sadly, I see nothing in McGinn beyond a green-washing, elitist and cynical attorney that he is. In his socially engineered world there are no jobs to sustain our city, just lots of useless toys that we can't pay for because we have no revenue. If he is elected McGinn will ...

Posted Mon, Sep 21, 12:44 p.m.

Ironically the tram in the photo goes to a major development that has sadly gone bankrupt. Not because of the tram, which was a good idea since this area of Portland is hard to access otherwise. Portland is a wonderful city, but I have to agree with some other posters ...

Posted Mon, Sep 21, 11:51 a.m.

I'm glad Grace wrote this article. The Mercer project has issues but I still haven't seen a better plan, and something needs to be done. As her sometimes mediocre performance on the job, most of the blame sits on the broad shoulders of her boss. The Nickels regime tried to ...

Posted Sat, Sep 19, 12:54 p.m.

So, let me get this straight. McGinn wants to dump cars on the surface, and then take away more of that surface to put light rail on it? What kind of voodoo transportation policy is this? His talents must be as an attorney, because I certainly don't see a planner ...

Posted Wed, Sep 16, 10:07 a.m.

The leader of the Grand Alliance decapitated? You are onto something David, but a little off in your historical analogy. The "Grand Alliance" suggests that Nickels was a Louis XIV figure, but I think a far better prototype is Louis XVI, who was indeed decapitated by the unwashed masses of ...

Posted Tue, Sep 15, 9:10 a.m.

I would encourage people to look at the list of Sally Clark's financial backers: http://www2.seattle.gov/ethics/searchlist/lists.asp?elcycle=el07a&hidRetrieve;=VIEW_EMPLOYERS&cbCampaign169;=ON The fox is guarding the henhouse.

Posted Wed, Sep 9, 9:22 a.m.

Mr. Wolfe suggests that planning can be accomplished in some kind of removed strategic framework, one that gets past the nitty gritty of grass roots neighborhood issues. When he talks about a "growing consensus among developers, environmentalists, and transportation planners", he has unwittingly touched upon a central reason that the ...

Posted Tue, Sep 1, 9:57 a.m.

"powerful political coalition of labor, greens, and developers" Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the developers's horses, And all the green's men, Couldn't labor Humpty together again. Greg Nickels forgot that his true constituents were the voters, and not powerful interest groups. When ...

Posted Wed, Aug 26, 4:37 p.m.

Well I'm glad that it is just a practical life-safety matter, Chris, and not partisan. Shame on me for thinking that your article was intended to panic the public at the start of a classic partisan face off in the non-partisan race for KC Exec. I know that would be ...

Posted Wed, Aug 26, 12:59 p.m.

Chris, the structural problem with the Hanson Dam simply moved from the "known unknown" category to the "known known" category, as Donald Rumsfeld would say. It is similar to the problems with some of the dams in New Orleans, we are lucky that it was identified in time. But the ...

Posted Wed, Aug 26, 9:46 a.m.

Vince, when you say things like the "Obama presidency won’t be doomed if" that suggests that it might be. Apocalyptic language that undoubtedly comes out of the "Great Recession", the mass hysteria that now grips us in the wake of the mass delusion of unlimited growth. The Green River situation ...

Posted Wed, Aug 26, 8:40 a.m.

Chris, methinks that you have contracted the mass hysteria virus. Apocalyptic visions often accompany troubled times, but popular delusions are to be resisted, be they of the negative or wishful kind. It could just as easily be a fresh wind as the stormy weather you predict. Let's just call it ...

Posted Tue, Aug 25, 9:19 a.m.

David, you completely lost me with the "public shyness" bit. The one thing that Nickels was not is shy, he was constantly putting himself in the middle of any public event he could. And he didn't just give the Great White Father Giving Out Trinkets speech, he stayed and talked ...

Posted Mon, Aug 24, 9:15 a.m.

Knute, I doubt that Nickels will go down in history as one of our better leaders. He got into office in large part because he was an effective and proven peer on KC Council, but once he got into an executive position as Mayor his pathological need to control became ...

Posted Fri, Aug 21, 7:06 a.m.

McGinn and Mallahan made it through the primary with negative campaigning against Mayor McCheese. With the bogeyman gone they will have to either shift into constructive dialogue, or start a good ol' Irish civil war. Neither is good at the former, so it is likely to be the latter.

Posted Thu, Aug 6, 6:55 p.m.

It is sad that Mike O'Brien continues to harp on a suface "solution" that would dump 110,000 additional cars into our downtown. That would destroy the quality of our city streets and very attraction of a high density urban environment. Precisely the kind of urban environment that we need to ...

Posted Thu, Aug 6, 12:29 p.m.

LiviaRyan: You could say this is a similar case. We rejected the two problematic options given to us in 2007, and now the bored tunnel came out as a smart "third way".

Posted Thu, Aug 6, 11:42 a.m.

Thank you Mr. Odland for well thought out article. The fact is that the tunnel solution is about as close to getting consensus as this city will ever achieve, and having funding from the state in place is something we just can't afford to lose.

Posted Wed, Jul 8, 9:19 a.m.

The philosophical issue with preservation in Seattle is that this city continues to see itself as a "new" or "future" city. Perhaps we need to change that mindset a little to recognize that the new and old are not contradictory, and that the city will benefit if we can figure ...

Posted Thu, Jun 18, 2:58 p.m.

The solution is to send Nickels off on his own fellowship. The poor boy never got any education other than that in the back alley of West Seattle High. And it is obvious that nobody - and I mean nobody - stole Mr. Big's lunch money. In fact Tim Ceis ...

Posted Wed, Jun 17, 12:03 p.m.

Elizabeth Campbell is for "retaining the capacity of the present Viaduct and Alaskan Way corridor", except of course for the minimum five years it will take to demolish and rebuild the mammoth structure. Five years of absolute hell where even the surface roadway will be completely closed. You've got to ...

Posted Wed, Jun 17, 8:04 a.m.

That poll is highly contrived. How many people would vote for McGinn if they knew that he supported tearing the viaduct down and replaceing it with... NOTHING? Our city streets, already overloaded, would get another 110,000 vehicles per day to deal with. Pedestrians, public transportation and bicycles would all be ...

Posted Wed, May 6, 8:42 a.m.

My prediction is that Hutchinson finishes first in the primary, with +30% of the votes (she has that hard right base, after all), and Dow Constantine squeaks in as second (with his growing "taste of a new generation" campaign grabbing younger voters). The primary will favor the two edges of ...

Posted Fri, Apr 24, 9:22 a.m.

The bored tunnel is a visionary concept, if practical solutions can be called visionary. As far as cost issue goes, that is a double-edged sword, since the cost of completely removing our western transportation spine would have been a financial disaster outweighing the cost of the tunnel by an order ...

Posted Mon, Feb 16, 4:50 p.m.

"The best hard-rock boring machine will become gunked-up to a standstill if it is surprised by a section of sand or clay." Matt is confused, there isn't any hard rock under Seattle - the boring machine will be the kind used for the glacial till that we have here. The ...

Posted Fri, Feb 6, 11:47 a.m.

O'Brian would be better served to get some environmental training instead of grandstanding, this is the ideologue who wants to unleash 110,000 cars onto the surface streets of our city. Ultimately he is little more than another attorney wolf interested in getting to power, even if he is dressed in ...

Posted Wed, Feb 4, 3:03 p.m.

I'm not so sure that a caretaker is a good idea for Metro, although I agree with most of the sentiments expressed by David. A caretaker is defacto a lame duck, which means little will get done during that period, and Metro needs some good leadership. It is a bloated ...

Posted Fri, Jan 16, 10:54 a.m.

Jan deserves some credit for the bored tunnel solution, no question, but it wasn't really any kind of coordinated plan on her (or anybody else's) part. This is evident in how the bored tunnel option was dealt with by the DOT project team. It was reluctantly studied, never properly developed, ...

Posted Thu, Dec 11, 8:53 a.m.

The compromise is probably the only way out of the impasse being created by misguided surface ideologues and the backward-thinking elevated supporters. Neither of these two bookends are viable. An elevated highway simply shouldn't be allowed in such a precious piece of urban land, while surface options would turn our ...