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He's got even more authority now, thanks to a voter-approved initiative that provides for evaluations of public-agency performance. The state auditor is effecting change inside institutions like the Port of Seattle.
READ MORE | 3 COMMENTSSlate's architecture critic, Witold Rybczynski, has just put up a fascinating slide show essay on downtown libraries, including Seattle's. To read the essay is to sense all the strain as architects try to redefine large library spaces for an Internet Age. Rybczynski focuses on reading rooms, normally the grandest spaces in downtown libraries and perhaps the spaces most likely to be made obsolete by the impact of Google and Kindle. Some, like Nashville's evoke past grandeur. Others, like Denver's (by Michael Graves) are fairly cartoonish efforts to create monuments to reading and public gathering spaces. Seattle's, notes the author somewhat mistakenly, tries to do without such a room (actually it's way upstairs, and fairly grand). Here's what he says:
READ MORE | COMMENT NOWThe once mighty Forest Service has fallen on hard times in recent decades, ever since the downturn in the timber industry, from which much of its budget and clout derived, and it has been hit by accusations of shoddy science under the Bush administration. The latest chastening arrived this week: According to an agency memo released by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the Forest Service is quietly shelving an ambitious plan to restructure its operations, conceived as part of Bush administration efforts to outsource government functions to the private sector.
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