It's April Fool's Day, and still someone announces an apparently earnest plan [234K PDF] to find financing and a location for a $1 billion basketball and hockey arena, perhaps in SoDo on Pier 46. At least, it appears former Sonic "Downtown Freddie" Brown and his partners are earnest, because Mayor Greg Nickels simultaneously issued a statement that, between the lines, characterizes the concept of Emerald City Center, which would sport a retractable shell of a roof, as half baked and dead at conception:
Read this interesting story about the Seattle School Board. You'll find the new language of big-company management being spoken by the new boardmembers, all of whom promised to bring that perspective to the troubled district.
The four new members, Peter Maier (a consumer lawyer), Steve Sundquist (formerly with Russell Investment Group), Sherry Carr (finance manager at Boeing), and Harium Martin-Morris (also a Boeing executive), all ran on the same basic platform: it takes experience with big business to handle a huge budget like the School District's. This experienced team was cast in the role by an informal coalition of school activists, with some helpful guidance from the Mayor's office.
Okay, classify this as a pet peeve, but it bugs me when politicians, including Christine Gregoire, wave the bloody shirt of the Minnesota bridge collapse as an all-purpose rationale to boost infrastructure spending. Gregoire has done this often. She raised the specter of the Minnesota disaster as an argument in favor of Proposition 1 last fall; she raised it again to argue for a new toll bridge across the Columbia River, and yet again at a national governor's meeting in February. I have no quarrel with repairing or inspecting roads and bridges--please, let's do that. But the fact is, we still don't have the final word on what happened in Minnesota, so the lesson there is unclear.
The Metropolitan Opera's live telecasts to movie houses pass the test of two very demanding masterpieces, Britten's Peter Grimes and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
Tacoma's Cushman dam reduced parts of the Skokomish to a trickle years ago, and the time to repair the damage — to salmon habitat and to the Skokomish people — is now.
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