Does anyone know if the contract still applies in the case of a state takeover of the district? Because that seems problematic…

Districts are stupid. Two-thirds of the city council doesn't represent me.

Doug dear, I have to agree with you on districts. I was one of the people who thought it would be good, but I was wrong. It's been a joke.

As for Seattle Public Schools - It seems like every election season we have a school bond. I know they are going gangbusters replacing schools, but how can they be running a deficit? It sort of reminds me of the library system: Lots of fancy new buildings (like that ridiculous central library) but no money to keep them open.

Hadn't known about the "Homeless Megaplex" protests.

If you haven't gone down there during the Pandemic, the CID has been absolutely fucked by the Homeless Crisis (and the linked Opiate/Meth Crisis). There are encampments everywhere under and along I-5. I don't want to exaggerate, but it's like the Walking Dead down there: shambling drug addicts on every block, using and dealing in doorways, all day long, from the Light Rail Station up to Little Saigon. They were there before the Pandemic, and they're (usually) harmless, but never in these numbers. It's undeniably squalid.

It's probably wise to back off and do more engagement - despite the urgency of the need.

+1 to DOUG. @4. Using districts to determine City Council seats has always been a conservative ploy.

I volunteered against the last failed districts initiative prior to the one that finally succeeded. Back when I was volunteering, it was common knowledge that "district-ing" was a conservative ploy and that, if you cared about good governance, you were against it. The most recent initiative only succeeded because (A) they successfully played the faux-populism card of sticking it to "The Man" that is that the downtown business interests and (B) we lost our collective institutional memory that this was a Trojan horse intended to push back against progress.

If you want to understand why our City Council has been so terrible recently, election by districts has to be a big factor.

Anyway, I was coming on here to express my dismay at the damage left by Hurricane Ian, how its force is a direct result of climate change, how Florida is run by a bunch of climate deniers, and how now they're going to shamelessly demand that our federal tax dollars be spent on rebuilding everything there just so it can be knocked down again in a year or two. Am I wrong?

We really, really underestimate climate change because its impacts are just too terrible to imagine, but aren't we reaching the time when it's simply no longer economically feasible to inhabit vast parts of Florida? And what about Cuba? Cuba's its own country. Those people have nowhere else to go.

@12: Far more economically feasible to rebuild stronger. What do you suggest, a 21st century Trail of Tears?

And please, we can't possibly underestimate climate change since A) Climate alarmists hate to think that others are not as impassioned as they are and thus feel compelled to continuously sermonize, and B) mother nature lets us all know equally her modifications in real time by making us all live through it.

@ # 11 If City Council districts are a conservative ploy, then how have they resulted in the most progressive Council in our city's history? Without districts, we would not have Kshama Sawant, Tammy Morales or Teresa Mosqueda.

We've have been hearing mockery of the "climate alarmists" for going on thirty years now. You know whose predictions about the likely effects of climate change have been closest to accurate over that same period? Come on, I'll bet you can guess.

@14 I was expecting someone to make the very point you're making. In fact, I was going to preemptively address it in my original post and just had to stop writing. Two answers.

First, regardless of how council districts have worked out in reality, the shift to council districts was always been a big agenda item for the conservative forces in this city.

Second, I tend to believe that Kshama Sawant's presence on the City Council has redounded to the benefit of the conservative forces in this city and this region and that they're pretty happy to have her there. Moreover, I think those conservative forces will take an ineffective, putatively ultra-progressive City Council any day over an effective, pragmatically progressive City Council.

Of course, we have to keep in mind that Seattle is not the only major American city that is stagnating and regressing, just like the United States is not the only major Western economy experiencing high inflation, so there's only so much we can blame this city's woes on our City Council and its makeup.

@16: "No individual weather event, regardless of how unusual or severe it may be, should be thought of as the direct result of climate change."

This is such a legalistic parsing, it makes you wonder why the commenter feels compelled to make such a narrow and misleading point. The Gulf of Mexico is 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. That is jet fuel for hurricane severity, and it would be difficult to find a climatologist or a scientist in a related field who wouldn't say that Hurricane Ian's severity is not the result of climate change.

Is half our hemisphere going to need to be destroyed by one-off weather events before we decide that these weather events might be some additional motivation to do something about climate change?

Anyway, I'm sure I'm wasting my time here writing this response. Going down rabbit holes with climate deniers (who will then adamantly deny they are climate deniers) don't accomplish nuthin'.

@19: Just don't conflate "climate deniers" with the reasonable commentary expressed in @16 and @17.

@19 we can do something anout climate change without abandoning Florida. Following that logic all of the Caribbean and gulf coast would need to be abandoned as well not to mention Asian counties thay get hit by typhoons. We have new materials and techniques since many of these structures were built so we can rebuild better. That should not preclude other mitigation efforts though.

As for the districts, there are no conservatives politically in Seattle and the council has passed a slew of progressive taxes and policies so I’d hardly call them ineffectual. The fact they’ve mostly resulted in lowering the standard of living in Seattle is mostly a comment about progressive policies in general and not the council.

@22: "@19 we can do something anout climate change without abandoning Florida. Following that logic all of the Caribbean and gulf coast would need to be abandoned as well not to mention Asian counties thay get hit by typhoons."

I hope you're right. The "not only Florida" part was the point I was making @12: "And what about Cuba? Cuba's its own country. Those people have nowhere else to go."

@21 law enforcement supporters always bristle when we write about the police in the active voice (which is why your "neutral" suggestion reverts to the passive traditionally used by reporters). Note the source article has "police fired shots".

"Police open fire" implies that officers discharged weapons, without first being fired on, and hit no one. Which is exactly what happened. So I'd say it's pretty neutral.

But sure, you go with "shot fired by police" or "armed suspect causes police to operate firearms" or "bar plays host to unexpected use of force by Tacoma's finest" or whatever suits your agenda.

@11 I can not contradict that. I wouldn't know. Nor, am I well versed in how the district wide elections were carried out. But one thing that occurs to me is that the idea that we should prioritize racial groups such that the idea that a group might lose their voice, has never been so strong. What I mean is that at the time, city wide might have been acceptable. But now, if portrayed as minimizing the minority voice of people of color in the cd and rainier valley, most Seattleites would do anything they felt necessary to stop that, which I think is the one argument for district elections.

Ladder 13 (L13) at station 37 and Medic 26 (M26) at station 26 were added because of the closing of the West Seattle Bridge. Nothing to see here.

rpsf @25, good observation. I think this the best explanation of how the progressive perspective changed enough since the previous ballot measure's failure for this last one to succeed. And it's certainly a valid concern, even if I believe it gets outweighed by the cons.

Of course, my own observations here are academic. I can't imagine us ever going back to fully citywide City Council elections. That cat is out of the bag. If I recall correctly, we were always the weird exception in having citywide City Council elections to begin with.

Besides, our nation has so many flawed, failed, antidemocratic institutions across all levels of government. The fact we're electing City Council members the way everyone else does--that doesn't even rise to the level of flawed or failed.

The buildings aren't filling with homeless because all the low-hanging fruit probably already accepted shelter offers. Now all you have left are addicts and mentally ill, this isn't an "if you build it, they will come" type of situation wherein just because you have housing people are going to accept it. lol