A conversation with Seattle
Many parents, looking at tuition costs that resemble home mortgages, might want to punch these experts in the mouth. Is it really so hard to imagine that students from Washington’s less wealthy counties might hesitate at the prospect of, three months out of high school, signing on to a four-year hitch that will leave them $40,000 in debt? Continue reading Why Johnny Can’t Afford a Washington State College Degree
I’ve seen some strange arguments put in play myself. There are the people who wonder whether Seattle–the city that supported the Sonics from 1967 to 2008–can now afford to support “another” team, as if the previous 40 years didn’t exist. That’s a bit of a head-scratcher. There’s the concern about congestion in the stadium district–my god, congestion! Continue reading Top 5 Reasons Why the New “Sonics” Stadium is Safe for Seattle
Florida emailed Talton for more background, all featured in his Atlantic Cities post, but the upshot is this: “Today, Seattle provides a good example of the back-to-the-downtown trend that is reshaping cities across the United States as workers relocate to formerly neglected urban cores that offer transit, walkability, and central location.” Continue reading Richard Florida’s “Seattle Boomtown” Source? Seattle Times Columnist Jon Talton
Using data from Seattle’s department of transportation, the Times’ Justin Mayo has created a Tableau map of more than 1, 800 collisions involving a bicycle from 2007 to 2011. My own infographic skills are not up to dropping an overlay of Seattle’s bike lanes on this map, but glance back and forth and tell me if you see what I think I see. Continue reading Are Seattle Cyclists Colliding with City Policy?
“One thing is certain,” writes the Seattle Times editorial board, “the battle […] has raged too long.”
They are tired of “adding long months of delay to a critical project that some think already is a decade or so overdue.” Considering that “the freeway is almost at capacity at peak periods,” delay is too “costly in terms of in terms of time lost, higher construction costs and inconvenience to the public.” Continue reading Seattle Times: Unacceptable Delay is Unacceptable
The most absurd claim, though, is that Metro is “continually asking for more money,” as if the problem is not that Metro is continually getting less in the first place. “Voters have already given Metro two recent tax increases,” writes Ennis, “in 2000 and 2006.”
As Desmond points out, King County Metro’s financial struggles stem from 1999’s I-695, which left transit dependent solely on sales tax revenues. The 2000 “increase” supplied Metro with less money than it had lost. After the 2006 “increase,” and the recession, “Metro’s revenues dropped twice as much as Transit Now was supposed to raise.” Continue reading For Just a Nickel a Day, You Can Feed King County Metro
SB 5399 (from senators Tom, Litzow, Hill, Hobbs, King, Hargrove, Sheldon, Shin) instructs public schools to ensure “that teachers who do the best work are the ones who keep their jobs when budgets need to be cut, by basing reduction in force policies on the evaluations the legislature has outlined for measuring teacher performance.” Typically, the schools use a last-in-first-out policy, which is now construed to mean protection for teachers with seniority, rather than what it does, which is kick the last person off the bus who got on. Continue reading How Do You Grade Teachers and Principals?