Focus on Seattle
And no, we're not going to talk about rain...

I've been lowering my nose to the proverbial grindstone this week (well, something to that effect) and so haven't been trolling around for news as much. I've also been feeling, well, just a tad crispy. I guess all bloggers come around to this point. And with all the high-falutin' discussion of the unitary executive and finely nuanced debate on the legalities of NSA wiretapping (and the onslaught misinformation volleyed about by the RightWingNoiseMachine--see this ThinkProgress post for some good debunking), my brain is hurting and I need to do some rebooting. I've also got some thoughts about redesigning this blog and adding some interesting functionality. So things might be slow for this week and possibly next.

That said, there are some interesting things going on here in my hometown of Seattle, including the appointment of a new City Council member by the City Council--instead of a city-wide vote--after the unexpected retirement of one of its number back in December. The list of 100 applicants just got whittled down to 14, and was dubbed by one of the entrants as "Survivor: City Council." It gets narrowed down to 6 on January 23rd, but in the meantime the Seattle P-I has its own Survivor-like poll (with brief descriptions and links to resume PDFs) so readers can do their own voting off of contestants... er, candidates (the poll is in no way binding).

It's nice to see not too many of the regular faces that we tend to see from one council race to the next. Here are my top picks from the batch:

Stella Su-Li Chao
Chao has a lengthy resume of community involvement, environmental work, as a volunteer on housing and homeless issues and planning and development work, particularly in the Chinatown/International District. She has worked as an advocate for people with limited English. [ed note - I'm drawn to her because of her experience with low-income housing and homelessness]

Verlene Jones
Jones is a Union Cities Organizer for the King County Labor Council. She wants to uses her skills as an organizer, educator and community activist on the council to build a strong city government. Jones is the labor liaison for the Seattle NAACP chapter and was recently board president for the Church Council of Greater Seattle. [ed note - I like that she's been working on the Living Wage movement]

Gail Chiarello
Chiarello managed $10 million in grants and contracts while working as grants manager at the University of Washington's physics department. Before that, she was director of the mid-Atlantic Regional Human Genetics Network in Philadelphia. She has a master's degree in city and regional planning from the University of California-Berkeley. [ed note - with our recent voting down of a city-wide monorail project, we need some serious rethinking of our city mass transportation plan, which cannot rely only on the currently under construction light rail project]

There's also an interesting "green power" project (covered in the P-I) that's happening in the unincorporated area called White Center (which is just south of where I live in West Seattle), which has traditionally been more diverse (i.e., code for Hispanic and African American rather than the crusty white European-style bread of usually associated with Seattle) and a bit more ramshackle (i.e., see diversity note).

The King County Housing Authority last week placed solar-electric modules on a low-income housing complex's community center in White Center -- and more such "Green Power" projects are in the pipeline.

The modules, installed on the one-story career development center at 330-apartment Coronado Springs, are part of a Seattle City Light demonstration project, the Green Power program.

But the installation of modules that can convert solar power to electricity is also part of a broader housing authority commitment to improve White Center, housing officials said.
[...]
The past four years, the housing authority has spent more than $2 million weatherizing and repairing low-income housing in White Center. The repairs, like the solar panels, make buildings more energy-efficient and send an energy-conservation message to tenants and the public alike, city and county officials say.
[...]

"Rather than putting solar modules on individual residences where they wouldn't get much notice, we wanted to put them on public places where it would help inform the public," Brautigam said. "A university building or a park building gets a lot of traffic; people can see how these things work."

But there is another reason, Brautigam acknowledged. Although solar-electric costs are likely to come down over time, the savings currently are not high enough to impose the technology on residents.
[...]
"It's a premium, not a savings, which is why it's voluntary," Brautigam said.

Yet 20 individual Seattle City Light customers already have chosen to install solar-electric modules on their own roofs at their own expense.

And perhaps even more significant, 4,000 City Light customers have already decided to pay a slight increase on their utility bills -- ranging from $3 to $15 -- to help pay for the Green Power program.