Category: Councilmember Godden

[Originally published May 2012. Sadly, still as relevant today].

If there’s one thing that defines the Puget Sound region this spring, it’s that we are a well-armed and embattled people. As a result, too many of our citizens – too many of our young people –have been killed or wounded by guns.

On Monday, after a spate of gun incidents over the weekend, the score was one bystander killed, another wounded, four gang-led drive-by shootings and an armed robbery. The violent weekend fell only weeks after a 21-year old culinary student, an innocent bystander, was fatally shot in Pioneer Square.

Then on Wednesday, to Seattle’s horror, a mentally unstable individual took five lives, seemingly at random, left one victim fighting for his life … Continue Reading »

Dear Friends:

As we prepare to send another year off into history, it’s time to take stock of the Year That Was. For the City Council, as an institution, and for me, personally, it was an eventful year.

In January, I took on new committee assignments, graduating after four years as chair of the council’s Budget Committee and the tough job of keeping the city’s core services strong in lean times.

My new committee chairmanship involves oversight of Libraries, Utilities and Center. For short: L.U.C.  I also took on chairmanship of the Council’s Waterfront Committee, overseeing work on the Seawall and replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Oversight of these important aspects of city government had its challenges and rewards. Foremost among the successes … Continue Reading »

A bit of post-election news around Seattle is downright grim for those of us interested in public affairs.

KING-TV has cancelled “Up Front,” a weekly program hosted by Robert Mak. The 11-year-old show featured local journalists commenting on local news and events. The show was always informative, always controversial and always the topic of conversation in the halls of government.

Meanwhile, KCTS-TV, Seattle’s viewer-supported public TV station, has taken a similar step: canceling “KCTS Connects,” its weekly look at public affairs, hosted by Enrique Cerna and in its 13th year.

KING’s cancellation was blamed variously on the need to downsize and/or on the lack of advertising. The latter seems to fly in the face of the avalanche of ad revenues reaped by the … Continue Reading »

Monday’s torrential rains – two inches in six hours in some neighborhoods – left puddles throughout the city, but a boatload of heavy flooding in South Park. One such area at 14th and Concord (pictured), a low-lying basin in the business district, was a virtual lake, afloat with ill-advisedly parked cars, perhaps three feet deep in places, and stretching a quarter of a block.

The problem is caused when narrow drainage pipes are overrun. The neighborhood is a low-lying area (barely above sea level) along the Duwamish. The river bed once meandered across the plane. But during settlement, the Duwamish was “straightened.” When winter storms come, the waters tend to return to their original glacier-carved channels. And South Park’s … Continue Reading »

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd thinks the players in the Petraeus scandal are like Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Othello. A better analogy would be to another Shakespearean general: Coriolanus.

Shakespearean tragedies are defined by fatal character faults. MacBeth’s was envy; Othello’s was jealousy. Coriolanus, on the other hand, was driven by ambition. And that certainly seems to loom large in the Tragedy of Gen. David Petraeus: a man motivated, from the beginning, by ambition. He wowed them at West Point and climbed the social ladder by wedding the West Point Superintendent’s daughter. He climbed the ranks to earn his fourth star and embraced fame as a military idol.

He didn’t travel alone. He once arrived at a … Continue Reading »

Little heralded, but certainly worthy of notice: Proposition One, the measure to rebuild Seattle’s badly deteriorated seawall, overwhelmingly passed on Nov. 6.

That means that Seattle has been saved from millions of Gribbles, those tiny marine isopods that have been eating on our seawall, slowly turning the nearly 100-year-old barrier that holds back the waters of Elliott Bay into sawdust.

Initial returns showed a 77% “yes” vote citywide. This is extraordinary support for a bond issue, particularly in challenging economic times. In other words, voters agreed to tax themselves to pay for reconstruction of the vital structure over a 30 year period. Approval means that the owner of a median-priced home will pay approximately $59 a year to retire … Continue Reading »

No, I am not planning to cancel my subscription to the Seattle Times. As a former Times employee who is now an elected official (on the other side of the notebook, if you will), I have been asked countless times what I think of the Times’ decision to fund political ads.

I confess; I did think about it. “Why not cancel?” was my initial knee-jerk reaction to the Times’ corporate decision to run free ads for Rob McKenna and Referendum 74.

The Times’ editorial board endorsement of candidates and initiatives are time-honored practices. So are the editorials that the Times publishes on behalf of its endorsements. (I cheered the one backing R-74; groaned when I saw the McKenna editorial.) Most readers understand … Continue Reading »

On Sunday, many of y0u may have seen Danny Westneat’s column about the Pay-by-Phone program (the mayor’s proposal to allow the use of a cell phone application to pay for parking). While I am glad that Danny listens to the City Council’s budget deliberations, I am sorry that he did not have space to supply all the facts and that, nowhere else, did the Times run a story with some very pertinent details.

This left readers to decide the issue with incomplete facts and some cherry-picked quotes.

Under the mayor’s proposal, if a driver had not paid for the maximum time allowed (for example, only 90 minutes in a 2 hour zone), it would be possible to add up to the … Continue Reading »