1) Ask and you shall receive: Last week, PubliCola wished for more information about elusive King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison’s views on county issues. (Hutchison, a former KIRO anchor, is a conservative former board member of the creationist Discovery Institute). Voila: Andrew Villeneuve at the Northwest Progressive Institute delivered this weekend, with a transcript of Hutchison’s remarks at last Friday’s Eastside Candidates Forum in North Bend.
Asked what she would do about the Critical Areas Ordinance, which was put in place to limit suburban development in rural areas, Hutchison called it a “classic example” of the county being “arrogant and disdainful [and] arbitrary” and said she would work to “make sure that property rights are restored.” Hutchison also said she’d support dissolving the region’s transit agencies and putting them under a single state-created authority. And she claimed, inaccurately, that the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices had been cut more dramatically than other county departments in this year’s round of budget cuts (in fact, health and human services bore the brunt of the cuts).
2) City council candidate David Miller told PubliCola last week that he is “not a NIMBY” (“not in my backyard”), adding that he supported density in urban villages and didn’t oppose increasing density in neighborhoods. “The issue isn’t actually density, it’s concurrency”—things like sidewalks, transit, and parks that should come along with new development, he said.
But two letters he sent last year—one about urban development in general, the other about the Northgate upzone—bely that claim. In the letter about urban development, Miller suggested that the city charge stiff fees for developers who want to build inside the city, to mitigate their impact on the city’s growth management plans. The idea that density is bad for the environment is a pretty standard NIMBY canard: In fact, in-city development actually helps growth management, because it’s far better for the environment than the alternative, suburban sprawl.
In the second letter, Miller wrote that “there is no reason to conclude that rezones are needed” in Northgate, and that allowing more people to live there could “result in density increases that are inconsistent with the city comprehesive plan” and the Northgate neighborhood plan. The city has targeted Northgate as one of its biggest urban centers—if density isn’t appropriate there, it’s hard to see where it would be.
3) Like pretty much everyone running for office, City Council member Richard Conlin marched in yesterday’s Pride Parade. Unlike most candidates, though, he brought gifts—reusable grocery bags filled with peas and cherries (apparently some sort of bawdy joke?) and emblazoned with a cartoon of Conlin (literally, a caricature of himself) on a bike.
4) Morning Fizz hopes Conlin bring extras to tonight’s party to support the Green Bag Campaign, which is pushing for a 20-cent fee on disposable grocery bags, at Western Bridge (3412 Fourth Ave. South) from 5:30 to 7pm.
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