Excuse me for a second while I mount my soapbox…
My mayor kind of sucks. I voted for him. I was hopeful. That hope has now dwindled into remorse. While I am happy with the Transportation Master Plan (light rail & bike spending in particular), I am disgruntled over an entire neighborhood’s request for a safer street/speed enforcement/re-striping being ignored and requests for meetings never answered by even a junior staffer – 35th Ave SW has ceased to be a residential street and has become a defacto highway. The alley vacation brew-ha-ha with Whole Foods pisses me off as there has been an empty hole in the ground in West Seattle while contractors and landowners have been in and out of bankruptcy court for about four years. Now that the construction on the building that will house Whole Foods has started again, the mayor pulls this shit out of his hat. After all this time, seriously?! I want Whole Foods in my neighborhood. My property value wants Whole Foods in my neighborhood. Whole Foods is an “Anchor Store” and with its completion and this year’s opening of Trader Joe’s next door, that corner of West Seattle will blossom and the vacant car lots will be replaced by retail and apartments and coffee shops and something other than fenced off parking lots with grass sprouting from the cracks. In the asphalt.
The gvn buy-back this year turned into a fiasco with an open air market place under the I-5 when the program’s money ran out. The mayor’s push for gvn free zones in city businesses is mis-guided, leaving patrons and business owners at the mercy of someone who is intent on doing them harm – all the while public safety/police reform are arguably McGinn’s weakest issues. There has been two years of May-Day crazy with ineffective leadership, report after report of continued police misconduct, an un-needed delay in choosing a new police chief… A push to keep bars open later so that even more alcohol could be consumed – we need more drunk people out even later to keep Seattle safe… The proposal to fire 200+ much need city employees was just weird.
I don’t think he is the anti-Christ or the fourth horseman or Gozer, but I wouldn’t invite him to a BBQ at the house. I don’t see a shining replacement for him on the horizon that I can get behind and cheer for and pin my hopes to. For the record: the current mayor of Seattle kind of sucks and I am a little disgruntled about it.
-dismount soapbox-