I was there at that raucous council meeting to repeal the vote, I signed an Open Letter from Tech Leaders Opposed to the Proposed Head Tax, and I was a volunteer signature gatherer and small donor ($275) to the repeal referendum effort. Why did the council vote 7–2 to repeal it, just a few…
Brandi Kruse at Q13 calls out the “Public Input” hoax, wherein the City Council and mayor’s office claim to seek public input, but usually this is done long after they’ve decided what to do. This approach has absolutely been the pattern with respect to: The Head Tax The selection of the city’s new Police Chief Safe…
The “Head Tax” isn’t the only major controversy in Seattle politics these days. Seattle City Council is forging ahead with plans for a publicly funded “safe injection” facility. I’m just getting up to speed on the discussion here, and wanted to pull together a post that summarizes where we’ve come from, what we know about such…
A vexing question at the center of the debate around homelessness policy is: where is the growth in Seattle’s homeless coming from? Specifically, to what extent is the growth due to locals losing their homes and being displaced vs. inbound growth from other regions of the US? Yes, I know it’s not entirely one or…
It’s going on three years since Seattle declared a homelessness crisis, but the homeless population in Seattle continues to rise. The amalgam of programs we’ve tried since 2015 hasn’t stemmed the growth in Seattle’s homeless counts; in fact, the numbers have actually accelerated, particularly of those living in vehicles. There is no shortage of recommendations…
I’ve been fairly vocal in my support of the repeal of the Head Tax on social networks like Nextdoor; the first step is to get a referendum on the ballot in November. I think giving the people a chance to repeal the Head Tax is the right idea. Our City Council has gone off the…
“I do not share the anti-business animus that I feel you are sponsoring…” Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, to Councilmember Kshama Sawant For some time now it’s been rumored that Kshama Sawant was allowing city resources to be used to print out posters and signs for her various causes. It was good to see Councilmember Sally Bagshaw call…
Hello, Seattle! I’ve just set up this blog. I wanted a spot to put various thoughts out there. I expect the topics to be varied. Things that interest me: making Seattle better, entrepreneurship, volunteering, technology/software, fatherhood (and more broadly the often undersold importance of fathers, as well as parenting more broadly), data analysis, machine learning,…
The Ballard Town Hall meeting on May 2nd 2018 may well be looked back upon as a sea-change moment for the city of Seattle. Many Seattleites like me have grown increasingly fed up with Seattle’s approach to homelessness, increasing taxation, lax law enforcement and general fiscal mismanagement at the City Council. The Ballard Town Hall…
King County’s Restaurant Inspection Grades, which is based upon the average of red-card violations in the past four inspections I’m exploring the Python stack for data analysis and machine learning. I know I’m late to the party, but have only recently discovered the impressive Jupyter Notebook (formerly IPython) data analysis platform and community. It makes…
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