The Daily Weekly is best experienced as a daily newsletter, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Sign up now.
Bound for Scrap The decommissioned USS Independence passed by Seattle midday Saturday on its final mission, from Bremerton and onward north through Puget Sound waters. It was the first leg of a long journey that will take the 60,000-ton super carrier around the tip of South America and eventually on to a scrapyard in Brownsville, Texas, where it will be dismantled at a cost of $6 million. This would be a great metaphor for the larger dismantling of the military-industrial complex, wouldn’t it? Oh well. West Seattle Blog has photos.
The End? As any Olympia-watcher knows, if it hasn’t made it out of committee yet, it’s not likely to. This is what has some proponents of the state’s film industry concerned, since neither of the bills that would extend the state’s modest film incentive has escaped committee. As The Seattle Globalist reports, the $3.5 million incentive, which is used both to support local filmmakers and to attract productions to the state, is due to expire in June. A lapse in the incentive in 2011 resulted in numerous industry defections to Portland and Los Angeles, sources say. An outright end to the program would no doubt mean more losses and less Seattle on the silver screen.
The Long and Widening Road Earth continues to move on the downtown transit front. But while most of the attention has been focused underground, where Bertha is in the homestretch of her two-mile dig, there is plenty of action happening above ground as well. As C Is for Crank reports, the Alliance for Pioneer Square recently settled its lawsuit with the city, county, and state over the width of the roadway that will be turning the waterfront into a massive live-action Frogger game. In short, the Alliance will stop complaining about the planned 102-foot-wide surface highway and, in exchange, the city will narrow the lanes to 79 feet after other transit modes come online in or around 2033. It was a long battle that started more than a decade ago. Erica C. Barnett has the full story.
Town Halls Are the New Brunch The surge in national political engagement appears to have trickled down to state government, as constituents filled up the Seattle First Baptist Church on Saturday to question the legislators of the 43rd District. According to the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, organizers claimed it was the largest town hall yet for the district. The people’s concerns? “public education funding, health care, housing and the homeless, the environment, the death penalty and use of deadly force by police officers.” Read the full report here.
Also … Today the King County Council will vote on whether to appoint an independent entity to oversee the investigation of the West Point plant disaster. Meanwhile, the microbes are in trouble! … Oh, and Dino Rossi is still making things up.
