Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn, building on his campaign branding as a “Netroots” candidate, has a Web page where citizens can suggest their own “Ideas for Seattle.”
I trust and hope McGinn knew what he was doing when he let his transition team set this up.
This has always been a city of dreamers and schemers, of utopian fantasies at greater or lesser war with one another.
You could make a whole book (and a few people have) of different people’s ways of closing Seattle’s most popular all-time conversational starting phrase, “What this town really needs is…”
I’ve heard, and spoken, that phrase all my adult life. The least imaginative versions invariably go that Seattle’s a total nowhere until it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s of San Francisco. But there have always also been more Seattle-appropriate (in civic-planning jargon, “site specific”) visions.
I like some of the ideas on the site, like replacing (instead of just scrapping) the Fun Forest, reducing Seattle’s stormwater pollution into Puget Sound, and micro P-patches in parking strips.
Of course, you know I’ve got my own ideas. Some of them I’ve shared here over the years.
So in the spirit of McGinn’s invite, here are a few of my own dreams and schemes for a brighter, shinier, sweller Seattle (admittedly, not all of these can or should be city government endeavors):
- Non-car (mostly street-level or elevated rail) transport between all in-town neighborhoods, regardless of what suburban voters vote for or against.
- An outdoor, all-ages concert venue running throughout the “dry season.”
- A real daily newspaper.
- A preserved and fixed-up Viaduct (or, if we really need a seawall project that a highway tunnel wouldn’t add much more cost to, repurposing part of the Viaduct as a park).
- Lidding more of I-5 and some of I-90 too.
- Legalized gambling, escorting, and public nudity. (Oh, and I suppose legalized toking as well, since so many seem to want it.)
- Year round sidewalk and street parties rotating around town.
- A municipal philosopher.
- A one-year trial ban on official use of the phrase “world class” within the city limits.
- Some men’s pro basketball games; those always used to be fun attractions.
