This morning the City Council met to put the finishing touches on the 2009 budget. Let's start with the bad news...
As you might remember, the Cascade People's Center fate hinged on receiving $75K in city funding to get them through next year. At this point it looks like that the funding will not be coming through as no one from the City Council championed the Center's subsistence, despite the tireless efforts of CPC staff and supporters. This means it's on to Plan B which was preliminarily outlined in a previous post.
On a more upbeat note, the City Council voted 8-1 to expedite Two-Way Mercer by releasing $30M for design work and land purchases to begin next year—Nick Licata was the lone dissenter.
Previously, the City Council was going to require Nickels to come up with a detailed plan to close a funding gap, but instead this vote was made in a gambit to position the Mercer Project as a potential recipient of federal money under the Obama administration's stimulus package.
You can read more about the Mercer vote in the P-I. Here's my favorite part of the article:
Councilman Richard Conlin said he's not particularly concerned about criticisms that the Mercer plan will leave drivers stuck in traffic. South Lake Union is evolving into part of downtown, so Mercer should function as a downtown street, not an I-5 ramp, he said.
"Free flow of vehicles is sort of an oxymoron there," he said. "We're making a commitment to make this a neighborhood. Neighborhoods don't have freeways running through them."
