Post Up: Our Roundup of this Week’s Regional News

Welcome to our new weekly roundup of news from across the Puget Sound region. Not comprehensive, these are stories that caught our eye this week.

One theme runs through this past week: we’re starting to put a price on things we used to get for free. Curbside parking, cheap power for server farms, an old assumption that growth pays its own bills. They’re all becoming metered. And some of the foundational pillars of the region are also starting to shift: Starbucks outsourcing to Nashville. The Gates trust closing its Microsoft chapter, a new mayor rewriting the zoning code, and the city taking inventory of what it wants to keep. Here are some highlights:

The meter is running

The public contract about what one gets for being a resident here is shifting in small votes and large court fights. Seattle’s city council is weighing a one-year moratorium on new data centers, a local version of what’s become a national debate about AI companies’ appetite for power. This has turned into a civic question and not just a utility one. (GeekWire) A smaller version of this tension: Bellevue voted to stop giving away curbside parking downtown — a suburb conceding that free curb space was a subsidy it could no longer wanted to provide. (The Urbanist)

In Olympia, Post Alley’s Steve Murch wrote about the fight over Washington’s new millionaire’s tax, which is narrowing to a question the state Supreme Court keeps revisiting — is income “property”? — even as that court gained a new member, with Theo Angelis sworn in this week. The Court who will likely settle the question is changing its makeup. (Post Alley; The Seattle Times) And in Burien, the council repealed its own minimum-wage ordinance, sowing huge confusion among local businesses. Yes, affordability is surfacing at all levels of our civic contract. (B-Town Blog)

Who decides, who answers

Several stories this week turned on the machinery of accountability, and where the gears jam. Mayor Katie Wilson’s “Taller Denser Faster” zoning plan began filling in its details, with the council angling to buy in and shape it. The density argument Seattle has deferred for a decade is now being taken on in the mayor’s office. (The Urbanist) The Times’ watchdog desk reported that law enforcement and the state auditor are being pulled into a King County fraud probe, the kind of slow-burn accountability story that only a daily paper with resources can surface. (The Seattle Times)

Seattle’s civilian crisis responders are still barred from much of the clinical work they’re trained for, blocked by the police guild’s contract even as the CARE team doubles in size. (The Urbanist) And a year on, Washington’s flood aid is nearly tapped out, with a fast-approaching deadline and most victims still waiting. Yet another disfunction that follows the dismantling of federal agencies like FEMA that we have long depended on. (The Seattle Times)

Odds and Ends

• The Gates Foundation Trust sold its last shares of Microsoft — 7.7 million shares — a last divestiture of the legacy source of its prodigious wealth that transformed Northwest philanthropy. (GeekWire)
• KUOW asks a question every cleanup eventually faces: what to do with all the debris from Gas Works Park — the literal residue of an industrial past the city has spent fifty years romanticizing and turned into a park. (KUOW)
• A set of Ai Weiwei’s bronze zodiac heads has landed at the Olympic Sculpture Park. These have appeared in many cities around the US — a dissident’s meditation on looted heritage, parked on the waterfront in time for World Cup crowds. (KNKX)
• And another legacy landmark falls: the Boeing IMAX is officially dead, another civic-scale screen lost to the economics of how we watch now. (The Stranger)
• Finally, from Willapa Bay: a UW scientist may have handed oyster growers a way to fight off the burrowing ghost shrimp that wreck their beds. (The Seattle Times)

Sources

We monitored 25 Pacific Northwest publications for this report.

Major regional outlets

1. The Seattle Times — the Northwest’s paper of record; the largest newsroom and the only one with a standing watchdog/investigative desk.
2. KING 5 — the dominant local broadcast brand; first to most breaking regional news.
3. GeekWire — tech and business with national reach and deep Seattle roots; essential for the Amazon/Microsoft/startup beat.
4. KUOW — the region’s leading public-radio newsroom; original civic and accountability reporting.
5. Cascade PBS / Crosscut — nonprofit, coverage of politics, policy, and culture.
6. KNKX — public radio (NPR news plus jazz).
7. The Stranger — politics, music, film, and culture with a point of view.
8. MyNorthwest — KIRO Newsradio’s site.
9. Seattle Met — dining, arts, and culture.

Civic, policy & sector publications

10. The Urbanist — land use, housing, and transit policy; influential well beyond its size.
11. Post Alley
12. HeraldNet — Everett’s Daily Herald; the paper of record for Snohomish County.
13. Seattle Transit Blog — transit operations and planning.
14. Seattle Bike Blog — streets, cycling, and traffic-safety.

Community

15. The Seattle Medium — the largest Black-owned newspaper in the Pacific Northwest.
16. Converge Media — Black and urban community culture and journalism.
17. Seattle Gay News — LGBTQ community paper, publishing for 45+ years.
18. South Seattle Emerald — For the community. By the community. In the community.
19. West Seattle Blog — among the most respected neighborhood news sites in the country.
20. Capitol Hill Seattle — community news for the Capitol Hill.
21. Westside Seattle — Robinson Newspapers (Ballard, West Seattle, White Center).
22. Bellevue Reporter — Eastside coverage.
23. B-Town Blog — Burien and the south end.
24. Lynnwood Times — Lynnwood and south Snohomish County.
25. The JOLT — Olympia and Thurston County.

We aren’t collecting from publications with hard paywalls.