News Tired of Footing the Bill for Nickels’s Campaign Stunts?
posted by on September 14 at 17:16 PM
“Operation Sobering Thought” cost $52,000 in police time; took up 900 police hours; and involved 40 officers.
This is a lot of money. But it raises a question for people like me who argue that we don’t need a license because we already (obviously) have laws on the books to bust wayward clubs.
The question is: Do I want us to spend that kind of dough enforcing those laws when the SPD has other pressing needs? My answer is no.
Because I don’t think we need to. The reason “Operation Sobering Thought” was so expensive is because it was a show. A show for political purposes.
But you don’t need to put on a $52,000 show to stop liquor violations. As the SPD acknowledged to me when I asked why they didn’t arrest the people on the spot instead of waiting three weeks: “That would have tipped our hand.”
In other words, the bad behavior would have stopped. Indeed, they didn’t need to continue with such an elaborate operation. They could have arrested the offender right there, thwarted the behavior and called it a day.
Meanwhile, the liquor control board can fine clubs and revoke licenses. So, I don’t think the city has to spend a ton of money enforcing the rules anyway.
So, I’ll throw the question back at the gung-ho Mayor’s office: If club security is such a burning issue for you, are you willing to prioritize the money that way? How are you going to enforce a special city license? With expensive stings? Or are you just going to do low-profile enforcement like the liquor board already does? If so, what’s the point of the special license?
And if you’re not willing to spend that kind of money, then shut up about the license.
Conspiracy theory alert:
OK, one of the biggest sources of revenue for shitty politicos is road building and maintenance.
Seattle city limits is notoriously pro bike and pedestrian and sock of shelling out money for roads.
Strategy::
Create a more moderate to right, car friednly voting base within city limits.
Tactic:
Develop condos and townhomes while easing out low rent housing to outskirts of town. Attract the desired voter demographic by making city living more family safe by pushing clubs to north and south corridors of town.
I know, it's nuts right. This haws nothing to do with changing the face of our voter districts. It's just some weird moral issue the mayor's got his teeth sunk into, right?
I don't think it's voting districts, as much as it is the whole development thing in general.
Developers have got a lot of money for politicos. I don't think they probably care who lives down there as long as they can afford to pay the asking price for the condos. Of course, it turns out that the people who can afford to pay that are the sort of folks @1 describes.
The license would be a very powerful tool for the mayor to wield in making sure that nightclubs don't interfere with sale of condos and other development.
If you are a developer, you love nightlife as a gentrification tool that draws the artistic and creative types into a neighborhood, because they are the ones that make it sexy for everyone else. But as we're starting to see, the fantasy of urban living and its reality don't always mesh up in people's minds. They loved visiting Belltown and being near all the action, but it never occurred to them that if you live there, the action lives there too, and you can't conveniently turn it off to suit your own individual needs.
That's a problem for condo developers. So when nightlife outlives its usefulness in a given area, you'd love to have the ability to kill it as efficiently as possible.
On that score, the license would be a real windfall. You'd eliminate a bunch of procedural process. You'd need much less of a paper trail. And you really only need to deal with one dude (the mayor), instead of the entire council or the liquor board.
That's a good service that people would pay for, in the form of contributions, etc.
If I'm a city politician, it's all about maintaining and increasing the city's property tax base. This is really what the density push is about. Seattle is one of the few metro areas where the tax base inside the city meets or exceeds the tax base outside the city limits.
That's huge on many levels. It's also what maintains the city government as a viable power center in the region. Those folks don't want us to become like L.A., where there really is no power center anymore, and tax base sprawls across a huge region. Just read "City of Quartz" by Mike Davis. It'll all be clear when you are done.
The mistake I think they are making here is in appreciating the role that the city's culture base plays in this whole equation and how it is a really under appreciated engine driving a lot of growth.
If you are too aggressive in killing it, or you try to push it off to the margins too much, you end up sapping all the energy out of a neighborhood.
Part of what gives urban living its energy is the friction of different people and things bumping up against each other. But that's a delicate mix. Too much chaos is obviously not so great for anyone. But I hope we don't go too far in the other direction and suck all of the cultural life out of the downtown core.
No. Sucky night clubs caught red-handed. Don't care. Regulate.
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