The city council just appointed a new public-information officer, after the old PIO, former Seattle Weekly writer George Howland, moved three floors down to join the Seattle Channel in the basement of city hall.

Howland's replacement, Kimberly Reason, was a media relations VP at Macy's before joining the council. Although the position is ostensibly temporary—council president Richard Conlin wants to rethink what the job entails, possibly add another employee to deal with community outreach, and "go for more of a community relations sort of approach"—Howland was also a "temporary" hire, and he held the job for two years.

The decision to hire someone from the corporate communications world is unusual, especially in light of Mayor Greg Nickels's appointment of Robert Mak, a longtime reporter for KING 5 TV, at a salary of $160,000 in May. The last three people to serve as media directors for the council came from government or media backgrounds.

That said, the council's communications director has a hell of a job—serving as the public face for nine often-dickering council members who all want their own agendas front and center. Although Conlin says "it will continue to be that kind of a job," he says in the long run, he hopes the council can be "more systematic about the way we relate to the community." That sounds like a strategic goal to better position the council against the mayor; but I'm not sure hiring a former flack for the retail industry is the way to do it.

Last night, about 20 students jammed into a room on Seattle University Campus to make signs for tomorrow's Prop 8 protest. But some of the folks who claimed they would arrive never showed up. It turns out, they went to another sign-making party in North Seattle instead. And when I got home, a stack of anti-Prop 8 signs were on the floor of my living room. My straight house mates and friends had been making signs, too. Jeez! How many people are making signs? How big is this march gonna be?

It appears the same sort of netroots movement that catapulted Barack Obama to the vanguard of the Democratic Party and later helped him out-fundraise the right is driving an old-school, civil-rights protest in Seattle. The spark started last week when Seattle resident Amy Balliett launched Jointheimpact.com to promote a national day of action. Nine days later, the web site is announcing protests in over 100 cities.

That web site has extended its reach into social networks. SU senior Andy Swanson, wearing a "Marriage is so gay" t-shirt, had used the "Seattle Protest Against Proposition 8" Facebook group and several Seattle University email lists to promote last night's sign-making event. "This shows how a modern medium has promoted a movement from the bottom up," he says. "It has ignited a fire in people."

Moments before I started writing this post, I joined the Facebook group, which started just a few days ago. I was the 5,131th member. By the time I published this post, 30 minutes later, the group had 5,227 members.

It's not just kids with computers, either. With the help of Equal Rights Washington, a thriving marriage-equality nonprofit, the march organizers have netted an impressive lineup of speakers. They include: King County Executive Ron Sims, State Senator Ed Murray, State Senator Joe McDermott, Mayor Greg Nickels, State, Representative Jamie Pedersen, City Council Member Sally Clark, ERW Executive Director Connie Watts, and Pastor David Strong.

The Specifics: Saturday, November 15, 2008, festivities starting at 10:30 a.m., rally and speakers at noon in Volunteer Park. A March to Westlake will begin after the rally. Got pictures of your sign-making, marching and rallying? Upload 'em to the Stranger Flickr Pool.

Right on the heels of November 4's huge mass transit win, Sound Transit just got another piece of good news: The Federal Transit Administration has awarded the agency an $813 million grant, pending a 60-day period of congressional review. The grant will fully fund the extension of light rail from downtown through Capitol Hill and to the University of Washington.

OK, the city council hasn't quite hashed out next year's budget, but your window for you to make the pitch for them to save your awesome city-funded charity/traffic circle/P-Patch is rapidly drawing to a close. On Monday, the council's budget committee will discuss, make final changes to, and adopt next year's city budget—which, unlike the county's budget, will only undergo relatively minor cuts. I've written about some of the likely changes in the paper and on Slog. Here are a few more items that are still on the table.

Seattle Public Utilities, which is funded from utility revenues, not the city's general fund, will dramatically expand its Dumpster-free Alley program to as many as 15 neighborhoods, adding $1.3 million to the program next year. Meanwhile, a proposal by the Seattle Department of Transportation to reduce alley flushing throughout downtown and the International District by 80 percent—of which council staff wrote, “degradation of the sanitary environment is a likely outcome," is no longer on the table.

Speaking of sanitation, the council plans to replace its much-mocked Automatic Public Toilets (APTs) with pretty much the same thing they had before—expanded access to certain restrooms in ordinary public buildings in and around downtown. Because it costs more to keep restrooms open longer, the cost to maintain the non-automated toilets will actually be higher than what it cost to run the APTs. Just how much more is unclear; currently, the debate centers on how many facilities are really necessary (there were five APTs in or near downtown, but some argue that a multi-stall restroom serves the purpose of more than one APT), and how much the city should be willing to pay to run them (council member Tim Burgess wants to limit the cost to keep the restrooms open to $70,000 annually per facility). Because the toilets would primarily serve the homeless (on the presumption that nonhomeless people could, for example, just pop into Macy's), funding for the program would move from Seattle Public Utilities to the city's Human Services Department.

Nick Licata's ongoing effort to stop the mayor's $200 million Mercer expansion proposal probably won't get much traction in this year's budget process. Although Licata's proposal to hold up $30 million in property acquisitions for the project because the proposal is not fully funded, and because the mayor has not identified a funding source to fill the gap, has merit, it doesn't appear to have enough council support to keep the property buys from moving forward.

Licata may have slightly more support for his rental-housing inspection proposal, under which landlords would be charged $28 per unit per year to pay for mandatory inspections of rental housing by the city's Department of Planning and Development. Supporters say mandatory housing inspections will get around the problem of tenants afraid to complain to the city for fear of retaliation by their landlords; opponents say it's unfair to tax an entire industry because of a few bad apples. On Friday, Licata's proposal lost by a 5-3 vote (with Licata, inexplicably, off the dais during the one controversial item on the agenda). For Licata to raise the proposal again, one of the five votes against it must make a motion to reconsider it at Monday's budget meeting; of those five (Jean Godden, Richard McIver, Jan Drago, Bruce Harrell, and Tom Rasmussen), Rasmussen seems the most likely target for Licata's lobbying. (I have calls in to various council offices to find out who Licata's trying to flip.)

The City Attorney's office wants to implement a new system for archiving emails to and from city employees, but the has placed a temporary hold on most of the spending until City Attorney Tom Carr and the city's IT department can prove that the system is secure and doesn't allow outsiders to access city emails. However, according to assistant city attorney Suzanne Skinner, the changes shouldn't delay the implementation of the program. That's good news. Currently, the city's email system deletes all emails after several weeks; even if a city employee moves an email to a folder, the system deletes it six weeks later. Because all city emails are public documents, technically, no substantive email should ever be deleted. Another problem, Carr says, is that as soon as a city employee leaves the city, all of his or her records are deleted from the city's servers—a huge problem for city attorneys involved in ongoing litigation. "In litigation, particularly federal litigation, you have a duty to save all relevant documents," Carr says. The public, too, should have a right to access all public records, not just those that are less than six weeks old.