It begins:

When you've fought every day for 10 years to turn a map you and a friend drew at a kitchen table into a $2 billion transit agency, and volunteered and done strategy for two winning underdog city council campaigns, and then run for city council yourself and nearly made it—to say nothing of half a dozen city and county ballot initiatives you've run, the first of which was called the region's biggest political upheaval of the decade on the cover of the Sunday New York Times—and in the end you lost most of your battles against WaMu or Paul Allen or the state or the Seahawks or the Mariners and had the gain sucked out of those battles you won, you know a couple things, or more precisely one thing: You know that the fix is usually in.

And you get pretty good at calling races...

Skipping ahead a few paragraphs:

It was painful to watch McGinn campaigning, because his agenda was exactly the one I fronted when I ran for city council in 2001 (plus consultants and savvy calculation). I hung back at the McGinn event [I helped organize], moved chairs, dimmed the lights when asked, ate sitting down, drank heavily. The candidate and I found ourselves going for the red beans and rice at the same time—we had never met before—and he recognized me, grinned broadly, and shook my hand. He said, "You've been through all this" or "You kind of laid the template for this" or "You helped us get here"—I would like to remember what exactly, but I could barely concentrate on what he was saying. I kept thinking about energy and idealism and hope and young hearts being thrown against this immovable thing. Wasted time. I could barely speak. He was nice. He was going to lose.

But there were things going on that I did not see.

The essay also touches on Seattle in the 1990s, the death of the monorail, Seattle's faux-environmentalism, how power is structured in this city, Richard Conlin's "deck-chair-rearranging legislation," grassroots democracy, Facebook, the unlikely new insiders at City Hall, and more. The whole thing is HERE.

The All City Coffee in Pioneer Square...

This happened about a decade ago: I'm in a Greenlake bar with a lady friend—let's call her Petra. Petra is American, has attended the best American schools, traveled all over the world, and speaks French. We are drunk and saying one drunk thing after another. These are the good times. All of sudden, a group of African men (four or so) walk into the establishment and order drinks from the bar. They are laughing and speaking in a strange language. Petra, who is white, turns to me and says: "Why do African men have the worst taste in shoes? Even in Paris, I noticed this. African men completely crash when it comes to choosing shoes." I look at the shoes of the African men at the bar—indeed, they are all wearing ugly shoes (over-designed with an Italian name). I look at my own shoes—they are hardly better (my mother bought them for me in a Gaborone store that claimed to have the latest from Rome—"This is my eldest son, make him look good, sissy").

This happened a few days ago: I'm sitting in All City Coffee in Pioneer Square. The sun is streaming through the windows, trains are exiting and entering the tunnel, a very black African walks into the cafe—Africans cannot miss other Africans in this outpost of the western world. Even now, after all of this time between the present and Petra, I want to see what kind of shoes the African is wearing—they turn out to be pretty handsome. Is this a sign of progress? African men are finally realizing that gaudy shoes with Italian names are not the keys to success? Or is this one an anomaly? The African ordered a cup of something complex.

The Quality Inn near the Seattle Center...
This has to be one of the ugliest hotels in the city, which is appropriate because the reason why I'm here is for a public meeting concerning the unpleasant (and unfinished) business of Hanford's radioactive mess. State officials are talking to citizens. The citizens are getting hot; the state officials are maintaining their cool. I notice the carpet.

Southbound on the viaduct...
Someone's beautiful ship has arrived on a beautiful day.

Via the Seattle Times:

The state's jobless rate edged up to a seasonally adjusted 9.3 percent in October, the Employment Security Department reported Tuesday. That's the same rate first reported for September, though after further analysis the September rate was revised down to 9.1 percent.

In the Seattle metro area, however, the unemployment rate jumped more than half a percentage point to 9.3 percent, bringing it in sync with the rest of the state for the first time since the downturn started.

Mayor-elect Mike McGinn lays out his vision, names his transition crew, and asks for your input on what to do next.

City Attorney-elect Pete Holmes sent a letter last Wednesday to the city's legal department, which currently reports to City Attorney Tom Carr, to assuage fears of widespread firing under the incoming Holmes administration. “No staffing changes will be made until I have had an opportunity to meet with each and every one of you to learn more about you and the jobs you perform,” Holmes wrote. (Full letter after the jump.)

But starting today, Holmes says he will begin meeting with the 150 lawyers and staff who prosecute in the Seattle Municipal Court and defend the city against lawsuits. On the campaign trail, Holmes said he would consider removing domestic-violence advocates from the city attorney’s office—to make their advice autonomous of prosecutors' agendas—and he bandied around the idea that a Mark Sidran-era lawyer had been there too long. "I was told all of them expected to lose their jobs if I were elected," he says. However, Holmes insists that he argued for “strengthening the independence of domestic-violence advocates, never decreasing their number.” He says, “There is only one person who will go for sure, and that is Tom."

But Holmes confirms some of Carr’s staff will be shown the door. “There will be departures, but I will not name them until I have met with them,” Holmes says. Potentially on the chopping block are the people who worked closely with the Carr in rejecting liquor licenses of upstanding businesses, cracking down on popular bars, and folks with so much as a pinky toe in Operation Sobering Thought—all Carr endeavors Holmes campaigned against. Holmes, says, “I have committed to meeting each and every one of them to learn what they do, and hear their suggestions for improvements before I make any changes.”

The meetings begin today in Holmes’s new transition office on the sixth floor of City Hall. Also on today’s agenda, Holmes will meet with Mayor-elect Mike McGinn and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg. They will discuss how to defend against an impending challenge to the city’s gun ban in parks and community centers, a challenge to losing federal stimulus money for work on Spokane Street, and ways the City Attorney’s office could emulate some of the structure at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office.

Holmes will announce his transition team after Thanksgiving and he will take office in January. While he won’t name any of the people who are getting fired before he takes office in January—“Nobody deserves that,” he says—some folks will fare better than others. Personally, I’d be cleaning out my desk if I were Tienney Milnor.

Mayor-elect Mike McGinn continues to beef up his outreach crew for his transition into City Hall. At a meeting on Friday, McGinn called in former city council member Heidi Wills, People’s Waterfront Coalition director Cary Moon, and Port Commissioner-Elect Rob Holland. Each are tasked with reaching out to their respective constituents and friends about how to build a better mayor's office. For example, Holland says, “He asked me reach out to the maritime community on his behalf."

Other recent additions to the transition outreach effort include Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute, Kim Cook, president of Local 925 in Washington State, and Joshua Curtis, executive director of Great City.

Meanwhile, David Postman, currently a spokesman for Vulcan who is assisting McGinn’s transition team, said Vulcan’s community outreach coordinator Phil Fuji has also joined the effort. Fuji used to work for the city and is providing consultation about city departments and utitlies.

McGinn plans to roll out a transition website later today—at the soonest—or later this week, Postman says.

After accounting for projects saved from the guillotine, the Seattle City Council had an awkward moment at its press briefing on the 2010 budget when council budget chair Jean Godden trumpeted her sacrifice of 10 days pay—and the 10 days pay of her staff—as a voluntary two-week furlough. Standing next to a bubblegum sow of a piggy bank, Godden was making a particularly generous gesture in the downtown library, which barely got back its funding. But what about the other council members, asked Seattle Times reporter Emily Heffter—would they also return some of their salary?

Indeed, it was probably time to finish. Council members, who make over $100,000 a year, can give back some of their salary, but they probably shouldn’t make their staffers—who make a fraction of that—find out they’re getting a pay cut by reading it in the paper. But if the council wants to bring it up, expect someone to ask the question. Right?

The meat of the press conference was about all the great stuff the council saved from the mayor’s clutches. Mayor Greg Nickels’s proposed budget would have maintained severe cuts to the library, but the council restored 12 branches of the Seattle library system to seven days a week and 60 hours a week. Nickels had proposed only six would go back to week-round service, many of the branches only staying open 35 hours a week. The council also provided $100,000 for homeless services for women, and $950,000 for three progressive anti-crime programs, Communities Uniting Rainier Beach (CURB), Get Off the Streets (GOTS), and Co-STAR, the Court Specialized Treatment and Access to Recovery Services.

"Every time we added something, we had to cut something," said Coucil Member Richard McIver. The council cut from the Office of Policy and Management—originally intended for the council and the mayor but usurped by Nickels—which will be folded in with the next mayor budget's with reduced staff. The council also cut two park rangers.

But the new budget also raises the city's revenue, Council Member Sally Clark pointed out after the press briefing. They restored funding to two parking enforcement officers that Nickels proposed cutting, added five more parking patrol officers—for a total of seven more meter maids next year—and increased the penalty for parking tickets by $4 a pop.

Mayor-elect Mike McGinn has announced that Liz Birkholz, a landscape architect and open-space advocate, will serve as his transition program manager. Darryl Smith, a Windermere Realtor and former city council candidate, and Kip Tokuda, head of the human service's family and youth division and a former 37th District Representative, will serve as the mayor's "transition facilitators" to oversee outreach strategy (I reported on that strategy yesterday).

Meanwhile, McGinn has tapped David Postman, the former chief political reporter for the Seattle Times and current spokesman for Vulcan, to serve as an advisor to the transition team. "I am helping out a little bit trying to give some advice where I can to streamline their operation," he says.

Postman wouldn't comment on rumors floating around town about other candidates for the transition staff or jobs at City Hall. "The mayor-elect is not going to be announcing his staff that way," he says. McGinn also won't announce his staff like other campaigns have. In the past, mayoral transition staff have held a circuses in front of the media, trotting out local political leaders and a bloated committee for a photo op, and then released a blizzard of press releases. "Mike’s not going to do that. He didn't run that kind of campaign, and he is not going to run that kind of transition," says Postman.

Obviously, Team McGinn has been inundated with calls and emails in the last few days. They ask that queries and requests be routed to the following folks:

To submit your resume for consideration in the new administration, contact April Thomas.

To request a piece of McGinn's schedule, email Jen Nance. (Good luck.)

To ask a general question about the transition, get your email in front of April Thomas.

Maybe the Seattle Times editorialist was just upset about A. Birch Steen's column this week.

On KUOW's Weekday this morning, Seattle Times columnist Joni Balter and a couple of callers wanted to know more about the Mercury Group, the quiet political consulting firm that just helped Mike McGinn win the mayor's race (and also helped Mike O'Brien take a city council seat).

As we wrote in this week's Stranger:

Go to the website of Seattle's Mercury Group, and you'll find very little except an address and phone number. The firm is quiet about itself, and its successes, but this year the outcomes of two local races spoke volumes about Mercury's skill at making winners out of relative unknowns.

One KUOW caller wondered: Is this the same Mercury Group that represents the NRA and has a headquarters in Virginia? Another caller wondered: Is this the same Mercury Group that helped conservative oilman T-Boone Pickens with his dreams of a giant Texas wind farm?

Behind it all was a basic curiosity: Who are these guys? And why haven't we ever heard of them before?

Some answers:

Seattle's Mercury Group is run by Seattleites Bill Broadhead and Julie McCoy, who have known Mike McGinn for a long time and worked with him on several campaigns—including his successful effort to defeat a statewide road-building initiative in 2007 and his successful effort to get the Seattle parks levy passed in 2008.

No, Broadhead and McCoy are not the owners of this Mercury Group (the one that's based in Virginia and works with the NRA). Yes, they do corporate work (for AT&T, for example) and they recently did some work helping T-Boone Pickens—with a web site for his wind farm initiative, not with his conservative political pursuits.

Yes, the Seattle Mercury Group generally shies away from calling attention to itself. (Which is why there's currently a sense of mystery about what it stands for.)

But in the end, when you look at the firm's size (about a dozen people working out of a Belltown office) and its list of political clients and campaigns (Ron Sims for governor, Heidi Wills for city council, Richard McIver for city council, Joe Biden for Senate, Beau Biden for Delaware Attorney General), you find nothing more sinister than a small local public relations firm with a political consultancy wing that's invested in getting liberal politicians elected.

Joni Balter on KUOW just now (in conversation with Eli Sanders), talking about the McGinn administration she anticipates. She went on: "Only the bike lanes will be paved in the next snowstorm. I mean cleared."

Joni Balter, Peter Callaghan, and I will be on KUOW's Weekday this morning, talking about the new mayor, the plodding way that Washington counts its ballots, the meaning of all the election results, the Ivar's billboard hoax, and other news of the week.

That's 94.9 FM starting at 10 a.m.

This morning, about 30 people representing labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and advocacy groups were given their marching orders—in the most egalitarian way marching orders can be given—in the mayoral transition offices on the 60th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower. Mayor-elect Mike McGinn asked the individuals, as community ambassadors, to go back to their respective constituencies and listen.

"We did not run a traditional campaign and we don't want to have a traditional transition," says Aaron Pickus, a staff member on McGinn's team.

The plan goes like this: They have to ask three questions (see below), write a summary on what they heard, and, at the end of this month, McGinn will hold three town halls (one in the north, one in the south, and one in the central city). In other words, this is a grassroots approach to the taking control of mayor's office. But this is no slapdash ship; the group members must email their one-page executive summaries by 8:00 a.m. on the 23rd. No faxes. These are the questions the McGinn administration wants answered:

1. How do we build the strongest possible team to achieve the policy objectives and values set forth?

2. How do we build public trust in the new administration?

3. What do you view as the incoming administration and the city’s greatest challenge — what should we do first out of the gate?

"We wanted to get the greatest possible amount of information from the broadest cross section of the city so we don’t have a traditional administration," Pickus says.

Of course, McGinn is still working on the more standard elements of a metamorphosis from underdog campaign to city hall's highest office—such as breakfasts with former mayors, finding key staff, forging allies with business leaders, and talking with elected officials—but these people are his base. "We want to feed the roots and we need your input," transition team staffer Liz Birkholz wrote in an email to the group this afternoon. The group's members included Dave Schmitz, president of the local grocery workers and service union; David Hiller, Advocacy Director of the Cascade Bicycle Club; Wyking Garrett, a Central District leader who ran in the mayoral primary; Adair Dammann, executive director of SEIU 925; and members of Great City and scores of other civic leaders.

I recommend you watch this video. While Mayor-elect Mike McGinn picks new drapes for city hall, he says, "We're not just going to talk to important elected officials, nor are we just going to talk to the same old people who advise new mayors about how things should work—we're going to talk to everybody."

The city council's budget committee, which includes every member of the council, voted today to eliminate a $25 fee on businesses for each employee who relies primarily on a single-occupant vehicle to commute to work. The tax became a political football in the mayor's race when Greg Nickels and other candidates used it as an anti-tax stump message; Mayor-elect Mike McGinn said he wanted to retain it for transportation funding. But considering that the average Seattle business has only paid about $90 a year in head taxes, it's a negligible—if not fabricated—political issue.

Originally proposed by Nickels before he opposed it, the head tax is designated for various transportation improvement projects. But it was best known as one of the revenue sources to fund bicycle and pedestrian improvements approved under the "Bridging the Gap" levy.

However, City Council President Richard Conlin, one of eight council members who supported its repeal, says that most of the head tax money went toward maintaining bridges—not to painting bike lanes and building new sidewalks. And, he adds, "We have parking taxes to fulfill promises in the Bridging the Gap levy."

Pinehurst organizer Renee Staton says, "In light of the recent election results and in light of the enormous budget shortfall, it seems shortsighted and plain poor stewardship for the council to continue on the path to repeal." She notes the city is facing $70 million budget shortfall.

The council will announce its final budget on November 19 and the full council will take a vote on November 23. After that, if people are worried about fewer bike and pedestrian improvements, Conlin says, "Look and see what we do."

I've mentioned before how much I love a Board on Geographic Names. I would like to mention it again now, seeing as the recent waterway-renaming decision of the Washington State Board on Geographic Names has just been unanimously endorsed by the mighty United States Board on Geographic Names:

The U.S. Board of Geographic Names approved the name Salish Sea today in a unanimous vote.

Make a note of it, people: the liquids formerly known as Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Georgia Strait are now the Salish Sea.

You got a problem with that? Talk to the Board.

Speaking on behalf of nine people who disagree—like, say, the Seattle City Council, which enjoys heated disagreements and divisive votes—is one hell of a job. This intrepid soul must issue press releases and field media requests on behalf of the entire council, no matter how fractured. It's a delicate dance. A dance that pays over $75,000 a year. But a dance that people don't want to do long, apparently.

Debra Carnes is the third defector in a year, after less than five months on the job. "It's challenging working for nine council members," says Carnes, "but that is not why I am leaving." Carnes says she couldn't pass up a job as a senior consultant at JayRay, a communications firm in Tacoma. "This was not my intention when I took the position," says Carnes, who will leave at the end of November. "I am sorry to go."

Before Carnes, George Howland held the job for two years before he left last fall to work for the Seattle Channel. Kimberley Reason left in June, although she was only supposed to hold the job temporarily. According to this nifty website on the earnings of public employees, the job paid Howland $75,127 in 2007.

There have been fourteen fires in the Greenwood neighborhood since June, Assistant Seattle Fire Chief A.D. Vickery told the crowd at a large community meeting at the Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church last night. Though city officials have yet to figure out whether they are dealing with one culprit or several, one thing is certain: none of these fires was accidental.

• Kaia Chessen

• Kaia Chessen

• Kaia Chessen