u/LOOKITSADAM

The move comes just as the Sound Transit board is poised to push the 4 Line, which will run between South Kirkland and Central Issaquah, to 2050. That represents a six-year delay compared to the current timeline, or a nine-year delay compared to the timeline presented to voters in 2016.

The agency's latest estimates put the 4 Line's cost around $6 billion, a range of $5.6 to $6.3 billion to be exact, at least before cost-saving measures are applied.

~ Nine years late, six billion dollars, and Issaquah is the one celebrating.

The ALA's annual "State of the Air" report ranked the Seattle-Tacoma area 8th worst nationally for short-term particle pollution.

Exposure to smog and fine-particle pollution can harm lung function and contribute to diseases including strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, the group says.

~ Wildfire smoke is the driver and it's getting worse. Pretending otherwise is not a policy. Guess what's driving the wildfire smoke.

Later that year, the teacher resigned. Not long after, he voluntarily gave up his K-12 teaching license. That decision stopped further investigation and the gears of oversight meant to provide transparency about problem teachers.

And the teacher soon got a faculty job at a nearby community college.

~ Resign during the investigation. Surrender the license. Take the next job. The state database stays clean.

"This is a policy disagreement that's dressed up as a civil complaint," said William McGinty, of the state attorney general's office.

The law allows the state to hold superintendents accountable and withhold school funding for violations. The current policy from the Washington State School Directors' Association holds that school employees should ask students how to identify them when communicating with the students' parents, as revealing their transition could be "very dangerous."

~ Court said no. The campaign to repeal it is already on the November ballot. Read the model policy first.

All told, the program has seen $8 million of cuts in less than two years. In April, the DNR announced that four campgrounds would fully close for the season, and a handful of others will see reduced seasons this year.

Despite the hard work of his small but mighty crew, Leach acknowledged campers and hikers may notice some differences this season, like less trail maintenance and smellier bathrooms.

~ Recreation funding cut, Conservation Corps cut, gas tax revenue projected to drop. What's left over is called "grace."

The 21st dead gray whale to be discovered along the Washington coast in 2026 was recorded along the shores of Willapa Bay. It was the third straight day of a dead gray whale sighting, as one washed ashore on Whidbey Island on May 13 and another was found in Moclips a day later. The leading cause of the gray whale deaths appears to be starvation.

"One of the characteristics has been lots of very malnourished whales, and it really cuts to what we think is at the heart of a crisis the gray whale population is facing." - John Calambokidis, senior research biologist at Cascadia Research Collective

~ Twenty-one carcasses on Washington beaches by mid-May, and starvation is the leading verdict. That is not a normal ecosystem.

On Oct. 15, the board concluded that reasonable cause existed that Simmons violated the Ethics Act. The investigation also highlighted issues around $1.35 million in grant funds secured by Simmons in the 2024 supplemental budget. The only qualifying subcontractor was the Equity in Education Coalition.

Simmons was employed as the coalition's part-time director of strategy from December 2023 through Jan. 10, 2025, then an additional three months as an independent contractor.

~ One qualifying subcontractor, one employer, one coincidence too many.

Layoffs at a Starbucks support center in Seattle will impact 252 corporate jobs, including a number of vice presidents, directors and senior managers, according to a new state filing. The affected roles announced Monday skew toward mid-to-senior corporate positions, with nine vice presidents listed, directors across many functions, senior managers, and senior-level specialists and analysts throughout.

Starbucks is shuttering select regional support offices in Atlanta, Burbank, Chicago and Dallas while maintaining its Seattle headquarters and offices in New York, Toronto and Coral Gables, Fla.

~ Home office cuts 252 while Nashville staffs up to 2,000. Headquarters is becoming a label, not a location.

Mayor Katie B. Wilson signed a settlement Tuesday that authorizes what a City Light manager says is by far the largest payout in American history from a utility to Indigenous tribes as part of a dam relicensing. The deal commits the utility to pay compensation of about $1.35 billion to the tribes, which will require significant increases in electricity rates.

City Light still refuses to concede that its dams block upriver salmon migration, even while committing hundreds of millions of dollars to truck salmon upstream and downstream around all three of them. The utility's agreement acknowledges the financial and cultural harm dams have done to the tribes, but it does not include a formal apology.

~ A century of "really green" branding, paid for by the tribes upstream. The bill just came due on your electric rate.

"Thousands of pregnant patients go to Providence facilities for prenatal visits that keep them and their pregnancies safe, but Providence denied its employees the opportunity to attend their own prenatal visits. Patients at Providence Swedish's First Hill campus can use a state-of-the-art facility to help new parents with breastfeeding, but Providence's own employees were denied adequate time and convenient, private spaces to express breast milk."

Employees also allegedly waited up to a month after requesting a pregnancy-related accommodation before getting a response from Providence.

~ Patients get the breast milk room. Staff get a written warning.

Most embarrassing for the city were the five self-cleaning toilets it placed in the middle of Occidental Park and in other neighborhoods in the early 2000s. Despite investing a million dollars apiece, reports said the bathrooms quickly became a hot spot for crime and the cleaning mechanism clogged with trash.

The Downtown Seattle Association's cleaning team deals with an average of 65 instances of human waste each week.

~ Five million on self-cleaning toilets that broke in months. Took 750,000 tourists arriving for the city to bother trying again.

Washington state was outpaced only by California in the number of tech workers laid off last year. More than 11,000 tech workers in Washington lost their jobs between May 2025 and April of this year, according to research from the workforce intelligence company Revelio Labs shared with KUOW.

So far this year, more than 4,000 workers in Washington's information sector have been laid off, according to state filings compiled by Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County. That's outpacing 2025 and 2024.

~ Second in the nation in cuts and the hiring freeze runs deeper. They're cutting now for AI productivity gains the data hasn't found yet.

A federal judge is weighing whether to toss redrawn political maps for Washington's Legislature that he approved two years ago, a move that state officials warn would take "a wrecking ball" to the upcoming primary, possibly forcing it to be rescheduled. This revamp shifted more than 300,000 people across 13 legislative districts in eastern and western Washington ahead of elections in 2024.

Stuart Holmes, Washington's election director, said in a declaration to the court this week that of the 294 people who filed last week to run for a legislative office, 67 are seeking seats in one of the districts with changed boundaries.

~ Eleven weeks to the primary and the map might not be the map.

Pierce Transit's funding rate has been stagnant since 2002, with its 0.6% sales tax rate well below peer agencies across the state. By comparison, Spokane Transit is funded by a 0.8% sales tax allocation, King County Metro has a 0.9% rate, and Community Transit in Snohomish County and Intercity Transit in Thurston County are both at 1.2%.

"In the last 24 years, while our funding rate has stayed the same, the cost to deliver and the demand for transit has outpaced funding," Pierce Transit CFO Christopher Schuler said.

~ Twenty-four years of flat funding while every peer agency caught up. Now Pierce voters get to clean it up.

Kubly has done his own rough estimate of when light rail could arrive in Ballard under Sound Transit's current deferral trajectory, and he puts the opening date in the late 2050s.

Truncating the SoDo-to-Ballard line at Seattle Center would cost 34,000 daily boardings according to agency modeling.

~ Voters approved Ballard rail in 2016. Their grandkids might ride it.

In 2016, when the Seattle Times editorial board helped block the earlier attempt at overhauling single family zoning, the median Seattle home price was just over $600,000. A decade later it's approaching $900,000. Seattle preserved single family zoning and the affordability Times columnists promised did not result.

The Seattle Times itself profited from selling exclusion: pages of real estate ads for "restricted neighborhoods" with racial covenants, Blue Ridge and View Ridge and Innis Arden, classifieds that ran the phrase "reasonable restrictions" into 1970.

~ A 50% home price jump in a decade is what "neighborhood character" actually cost.

Boeing reached an agreement with the Department of Justice to avoid criminal prosecution and has reached confidential settlements in dozens of lawsuits brought by the victims' families.

The Justice Department filed a fraud charge against Boeing in 2021, alleging the company intentionally misled safety regulators about its new software system on the Max.

~ Two civil trials. 346 deaths. DOJ dropped the criminal fraud charge. Confidential settlements closed the rest.

An audit of the Digital Navigator Program found the state Department of Commerce had a serious lack of oversight of contractors within the program and a failure to clearly define requirements that did not set up their grantees for success. The audit found that the responsibility for communication and oversight in this program was on the shoulders of one improperly trained employee at the department.

The loss has caused the decades-old nonprofit to let their entire staff go and has severely impacted their ability to provide services to the community.

~ Commerce wrote vague rules, never shared them with grantees, then refused payment for not meeting them. The audit said Commerce failed. Mission Africa paid the bill.

Only 14% of new officers and 16% of veteran officers had finished the mandatory 40 hours of continuing training as of last May, the most recent data analyzed by the State Auditor's Office shows. At the current rate, about half of all officers will not complete the required patrol tactics training by 2028, the audit states.

About 93% of Seattle police officers had completed the required patrol tactics training as of last year, department spokesperson Patrick Michaud told Axios. He did not specify how many officers had fully completed that requirement.

~ Voters passed I-940 in 2018 with a 2028 compliance window. The chiefs' response to the audit: maybe the data is undercounting us.

The group has tallied up 159 incidents in which they say Kruse engaged in "political advertising" for the initiatives, calculating their value at between $345,000 and $1.25 million based on estimated ad rates for Kruse's podcast and the reach of her social media posts.

Kruse's "unDivided" podcast is sponsored, in part, by Project 42, a Heywood-funded group that pays Kruse to cover certain topics.

~ The PDC will decide the legal question. The hedge-fund-funded influence operation is worth knowing about either way.