Now that the primary election is over, the Seattle City Council has returned to its usual ways of not getting things done. Earlier in the week, it was rejecting rent control yet again. Now, Axios-Seattle reports that for “the second time in three months, Seattle is considering a proposal to let the city attorney prosecute low-level drug crimes.”

That’s right, while the rest of the world can see the problems associated with allowing unfettered public drug use, in Seattle, that is not a big thing to city council incumbents (the majority of whom will thankfully be moving on to different jobs next year). However, Mayor Bruce Harrell, who doesn’t want to lose his job in 2025, has cobbled together a weak “new ordinance (which) would let the city prosecute drug possession and public use. But it also says police should generally only arrest someone for those crimes if that person ‘presents a threat of harm to others.’” You can read more about how virtually no one would get arrested under this new policy here… Axios-Seattle

The irony is probably lost on the people who lost their homes and livelihoods, but Capital Press writes about a U.S. Fish and Wildlife report on the Northwest owl situation, which features the sober conclusion that “unless wildlife managers intervene, spotted owls are likely to soon become too few to ever recover in Washington, even with other conservation actions, the report warns. ‘Barred owl competition is the greatest direct factor driving the current and continued population decline of the spotted owl and may limit the positive effects of other conservation actions in the near term.’”

For people who can remember the 1980s, the spotted owl used to be a very big thing for Seattle environmentalists since “Spotted owls have been federally protected since 1990 and on the state endangered species list since 1988.” However, as one local official noted, “restrictions on logging devastated timber towns in Oregon, Washington, and California and didn’t work,” and even though “Federal and state regulations have cut the amount of owl habitat lost to logging, (the) spotted owl population has dropped by nearly 75% at Mount Rainier and more than 80% in the Olympics and Cle Elum.” You can read how that leaves the feds deciding which owls to kill now here… Capital Press.

On the heels of the latest version of Washington’s owl wars comes news of the latest farmland fights in Skagit County.  This time it pits large farmers against … wedding planners, according to NW Newsradio, which reports how a “dispute over how farmland is used in Skagit County could put an end to agritourism.”

Lest you think this is of little concern to the rest of Washington, keep in mind that “agriculture, including livestock and dairy, is a $300M a year industry in Skagit County.” You can read more about how that could hurt small farmers who “must diversify using weddings, parties, and family picking events to make ends meet” here… NW Newsradio.

Shift is not sure what to make of the many excuses offered by a Yakima city spokesperson in this Apple Valley News report previewing upcoming budget cuts, but suffice it to say that it doesn’t appear any spokespeople are being cut from the budget while police and firefighters will be.  You can read more about the threat that because government can’t live without lots more tax dollars, and “if that means the community is not willing to increase taxes to support a higher level of service, we will have smaller government and will have fewer programs and services” here… Apple Valley News Now.

Buried deep in this typical story from Northwest Newsradio about liberal activists using whatever excuses they can to ban most homeless encampment sweeps is this simple statement of facts from one city bureaucrat which the activists ignore: there were “over 1,300 offers of shelter” to Seattle homeless, but just “206 enrollments into shelter were confirmed.” That means about 1 in 6 of the homeless offered shelter accepted the offer.

That simple statement reveals that there will never be enough “housing” available for all the homeless because some of them prefer the rules of the streets to any rules placed on them by a social worker offering shelter. You can read more about how that truth is playing out after another misguided judge has thrown a wrench into any of the city’s efforts to clean up its streets here… Northwest Newsradio.

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