My grandparent’s place is on the market. We’ve had 4 offers on it, all of which fell through. It’s a tough market right now. I get that. But I’m a little peeved at the behavior of one Ms. Marilyn Scott.

Offer one was from Marilyn Scott. Got the offer, sent it to the lawyer, incorporated some technical changes into a counter offer, but accepted her price. Before we sent it over to her though, she withdrew the offer. I didn’t pay attention to the name at the time though.

Got a second offer from someone else. It wasn’t a great offer. I was about to counter offer when a second offer came in for a lot more money. It was from Marilyn Scott. So we pursued that offer, only to have her back out again. And by the time we figured out she wasn’t serious, the first offer was gone.

Here’s the key, I didn’t associate the second offer from Ms. Scott with the first. Thought they were from two different people.

A fourth offer came in. This one also from Ms. Marilyn Scott. This time I recognized her as the buyer from the second go around. I countered with the same technical changes again, but I suspected there was something wonky going on. I didn’t even bother letting the family know this time. I figured I would as soon as we had come to an agreement on the terms of the P&S, because I suspected she’d back out like the second time. Which she did.

Only just now did I look at the first offer again and realize it was the same woman in three different cases. If she comes back with yet another offer, I won’t even bother. Something screwy with the woman.

You’d think her real estate agents wouldn’t keep making offering for the same place on her behalf. And they probably wouldn’t. All three offers use different agents. Our listing agent has talked with two of them. Neither of them knew she was working with another agent. Now that I’ve pointed out the third, we’ll talk with that one too.

Anyhoo, the whole point of this is to get it all into Google. I’m betting there are other agents around Seattle who have Ms. Marilyn Scott as a client too. If you do, you might want to have a talk with her. If you are a seller, be aware that Marilyn Scott is likely not serious.

Having not sold a place in the Seattle area before, I have no idea if players like this are common. Just weird.

Fairview and Lynn, 1962

Item #63791 from the Seattle Municipal Archives Photograph Collection: Fairview and Lynn, minus my apartment building, September 1962. No Pete’s Market either. It does appear that Robert in Yellow House’s house is there though.

Seattle Intelligencer Building (1874)

The Seattle P-I announced today that it will publish it’s last print edition tomorrow, March 17th. After that it will go online only. What the online version will look like, how Hearst will staff it, and what kinds of news they will cover in the online incarnation have not been announced.

On one hand, I am sad to see the newspaper disappear. The P-I has been a part of Seattle for years, longer than the surviving Seattle Times in fact. I delivered the P-I for approximately three years in the 1980s, spanning the standalone time and the beginning of the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times, when their biggest rival took over all aspects of the paper except editorial. My grandparents to this day only pick up the P-I on their morning walks. I always considered it the better newspaper of the two Seattle dailies.

That written, I think the city news is in dire need of a shake-up and this might be the needed catalyst. Both dailies are as bland and mediocre as local TV news. They appeared to be in a fight for the most milquetoast middle of Seattle’s culture. When I moved back to Seattle after a decade in Idaho, I did not subscribe to either paper. I continued my subscription to the New York Times. In Idaho it was necessity because the Idaho papers and the Spokane papers are so provincial that the only way to get any kind of non-wire-service coverage of the world was to get newspapers from outside the confines of the Palouse.

On returning I found my sanity still necessitated a New York Times subscription. Too many puff pieces. Too often getting the story wrong. What comes to mind is how the P-I blithely cast aspersions on a crane operator after his crane fell over in Bellevue several years ago. He’s a former drug addict! That must be a factor in the accident! Then when his drug tests turned up clean, nary a word from the P-I in apology. They didn’t even give the clean bill of health the same prominence that they did the drug accusations. Those got page 1 for several days. The exoneration got buried. That is typical television news style. Lurid tales of murder, sex, drugs, and anything that might shock and scare middle-brow Ballard. And lots of boring, bland stories about snow, or rain, and fawning Microsoft coverage. Bleah. I couldn’t pay for that.

Instead, I subscribed to the P-I’s local news coverage via feed syndication. If the headline indicated something of interest, I’d read the excerpt. If that indicated something worthwhile, then I’d click through to the story. In the last 30 days, I only read 13% of the excerpts. And almost never about local politics, which should be a local paper’s forté.

Where did this news junkie get his news? The Stranger. The sad fact is that the local free alt weekly Stranger has hands-down the best news in Seattle. That’s partially because they are willing to have a point of view in their news pages, where the dailies have tried to be objective (maybe I’ll write about objectivity another time). But it’s partially also because they have dedicated reporters who really dig into our urban politics. The Stranger more often covers stories I care about than our other papers.

In it’s current form, the Stranger isn’t a substitute for a good daily. For one, they are too focused on politics and arts from a hipster perspective (despite the fact that they denigrate hipsters at every step, they are tied at the hip to them). They are also only once a week. They don’t have the numbers of staff to cover breaking news. They can’t do investigative journalism properly either because of their staffing levels.

The word I am hearing is that the online P-I will have greatly reduced staffing levels and will become something like Huffington Post, partially an aggregator. If that’s the case, I won’t bother paying much attention.

There are some experiments in news in Seattle. I am hoping one of them takes off. Perhaps The Seattle Courant, Publicola (awful name), or Crosscut (although anyone who publishes Knute Berger needs to have a CAT scan). Maybe something else.

With two bland dailies sucking up 90% of the news space in Seattle, I don’t think their was much room for these experiments. But over the last year as it became increasingly apparent that one or both would shut down, these online sources germinated (and the Stranger increasingly began using Slog as the vehicle for stories that later appeared in the print edition). Now that the P-I will be really emasculated, these perhaps can really thrive. It’s going to be scary, and ugly, and it’s sad that the P-I went. But something needed to die in order for something new to live.

The City of Seattle’s Proposition 2 concerns increased property taxes for six years for parks purposes.

If approved, this proposition would fund acquiring, developing and restoring parks, recreation facilities, cultural facilities, green spaces, playfields, trails, community gardens, and shoreline areas; all as provided in Ordinance 122749. It would authorize regular property taxes higher than RCW 84.55 limits, allowing collection of up to $24,250,000 in additional taxes in 2009 (up to $145,500,000 over si years). Taxes collected in 2009 would be limited to $2.60 per $1,000 of assessed value, including approximately $0.19 of additional taxes.

Should this levy lid lift be approved?

It’s kinda pricey, but there’s a good argument for it. If Seattle is going to become a world-class city, it’s going to get a lot denser. The additional people will not have the single family home and yard that has been Seattle’s reason for being for a century. We’ll need open spaces and green spaces for people. That means parks. And we need to start developing them now, so that we will be ready when we are a bigger city.

I will vote yes.

The City of Seattle’s Proposition No. 1 concerns increased property taxes for six years for Pike Place Market.

If approved, this propsition would fund seismic, safety, energy-saving, and other basic infrastructure improvements at the publicly-owned Pike Place Market, last renovated in the 1970s; all as provided in Ordinance 122737. It would authorize regular property taxes higher than RCW 84.55 limits, allowing collection of up to $12,500,000 in additional taxes in 2009 (up to $73,000,000 over six years). Taxes collected in 2009 would be limited to $2.60 per $1,000 of assessed value, including approximately $0.10 of additional taxes.

Should this levy lid lift be approved?

I am torn on this one, but ultimately I think I will vote for it.

Mostly I just don’t know that the benefit to Seattle is worth the public cost. I don’t think Pike Place Market really brings in that many tourists. Sure they’ll go there once they get here. But I don’t think it brings additional tourists who wouldn’t have come otherwise. On the other hand, I like the market (I used to hang out there every day after high school) and I like the ability to buy fresh foods and handmade items. But I don’t go there that often anymore. I’d love to see businesses renting there put up more of the infrastructure money.

Count me for this one, but reluctantly.

Although the mayor’s press release on the proposed plastic bag fees notes that plastic bags are particularly harmful to marine life as compared with paper bags, the big push is because the bags take up 4% of our landfill.

In other words, Westneat is building up a nice straw man and then knocking it down. It seems like the Seattle Times really doesn’t like the proposed fees. They’ve charged the fees will hurt the poor, and now this. It won’t hurt the poor. The city will be giving out free re-usable bags. The charge will get people to change their behavior. Because of that, they will not be paying this fee enough to hurt them. People respond to economic incentives. This is a conservative way to address a problem. It uses the market and the laws of supply and demand to achieve a needed end.

So get smarter, Seattle Times.