Here is my quick assesment of the public hearing tonight (7/19).
For the most part, the issues at hand require so much research, nothing can really be learned at these things because there are biases and claims that can’t really be answered or addressed in this forum. One thing it does provide is an opportunity for council members to take their constituents pulse on the matter. Hopefully they got something out of it and it was useful.
I really wished I would have recorded all the “coulds”, “mights” and “mays” in Tay Yoshitani’s comments to the councils. There were a lot and he never said, it would cost jobs once.
Here is the tally that I took during the event:
A couple notes and comments on my tally:
- Pro:Industry or Con:Industry pretty much mean that the person was representing a trade of sorts. The pro’s were construction, sheet medal, painters etc., where the con’s were probably tied to the port in some fashion but did not mention it the port.
- Pro: Sonics Fan is probably doing a disservice to the category because there were a lot of sonics fans that brought up good arguments citing the deal that should have been in the Pro: General category. There was some obvious fans that just wanted the Sonics back in this category.
- Pro: General are those that had a multiple set of arguments, usually well-constructed and fairly fact based.
- NEU: General were mostly the 17 members of the Seattle Stage Hands Organization/Union. Most of them mentioned opposing privatization of Key Arena and Seattle Center. I am unaware if this is part of the MOU so if someone knows, please let me know. I felt their stance was relatively neutral here other than they want their interests heard…which they were.
- Con: Port – well you probably know this one. Anytime the Port came up or the reference to Longshoreman came up I coded the speaker in this category. (By the way, how awesome would the name Longshoreman be for a Seattle NHL team?)
- Con: General were comments generalizing the arguments against it or the more time, “what’s the rush” category.
Here is the summary in pie chart form:
