January 2013

Press release:

Copperleaf Restaurant & Bar in SeaTac was awarded “Best Independent Restaurant of the Year” by the Washington State Wine Commission’s annual Washington State Wine Awards on Monday, Jan.14.

The restaurant is located at 18525 36th Ave. S.

The award recognizes Copperleaf for its commitment to sourcing and promoting local artisans, farmers and purveyors in the restaurant, as well as for its wine philosophy, wine lists, promotional activities, service, staff training and merchandising.

Northwest varietals represent more than 85 percent of the 52-seat farm-to-table restaurant’s wine list, including many boutique Washington state labels such as Chatter Creek (Woodinville, Wash.); Covington Cellars (Woodinville, Wash.); Tranche Cellars (Walla Walla, Wash.); Tru Cellars (Walla Walla, Wash.); Syncline Wines (Lyle, Wash.); Abeja Winery (Walla Walla, Wash.); Saviah Cellars (Walla Walla, Wash.); Snoqualmie Vineyards (Prosser, Wash.) and more. Additionally, 44 percent of Copperleaf’s glass pours and 22 percent of its bottles are bio-dynamic, organic and/or sustainably produced.

Prior to the last City Council election, whatever the city manager proposed was accepted and approved by the City Council majority with few questions.

City business went forward like a “well oiled machine.” Even project over runs and lawsuits didn’t slow down the process.

Then some of the new council members began to ask the city manager for more detailed information concerning progress on city goals, objectives, and finances. Unfortunately the city manager hardly ever gets around to producing the information so council can make educated decisions concerning his proposals.

As an example, for the last six years Mr. Martin has not provided the council with the quarterly budget reports, (required by state law), even though some of the council have requested to see them.

There are four council members who are in lockstep with the city manager to provide a majority vote to approve his agenda.

When one or two of these four are absent, he can’t be sure his agenda will be followed, so it appears the city manager has put on hold, a lot of work to which the council should be attending.

Rejoice, the burn ban has been lifted!

Well, at least in 40 minutes, at 1 p.m., Jan. 16 it will officially be over according to the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. It will continue on in Snohomish and Pierce County (in case you folks are reading the Ballard paper).

"We're lifting the ban in King County because air pollution levels there have improved," said Dr. Phil Swartzendruber, agency forecaster. "Based on historic patterns, it’s unlikely they’ll reach trigger levels in the next few days."

So while we don't condone going fire crazy (wood smoke can still pollutes skies significantly), this does mean that you can snuzzle up next to a fire as you watch the sunset at Golden Gardens. Finally.

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It's never a bad time to learn first aid, so why not do it this month, when you can take the class for free? Ballard District Council Chair Catherine Weatbrook sent us the following announcement. She said spots are still available and that the first aid training is part of an effort to help get the neighborhood prepared in case an emergency or a natural disaster happens.

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"The Ballard Prepares team, a committee of the Ballard District Council and a broad community network, with the funding of a Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Small and Simple grant and community donations, is offering free emergency first aid training to 90 people in the Ballard area. Our objective is to have 90 additional people who live and/or work in our community trained to be able to respond in an emergency. The course requires two online components to be completed before the one time - in person training - on Saturday January 26th from 9am-2pm. The online components includes blood-borne pathogens, first aid, and the in class component will include CPR and the use of AEDs.

Seattle city planners, “using conservative scientific assumptions,” believe sea level rise due to climate change will flood portions of our shorelines regularly at high tide by the year 2050.

According to a map published by Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) planners in 2013, parts of West Seattle, Harbor Island, South Park and much of the Duwamish shoreline “could be inundated by 2050. The impact on Seattle shorelines depends on factors such as tides and storms, along with actions the City may take to reduce its own contribution to climate change.”

“Climate change is an immediate and critical challenge,” City Councilmember Mike O’Brien wrote in a press release. “We are already seeing impacts in Seattle from extreme events, such as last month’s flooding of some 100 properties along Beach Drive in West Seattle. We need to take bold steps to prepare our city for expected impacts and drastically reduce our contribution to greenhouse gases going forward.”

A Seattle film maker, Collin Monda has assembled a short but evocative film on the closure of the Easy Street Records Queen Anne location. The closure, brought about by the loss of the lease, will happen January 18 with a live appearance of the band Yo La Tengo, followed the next day by an auction of many of the store's fixtures and memorabilia. Some will be brought to the West Seattle location which will remain open.

The West Seattle Herald broke the news of the closure on January 2.

The film shows the reasons why the store came to be a cultural touchstone for the community and beyond, showing the large album cover paintings on the exterior, the in store displays and an in-store performance.

The location is being taken over by Chase Bank.

Well, we don't have the answer to the question in the headline quite yet, but because of increased interest in our stories on airplane noise, we thought we might point you to a handy tool.

Port of Seattle Spokesman Perry Cooper, who has been involved with the rolling out of the Greener Skies program (which involves a smoother, slightly less noisy landing process but resultes in more clustered air traffic) showed us Aircraft Webtrak. It's an online tool that you can use to track current and past flight traffic. Besides being informative, it's pretty cool to play around with.

We haven't played around with it too much yet, but it appears flight traffic really isn't that heavy in Ballard, except for the occasional plane from Anchorage, AK which cuts across Sunset Hill at 65th St NW.

By Christopher Duclos

The Beaver boy’s win total reached double digits after Monday night’s battle in Sammamish. The boys traveled to the plateau to face the Skyline Spartans.

The last time the boys faced the Spartans was at home. Ballard walked away with the win after a defensive 49-41 decision. Skyline was not about to experience the same heartbreaking loss at the hands of Ballard.

Skyline pulled away slightly at the end of the second quarter with a halftime score of 27-25. Both teams seemingly did not want to miss a beat. The game came down to whoever scored last with Ballard escaping with a narrow win.

The Verduin-Berger duo strikes again with both scoring over 10 points. Scoring summary as follows: Verduin 16 points, 10 boards; Berger 10, Deger 7, MacGeorge 6, Brown 6, Owens 4 & 5 assists; George 2, Rauda 1.

Notes:

• Ballard climbs up to 5th place in Kingco power rankings. Read about the latest rankings at kingcosports.wordpress.com
• Congratulations to Stuart MacGeorge who got his 500th career point for the Beavers

It wasn’t my intent not to leave Ballard for anything other than airport pick-ups and drop-offs for a period of three weeks, but that’s what happened. I might not even have noticed except for the observation by a friend visiting from the other Washington. She was only here for eight days; what did she expect, Fremont?

Martin and I had really meant to make an effort to leave Ballard the day before solstice. To take the now unfamiliar Metro route #61 to the other downtown, perhaps visit the other market, but it had already rained an inch since midnight. We needed to stay near our basement stream. So my contribution to the “what the holidays mean to me” even as articulated on KUOW’s The Conversation was all about lowering expectations.

Perhaps I lowered them too far. Perhaps I kept myself at basement level and forced my world-traveling friend to hunker down with me. Was that wrong?

Barely leaving Ballard definitely revealed itself as the theme of the 2012 holidays. (Besides, we did let Anna leave once as we celebrated her birthday on the Seattle waterfront, between the Seattle ferries and the new Ferris Wheel).

By David Rosen

The Seattle Fire Department was dispatched to the 7300 block of California Ave SW around 5:55 am this morning for a Medic 6 response, usually meaning there is some kinda of trauma involved. Upon arriving they found no one was injured or needed to be transported to the hospital.

According to a witness on scene, a truck was traveling southbound up Gatewood Hill and lost control hitting a parked car on the shoulder and then took off.

A second car was traveling the same direction when it lost control as well hitting the same car but received only minor front end damage.