I don't think chess competitors want to be called cute. Chess is hard-core. It's strategy, it's thinking ahead, it's playing to win. However, Officer Cookie's Urban Chess Club is the cutest, best chess program ever. Saturday afternoons at the Rainier Beach Library a couple of dozen kids show up to pair off, shake hands and take each other on. The youngest last Saturday looked to be about 7 years old and the oldest will be a junior at Cleveland next year. The group was mostly boys, but there were a few girls, too. There's one dad who brings his three daughters to play. He plays one while the other two square off. Over the course of the afternoon the players moved through games, switched partners and moved through more games. A chess tutor schools players in the technical and strategic steps of the game. Everyone who makes it through the whole afternoon gets a prize from Officer Cookie at the end of the afternoon.

SPD Officer Cookie Bouldin has run the chess club for a few years now and is starting up a sister program in the Central Area. Chess isn't what some people expect of the kids who show up Saturday afternoon at the library. They don't see chess as the sport of Rainier Beach kids, but these kids love it and they're really good. I watched the seven year old boy clean up against older opponents. The girls were sharp and eager to get into the next game. The program at Rainier Beach costs approximately $2,500 which Officer Cookie works to scrape together each year. A cheap price for lessons in strategy and sportsmanship.

I still can't talk much about the Denny's/Manning's building in Ballard because the clock on the appeal period is still ticking. There is still an outside chance that City Council might have to take some action related to the landmarking decisions, so councilmembers need to do what they can to stay open-minded and fair. I can say that it's been a week where I've felt both whip-sawed and inspired at various times.

I'm regularly whipsawed during the day as I move from one meeting where I'm told, "Hey, if you really cared about improving housing options and affordability, you'd allow more development," then to another meeting where I'm told, "All this new development is killing Seattle and driving housing prices sky-high — stop!"

It strikes me that cheap money has been more responsible for escalating prices, but I worry about how we maintain the character of our neighborhoods. Maybe the disappearance of cheap money will help with that, but neighborhoods like Pike/Pine are trying to be more deliberate as they stretch for ways to truly shape new development and support retention of existing older buildings. This is the constant tension in our neighborhoods, right? How do you keep what makes Wallingford "Wallingford"? I think Knute Berger did a good job of sounding the call in a CrossCut article this week:

"... (I)t does seem to me that it is incumbent on us to protect what's important and to apply high standards to the new, to demand that the old be replaced with something better. That is not happening. Preservationist panic is in part driven by the fact that we're undergoing a boom that is flooding the city with market-driven mediocrity and not fulfilling the urban promise that has been embraced by the developers and policy makers."

I attended the annual Arts Fund lunch Thursday and heard a terrific speech by Ben Cameron, program director at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Ben spoke eloquently and demandingly about the pressures arts groups face in competing for audiences with modern technology and communications (interesting with Bill Gates in front of him in the crowd). He recited a quote from President Kennedy's 1963 speech at Amherst College honoring Robert Frost. In the passage Kennedy acknowledges balancing acts that were even then a challenge:

"I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future."

I think that phrase, "handsome and balanced cities for our future," makes a great, albeit high-level and subjective, measuring stick.

Here's a cool thing I learned about yesterday. You know how we talk about market incentives for curing ills now? We'll create incentives to save historic buildings, create affordable housing, and preserve art spaces. Incentives and credits are a huge part of our moves to cool global warming. Drive your car while you purchase off-setting actions carried out by someone else. A company has figured out how this could work in restoring habitat along the Duwamish River.

The Duwamish is Seattle's poster child Superfund site. Seattle's only river was added to the nation's list of most contaminated places in 2001 after a century of dumping, spewing and dredging. The City, many businesses and river advocates are working to turn the tide, so to speak, but restoring a river to health is harder than messing it up in the first place. A company called Bluefield has made a proposal to the City that may help. Bluefield has smartly figured out that clean-up officials will require many companies and agencies that had a hand in polluting the river to pay not just for cleanup, but also for river restoration. For some companies this will be tough because they use all their property right up to the water's edge. So, a business opportunity is born. Bluefield is proposing to restore habitat on publicly-owned properties along the river. They would lease street ends or other property from the City, for instance, and restore quality river habitat, creating "eco-credits" (maybe a certain number of credits for every acre of habitat created) that could be purchased by others along the river who will have restoration responsibilities to meet, but little opportunity to do actual restoration on their own property. It would be up to the cleanup trustees to determine how many eco-credits would be available for purchase as the result of a Bluefield restoration.

This proposal is now before the Environment, Emergency Management & Utilities Committee for consideration. It's intriguing. The requirement for habitat restoration along the Duwamish may be 100-150 acres. Most businesses along the river don't know habitat restoration. It's not their business. Maybe the Bluefield deal is part of the answer. We get a head start on river restoration, salmon get some improved habitat, businesses get a way to meet their restoration obligations, and neighborhoods along the river get improved street ends. Score one for market forces?

I often get asked about all the great perks that must come with being a city councilmember. There are a few. I have great art in my office thanks to the City Light collection. I get invited to a lot of events around town. That's both a burden and perk because you have to decline most things or you'd never go home. Also, if it's a dinner or lunch with a price tag, I need to pay my own way. When I tell people that we're not swimming in perks (except the perk that is the warm feeling from public service), they are both satisfied and slightly disappointed at the same time. Maybe in San Francisco and New York elected officials are seen out at the best restaurants dating beautiful newscasters, but I don't know how they afford it in terms of either money or sleep.

Well, I enjoyed a huge perk this evening -- meeting the captains and a few crew members from the Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch." This is the show where cameras follow fisherman into the Bering Sea King Crab season. I'm not exactly sure why the show is popular with so many people, but it's big. If I'm watching TV and come across it, I'm drawn in immediately. I have two six-year-old friends who love it. The guys (and it's almost exclusively guys) work hard in mostly terrible conditions. The pitch and roll of the boats on the screen is enough to make you green. They're the guys you used to see all the time on the streets of Ballard, around Fisherman's Terminal, and other parts of town. The Discovery Channel brought the newly minted TV stars to Duke's on Alki for a promotional event. Duke's was a great location and the guys were generally pretty nice about meeting people and signing autographs. I think they remind me that Seattle is still a stronghold for the fishing fleet, that lots of people, generations of families, still go out and fish despite the quota system, overfishing fears, international competition and stark danger.

Dukes had set up a great spread of food, including King Crab legs. I'm more about Dungeness, personally. They're totally different. Not surprisingly, I didn't see any of the "Deadliest Catch" guys touch the crab.

I just completed a totally painless stint of jury duty. This was my third time serving in the 20-plus years I've lived in King County. I received my summons in the mail a few weeks back and reported yesterday morning to the Regional Justice Center in Kent. And there I sat with a couple of hundred of my neighbors. Not all appeared to be retirees. I have to say that the Wi-Fi access makes waiting a lot less painless. I could tap into my email and get work done. On the other hand, perhaps I should have taken the opportunity to plough through a book. Those seemed to be the two main activities in the assembly room. Today, though, I was next to a stitcher. There was plenty of good-natured grumbling from people about how they'd been called twice in six months or had never before been called, but their partner had been called three times in three years. Kind of like trying to figure out how the Shuffle on an iPod decides to play certain songs more than others. Or does it?

Yesterday I was called as juror 40 of a 40-person pool. If you haven't done jury duty before, this is the first stage of action. You get assigned a number which gives you some indication of the likelihood of you actually make it onto the jury in question. In order for me to make it into the jury box, approximately 30 people ahead of me would have to be excused for some reason (or no reason, really). So, as Potential Juror Number 40 I could take in the rest of the action without much concern about what would happen if I actually made it into the box. The case in question involved a drug possession arrest in South King County. Getting to hear the juror-questioning by the prosecutor and defender, and then watching which jurors are "thanked for their service" and dismissed is fascinating. One of the questions asked by the prosecutor was, "Who here has ever had a positive or a negative interaction with a police officer." Several hands went up and I learned people can be pretty forthcoming about their experiences. The best answers came to the questions, "Who here has heard the phrase 'victimless crime'?" and "Do you think drugs should be legal?" I was surprised by the wide spread of opinions in the group.

The two sides settled on a panel of jurors relatively quickly and then the rest of us returned to the big pool. No juries were called for today, so my service ended. If you go two days without making a pool, you're set loose. Someone told me late in the day, "It's an experience. You'll have something to talk about at cocktail parties this summer." Now I just need to make it to a cocktail party. The chances of that might be less than I had making it onto a jury.

I just returned from a meeting of the Board of Health's sub-committee of Provision. It's the sub-committee that will grapple with long-range planning for the provision of health services by Public Health Seattle & King County. Unfortunately, that means we'll also grapple with the very real need to slice a big chunk of money from the Department's budget in 2009. PHSKC runs public health (including dental) centers in King County, inspects the restaurants where you eat, provides immunizations to kids and the elderly, screens for STDs, supports at-risk pregnant women and so much more. It is exactly what you think — the place where people with no or limited insurance go for health and dental care when they go at all.

King County projects a $60 million shortfall next year. That's a huge number. Why? Because King County is greatly dependent upon our property taxes to fund "general revenue" departments (like Public Health). When voters approved the Eyman initiative capping property tax revenue increases at one percent a year it ceded an ongoing, chronically debilitating budget problem for King County. General inflation rises at three percent a year. Every year there's a two percent gap. Then you factor in the higher inflation (four percent) that hits medical services. Public Health's costs outpace revenue at a more devastating rate.

Over the next few months Public Health will talk with community people, health care advocates, non-profit providers and others about what to cut. Immunizations? Special care for special needs kids? Family planning? Oral health? A staff person next to me at the meeting yesterday said, "These choices make me sick. Every one of them." Another Provision Committee member said, "You're stabbing me in the eye with some of these."