1. When Mayor Greg Nickels releases his 2010 budget on Friday, the document will include a financing plan for the city's portion of the proposed $4.2 billion waterfront tunnel. Additionally, according to City Council transportation committee chair (and tunnel fan) Jan Drago, the budget could contain some provisions that start locking the city in to the tunnel decision.

"The budget will spell out the city's responsibility on building the tunnel," Drago says. Drago says the city is also poised to start entering into a series of Memorandums of Understanding and Memorandums of Agreement with the state that would further confirm city support of the tunnel decision.

As the Tacoma News Tribune reported last week, the state department of transportation has already put out a call (a Request for Qualifications) for contractors interested in digging the tunnel, and plans to choose a company by 2010.

Mayoral candidate Mike McGinn opposes the tunnel; his opponent Joe Mallahan supports it.

2. A pollster who has done work for McGinn's campaign was convicted in 1995 of bank fraud and possession and utterance of counterfeit securities. Between 1992 and 1994, the pollster, Chris Bushnell (then Chris Haugen), and a friend forged nearly $38,000 in money orders; acting alone, Bushnell circulated another $55,000 in counterfeit money orders.

He was ordered to pay around $65,000 in restitution, given a suspended four-month prison sentence, and required to perform 250 hours of community service. In 1997, Bushnell lost his position as director of national affairs for the Associated Students of the University of Washington when the felony conviction came to light.

"I made a number of mistakes when I was a teenager, and that was certainly at the top of the list," Bushnell says. "It's not something I'm proud of. It was a really stupid mistake." Both Bushnell and McGinn say Bushnell mentioned the conviction to McGinn a couple of years ago, when Bushnell did polling for the 2007 campaign against the "roads and transit" ballot measure. McGinn says "I kind of put it away in my irrelevant file" because it happened so long ago.

Bushnell worked as the chief economic forecaster for former county executive Ron Sims for about six years (he left in 2008); during that time, he spent one week a month for "about a year and a half" telecommuting from Hawaii, where his wife was going to graduate school. (Later that year, he presented a controversial report showing that the county's massive budget shortfall was the result of overspending, not a structural or Tim Eyman-related problem, winning him the ire of just about everyone at the county.)

Bushnell took his wife's name in 2006, a decision he says had nothing to do with his past trouble with the law. "We flipped a coin and that was that," he says.

3. Stephen Pidgeon, the attorney who presented the case against Referendum 71 to the the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce's Public Affairs Council a few weeks ago (a "yes" vote on R-71 upholds state domestic partnerships legislation; a "no" vote overturns it),  reportedly had a rather unique take on why gay folks shouldn't be given the same rights as straight folks.

According to sources who were at the endorsement meeting, Pidgeon blamed domestic partnerships for recent high-profile technical problems with Boeing's 787 and Microsoft's latest software upgrade.

Wing trouble with the 787 Dreamliner? Blame the gays.

Both companies, Pidgeon reportedly noted, passed domestic-partner policies shortly before running into technical glitches. The new policy, he argued, had "undermined [employees'] ability to make good decisions," one source at the presentation says. "It was the strangest thing I've ever heard."

The Chamber voted to endorse R-71.

4. One upcoming candidate forum we left off our upcoming candidate forum list yesterday was this:

Candidates for Seattle School Board will answer questions about school district concerns Tuesday, September 29, in the Garfield High School Commons.  Doors will open at 6:30 pm, with the forum beginning at 7:00 pm. KUOW's Phyllis Fletcher will moderate the forum, which is sponsored by the Garfield High School PTSA.

5. Two Seattleites are among this year's $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" winners : Documentary filmmaker James Longley (Gaza Strip, Iraq in Fragments) and poet Heather McHugh , a writer-in-residence at U.W.

Cool footnote: The pair are already noted geniuses. In 2006 and 2007 respectively, both Longley , 37, and McHugh, 61, won "Genius Awards" from the Stranger—the annual $5,000 grant the alt weekly awards to artists around town.

6. While reporting on Sen. Maria Cantwell's amendments to the Senate Finance Committee's health care reform bill  yesterday —she's on Sen. Max Baucus' (D-Montana) powerhouse committee—we noted her proposals to regulate pharmaceutical industry profiteering and the fact that she's co-sponsoring a public option amendment with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

However, SEIU Local 775, which represents local health care workers, has called our attention to  another Cantwell amendment—one they've been lobbying Cantwell's office to propose: A 1.45 percent surtax on short-term capital gains to fund home care as an alternative to nursing homes.

Local 775 president David Rolf says Cantwell's amendment "would help transform the nation’s long-term care system to look more like Washington State’s, where every person who needs long-term care can choose to receive it in the setting of their choice, including their own home.”