City council candidate Jessie Israel, running against three-term incumbent Nick Licata, is distributing a negative piece attacking Licata for, among other things, reading poetry at the beginning of committee meetings, being an obstructionist, and (really? still?) appearing on stage with Ralph Nader in 2000.

The piece is pretty clever, actually—it's a crossword puzzle, with questions like, "During the dotcom bust, Nick Licata said "There are too many _____ coming to South Lake Union," and, "Though many in this group have become aggressive and threatening and there is an increase in street drug dealing, Nick refuses to address the reasonable concern about the livability and safety of our public spaces." (The answers: "Jobs" and "panhandling," respectively).



In an endorsement interview yesterday, Licata responded to both of those charges. Regarding his South Lake Union comments, he said that his concern was that creating a huge amount of job capacity in South Lake Union was not the same thing as creating actual jobs. And he acknowledged that he doesn't support simply cracking down on aggressive panhandlers, and said he would support reasonable restrictions on panhandling as long as they didn't violate people's civil rights.

We'll be posting an edited version of that interview later today.