1. PubliCola sat down yesterday with Grace Crunican, the outgoing chair of the city's transportation department. (Crunican became a controversial figure in the Nickels administration for her handling of the December 2008 snowstorm and her decision to promote a street-maintenance director despite documented problems with his management style.)

We'll have more from that interview later today, but here's a preview:

Asked who she voted for in the November general election between Joe Mallahan and Mike McGinn, Crunican replied: "McGinn. ... I voted as a citizen. I thought he understood the problems of the city better than the other fellow," Mallahan.



And asked what she would have done had Nickels won reelection, Crunican said she might have stepped down anyway. "I don’t know that the mayor would have asked me to stay on, and I would have probably asked for some kind of sabbatical at least," Crunican said. "It's been eight years of a high level of activity."

2. Crunican also defended the city’s bike master plan, which has built 90 miles of bike lanes and sharrows since it was passed in 2006. Of those 90 miles, however, only 13 are bike lanes—the rest are sharrows, lane markings that let drivers know a bicyclist may be in the road.

“I understand that the bike people don’t like sharrows as much as bike lanes, but when we started, people were saying, ‘Why are you taking lanes away from cars?’ … We did bike lanes where we could and sharrows where we couldn’t, and bike ridership has gone up 15 percent.”

3. Josh will be on KING 5's Up Front this weekend discussing the upcoming legislative session. Check back on PubliCola for exact times.

4. Last month, community activists raised concerns about the city's new open-government policy. Among them: The fear that city officials would bypass public-disclosure laws by posting on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Items posted on those sites, the activists argued, would be exempt from public-disclosure laws. (They also argued that Facebook and Twitter required too much information from people who want to access them, violating visitors' privacy—a claim we thought showed a lack of understanding of how social networking works).

To test the theory that Facebook posts are exempt from public disclosure, we did a disclosure request for all of City Council member Jean Godden's Facebook posts for the last six months. (Not to pick on Godden, but because she's one of the council's more prolific Facebook posters).

Like most public officials' Facebook pages, Godden's is a combination of personal anecdotes ("spending a couple of hours in the garden, 'rounding' up herbs for the winter") and political observations ("still struggling with Seattle's 2010 budget and trying to get a handle on 2011.")