At its budget meeting this morning (the afternoon budget meeting is going on now), the city council agreed to preserve funding for 10 neighborhood district coordinators---who serve as the city's liaisons to the neighborhoods---at full time. Previously, the council had considered funding 12 district coordinators, but at only 80 percent time. The city has 15 neighborhood district that will now be overseen by just 10 city staffers.

Additionally, the council agreed to scale back the amount of space at Green Lake Community Centerthat it had planned to convert to office space for Seattle Parks Department employees, and to restore drop-in hours at Green Lake, plus Laurelhurst, Alki, Ballard, and Queen Anne.

Under Mayor Mike McGinn's proposal, three upstairs rooms at Green Lake Community Center, which currently house drop-in programs for toddlers and parents, dance classes, and other programs, would have been shut down and turned into office space for 25 parks employees. Instead, the city will convert one room to office space that will house nine parks employees. After visiting the Green Lake Community Center yesterday and finding it packed at noon on a weekday, council parks committee chair Sally Bagshaw said, "I felt it was important to retain the space for the community."

The council also agreed to convert a room at the Laurelhurst Community Center to office space for 11 parks employees.

Bagshaw said she hoped the conversions would be temporary. "[Parks department supervisor] Christopher [Williams] said they're going to use the least invasive type of office space [so the rooms] could be converted back" to public use, "and frankly, we would hope that there would be space other than this for the parks employees. ... In the perfect world, we would want to have the employees somewhere else."