Mike O'Brien is a hippie with an MBA.

The former leader of the local Sierra Club and a longtime chief financial officer at a major local law firm, O'Brien combines a strong environmental background with impressive financial credentials.

One of the leaders in the campaign to defeat the 2007 "roads and transit" ballot measure (the proposal, which failed, tied light rail to 182 miles of new highways), O'Brien stands out in the crowded field for City Council Position 8 for his environmental background, for his opposition to the waterfront tunnel (a position he shares with fellow ex-Sierra Club chair Mike McGinn, who’s running for mayor), and for his commitment to prioritizing transit over other transportation options.

But the main reason we like O'Brien is that he has an innovative, smart approach to the problems facing the city.

O'Brien says he approaches every issue—from environmental questions to issues like gang violence and Seattle's failing public schools—by figuring out the economic problem  behind it, and fixing that. We like his Marxist approach. (Thanks to President Obama, we're all socialists now.) At law firm Stokes Lawrence, for example, he proposed offering lawyers a cash bonus in lieu of "free" parking, resulting in a dramatic reduction in the number of lawyers who drove to work alone.

And he's a wonk. Case in point: Asked what he would do, besides increasing funding for alternatives to driving, to decrease greenhouse-gases, he launched into a super-technical lecture about energy efficiency in the built environment. It's not enough, he argued, for City Light to claim it's "carbon-neutral" because its energy comes from hydropower; the utility needs to invest heavily in energy-efficiency programs to become carbon negative .

O'Brien's opponents for open Position 8—city transportation manager Bobby Forch, landlord and three-time candidate Robert Rosencrantz, North End neighborhood activist David Miller, former Team Nickels staffer Jordan Royer, and real-estate broker Rusty Williams—represent various positions on the same old downtown-vs.-neighborhoods divide.

In a time of historic change, an environmentalist with a solid financial background like O'Brien is exactly the sort of person we need on the City Council.

PubliCola picks Mike O'Brien.