Update: at last Wednesday's school board hearing, board members chose to delay their decision on a $6.1 million contract with Coca-Cola until October. The move followed another round of articulate, impassioned public presentations at the meeting. While the contract itself is still a question in the balance, the delay has to be regarded as a tremendous victory for community activists. A month ago, this was a done deal. Now, it's not.--Geov Parrish

The incalculably valuable free media given to Nordstrom's for their new store opening was a sickening spectacle of commercial media sucking up to a company that spends a lot of money on advertising. There's no other way to explain how a store moving across the street can be a lead story on TV newscasts and make the front pages of the local dailies every day for a week. The coverage of this non-story sends a clear message: we'll say whatever you want us to. (Along with the subtext: you owe us now.)

Unfortunately, it also sends another clear message: coverage of controversial aspects of local business practices--like the use of federal money intended for low-income housing to build the new Nordy's palace, or the millions in tax money overpaid for the parking garage next door--won't happen if at all possible. If the story's too large to avoid, as the Nordy's scandal (which probably cost Seattle's mayor a federal job) briefly did, coverage will be skewed and relentlessly apologetic for business interests. Even if those interests involve ripping off taxpayers. Heck, especially if it involves ripping off taxpayers.--G.P.

Former logger, beat poet and longtime environmentalist Gary Snyder was shunted off a list of speakers at an annual forestry conference in Corvallis, Oregon, last week, after conference organizers realized the event's spectacularly bad timing. The conference, sponsored by the timber company Starker Forests and the Oregon State University College of Forestry, will take place three days before Oregon votes on Ballot Measure 64, which aims to end clearcutting in the state's forests. According to the Corvallis Gazette-Times, the Dean of the Forestry school phoned Snyder at his California home and dis-invited him, above Snyder's protests that he didn't know anything about Measure 64 and wouldn't discuss it. The subject they succeeded in stamping out? Timber practices in East Asia.--Adam Holdorf

As if you didn't already know that rents and housing prices in Seattle are through the roof, the National Association of Realtors and the Washington Center for Real Estate Research are ready to give you exact figures. The median price for a single-family dwelling in the greater Seattle area is $203,500--an increase of 14.5% over the first quarter of 1997. In fact, the Seattle area is the fifth most expensive on the list, behind only San Francisco, Honolulu, Orange County (Calif.), and Bergen/Passaic counties in New Jersey. If you're new in town and looking for a place to stay, why not head back east to New York, where the housing is 12% cheaper, or south to Los Angeles, where prices are 13% lower? After all, Boeing's just gonna lay you off in six months anyway. If you've already got a place to live and are paying outrageous rent, you might want to put in your two cents at a City Council public hearing on requiring landlords to provide 60 days notice (instead of the current 30 days) for rental increases that are over 10% of your current rent (see the Activist Calendar in this issue).--Maria Tomchick

At any rate, don't move to the International District. Paul Allen's First & Goal, which is building the Seahawks Stadium, has given the International District community a choice between construction noise on one hand and losing their mitigation fund on the other. First & Goal is saying that they can't finish the stadium on schedule and on budget (surprise!) unless they have two separate shifts of workers on the site from 5:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., which would violate their city use permit. The permit limits construction and demolition noise to between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Of course, to buy some quiet time in early mornings and evenings, the community can give up the $6 million fund that First & Goal set aside to mitigate the effects of the stadium on the neighborhood. The fund is supposed to pay for housing construction, transportation, cleanup after stadium events, landscaping, and economic development for local businesses that will suffer during the construction. Somehow, First & Goal calculated that the amount they would need to pay workers for overtime on the current schedule is about equal to the $6 million that's in the mitigation fund. Funny how that works.--M.T.

Those looking for Seattle's next great public-private partnership scam might want to check out the 99-year lease recently signed for the publicly-owned, mostly vacant PacMed gothic castle at the north end of Beacon Hill. The developer--Wright Runstad & Co., the same well-connected folks who did Columbia Tower, Washington Mutual Tower, and are now building the World Trade Center and the King Street Center near the train station and Kingdome--intends to sublease the building to Amazon.com for office space. Greasing the wheels is another familiar name in the annals of Seattle's secret government: the law firm of Preston, Gates, and Ellis. A private-sector confidant of Paul Schell on housing issues, Joel Horn, happens to work at Wright Runstad, whose proposal beat out a competing proposal to use portions of the PacMed tower for low-income senior housing.

A number of questions arise, from the big picture--how did a publicly run medical facility, originally dedicated to serving low-income populations, come to be peddled on the open real estate market to a bookseller?--to the more mundane, like: what will the impact be of over 1,000 employees driving in on one two-lane access road to what is an otherwise entirely residential neighborhood. Public oversight of the facility comes from the usual collection of sycophants on an "independent" Public Development Authority board, who have no problem with turning public property over to a corporation not even remotely related to the PDA's mission. Environmental impact reviews and city council approval on the lease deal could turn interesting.--G.P.

The privatization of the PacMed building is turning into a sweet deal for Wright Runstad, who will only pay about $8 per square foot for the space. Current office rents in downtown Seattle average between $12 and $21 per square foot, with the primo spaces going for up to $40 per square foot. PacMed defends the bargain rate by saying that Wright Runstad will put up $25 million of their own money to make improvements on the building. But even so, if we do the math, Wright Runstad stands to make anywhere from $50 million to $250 million (or more) over the life of the lease, if they turn around and rent the building out at market rates. Isn't it nice to know that our mayor is out scrambling to provide affordable housing for private businesses and extraordinary profits for developers? Of course, the media has missed the major story: if not for the greed of Mayor Schell, Joel Horn, and Wright Runstad, the former hospital would probably have been converted into affordable senior housing. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have my grandma living there than in someone's converted garage.--M.T.