The city auditor's office is a department so obscure—few are even aware it's part of the legislative branch—and minuscule—one auditor, nine employees—that it's hard to imagine it eliciting a peep from the council at budget time. Nonetheless, Council Member Peter Steinbrueck's proposal to expand the office by four employees and place it under the watchful eye of a new city committee has irked some on the council, like finance committee chair Richard McIver, who isn't convinced the office is effective in the first place. This week produced two competing Statements of Legislative Intent (known, cutely, as SLIs) from Steinbrueck and McIver. The former proposed the new committee; the latter suggested an audit of the auditor's office itself. In other budget news, Nick Licata spent the last week negotiating the details of a massive police-funding proposal; although no one expects every aspect of the council's compiled laundry list to pass, many of its elements—60 new cops, a domestic-violence legal advocate, revival of the (renamed) Community Service Officer program—are things many on the council, especially Licata, have been trying to add for years.

The Seattle Times editorial board took Licata to task Monday for failing to release the results of an investigation into discrimination claims at the city. The editorial, titled "City Should Release Discrimination Report," lambasted Licata for withholding the findings of the $200,000 study. "Anything less carries the potential of eroding public trust." The only problem is, Licata says he told reporters 10 days ahead of time exactly when he planned to release the report: Monday, which is when he released it. Times editorial writer Lynne Varner, who wrote the editorial, says she interviewed Licata a week before the editorial ran and wrote it then; however, she says, "it was held all of this time because of other editorials, chiefly endorsements, that needed to run." Nonetheless, the vaunted "wall of separation" between news and editorial shouldn't become an excuse for editorial writers to get their facts wrong.

They managed to keep the question of how to replace the viaduct off the ballot, but that hasn't stopped the mayor's office—whoops, make that the "Waterfront for All" campaign—from doing push polls to help advance its pro-tunnel agenda. The latest—a survey so blatantly biased that even the resolutely objective Seattle P-I couldn't help but acknowledge that its questions "framed [the tunnel] in a favorable light"—was intended to counter a recent Times poll putting support for the $3.6 billion—$5.5 billion tunnel at a paltry 25 percent. In addition to asking leading questions (suggesting, for example, that the mayor's tunnel would "significantly reduce noise and air and water pollution, making downtown a more enjoyable place for people who work, shop, live, and visit"), the pro-tunnel poll eliminated almost any mention of the surface/transit replacement option, confining it to a single question (do you prefer the tunnel, elevated, or surface option?) and thereafter ignoring its existence. "They gave me a whole bunch of pro-tunnel data," says Kelly King, a surface/transit supporter who was called by a pollster. "I just kept saying 'Neither,' 'Neither,' 'Neither.'"