(Photos courtesy Brenda Hatley)

By Hayden Yu Andersen
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

Dozens of youth robotics teams from elementary and middle schools across the district gathered on December 6 at Robert Eagle Staff Middle School for this year’s FIRST Lego League qualifier. By the end of the day, three teams from West Seattle – Madison Middle School, Lafayette Elementary School, and Alki Elementary School – emerged triumphant, with their sights set on the next round of the tournament.

Of the schools who competed that day, nine were from West Seattle, including Genesee Hill Elementary, Fairmount Park Elementary, Gatewood Elementary, Arbor Heights Elementary, West Seattle Elementary, and the aforementioned teams that are moving up to the next round.

A local parent tipped us about the students’ achievement, so we set out to get details. We spoke with Brenda Hatley, a coach for Madison Middle School, the only West Seattle middle-school team to advance to the next round, and she says the turnout at the qualifiers was impressive. Hatley first became a coach for her son’s 4th-grade team and was one of the founding parents for Lafayette Elementary’s Lego Robotics team.

She says the program, which pairs engineering with LEGO, coding, and real-world projects, is a fantastic program for students who are less interested in athletics but still want to capture the excitement of a pep rally.

“It’s not a sports team, but they’re still getting so hyped up. The kids were cheering for each other, and the pressure was there; coaching through that was an incredible experience,” Hatley said.

Madison’s team, the Madbots, will play their next match on December 26th, at a to-be-determined location. The teams that do well this month will move on to the city-wide competition in Downtown Seattle, before moving to the regionals at Washington State University, and beyond to the international finals. Regardless of how they perform, Hatley says she and the other parents are planning to travel with their team to the city-wide and regional competitions.

“I’m really proud of the team,” Hatley said. “Last year, the fifth graders didn’t move on, and we had lower expectations; we just went in to learn more and get better. This year, we get to move on and see what the next level looks like.”

A year after creating a special committee on cost-of-living, the San Diego City Council is shutting it down.

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who chaired the committee, said he was content to let it die as the council had plenty of work to do completing policy initiatives that started there.

The committee took on some of the most high profile and divisive issues that the city considered last year, such as the successful effort to increase the minimum wage for tourism workers to $25 starting in July 2026.

But it also operated just as city officials passed new and increased fees that added to residents’ cost of living. The city’s new monthly trash fee, hikes to parking rates around town and increased charges for using city facilities all hit residents’ bottom lines this year.

Elo-Rivera stood by approving those fees with one hand while trying to combat costs with the other.

“The cuts on the table that those fee increases mitigated or avoided — library, recreation center and park hours services —  were things the community said they didn’t want cut,” he said. “The fees we established were the most fiscally responsible way to avoid those cuts.”

Elo-Rivera is still pushing two other cost-of-living initiatives that could pass in 2026. One is a joint effort with the county to ban landlords from charging hidden fees tacked on to rent. The other is a potential June ballot measure to impose a $5,000 per-bedroom tax on vacation rentals or second homes.

“I completely understand why someone would say, ‘If you want to fix the cost of living, don’t raise these other costs,’” Elo-Rivera said. “We proposed a vacation home tax for the specific purpose of having the things that city residents want and deserve, without the cost of that resource falling on the backs of middle class and working class San Diegans.”

San Diego this year also became the first city in the country to ban grocery stores from offering digital-only deals, another initiative that started at the committee.

Elo-Rivera said the fees the city passed this year “only made it more important to have urgency to address cost-of-living increases driven by corporate greed, those that are disproportionately felt by everyday people.”

Councilmembers Henry Foster III and Marni von Wilpert also served on the select committee. Elo-Rivera credited them for stepping up. 

“Everyone wants to talk about affordability, but nobody wants to own it,” he said. “There’s a tension there, but those two weren’t afraid to stand next to this issue and wrestle it.”

Some of Alaska’s scenic rivers and streams look downright apocalyptic this year because they turned a flagrant orange color — but it’s not due to local pollution, according to scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In actuality, the orange tinted water is rust, released as the frozen ground in Alaska thaws out due to unchecked greenhouse gasses driving global warming. And it’s leaking into the state’s waterways, according to NOAA’s annual report on the Arctic region, where it’s posing a danger to local wildlife, residents and commercial fisheries.

The day-glo rivers are also a bright orange flag that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the world. The massive defrosting is also anticipated to increase sea levels and screw up weather patterns, according to scientists who talked to NPR.

“When the Arctic thaws and warms, it’s having an impact on the global climate,” Matthew Druckenmiller, lead author of the report and senior scientist with the Boulder, Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, told the broadcaster.

The planet is already showing signs of distress from global warming, such as large-scale forest fires and extreme summer temperatures outside the Arctic, which Druckenmiller described as a giant fridge for the planet.

“The Arctic is warming several times faster than Earth as a whole, reshaping the northern landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods of Arctic peoples,” reads the NOAA report. “Also transforming are the roles the Arctic plays in the global climate, economic, and societal systems.”

Zooming back to Alaska, people started noticing the orange waterways in 2018, according to NPR.

“ We heard from people who live in the region — pilots who are often flying over, people in the national parks,”  US Geological Survey research hydrologist Josh Koch told the broadcaster.

As temperatures heats up in the most remote parts of Alaska, permafrost — ground that usually stays continuously frozen — is melting, and that’s unlocking iron in the soil, which oxidizes from exposure to water and air, causing rivers and streams to turn orange. Surveys revealed that this contamination is far reaching, covering hundreds of miles of terrain in Alaska.

“It’s often not orange until it reaches the stream, and then all the iron and other metals can precipitate and create this iron staining,” Koch added.

It’s not clear if residents are being harmed from the polluted water, but local scientists are monitoring the situation, NPR reports.

The other problem with these rusty rivers is that they increase the acidity level in the water, according to the NOAA report, and this may harm fish like Dolly Varden char, whose juvenile offspring have experienced a sharp decrease in numbers most likely due to iron in its aquatic habitat. And that’s pretty bad for everybody in Alaska.

“The food chain is connected to the lives of people living in the Arctic,” Druckenmiller said.

More on climate change: Melting Glacier in Alaska Floods State Capital