A changing of the guard at Seattle City Hall

Two terms and out.

For Mayor Greg Nickels and incoming Mayor Mike McGinn, Friday marks a changing of the guard at Seattle City Hall. Nickels leaves after eight years, which is expected in Seattle, and McGinn cycles in.

Cover your ears, negativists: Nickels should leave with his head high. He was a strong mayor with a sturdy grasp on the city.

He gets credit for pushing through Sound Transit light rail. Yes, it's ridiculously expensive but it creates a modern and necessary transportation alternative for a rapidly growing region. Our grandchildren will thank him years from now.

His fixation on completing light rail helped the project. Ridership should increase as our highways fill with 770,000 new residents statewide who moved here or were born here during the past decade.

Nickels deserves kudos also for leading the way on public safety, as overall crime dropped to historic lows during his term. Seattle's violent and property crimes edged up in 2009, but two years before that hit the lowest levels in four decades. That's saying something about Nickels and his former Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, now President Obama's drug czar.

And Nickels wins plaudits for insisting there be a plan to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Allowing that dangerous roadway to crash to the ground in an earthquake is the opposite of leadership. Take note, McGinn.

Nickels' sometimes overbearing tunnel vision aggravated a lot of people, but his success lies in the fact that a regionwide ditherfest turned into a plan. And it now has legislative support from both the city and state.

McGinn has other ideas about the tunnel and he may attempt to gut the plan, in part because it is so expensive.

Nickels, meanwhile, leaves office as a doer. As he said at a post-primary news conference, he became mayor to accomplish things, and sometimes that means staying in the job less time than desired.

Nickels clearly fell down on delivery of basic services in the seventh of his eight years, the blasted December 2008 snowstorm being Exhibit A. But I am ready — and I believe other Seattleites are, too — to stop being peeved about snow removal and salt, and the maddening lack of both. Over time, anger isn't productive.

McGinn comes in as a thousand question marks. He has sufficient public support to lead in a different direction. His election represents an anti-establishment theme in the city.

Yet aside from bicycles uber alles and more micro-process, I am not certain what his course will be.

McGinn, who was very accessible to the media during the campaign, employed an East German state media approach during the six weeks of transition. No one-on-one interviews unless he really likes you.

He did tell a group gathering of Seattle Times staff he believes his election represents a generational shift, and a move toward equal rights, the environment and urbanism. I think he has that right.

Voters did not support Nickels' beloved plastic-bag tax as a way of expressing their inner greenery, but they did back a Sierra Club leader for the city's top job.

McGinn's biggest decision in the months ahead will be hiring a strong police chief. This week, he appointed an impressive list of people to the search committee, including Anne Levinson, deputy mayor under Norm Rice, and King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg.

Even with overall reductions in crime, a sense of menace pervades many downtown streets and neighborhood business districts. During the campaign, McGinn said he was skeptical of Councilmember Tim Burgess's plan to restrict aggressive panhandling, so the new mayor must offer his own plan to make city streets safer. An anxious city is waiting to hear more.

McGinn also now has to replace Grace Crunican as the city's transportation director.

But that's all in the future.

My thoughts on this New Year's Eve are about Nickels, who, with a few notable exceptions, led this city with dignity, sharp political skills, thick skin and professionalism.

It's not just end-of-an-era sentimentalism. Nickels served us well.

Joni Balter's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is jbalter@seattletimes.com