Under the new City Council system of electing council members by district, Maple Leaf after the 2015 elections will be represented by two council members.

Most of the neighborhood will be in District Five, from Northeast Northgate Way down roughly to the middle of the new Maple Leaf Reservoir Park.

Neighbors who live south of a line drawn horizontally though the park will be in District 4.

Learn more about this at the January meeting of the Maple Leaf Community Council. It’s Wednesday, January 29th, from 7-9 p.m. at Olympic View Elementary School, Eighth Avenue Northeast and Northeast 95th Street. Free, licensed child care will be provided.

Also on the agenda, the community council’s work plan for the year, an update on the ever-popular Bicycle Master Plan (a separated bike lane on Roosevelt Way Northeast?) and changes to public school boundaries.

Last April, and again in late June, we posted on the possibility of broadband (read “really fast“) Internet service coming to parts of Maple Leaf.

By June, pricing had been announced, as was the fact that the initial list of demonstration projects had dropped the Northgate/Maple Leaf piece.

We never got any response from emails or voice mails we left with the city’s designated partner, Gigabit Squared Seattle. And although its website still works, the company apparently does not.

From our news partner The Seattle Times earlier this month:

Erin Devoto, Seattle’s chief technology officer, said that as of mid-November, the company’s phones were turned off and the city was unable to reach its officers. She turned over the bill for city staff’s preliminary engineering work on a broadband network to the City Attorney’s Office for collection.

The Times has more background here. And GeekWire has posts here and here.

It’s the second time the city’s plans for broadband have died.

Update 5 p.m.Rainfall during daylight hours: .70 inches. Top wind: 43 mph at 1:32 p.m.

Update 12:08 p.m. Thunderstorm, No power 8th Avenue Northeast to Lake Washington between Northeast 77th and Northeast 38th streets.

Update 11:55 a.m. Rain falling in sheets. More than 6,000 without power.

Update 11:30 a.m. This just in from Seattle City Light:

Gusty conditions continue and so does the risk of more outages. Getting reports from Ravenna right now. 5400 customers, report of wires down. Please call 684-3000 or 684-7400.

Rain overnight - .71 inches here at Maple Leaf Life South in the last 24 hours - means six of the nine settling ponds on the east side of Reservoir Park are full or filling.

And spilling over into miniature waterfalls.

Which should continue through the day. The forecast, as of 10 a.m., is for rain and possibly a thunderstorm, with wind gusts to 39 mph.

In the mountains - a different story. A winter storm watch from 2 p.m. today until noon Sunday. From Cliff Mass:

The weather map at 1 p.m. Saturday shows the story: LOTS of isobars over the region. Expect blizzard conditions in the passes. If you (travel) into the mountains that day, prepare for difficult conditions (chains, food, blankets). I would expect some avalanche control closures as well.

Seattle Police this morning announced the arrests of two men in connection with a robbery near Northgate Mall that occurred on Boxing Day - Dec. 26th.

At about 2:30 p.m., the victim was walking near the mall when he was confronted by three acquaintances. They engaged in a conversation when one of the men asked the victim if he could try on his Ralph Lauren down vest.

The victim told him no, and the suspect pushed him against a wall and held him there. He ordered him to take off the vest and then motioned toward his waistband, as if he was reaching for a gun. The suspects removed the victim’s vest and distinctive Gucci belt and then fled in a car.

Robbery detectives were assigned the case and distributed a wanted bulletin for the suspects. Yesterday, just before noon, a Shoreline Police Department officer located and arrested one of the suspects near Northeast 174th Street and 15th Avenue Northeast, just north of the city limits.

During his arrest, the officer located a loaded .380 caliber semi-auto handgun in the suspect’s waistband. The handgun had been stolen in a 2012 residential robbery that happened in King County. The suspect was wearing the victim’s Gucci belt taken in the robbery.

Officers arrested the man and his brother, ages 19 and 20. The third suspect is still at large.

The original police report states the robbery occurred in the 400 block of Northeast Northgate Way, along the north side of the mall. It says the robbers got away in an old Toyota, driven by a fourth suspect.

The robbery, just after 4 p.m. apparently occurred at the Umpqua Bank at Roosevelt Way Northeast and Northeast 64th Street.

The suspect is described by police as 6-foot-2, 175 pounds. The Ravenna Blog is reporting the same bank was robbed last March.

Plus, we’ve added a new bird to the Birds of Maple Leaf Reservoir Park - a Western Gull.

John emails: “JUST when I was feeling so good about our street being a bare spot on the crime map:

My beloved/beat up Subaru Legacy station wagon was swiped from in front of my house (on Northeast 89th Street, just east of 15th Avenue Northeast) late Sunday or early Monday a.m.

His 1990 wagon is one of 11 cars on the police crime map at right stolen since our last report a couple of weeks ago.

It is a blue 4-door wagon with black luggage rack, WA Plates 467-YNK - it has the distinctive feature of the right front head light being held on by a set of external metal brackets.

A word to the wise: keep your car locked and think about a car alarm if it is of sufficient value.

In a later email John added the police told him “it was probably used either for a joyride or to carry out illegal ‘business’ and, in all likelihood, it will appear somewhere in the metro area - and my key will work, since they use blanks to steal cars these days - they don’t jam screwdrivers and pull wiring like ‘back in the day.’”

Amy emails this afternoon:

Someone in the neighborhood suggested I send my info to Maple Leaf Life about our missing cat. I’m heartbroken, so I’m hoping you’ll be able to post a blurb. The info is below and pictures are attached. Thank you!

We’re out of town and our cat ran away from home, Northeast 98th Street between Roosevelt and Eighth avenues northeast, on Thursday. His name is Macchiato (Macchi for short). He has medium length black and white fur and weighs about 10lbs.

He’s probably pretty freaked out, since he’s never been outside for more than five minutes at a time. If you spot him please let me know ASAP! My number is 314-223-7781.

He’ likely going to be hard to catch. Any help is appreciated, we feel so helpless since we’re not able to be there looking for him ourselves.

Back when the Maple Leaf Reservoir Park opened, several people wondered about the paved park path.

Mostly, they wondered how long it is. In comments on our post from the time, David Miller said it was about half a mile.

Now Alicia emails:

We’ve been wondering what the distance around the big, paved loop at Maple Leaf park. On Christmas day, we took a measuring wheel to find out. It’s about 2480 feet around. That’s almost half a mile.

While we were measuring, a dozen people stopped to ask us what the distance was. Could you publish it for folks?

Update: “I asked the parks dept about the length of the path when the park first opened. The response: ‘The outer asphalt pathway is 2,540 feet, so two laps is 200 feet shy of one mile.’ - Maryanne”

Maple Leaf also has a new Kickstarter project - Stacy Brewer of the Seattle Urban Farm School is trying to raise money to turn her garage on Northeast 97th Street into a schoolhouse so she doesn’t have to teach classes in her living room.

Her goal is $12,815. Her Kickstarter page is here.

Finally, we picked up several dozen comments on our post about Seattle considering whether to pick up trash only every other week.

Since then the City Council has unanimously passed a bill that would open negotiations with trash haulers on the possibility. Crosscut has an update here.

And this week the Seattle Times has an editorial on the subject, although on reading it appears the newspaper’s position is “we should think about it.”

Just in time to take advantage of your guilty holiday appetite, local nonprofit Feet First is getting the word out early about its Stairway Walks Day coming up Feb. 8.

The second annual event showcases staircases in 18 different Puget Sound neighborhoods, including hilly Maple Leaf, where the above photo was taken on this urban hike from Feet First’s Northeast Seattle Trails map (pdf).

There’s not a lot of information about the event this early, but we will keep you posted as the featured walks are planned.

Terry, a neighbor, emails:

“The family which owns Deuce the bulldog, kidnapped from Crown Hill, still hasn’t found him and one of their largest flyers was torn down, from a pole by the Northgate library. That might indicate the dog is in the Northgate or Maple Leaf area.

“Moreover, they have been handing out smaller flyers to people in this neighborhood and the family desperately needs help. Here’s their webpage: https://www.facebook.com/deucepodhola

“It’s Christmas. Could you go against protocol and run something on the family’s quest to find Deuce? They need a Christmas miracle and having people aware of this matter, in the Maple Leaf neighborhood, would be a good thing.”

As the snow fell Friday morning, so did the “boarding house” at the north entrance to Maple Leaf Reservoir Park.

Plans are to construct four new homes on the site at 12th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 88th Street, while retaining the largest trees. You can see our previous post here, or see the company’s plans for the “Canopy at Maple Leaf” at the Build Urban website.

The remains on Sunday morning.

Last-minute holiday gifts and stocking stuffers? Follow the signs.

For at 1517 N.E. 89th St., Maya Radoczy operates her 1,200-square-foot hot shop, hand-blowing glass art and objects, at very affordable prices.

You can see a video - and our post from 2010, here.