Market at the Marquee runs Thursdays in August — the 6th, 13th, 20th and 27th — from 5 to 8 p.m. on the closed block of 9th Avenue. Here is that calendar alongside what else is booked on the convention center campus this month.

A hotel guest and an Airbnb guest pay an identical tax stack on a Seattle night. The hotel guest's convention-center dollars stay with the convention center. The Airbnb guest's are handed through, every quarter, to the City of Seattle for affordable housing. Which makes the campus, on that line, a toll collector for somebody else's program. That is one toll, and it runs the way tolls are supposed to. The second runs the other way and appears on nobody's bill — the industry billing the rest of the economy for the visitors it wants to go and find.

Are you a senior operator in one of Washington's seven tourism sectors? The initial Ratepayer Oversight Board — the body that will design what your industry pays into the state's new tourism assessment — is being seated now, and applications close July 31. Here is how to put your name in.

The lesson the hospitality industry took from 2011 is that anything living inside a public budget can die there. This is the story of what it built on that lesson — a merged lobby, a political circuit made of public filings, and now a statewide tourism assessment written into law as money the legislature can't reach, governed by a board the industry seats itself.

Mayor Katie Wilson has appointed Zahoor Ahmed — a career hotel-finance executive who has chaired the boards of Visit Seattle, the Downtown Seattle Association, and the Washington Hospitality Association — to the public board that governs the convention center. The council confirmed him nine to zero on July 14.

Whoever has been reading about the kiosks, here is the rest of the file — the conference, the no vote, the ordinance, and the lobbyist who chaired the host association.

The Downtown Seattle Association is nearly seventy years old, heavier relative to its city than any downtown organization we surveyed, and politically fused in a way peer cities deliberately avoid. Who makes this city — and for whom?

A decades-old arrangement — a lump-sum payment from the public campus to the private nonprofit that markets it, renewed across thirty-seven years with no competitive process on record, and graded by people who sit on both sides of the table.

The biggest movie of the summer asks how you treat a stranger. Seattle's answer, on the record — a toll of nearly a tenth on every downtown hotel-room dollar, funding a temple most visitors never enter, run by a board chaired from the innkeepers' guild. Five of the nine seats that govern it come open this summer.

The Seattle Convention Center is turning 9th Avenue between Pike and Pine into a car-free pilot from July 28 through September 8, with Market at the Marquee night markets in August.

Seattle was voted the best World Cup host city in the country, and the only one where air travel fell instead of rose. The crowds that packed the waterfront were local — which is exactly the argument for running our convention center as Seattle's living room for the whole region, not a hotel-room machine.

Seattle just licensed twenty years of its public sidewalks to a Columbus billboard company. The neighborhoods that will host the kiosks were never asked — and the city is last in line for the money.

One Friday a month, downtown Seattle finds its rhythm. A dispatch from the February Fourth Friday art walk through the convention district.

The Seattle Sports Commission's Region Ready program is turning Pacific Place into a stadium annex. What that reveals about downtown activation — and who does it.