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.

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 Convention Center is redrawing its whole campus. Three firms submitted three very different visions of what it is for — and the choice was made last August, with no public hearing. Take the pick yourself, then meet the three plans.