From the May 20 – May 26, 2004 issue

News

In The Hall

by Erica C. Barnett

While his council colleagues were jetting to Munich on what was dubiously dubbed an "international study mission," Peter Steinbrueck aimed for the Vegas strip, where he toured that city's still-unfinished four-mile monorail. Tagging along on Steinbrueck's educational excursion was monorail director Joel Horn, who courted the sometimes-wobbly monorail supporter. The price tag for Steinbrueck's trip, paid for out of his office fund: around $700 including two nights at the chichi Paris hotel.

Back in Seattle, the city's marijuana policy review panel tried last week to get a look at who's being arrested and prosecuted for marijuana possession, and why. Just one problem: City Attorney (and I-75 opponent) Tom Carr still refuses to hand over the case numbers and names panel members say they need to determine whether the law is being enforced, calling it a "clear violation of [pot suspects'] privacy." But if that's the case, befuddled-looking panel member Kris Nyrop wondered at last week's meeting, then why does the county's website list the names and case numbers of everyone who's been booked into King County jail in the last year, regardless of whether they were convicted? "If this is available on a public website, I really can't understand why the city attorney's office won't give us the same information." Nyrop was speaking to an empty chair; Carr, who nominated himself to the panel, has made it to only one of the last four pot panel meetings.

While the city attorney has been AWOL from the marijuana panel, his tall, bald, besuited figure has been haunting the carpeted hallway outside council offices in recent days. Carr has been calling around to lobby council members against a proposal by Nick Licata that would repeal most of the city's impound law. (The ordinance allows cops to tow away your car if your license was suspended for a minor infraction, like an unpaid traffic ticket.) Last week, Carr shopped around an alternative that would keep impound while letting first-time offenders off the hook. Unfortunately, Carr's presumptive sponsor, Richard McIver, seemed less than enchanted with the Carr compromise; on Monday, when I ran into McIver smoking outside the entrance to city hall, he said bluntly: "I want to end impound--period."

Meanwhile, Licata walked out of a Monday morning meeting in Carr's office more pumped than ever to move forward with the repeal. "He wanted me to wait" to bring up the legislation, Licata said, presumably to give Carr more time to lobby the council. "I'm slow, but I'm not that slow," Licata laughed. (The legislation was scheduled for Licata's Tuesday afternoon committee meeting, after The Stranger went to press.)

In the ongoing tug of war between the mayor and the council, even the minutiae become fair game. Exhibit A: The city's mayor-controlled IT department took nearly a year to finish a cluttered redesign of the council's website (Sabotage? Judge for yourself: www.seattle.gov/council). Council spokesman Martin Munguia (who says, "we've come a long way" in the past year) also says the IT backlog got so bad that at one point he had to learn HTML to keep the council's online press releases from trickling out as many as three or four days late.

barnett@thestranger.com