Witness: Most recently The Stranger busted Mayor Nickels for planning a fundraiser on behalf of some incoming council members and offering them temporary offices and staff in Key Tower--tacky and questionable moves that leave one wondering about Nickels' political instincts. More telling, though, within the space of a few days in mid-November, Nickels directed two hot-headed letters to council; a council that, for once, seemed to have the upper hand over Nickels.
The mayor's curt November 12 letter--addressing City Council Member Richard Conlin's counterproposal to Nickels' Northgate plan--read like a crybaby stomping home after losing at kickball: "If this council won't act, I will work with a new council in January." Waaaaahh! Less than a week later, with bullet points, italics, and bolded headlines, Nickels sent a three-page November 17 treatise on the council's counter budget proposal. It read like a weird letter from a jilted ex-boyfriend.
Certainly, Nickels isn't imploding as dramatically as Nicastro did, but Nickels' gaudy temper tantrums do reveal a mayor who senses something has changed. And something has changed. It's the untold story of the recent anti city council incumbents election: Voters had the mayor in their crosshairs on Election Day too. Nickels' lock on power was jostled as a result. Basically, the voters sent the message that they wanted more engaged representation from council--and so, fired up, the city council got in Nickels' face just a week after the election with a Northgate plan of its own and a budget plan of its own, forcing the mayor to play by the council's terms on both issues.
"There's a different atmosphere around here. Change is in the air," City Council President Peter Steinbrueck says--adding, re: Northgate, "the mayor's office had certain assumptions about what they might get from us, and they have miscalculated. They thought they had this wrapped. That wasn't the case."
Indeed, despite Nickels' heated stance, the council's Northgate counterproposal has already reframed the Northgate debate, forcing Team Nickels to adjust to council's priorities. A few days after condemning the council's proposal and pledging to wait for the new council, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis attended the current council's November 17 Northgate committee meeting as Steinbrueck suggested. "We needed a clear signal that the mayor was willing to negotiate with us," Steinbrueck says. "I asked Tim [Ceis] to step into this. After all, we have the potential to walk away from the deal that the mayor negotiated with [Northgate Mall property owner] Simon Property. We can just vote it down."
"We want to work something out," a chastened Ceis says.
More than Northgate, it's the budget story that reveals the changing dynamic between mayor and council. The council took $3.7 million in unanticipated revenue from real-estate excise taxes and other sources, $4.2 million from the city's emergency sub-fund, and $700,000 poached from the mayor's pet projects--and used the money to cover $2.6 million in council pet projects and $6 million in court-mandated streetlight costs. (A November 13 Washington State Supreme Court decision transferred the costs of maintaining city streetlights from Seattle City Light to the city's general fund, a ruling the mayor's budget hadn't prepared for.)
The council's trick--it passed its $666 million budget 9-0 on Monday, November 24--put the mayor on the defensive. "They keep saying they saved the day," Ceis complains about the council's plan to fund more social services and still deliver a balanced package, "but that day isn't sustainable."
Given that the council's budget actually is sustainable--the math balances out--what probably bugs Team Nickels is that council wrested control of the budget away from the mayor and reframed the debate, upstaging Nickels by funding stuff like health clinics, homeless-youth outreach services, and sexual-assault services--items left off Nickels' budget. "The council has put the mayor in the position of being the bad guy," Ceis says, "because we would have to come back and make the tough cuts to balance the budget."
Correction: The budget is balanced. The mayor only has to make "tough cuts" if he wants to restore his priorities over the council's. In short, the council outfoxed Nickels. Now, rather than revamping the budget on his own, Nickels has taken the unprecedented and humbling move of agreeing to work directly with council on any changes.
"It is interesting what happens when you stand up to Nickels," says soon-to-be council president and current budget chair Jan Drago. "It's all about power. And that's respected."
