Chamber Made
Last week The Stranger reported that on November 4, the city council passed a pro-business resolution under the influence of--and after having just attended--an annual Seattle chamber of commerce conference in Vancouver, BC, where a majority of council members met far away from the purview of Seattle's citizens. The measure explicitly signaled the council's commitment to green-light developers and businesses who want to expand and/or set up shop in Seattle. (The resolution specifically mentions South Lake Union.)
Council Members Nick Licata (who wasn't in Vancouver) and Judy Nicastro (who was harshly skeptical of the city's May 2001 deal to sell South Lake Union property to Paul Allen) were the only nay votes. Licata argued that the resolution let development plans trump neighborhood concerns. Nicastro has since added that the recommendations hadn't been properly vetted, and may come with hidden costs.
While the resolution isn't as suspect as, say, Winona Ryder in a department-store dressing room, it does raise questions. Should the council be meeting as a group outside the public process, getting lobbied, and translating that lobbying into legislation?
I'm not the only one with questions about how things went down. In a November 12 memo, legislative staffer Bob Morgan, who has been working with the council on UW development plans (also explicitly mentioned in the council's November 4 resolution), flagged the Vancouver conference as having raised potential process violations.
"Council members may have had conversations at the Chamber of Commerce Leadership Conference in Vancouver about the merits of the proposed [UW] master plan," Morgan wrote. "Such conversations would be a violation of the council's rule prohibiting ex parte communications."
"Ex parte" is parliamentary-speak for lobbying that isn't included in the public record and that's made outside a public hearing or meeting. While the presence of a majority of council members actually turned the Vancouver trip into something of a legislative meeting, it wasn't accessible to Seattle's citizens.
Morgan told council members they could correct the problem by "publicly announcing the substance and content of the communications and giving the parties the right to rebut the substance."
Morgan's alert went over well. In response to the memo, at least three council members reported that, indeed, recent Seattle chamber president and current Boeing lobbyist Bob Watt had lectured council members about UW expansion in Vancouver. The council members said they would make sure that the substance of Watt's comments went into the public record, where it could receive a full vetting.
That's nice, but what about the substance of the other lobbying that went on in Vancouver--lobbying that produced a resolution expressing the city's "commitment to the regional economic strategies developed at the 2002 Leadership Conference [in Vancouver]"? Will those strategies get a public vetting?
