For the past few months, outgoing City Council President Sara Nelson has been pushing her final agenda: a bill to regulate political consultants. It made it to full Council on Tuesday and passed as Nelson’s last act on the dais. But by the time it reached the full council, the bill had been so heavily amended that it barely did, well, anything.

Under the bill that council passed, political consultants must register with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC) within 15 days of providing political consulting services and disclose which city candidates, campaigns or ballot measures they work for, as well as when that work began.

“What we’re really trying to do is strengthen public trust in local government, and that depends on our constituents having confidence that what we’re doing, that the decisions that we make, are in their best interest,” Nelson said at Tuesday’s meeting.

The approved legislation, however, does not do what Nelson originally proposed. The crux of her bill was a ban on political consultants simultaneously holding city contracts while doing outside campaign work, along with a one-year cooling-off period before consultants could return to city work after campaign activities.

Those prohibitions are now gone. Instead, the bill focuses on consultant reporting and disclosure—a provision from Councilmember Dan Strauss’s amendment. And actually, similar reporting requirements appeared in Nelson’s original draft but were stripped at last week's committee meeting.

Strauss reinstated those requirements, arguing the bill needed to mirror consultant laws in San Francisco and Portland, which Nelson had repeatedly cited as models. He warned that if the bill passed with the prohibition elements, Council would be passing “first-in-the-nation legislation that has not been tested.”

“If this amendment does not pass and the underlying bill goes above and beyond what our peer cities are doing, I will not be able to support the bill this time,” Strauss said.

A second amendment, sponsored by Councilmember Rob Saka, requires City Council to consult with the SEEC on national best practices should it decide to revisit the ethics code in the future. It’s nonbinding, but could potentially delegate more rulemaking authority to the SEEC. 

It’s pretty much an optics amendment in response to criticism Nelson has faced for introducing this bill at the 11th hour. Nelson’s bill was seemingly a reaction to an iffy contractual relationship between Mayor Bruce Harrell and his consultant, Christian Sinderman, who was simultaneously working for Harrell while running Nelson’s competitor’s campaign in November’s election.

“However valid and pure motive and intent any changes that directly originate from individual council members,” Saka said, “the appearance of impropriety is not where it could or should be, and for those reasons, I think on a going-forward basis, we need to be more hands-off with this and all just collectively agree to live up to whatever the independent experts think.”

The third amendment, sponsored by Nelson and co-developed with Councilmember Maritza Rivera, requires consultants who have city contracts while working on campaigns to disclose that overlap to the SEEC, declare in their contracts that they are not violating ethics rules, and state which city department they’re consulting for. 

Sure, that’s great. But it’s already public information Seattle’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services could pull anyway.

Stephen Paolini, principal at Bottled Lightning Collective who worked on the PAC supporting Mayor-elect Katie Wilson’s campaign, says Strauss’s amendment was good, but the overall bill is “meaningless.”

In a text to The Stranger, Paolini says the legislation has “no impact on transparency or accountability. It’s just asking consultants to fill out a form to the SEEC of information the SEEC already has.”

He also says Saka’s amendment requiring SEEC involvement in future ethics legislation is a “hilarious self-own to end the Nelson era in Seattle.”

“This is essentially them admitting that they should have talked to actual experts before presenting legislation that seemed to be the result of a sloppy word association session,” Paolini says. “Confused why we all wasted a bunch of time on this, but what’s new when it comes to Nelson’s council.”

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Stephen Paolini worked on Mayor-elect Katie Wilson's campaign. He worked on the PAC supporting her campaign.