Schaltung
Getting information out of council offices has been like pulling teeth with a monkey wrench lately, what with all the hush-hush negotiations on the monorail, but council member Nick Licata's office was eager to relay one bit of news: His proposal to repeal the impound ordinance, briefly spiked when City Attorney Tom Carr scared two of its sponsors into postponing it, was coming back up for a vote. (The law allows cops to tow away the cars of people whose licenses were suspended for minor violations like unpaid tickets.)
But on closer inspection, the prognosis didn't seem quite so upbeat for Licata's ballsy proposal. Last week, a related bill was floating around city hall. While the new bill would let first-time offenders drive away with a warning, after the first offense, the old impound law would still apply. Who drafted the "compromise"? Why, none other than impound fan Carr, who sent it down to the council last week. (The ordinance could be introduced by Richard McIver, who was headed for Germany on Friday with two of his colleagues and couldn't be reached. More on that later.) On Monday, Carr said he was working with "the whole council" on the proposal--but as of Monday afternoon, he hadn't gotten around to calling Licata, whose office wasn't aware of any substitute legislation.
Whichever version prevails, one thing's clear: Something's got to be done about impound. And something is being done: Last week, a federal judge gave class-action status to the 10,000 to 15,000 drivers whose cars have been taken under the impound policy.
As for the mystery of the missing council members: Although the council hasn't found a single spare moment to take up its "temporary" strip-club moratorium in the past 15 years, three of them (Jan Drago, McIver, and Jim Compton) did manage to squeeze in a weeklong trip, sponsored by the Trade Development Alliance, to Munich to "study [ways] to steer Seattle into the next century," according to the TDA's website. Rick Olsen, spokesperson for the Puget Sound Regional Council (which paid McIver's fare), couldn't tell me much about the trip, and council spokesperson Martin Munguia, likewise, knew "next to nothing" about it. So I took a look at the agenda (www.ci.seattle.wa.us/tda /munichagenda.htm), where I learned that the council will be studying such things as "how Munich works," "basic sciences," and something called the "Bavarian cluster strategy."
Meanwhile, back at home (not to mention reality), council member Jean Godden was busy axing a wacko proposal that would have all but given City Light the go-ahead to build a Vulcan-backed electric substation in South Lake Union (and, incidentally, paved the way for Vulcan and the mayor's as-yet-unapproved biotech blueprint for the neighborhood). The legislation would let City Light continue working on (and buying land for) the substation, which sounds innocuous, until you consider that once the substation is built, a whole bunch of other stuff--zoning changes, a streetcar, costly street improvements--will become faits accomplis. Godden's committee wisely nixed the slippery-slope proposal until the mayor's office comes back to the council with a real South Lake Union plan--and then, Godden's office says, they may have something to talk about.
