Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between summer doldrums and a slow news week. Although every summer seems more and more eventful (last year: the monorail overthrow; this year: the war on nightlife), the time comes each year for the city council's summer recess, when all public business slams to a halt.

On August 17, seemingly oblivious to the looming hiatus (at one point, she mentioned "next Monday's [nonexistent] council meeting") ambitious rookie Council Member Sally Clark held a meeting of her neighborhoods and economic development committee in an upstairs room at the Capitol Hill Library. Clark, the first council member since her former boss and mentor, Tina Podlodowski, to hold committee meetings in neighborhoods, planned a packed agenda. It started with a controversial proposal by Mayor Greg Nickels to lower ethical standards for members of city boards and commissions, allowing board members to vote even when there's an apparent conflict of interest (as long as they disclose the conflict) and exempting committee members from fines (currently up to $5,000) for violating conflict-of-interest rules.

Dozens of people, including former ethics commission chairman Tim Burgess, spoke against the changes, which they said would render the city's conflict-of-interest regulations toothless. "I can't understand why we would have a prohibition on an actual conflict of interest and at the same time remove any ability to enforce it," Burgess said. Proponents, meanwhile, argued that subjecting volunteer commission members to a potential fine would have a "chilling effect" on applications, an argument Council Member Peter Steinbrueck dismissed brusquely: "This is a big city with a lot of people who do not have conflicts who can advise us on any number of things. I can't accept the claim that if you have to abide by a set of rules, we're not going to get the expertise we need." The committee balked at making a decision Thursday, although Clark said she was "leaning in favor" of strengthening the mayor's proposal and "instituting a fine."

Opponents of Seattle Housing Authority policy, which has focused in recent years on creating mixed-income housing, sometimes to the detriment of the poorest public-housing residents, sensed collusion between Mayor Nickels and SHA when Nickels nominated a previously rejected senior-housing resident, Paul Schell nominee Sybil Bailey, to fill an empty resident seat on the SHA board. However, a records request for all communications between SHA and the mayor's office about the appointment yielded an overwhelmingly innocuous pile of documents, which consisted mostly of e-mails between SHA and mayoral staffers about how to get the word out about the open seat. Steinbrueck (who also had strong words for the mayor's film and music office on proposed nightclub regulations—see "Unhappy Customers," this page) said August 18 that he would fight for more police funding in this year's budget—a response, in part, to public-safety concerns that the mayor's nightclub regulations conspicuously ignore. "More police could be an important part of the answer," Steinbrueck said.