Meta: González and her colleagues discussed the difficulty of participating in virtual meetings… while in the ongoing virtual meetings of the Seattle City Council
A bill to keep Seattle’s development projects moving forward through the COVID-19 crisis got snagged up in process Monday as the City Council fell a vote short of the 3/4 approval required to pass the emergency legislation.
CHS reported on the proposal from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office that seeks to temporarily move city processes like approval of design review and landmarks protections from citizen panels to City of Seattle staff during the COVID-19 restrictions. Under the proposal, public comment would still be collected.
Monday’s session on the legislation brought a rare split for the council with West Seattle’s Lisa Herbold, Northeast Seattle’s Alex Pedersen, and South Seattle’s Tammy Morales voting against the bill after a long discussion about the difficulties of participating in virtual meetings and concerns about an element of the proposal that would exempt affordable housing from review to help reduce city staff workload.
Seattle City Council Insight reports that council president M. Lorena González got tangled in parliamentary procedure after the failure and was forced to table a motion for reconsideration of the emergency bill until the next meeting of the full council — possibly Wednesday.
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Alex Pedersen is a joke. I was not surprised that Herbold and Morales voted no, but who is Pedersen trying to impress? His rich snob friends over in Laurelhurst who don’t want to see the Talaris project proceed? What a joke he is. His vote probably cost a lot of jobs in the design and construction fields. Nice job Alex!
Disagree. Alex Pedersen is at least one moderate vote on the Council, which has tilted pretty far-left in recent years. A balance of ideas is good for democracy.
Quite right, Bob.
He just pretends to be moderate. I thought he would be too, but he proved who he really is the other day, which is a Jack Ass. Sorry Bob, I know you like him but I think you’ll see over time that he’s full of S*#it. On a vote that matters to keep people working, especially design professionals, Sawant was very measured and rational which was nice to see for a change. Pedersen sold workers down the river do he could satisfy his NIMBY friends in Laurelhurst.