Last night the City-County Council voted on Proposal 131 - giving the Ballard Administration permission to continue to craft a final agreement to sell the water and sewer utilities to Citizens Energy - and Proposal 132 - which raises the Payment in Lieu of Taxes paid by the sewer utility and floats $170 million in bonds secured with that increase in PILOT.
Here is how the individual Councillors voted.
Proposal 131 -- 18 yea votes -- Libertarian Coleman and Democrats Nytes and Moriarty-Adams joined all Republicans, Cain, Cardwell, Cockrum, Day, Freeman, Hunter, Lutz, Malone, McHenry, McQuillen, Pfisterer, Rivera, Scales, Speedy, and Vaughn. 11 nay votes -- all Democrats, Bateman, Brown, Evans, Gray, Lewis, Brian Mahern, Dane Mahern, Mansfield, Minton-McNeill, Oliver, and Sanders
Proposal 132 -- same vote as above except that Libertarian Coleman changed positions.
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2 comments:
Can someone help me understand how the Council voted to give the Mayor permission to continue to craft this deal when they didn't vote to give the Mayor permission in the first place?
I think it is an embarrassment to our local government process.
Councillor Vaughn explained at the last Rules committee meeting that it was a misunderstanding between himself and the Administration. He told them that the Council didn't need ALL the details, but they interpreted that to mean they didn't need anything but the basic ideas that would form the basis of the deal. Therefore the Proposal was written with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) as the core.
The Committee immediately amended that Proposal to create a new Council committee to review the final deal and send a recommendation to the full Council for the final vote. This Utility Oversight Committee will be composed of 6 Republicans and 5 Democrats.
The lingering question has been, so, if this form of Prop 131 really resulted from a misunderstanding of how detailed the deal had to be at the point the Council approved it, then why couldn't the Council simply table this Proposal and amend it with the final deal when that was available? Then, all parties in the Council would have had ample time to review the late-arriving documents the Administration finally posted on their website on Friday.
All that said, I haven't heard a good reason why this form of Prop 131 could not have been tabled. The Mayor certainly doesn't need the Council's permission to work on a deal -- and it likely was doing so as the Council was engrossed in monkeying with Prop 131.
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