This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.
As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them. The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.
The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”…