Council Recess – no meetings this week

This is the calm before the storm so don’t get used to it. Every year Council goes on recess for the last two weeks of August, returning the first Tuesday after Labor Day. Then they have only two or three weeks, depending on when Labor Day falls, to vote everything out of committee for the last City Council meeting before budget deliberations officially begin.

This year, that’s Tuesday Sept. 22 – the Day the Budget Drops. It’s going to be a long agenda.

Not because of the budget transmittal itself. That’s kind of a ceremonial thing usually taking the form of the Mayor giving some speech about the budget being a moral document expressing our values so don’t even think about messing with it (in so many words).

No. It’s going to be a long meeting because there’s a lot of crazy legislation out there that’ll be scheduled for final vote or it’ll have to sit around until after Thanksgiving when the budget’s done. Things like UFCW’s shitty “Fair and Transparent Pricing” bill that’ll raise the price of groceries. Or CM Rinck’s Domestic Workers bill that’ll make it harder for single moms to hire a nanny to watch her kids because she fled an abusive husband and can’t afford the fancy preschools that upper middle-class, “in this house we believe” households (as I call them) can afford.

Hopefully hardworking Councilmembers are spending their recess coming up with amendments to make these bills less bad (better yet, they could just vote no – hint, hint). If so, those amendments are gonna take a lot of wheeling and dealing to get three votes to pass in committee – way easier to get than trying to get five votes in Full Council (as we old-timers used to call what’s now “City Council” which I think is a confusing name for a meeting).

Because with all 7 district reps on the ballot next year, taking hard but pragmatic votes will require more guts than usual.

But I digress. It’s gonna get busy when Council returns on September 8. So rest up.