It is becoming easier, and more depressing, to foresee next year's path for InsolvenCity.
More than one week
after a unanimous council
approved prevailing wage legislation,
developers' spokesman Mayor Luke Ravenstahl -- sacrificing a head start on
his New Year's Eve bender chasing skirts along the entirety of Carson Street, er,
devoting some rare down time to his son, er, his holiday --
delivered a veto at approximately 3:30 p.m., timing that complicated, if not prevented, any effort to override that veto by the soon-to-expire council (the city code imposes a 24-hour notice rule with respect to any meeting at which a vote is to be conducted).
A few hours later, and a few hours before midnight's lapse of the current council's authority, members convened at a special meeting to respond to the mayor's demonstration of his level of respect for council.
"
This is the way fascists do business," declared Patrick Dowd,
awakening from his bizarre, counterintuitive courtship with the mayor and cheering the people who fought to elect him by damning the mayor's cynical manipulation of the legislative calendar turning an accusatory glare toward Bill Peduto and Doug Shields.
Mayor Ravenstahl,
reading a statement written by a consortium of developers and approved by John Verbanac communicating his reasoning to council by letter, emphasized
Walnut Capital's marching orders his desire to "promote, encourage and . . . incentivize the private sector."
The threshold for overriding the veto was six votes; five such votes were cast. That likely was the most appropriate result, under the rules. But the manner in which the mayor's emerging bloc of flunkies conducted themselves furthers a pattern that threatens to ensure yet another year of dysfunction in InsolvenCity.
The Propositions Board (far right column) includes a new, related set of lines.
UPDATE: A
junkie notes that this is not Mayor Ravenstahl's first display of imperious timing.
No comments:
Post a Comment