The Pronto vote — oops!

The City Council has announced a correction on the final vote on Pronto in the Sustainability and Transportation committee on Tuesday.It turns out that Council member Debora Juarez voted “yes” on the final, amended version of the bill to acquire the assets of the ailing Pronto bikeshare system.  That means the final vote was 4-2, with Juarez, Johnson, Sawant and O’Brien voting “yes” and Burgess and Herbold voting “no.”  Originally the vote was recorded as 3-3, with Juarez voting “no.”

This means that the bill goes to the full council with a recommendation to approve (rather than no recommendation). It will still have a divided report attached to it, and under the rules of procedure for the City Council will still wait until the March 14 full Council meeting to give the Council more time to consider both sides of the divided report.

But it does change the likelihood that the bill will pass: assuming that the four members who voted “yes” will do so again, that means that  only one of the three Council members who didn’t attend the committee meeting, Bagshaw, Gonzalez and Harrell, will need to vote “yes” in order for the bill to pass.

Bagshaw is a big bike advocate, but might be swayed to vote “no” by the notion of having more funds available for addressing homelessness. Harrell is most likely to join Burgess on the side of “good governance” and vote no, particularly if he feels that his district is unlikely to be served well by even an expanded bikeshare program. Gonzalez is a wild card, not having taken a stand on bike infrastructure in the city and because she holds one of the two “city wide” positions rather than representing a specific district.

It seems unlikely that all three will vote “no.” More likely is that one or more of them will ask for further amendments to the bill in order to secure their vote in favor, but in the end it will pass. Let the horse trading commence.