This will be pretty short.
- Council President Harrell circulated a letter for his colleagues to sign supporting the repeal of Initiative 200, which banned affirmative action in the state.
- The Office of Intergovernmental Relations gave another weekly update on the state legislative session currently underway. A few bills the city was promoting didn’t survive the first cutoff last Friday, including portable benefits, gun responsibility, and repealing the ban on rent control. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is the cutoff for fiscal-bills to be voted out of committee in their house of origin, so next Monday the list of bills still being tracked will be much shorter. Today’s report isn’t yet posted, but here’s last week’s.
- Next Monday, Council member Sawant’s committee will hold a special evening meeting to hear from homeless service providers who were not funded in HSD’s 2018 Homeless Services RFP. They are likely to also dive into understanding how the “bridge funding” provided is being used, and what will likely happen to the people being served by the organizations that lost funding. Sawant has been a vocal critic of the RFP process.
- Council member Johnson’s committee meets Wednesday morning. They will take a vote on an appeal of a contract rezone along Dexter Avenue, and they will once again take up the issue of modifications to off-street parking rules.
- Council member O’Brien’s next committee meeting is tomorrow (Tuesday), at which he plans to discuss “hostile architecture,” in particular the recent cases of SDOT installing bike racks in certain places to discourage homeless people from camping there. According to O’Brien, both Mayor Jenny Durkan and the interim SDOT Director have stated their opposition to the practice, and SDOT has agreed to relocate the bike racks.
- This morning, Council members Herbold and Gonzalez recapped the most recent meeting of the Progressive Revenue Task Force, in which they reviewed progressive revenue recommendations from the Center for American Progress. The task force has three more meetings scheduled before it is due to deliver its recommendations to the Council. The next meeting is February 15th.
- This afternoon, the Council voted to appoint Ryan Vancil as Hearing Examiner.
- This afternoon the Council also adopted its 2018 Work Program.