This afternoon the City Council passed an ordinance requiring gun owners to securely store their firearms at home when not being carried. As I wrote previously, this is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it’s beyond the authority of the city to enact it because state law preempts cities from passing their own gun regulations.
This afternoon in an interview I asked City Attorney Pete Holmes for his legal argument as to why the city has the power to enact this ordinance in the face of a state law that clearly prohibits it.
Today the City of Seattle filed a petition with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking it to rehear en banc the appeal of the ongoing lawsuit filed by Uber and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the city’s ordinance allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize.
Late last week, a lawsuit was filed against the City of Seattle, alleging the City Council and the Mayor violated the Open Public Meetings Act when they pushed through a repeal of the controversial head tax last Tuesday.
The Hearing Examiner’s Office has been adjudicating nine separate challenges by neighborhood organizations to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the city’s city-wide MHA upzones. After a hearing on May 31 to discuss several motions for summary judgment, last Friday the Hearing Examiner issued rulings — and it largely went in favor of the city. The appeals are far from resolved, and won’t be until early fall, but several issues were taken off the table as potential flaws in the FEIS.
This morning the State Supreme court handed down a ruling in a lawsuit that Uber and Lyft filed against the City of Seattle. While the case isn’t over, Seattle won a key battle — and so did the public’s right to see what its government is doing.
Earlier this week the City of Seattle filed its first brief to the Washington State Supreme Court, attempting to entice it to take up the legal challenge to the city’s income tax ordinance.
Earlier this year, the Council passed a one-year moratorium on sites such as Rentberry and Biddwell that allow landlords to conduct auctions for their rental properties. Today, the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court challenging that moratorium.
While everyone was watching the Council try to decide whether to impost a head tax, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals made its own news today by ruling against the city in a case regarding its ordinance granting Uber and Lyft drivers the right to collective bargaining. But buried in the ruling is a legal precedent with potentially far greater impact.
This morning, two landlords and the Rental Housing Association of Washington filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court challenging the City of Seattle’s “Fair Chance Housing” tenant-protection ordinance that prohibits the use of criminal records in selecting tenants.
