Although a council committee voted 5-2 this week to increase building heights on a piece of Vulcan-owned land in South Lake Union this week (the University of Washington wants to turn it into a 125-foot-tall research center), the project could run into a new roadblock: A new city council that lacks two of the members who were expected to vote in favor of the project.

Sally Clark and Jan Drago had supported moving forward with a vote of the full council this coming Monday. However, because council president Richard Conlin objected to fast-tracking the upzone (ordinarily, proposals on which a committee is divided don't move forward the following week), the vote won't take place until January 11—when Drago, who voted in favor of the upzone, and Richard McIver will be replaced by Sally Bagshaw and Mike O'Brien, respectively. That will leave four votes solidly in favor of the proposal (Sally Clark, Tim Burgess, Bruce Harrell, and Jean Godden), two solidly against (Tom Rasmussen and Nick Licata) and three up in the air (Bagshaw, O'Brien, and Conlin).

Conlin wouldn't say how he planned to vote on the proposal, saying he planned to "reserve judgment until my final decision." However, he did express "concern about the issues surrounding" the process for approving the amendment.

O'Brien tells PubliCola he doesn't have a position on the UW's particular request, although he supports density generally. And Bagshaw telss us she has "not been involved" with the discussions.

As I wrote yesterday, most of the opposition to the height increase centers on the process, not the height itself. Ordinarily, upzones can be done as part of the larger neighborhood planning process or through a "contract rezone," which requires mitigation from the developer and does not allow any lobbying of the council. This height increase is different because it's being done through a "text amendment," which requires no mitigation, allows lobbying, and takes far less time than either a contract rezone or the neighborhood planning process. UW says they need the change immediately to move forward with their research center; opponents say the university and Vulcan should have to follow the same rules as everybody else.

A side note: Council members (including Conlin) and staff told me they had heard that Vulcan had talked about gating off some of the open space the company said it would provide as part of the upzone, making it accessible only to people who work on the UW campus.  Vulcan spokesman David Postman says the space "will indeed be open for the public to enjoy." However, he says, "This is a biotech facility, and as such the medical school has reasonable concerns about public safety. We need to make sure that UW students, staff and the public are not put in danger by any sort of inappropriate or potentially dangerous behavior by anyone in the open space, and the school should be able to enforce trespassing laws if necessary." Postman says Vulcan is still working out the language to accomplish that with the council.