Maybe the Common Council is being thrifty; maybe the councilmembers are living in the past. In any case, they were all still using 2006 desk calendars at Tuesday’s meeting.

Maybe they are just reluctant to turn the page on former Masten District representative Antoine Thompson, gone to Albany to represent the 60th District in the State Senate. Thompson, of course, replaces Marc Coppola, who replaced Byron Brown when Brown was elected mayor last year; Brown won the State Senate seat in 2000 by unseating Marc’s cousin Al Coppola, who was appointed to replace Anthony Nanula (remember him?) when Nanula was elected city comptroller in 2000; Nanula took the seat in a 1994 special election to fill the vacancy left by Anthony Masiello when he was elected mayor. Who says nothing changes in Buffalo politics?

Finding a replacement for Thompson is on the Council’s agenda this week; the members will interview candidates and vote in Thompson’s replacement this Friday, January 12.

The leading candidate for the job is Erie County Legislator Demone Smith—a fact first reported by Brian Meyer in the Buffalo News on December 31. “Smith,” Meyer wrote, “is considered a shoo-in to become Buffalo’s newest Common Council member.”

Which is true: Meyer predicted that Smith would win the support of the Masten District’s Democratic committee members, and on Saturday, January 6, he did. And, as Meyer reported, traditionally the Council has followed the recommendation of district committee members when filling vacancies. The party’s apparatus has spoken and so the question ought to be settled—and, truthfully, it probably is. Expect Smith to be voted in on Friday—unanimously, no doubt, because who wants to start your relationship with the new guy by explaining why you didn’t want to give him the job?

Meyer’s article irked South District Councilmember Mickey Kearns, however. Kearns led the effort to place a referendum on November’s ballot requiring greater transparency in the way vacancies are filled. The measure, approved overwhelmingly by voters, requires vacancies to be advertised on the city’s Web site and on public television for at least five days. Applicants submit resumes by a certain date, after which councilmembers may vet candidates any way they see fit before voting in special session to fill the job.

Kearns, it bears recalling, won the South District seat that was vacated in spring of 2005 by former mayor Jimmy Griffin, who came out of retirement vowing to fix the Hickory Woods fiasco for which he bore much responsibility and then to relinquish his seat on Council. One can debate whether Hickory Woods is fixed, but Griffin did retire again, and he supported Kearns as his replacement. The South District’s committee members, however, did not: They backed Jeffrey Conrad. So did Congressman Brian Higgins. So did the fundraisin’, party-givin’, wagon-circlin’ political club known as Goin’ South, which wields considerable influence in the local Democratic Party. The Common Council, following the aforementioned tradition, appointed Conrad to take Griffin’s seat, conferring on to him the advantages of incumbency in that fall’s Democratic primary. Those advantages did Conrad no good at all, however, as he lost to Kearns, who also won in the general election and took office January 1, 2006, and has been touchy about Democratic Party machinations ever since.

So Kearns was displeased to read Meyer’s accurate reporting of those machinations, which Kearns argued undermined the public sense that the Council is capable of operating independently, free of the influence of party bosses.

“When you read in the paper that someone has been anointed, that’s pretty discouraging,” Kearns said during Tuesday’s session. University District Councilmember Bonnie Russell concurred, adding that you can’t and shouldn’t believe what you read in the papers; that amused both representatives of the media present at the session and Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis, who suggested that candidates for the vacancy be reminded that Brian Meyer is not a member of Council.

Council President Dave Franczyk brought the conversation more or less to a conclusion with what could be interpreted as a double-edged admonition: “It’s up to every individual councilmember’s free wills” how they vote, Franczyk said. That is, you’re free to vote any way and for anyone you like, based on whatever considerations you think obtain in evaluating your new colleague from the Masten District. You’re also free to bear the political repercussions—from the Democratic Party, from your own district’s committee members and from your fellow councilmembers.

The only other lengthy discussion during Tuesday’s session had more to do with ensuring job vacancies than filling them.

Niagara District Councilmember Nick Bonifacio began a conversation about the proposed living wage increase—whereby anyone doing business with the city would have to pay its workers at least $9.59 an hour with benefits, or at least $10.77 an hour without benefits, a hike of 65 cents—by pleading for an exception in the case of seasonal jobs. Seasonal jobs, he argued, provide high school and college age kids, who might otherwise take to the streets and do mischief, with lessons on the value of hard work. Subjecting seasonal jobs to the living wage increase might result in fewer of these priceless opportunities.

Most likely there will be no exception for seasonal workers employed directly by the city, who will be subject to the wage freeze mandated by the control board. The living wage increase, if passed, will benefit only employees of companies who contract with the city. (Delaware District Councilmember Mike LoCurto observed: “Sometimes I think the control board is making it up as they go along. It’s okay to give a raise to someone who makes $80,000 a year, but for those who mkae $10 an hour…”)

When Bonifacio had made his statement, Brian Davis chimed in with a series of questions regarding responsibility for notifying those companies who would be affected by the living wage increase. Who would tell them? How would they know to figure this increase into their budgets? This line of questioning prompted some confusion; no one seemed to understand what Davis wanted to know, and responses by Lovejoy District Councilmember Rich Fontana and the Corporation Counsel’s Peter Savage failed to satisfy.

Davis might have received a better answer if he’d phrased his first question the way he phrased his last: Does the living wage law apply to agencies and businesses supported by city-awarded community block grant development funds?

Ah, there it is. Block grants. Seasonal jobs. A cynical observer might suggest that the questions raised by Davis and Bonifacio had to do with ensuring that the pool of patronage jobs available to the friends and families of those in city government doesn’t shrink.

In politics, after all, it is better to have 1,000 people owe you $100 than it is to have 100 people owe you $1,000. That is true this year and last year and every year.