Tuesday’s agenda was brief and quickly dispatched; less than an hour after he’d gaveled the Common Council into session, Council President Dave Franczyk raised the gavel again to close the people’s business.

But before he could bring the hammer down, Lovejoy District Councilmember (and Majority Leader) Richard Fontana asked Franczyk to accept a late-file item from Ellicott District Councilmember Brian Davis.

Franczyk looked confused, then asked what the very-late-filed item was about. When Davis said it had to do with the Stillwater Restaurant, the Council President visibly shifted into reverse. There’s a lot of controversy around that restaurant, he said (in so many words), talking over Davis’s attempt to explain. We’d better take time to read this.

Stillwater is the Delaware Avenue restaurant whose continuing application for permission to build and operate a large back patio, opening onto Virginia Place, has drawn opposition from immediate neighbors and the Allentown Association, as well as the city’s planning and preservation boards. Davis, opponents say, has been pushing unduly for approval of the patio; even as the proposal lies apparently dead in the water, he has kept Stillwater’s application in committee, in case there is some breakthrough in negotiations between the restaurant’s owners and its neighbors.

“We’re really just closing the circle,” Davis said, explaining that the Common Council had granted Stillwater a variance to operate as a nightclub—interior only, no patio—but had not yet approved its license application to operate as a nightclub. The late-filed measure would make it official, and haste was required because Stillwater is hosting a charity function this weekend. The measure, he said—correctly, it turns out—had nothing to do with the patio application.

But Franczyk was suspicious. He suggested a five-minute recess during which councilmembers could read what Davis had submitted.

When the Council reconvened, what Franczyk had read had not allayed his concerns; nor did the explanations Davis whispered into his ear while Niagara District Councilmember David Rivera revisited an item designating PUSH Buffalo developers for two properties on Massachusetts Avenue.

(That’s a piece of work for which Mayor Byron Brown deserves credit, which he received—exclusively. Rumor has it that Brown would not allow any other elected officials to be invited to the announcement.)

Franczyk noted that, for a measure that did not concern the patio, there was a great deal of the language about the patio included. He might also have noticed that the paperwork had been sitting on somebody’s desk for at least a month, leading one to wonder why it had been put off until the late last minute, with a charity event purportedly hanging in the balance.

And so Davis’s late file was deemed too late. Davis did not put up a fight.

—geoff kelly