City Councilmember Nick Licata

I can already see Nick Licata‘s Christmas card to Mayor McGinn: “Thanks for making me look middle-of-the-road.” The City Council’s Licata has long been–years before President Obama’s election–Seattle’s “socialist” in city government, often ending up on the wrong end of the teeter-totter from everyone else on the Council.

With McGinn assuming the loose lefty cannon mantle, Licata has been free to act as the voice of reason. Today, he’s brokered a compromise to quell the contretemps arising from the funding of MOHAI’s move to the Lake Union Armory. (The details are spelled out in his Urban Politics newsletter, which will be up shortly.)

With statesmanlike restraint, Licata chose to focus on the more proximate needs of the two parties at odds: Mayor McGinn needs to find cash to balance the budget, and MOHAI needs all the help it can get to survive its move. What Licata rather cunningly realized is that the two cash crunches don’t coincide in time. His compromise means the city will still pay MOHAI the agreed upon $7 million, but not during the next budget year.

Restructuring the release of the $40 million that MOHAI will receive from the State can achieve these two objectives. The City will retain $8.5 million during 2011 and 2012 and then pass that amount onto MOHAI after we receive our share of the land proceeds in 2013 or later. The result is that we have real cash to spend on one-time needs, like summer youth employment, library collections, and food banks that we otherwise would not have.

Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Licata looks very good here because the Council as a whole was inclined to tell the Mayor (whom Licata refers to as the “Executive” repeatedly, and amusingly, given the recent flap over Council President Richard Conlin’s “usurpation” of executive signing function) to go pound sand. That, satisfying as it may be to the Council, does not actually help deal with the looming deficit, as Licata’s time-delay funding maneuver does. The Council will vote on formalizing the plan next week.

For the record, Licata accomplished this by sitting down with MOHAI to see what could be worked out, rather than sending the museum a peremptory letter demanding a share of the state’s funding, with the threat of denying city funding if the shakedown didn’t proceed as planned. Watch and learn, Mayor.