This week’s absurd City Council meeting is exactly why so many council members insisted last summer on appointing someone as interim mayor who would promise not to run for the seat in May.

Mayor Ivy Taylor made that promise. That’s why she won the interim appointment. District 4 Councilman Rey Saldaña cast the decisive vote in Taylor’s favor after switching his preference at the last minute from Councilman Ray Lopez, who was truthful about his mayoral ambitions.

“We needed someone who is going to be able to make unbiased decisions with little political pressure,” Saldaña explained at the time.

Nine months later, Taylor is running for mayor, and the political pressure is causing her to make biased decisions. Hence the absurd spectacle of this week’s council meeting.

It was a tense political showdown that should not have been tense, political or even a showdown.

It started when Saldaña filed a request last month for the council to vote on a resolution in support of local control.

Taylor ignored it because the resolution mentioned the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance along with a half-dozen other laws as beneficial to San Antonio. In 2013, as a councilwoman, Taylor voted against the ordinance, which added protections for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

As weeks passed and the legislative session in Austin progressed, Saldaña grew frustrated that the mayor was not placing his resolution on a council agenda for a vote. So he made a motion last week for city staff to do so.

District 9 Councilman Joe Krier, a staunch Taylor ally, sensed opportunity. As chairman of the council’s intergovernmental relations committee, he could influence the way the resolution looked.

The day before the full council was set to consider the resolution, Krier led a meeting that culminated in a vote to recommend a different version of the document, one that listed more than 60 bills under consideration by the Legislature that would undermine local control.

Printed front and back, “version 3” of the resolution was a five-page inventory that no one was going to read, an exhaustive document that mentioned proposed bills such as one that would prevent cities from regulating the temperature of raw milk. The result: a watered-down resolution that drowned out mention of the nondiscrimination ordinance.

District 10 Councilman Mike Gallagher, a fellow North Side leader, was on board with Krier.

At the council meeting, Saldaña stood his ground.

“I know that I care about things like protecting the nondiscrimination ordinance more than I do about regulating the temperature of raw milk,” he said from the dais. “We need to have a backbone about local control, and we shouldn’t be afraid of putting things out and naming them and not choosing the alternative, which is to cloud it amongst others that may be important or not. We need to protect those (laws) that are the most controversial.”

From the dais, Taylor argued against that.

“I believe that version 3 is what allows us to focus on what unites us,” she said.

The irony was obvious: The proliferation of “versions” of Saldaña’s simple, nonbinding resolution was only dividing the council. And the person responsible for the rift was Taylor, whose appointment Saldaña had cinched last summer in order to avoid political rifts.

The outcome of the dispute was not kind to Taylor, Krier or Gallagher: The council voted 7-3 for Saldaña’s version of the resolution. If the trio had been trying to build a conservative coalition on the council, they failed.

Then again, maybe everything was staged.

One conspiracy theory goes like this: Saldaña schemed all along to back Taylor into a corner and dare her to push back against the nondiscrimination ordinance, thereby reminding voters of her controversial vote in 2013. (Saldaña denied this.) Taylor, meanwhile, leaped at the chance to remind conservative voters that she had fought the ordinance.

In any case, political pressure certainly distorted and corrupted what should have been a simple vote in support of local control, something upon which every council member already agreed.

bchasnoff@express-news.net