Seattle City Council hears unique proposal when couple gets engaged at meeting

Brett Horvath and Berit Anderson have been dating for four years – and as young people do these days, Brett wanted to make his proposal special.

Instead of taking Berit to the middle of a golf course on a moonlit night, or taking out on a paddle boat at Green Lake, he decided to propose at a Monday’s Seattle City Council meeting.

When it was time for any other business at the Seattle City Council meeting, Councilmember Mike O’Brien said, “I’d like to move to suspend the rules for brief consideration of the resolution of the use of artificial intelligence in government and possible relationship rezoning.”

At which point, Horvath, a tech consultant who is a friend of O’Brien’s, stepped forward to testify, complete with a PowerPoint presentation charting the progress of his relationship with Berit Anderson, an associate editor at Crosscut.

“This image charts general relationship happiness over the years that we’ve been dating from 2009 to 2013,” said Horvath, referring to his PowerPoint presentation.

Council President Sally Clark seemed convinced the relationship had a future, and was pleased with the paperwork. “I would note that it looks as you have obtained both parental blessings permits, which is important. We’re big on permits.”

But some members had pointed questions. O’Brien asked, “I’m inclined to support this proposal, but the testimony remains, leaving a lot of questions unanswered. Things like, when will the wedding be? Where are you going to live? Do you want kids? Would you consider adoption? What kind of font would go on the wedding invites? At what age will you tell your children to watch the Star Wars trilogy and will you ever tell them about the new movies?”

In the end the measure proved to be fairly controversial. It ended up in a tie vote, four yeas to four nays with one recusal and so the council punted the final decision to the bride-to-be.

She came to the podium and they kissed, as supporters in the audience clapped, and a little pickup band played “All You Need Is Love.”

There was some pushback in the comment section on Crosscut that this was a waste of city council time, but there was also pushback to the pushback to the effect that once in a while the watchdogs can lighten up, considering it was the last meeting of the year.

MyNorthwest.com’s Alyssa Kleven contributed to this report.