The Seattle Times reports that Seattle business owner Dave Meinert, a member of Mayor Ed Murray’s income inequality advisory committee is calling the process leading to a supposed compromise proposal a “charade.” His characterization is a pointed departure from Seattle nice.

 … Meinert says he feels betrayed by the process because the proposal business owners agreed to was not the same plan now being debated by the City Council. A longtime player in local politics, Meinert is prone to the occasional social media rant, and he unloaded on Murray’s $15 an hour plan in a Facebook post Wednesday night.

The Council is considering the proposal, including several amendments, today. The Seattle Times encourages a teen or training wage.

The training wage idea is strongly backed by micro-businesses in Seattle’s ethnic minority community to facilitating training of new immigrants with limited English. The teen wage idea acknowledges that employment rates for workers aged 16 to 19 in the Puget Sound have fallen by half since 2000, according to the Brookings Institution.

It’s a good idea, rather, a good patch on the bad idea that is a $15 minimum. Supporters of the wage increase must be drawing comfort from the decision of OneSeattle, a business group focused on the minimum wage, not to run an initiative this year.

Alex Fryer, a spokesman for the group, says they met yesterday and “we’ve decided not to go forward with an initiative.” The point of the group, Fryer says, “was to get a wide variety of people to come together” from the business community to raise awareness of their issues, and they did that; now, he says, they’ll focus on continuing to “engage” the city council, which still has to pass some version of the IIAC compromise.

Still, $15Now continues to press for a more extreme measure, even in the face of labor opposition. It’s not clear that they’ll qualify their initiative.

With all this going on, it’s time to take the rise of machines seriously. Seriously.

UPDATE Publicola reports that the mayor’s package was adopted unanimously by a key committee, with few amendments.