As Damon Agnos points out, Tom Carr sighed in this morning’s Seattle Times that he wished “the council would contact me before doing things” like holding budget meetings with the mayor in private. Carr, who is running for reelection this year and has been criticized in the past for his stance on public disclosure, also told me yesterday that he was not consulted. But according to City Councilmember Jean Godden, the council did contact Carr’s office beforehand. “We forwarded a request three days before the [first] meeting to find out whether it was okay. They didn’t give us a response.” And on the same day that Carr told the Times that the confabs with the mayor “may” violate the state’s opening meetings law, Godden says she received an e-mail from him that “definitely” did not advise the council to stop such meetings. While she says she can’t discuss the precise contents of the e-mail, which was marked “private and confidential,” she explains the apparent discrepancy by noting that Carr told the Times merely that the meetings “may violate the spirit of the law. I don’t think he said they were illegal.” UPDATE: Carr denies Godden’s account. “We can’t find a record of any request,” says Carr, who just called. Ben Noble, the Council central staffer whom Godden said checked with Carr’s office, did in fact do so — yesterday, according to Carr, not several days before the first closed meeting. Noble, reached on his cell phone in the middle of a meeting, declined to talk about the matter.As for Carr’s opinion on whether or not the meetings are legal, he says his comment to the Times yesterday was a response to the reporter’s description of the meetings, not a considered judgment based on the facts. “I never said [the meetings] violate the open meetings act. I said I had a concern.” He would not comment on what he wrote in a follow-up e-mail to Godden, which he said he sent this morning, not yesterday. UPDATE to UPDATE: Having had a few words with a pissed City Attorney’s office, Godden now says she was wrong about the council contacting it before the meetings. So far, though, she hasn’t changed her story about Carr’s e-mail not advising the council to reverse course, whatever concerns he expressed to the Times. Meanwhile, Carr’s challenger in the City Attorney’s race, Pete Holmes, just sent out a press release calling those pro-public disclosure comments an “election year conversion.”Bottom line: Carr is not “challenging” the closed meetings, as the Times put it in its headline. As for the meetings themselves, Godden’s latest position is that she will continue to have private meetings with the executive office–but not with other council members. She says they can ask for their own briefings if they want them.