Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's approach to City Council this past year, culminating in Wednesday's three-hour standoff, can be best summed up with that old Groucho Marx ditty, "I'm Against It."

I don't know what they have to say,

It makes no difference anyway,

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

No matter what it is or who commenced it.

I'm against it.

This perpetual tiff turned council chambers into Bizarro World, a place where the mayor offered to help council get its pension-funding scheme approved -- by vetoing it immediately.

In the strange logic of the day, Mayor Ravenstahl hit upon the one way the plan could succeed. Because he wasn't going to sign that bill, nuh-uh, no way, not a chance. It didn't matter how many different ways a tag team of council interrogators asked him.

So the veto was the oddest kind of favor. It beat the mayor taking no action at all; if he delayed even a few days, the state's year-end deadline to shore up the pension fund could not be met. With a swift mayoral veto, council can vote to override him and avoid the state takeover.

The Marx Brothers couldn't have plotted this better. Or to put that another way ...

Your proposition may be good,

But let's have one thing understood,

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

And even when you've changed it or condensed it.

I'm against it.

After a three-hour tour kept leading back to the same place, council finally voted to dedicate $13.4 million in parking tax revenue each year, for the next three decades, to the pension fund. This flipped over a plan that had been approved less than hour earlier: to use the Local Services Tax -- the $52 annual fee lifted from those who work in the city -- for that purpose.

This parking-tax infusion, plus at least $45 million that council voted to shift from general debt service to pensions, should be enough to push the pension kitty above the 50 percent funding mark that the state demands.

If the money falls short, the city just shafted itself, because the money would still be irrevocably dedicated to pensions and the city would lose access to that funding stream for any other use. But the state would take over the pension fund anyway.

That risk scared council members Ricky Burgess and Theresa Kail-Smith enough to vote no. It scared the mayor enough to put the onus for this plan entirely on council, even as his promised veto will allow council to beat the deadline.

You could say he is trying to have it both ways. If council's plan works, Mr. Ravenstahl can rightly say he didn't stand in its way. If it fails, he can say, I told you so.

It's not exactly leadership, but it's not exactly obstructionism either. As the mayor conceded in a Tuesday news conference, as risky as this plan is, it's preferable to a state takeover or the previous council plan to issue more debt.

As he put it Wednesday, "I hope you're right. And I hope I'm wrong."

To his credit, Mr. Ravenstahl resisted urges from council President Darlene Harris and Ms. Kail-Smith to go behind closed doors with a handful of council members and hash out a compromise. He wanted an entirely public process.

But pushed far enough, he finally came back to the one thing he would sign, the one thing he's always wanted: a long-term lease of the city's parking garages to private industry.

"I think you've boxed yourself in," the mayor's exasperated longtime foe, Councilman William Peduto, told him. "If this council doesn't support the lease plan, you're ready to take us over the waterfall."

Council has gone equally Groucho on all the various modifications of that lease plan proffered by the Ravenstahl administration. It doesn't want to give up control of those assets and see parking rates skyrocket.

But the mayor complained that council voted up parking meter rates anyway. They'd have risen even higher under the mayor's initial privatization plan, but just before he left council chambers, Mr. Ravenstahl spoke wistfully of what might have been: three new garages and "a more pleasant and safe parking experience."

Yeah, commuters would have come flocking in for that oh-so-special "parking experience." I'm not sure if that phrase was ever in a Marx Brothers movie, but it put a fitting capper on the festivities.