What's in a name?

For a mid-week pick-me-up, there's nothing quite like news of two of our professional, mature city officials almost throwing down in City Council chambers. The catfight nearly occurred at a Council meeting yesterday, when Carol Alvarado apparently called Shelley Sekula-Gibbs a ... uh ... well, actually, we don't know what, because the news report didn't say. But it managed to ruffle Sekula-Gibbs's magnificent yellow feathers.

"My councilmember, Carol Alvarado, seems to be committed to every time I bring up the word TML to have an expletive deletive come out of her mouth," said Sekula-Gibbs during Tuesday's meeting. "That's unfortunate."

The incident happened during Tuesday morning's fiscal affairs meeting. Sekula-Gibbs was at the mic when she says Councilmember Alvarado called her a derogatory term.

According to Gibbs, this wasn't the first time Alvarado called her the word. The same thing happened, she said, during another council meeting last week.

"During that conversation is where she first said, 'You are such a ——," said Sekula-Gibbs. "And it was very inappropriate."

Houstonist assumes the thing that makes Alvarado start cussin' is the Texas Municipal League, a nonprofit organization that represents the concerns of Texas cities in the state Legislature and before Congress. Two weeks ago, Alvarado and Sekula-Gibbs were on opposite sides of a Council debate about whether to use taxpayer money to pay $68,000 in dues to the TML: Alvarado made a motion to kill a proposal to use public money for the dues, which made Sekula-Gibbs (who wanted Council to vote on the matter) mad.

Alvarado said she and Sekula-Gibbs had words last week, but she doesn't remember using any derogatory terms, and she said no such words were used yesterday. And though KTRK reported it listened to a tape of Tuesday's meeting and didn't hear the the alleged derogatory word used, Alvarado seemed to be covering herself a little bit, just in case: "I get called a lot of names, sometimes not the most favorable," she said. "I tend to focus on the issues that are important to the city."