The Evanston City Council extended a freeze on new downtown construction by two days at a Council meeting Monday night.

The original moratorium on building permits, passed on June 11, was meant to buy time for the city to develop its Downtown Plan and was set to expire Dec. 9.

Lawmakers were expected to be finished with the Downtown Plan by now but haven’t finalized it, and some aldermen wanted the construction freeze to be extended by 95 days so lawmakers could finish the plan. The Plan Commission meets tonight at 7 p.m. to further discuss the plan.

Since the City Council’s next meeting is Dec. 10, one day after the freeze is set to expire, aldermen had to act Monday.

They voted to “suspend the rules” in order to introduce and vote on the extension in the same meeting.

Suspending the rules was a legally necessary step, said Herb Hill, assistant corporation counsel on the Plan Commission, who commented several times on procedural rules.

Ultimately the council voted 6-2 to extend the moratorium by two days, to Dec. 11, so they can debate further at the Dec. 10 meeting. Ald. Steven Bernstein (4th) and Ald. Ann Rainey (8th) dissented.

Bernstein argued that the extension would be “useless” because the zoning process takes long enough that there will not be a rush of applicants when the moratorium expires.

Rainey said she wanted to avoid the “chaos” of debating a change in the moratorium’s length.

Other agenda items at Monday’s meeting were approved unanimously. They included a $210,850 contract to purchase up to 5,000 tons of salt for icy roads from Morton Salt Company and a $349,992 contract with engineering firm T.Y. Lin International in Chicago to develop a 20-year transportation plan for Evanston.

Reach Sean Walsh at [email protected].