128 New Police Cruisers With Federal COVID Relief Money?

Nashville is receiving more than $200 million of federal COVID relief dollars under the American Rescue Plan. At the Council’s December 21 meeting, we’ll decide whether to approve a resolution to spend $8.5 million of that money on 128 new police cruisers.

The resolution came to the Council on December 7, but was deferred. At the Budget & Finance Committee meeting on December 6, we had a discussion about whether the city should be using federal relief dollars for Metro’s long term deferred capital needs while many in our community are still impacted by the pandemic. The committee voted to defer for further discussion.

Yesterday, Council members received a letter from Chief Drake urging us to support the $8.5 million purchase. In the letter, Chief Drake talks about his department’s “aging” fleet. There’s no question that he’s right about the aging fleet. One of the long term impacts from the fiscal crisis that came to a head in 2019-2020 is that, because Metro cut corners on vehicle replacement programs for too long, our fleets now are older than they should be.

Chief Drake also describes his desire to implement “10.5 hour shifts with 4-day work weeks” instead “8.5 hour shifts with 5-day work weeks,” and how the department needs the additional vehicles to make this change.

I think Chief Drake makes a pretty good pitch about why MNPD needs some new vehicles. I do NOT think the money should be coming from federal COVID relief dollars. There are two reasons for this.

First, the big lesson from the fiscal crisis was that a city’s budget should be “structurally sound” — recurring expenses should match recurring revenue. From this perspective, if this city needs 128 new police cruisers because the fleet is aging and there’s a policy decision to change up work shifts, that’s not a one-time expense!! Nashville needs to buy what it needs and get used to paying for what it needs — not inflate fleets with one-time money from the federal government with no plan about how to pay to replace those vehicles when they wear out.

More importantly, many people are still hurting from the pandemic. We should prioritize getting federal relief dollars deployed directly into the community. To me, the idea of paying for deferred fleet needs with COVID money gives the impression that COVID and its impact on people is over. In reality, we are about to hit the next surge in COVID. We are all sick of it, but it’s not over. I would rather get the money spent directly helping people before we look at paying for upgrading vehicle fleets from one-time federal money.

Stay tuned to see how the Council decides to balance these interests when we meet this week.