Abstentions on Amendment D

There was an administration amendment moved by CM Pulley on Tuesday to remove employee step raises and to add $2.6 million in police funding back into my substitute budget after I had removed it. The amendment received 21 votes in favor, 9 opposed, with 10 abstaining. I was one of the abstentions. A lot of people (especially on social media) are asking why there were so many abstentions.

The short answer is that, in order to shore up the likelihood of my budget passing, I agreed to abstain on that amendment.

More about the amendment

For several weeks, the administration had attempted to convince me to compromise my position and accept their proposed $1.00 rate increase under various conditions. I declined. I felt that the community and the Council deserved to have more than one credible budget option to consider. I also felt that my substitute budget did more to help people impacted the most by the rate increase.

While still pushing for their own budget, the administration put “Amendment D” in the budget amendments package. It accomplished two things that the administration had been clear to me that they cared about. First, they thought that my substitute unfairly offered “step” increases to Metro employees without also offering “open range” pay increases.

For Metro employees (not including schools), about two-thirds are eligible for “step” increases in pay. These are what they sound like — annual increases in known relatively small amounts. The other third of employees are eligible for “open range” increases. The size of these increases is determined at the discretion of Metro department management. It is true that my substitute budget offered step increases, but not open range. The administration strongly disliked this.

Second, the administration felt strongly that they had committed to the police department to fund the training and equipping of an incoming recruiting class. They felt that my substitute budget went back on their promise to MNPD. I heard that argument and had planned to persist with my substitute budget anyway.

Vote counting 48 hours before the vote

Many of you will remember that I fought and lost pitched budget battles in 2018 and 2019. That wasn’t because of bad vote counting. With a 40 person Council, there will always be a few votes that surprise you. Last term, everyone in the Council knew the 2-3 members who were most likely to cast a surprise vote. Each of the last two years, the votes were close enough where I would have passed my budget if the unpredictable votes had broken my way. So I went for it…and lost twice. In each case, Mayor Briley worked hard in the final 48 hours to defeat my budget.

This year, there was added uncertainty. We haven’t been able to meet face-to-face. On top of that, there are 18 new members who I haven’t seen in action on hard votes. Also, the fact that CM O’Connell still had his (ultimately withdrawn) substitute budget floating around seemed to be distracting a few members and I had no good information about where they would end up. Vote counting this year had a larger margin of error than the last two years.

By last weekend, my best guess was that I was ahead on passing my substitute budget, but only by a few votes. I also felt that the administration was ahead on passing their amendment, but only by a few votes. And on Sunday afternoon, I learned that the number of new COVID cases to be announced on Monday was going to be around 300, which meant no Phase 3, which meant the Council would not meet in person for the budget vote.

From the experience of the last few years, I was prepared to somehow conduct a remote last 48 hour campaign to be the right side of a battle for votes with a Mayor. Based on the fact that no Council had ever passed a higher tax rate than what the Mayor proposed, I was very concerned about passing my budget at all if Mayor Cooper chose to work as hard as his predecessor did to beat my budget.

What happened next

To their credit, the administration approached me again about compromise over the weekend. I assume they were reading the votes about the same that I was. This time, instead of pushing a compromise at $1.00, they suggested a compromise based on my substitute budget. They would support the passage of my substitute budget if Amendment D was added. They continued to make their arguments about the unfairness they saw in having step increases without open range increases, and about their commitment to fund the incoming recruit class at MNPD. This reflected them coming 90+% of the way from their position to mine. It was a significant change in position.

If the administration were to support my budget in conversations they were having with Council members in the lead up to the vote, it would essentially guaranty passage of a budget that would add a $15/hour minimum wage for 1500+ school employees, add $7.5 million more for schools, allow community centers to open on Saturday mornings, add a new Chief Diversity Officer position, add a new Workforce Diversity Officer position, double the funding for the Nashville GRAD program, increase the Opportunity Now program for meaningful teen summer jobs by a third, add an IT position to the Juvenile Court Clerk’s office to help Judge Calloway's restorative justice program be able to work remotely, double a grant to TSU, and more. As described in a previous post, these changes were meant to help people who would be most impacted by the needed rate increase.

In return, they wanted to strip out the Metro employee (not schools) step increases and add the $2.6 million back in for the police department. Based on all of the circumstances, I decided to accept the administration’s suggestion. I told them that I would not sponsor their amendment and that I could not vote for it, but that I would agree to not work against it either. With my permission, the administration began telling CMs that I planned to abstain. I can’t know what was in the hearts of other CMs when they abstained, but I believe most were following my lead.

Maybe I could have had it all this year, beaten down Amendment D, and still passed my substitute budget? I don’t know. I had a decent hand to play, but history said no and it was far from certain what would happen.

If you were disappointed in the abstentions on that vote because of either the employee pay or the police funding, this explanation may not help much. While I've been calling for Anderson to be fired since 2018, and I think I was the only white countywide elected person to openly support the community oversight board referendum, and I was the author and co-lead sponsor of the legislation requiring MNPD to respond to the Driving While Black report, I know every vote matters. I can tell from my email traffic and my social media that many people think that I did not adequately support employee pay or that I am not adequately in the fight for equity and justice. I accept that perspective and challenge. I am willing to fully own the abstentions on Amendment D. Absent my agreement to abstain, the vote would have been a lot closer.

Thank you for listening.