Why isn't Council standing up to John Cooper?
Council has more power in the budget process than they give themselves credit for. They should use that power to craft a budget that reflects their priorities.
When the Metro Council meets tonight to vote on the fiscal year 2023 operating budget, they will have a substitute budget, proposed by the Budget & Finance Committee Chair Burkley Allen, and a slew of amendments to consider. Councilmember At-Large Bob Mendes has already provided an overview of the budget process, so I won’t restate that here, but I encourage you to read his blog post if you’re new to this or need a refresher.
As I’ve watched the Council work through departmental budget hearings, budget workshops, and ad hoc conversations, I’ve noticed a hesitancy to dip into certain sources of funding. CMs seem especially wary of suggesting that new positions be removed from one department in order to fund additional positions in a different department. There appears to be a feeling that those positions have already been promised, as evidenced in Budget & Finance Chair Allen’s constant talk of “raiding” departments. The implication is that those funds are already spoken for, and that removing new positions from the mayor’s proposed budget would be akin to laying off employees (it wouldn’t).
Here’s the rub: Council’s basic unwillingness to move positions around in the budget has severely limited its ability to make significant changes to the mayor’s proposed budget. Council is tying its own hands.
As CM Mendes ably described in his blog post, there are only so many places from which you can pull funding for recurring expenses. So, when push comes to shove, you’ll eventually have to (1) move positions or programmatic funding around, (2) raise the property tax rate to generate new revenue, or (3) accept that you’re giving yourself very little wiggle room to modify the budget in any meaningful way. With the exception of fiscal year 2021 – the first in Metro history where the Council approved a property tax rate higher than what the mayor had proposed – the Council generally chooses option #3.
Here’s an example of this phenomenon at work: the Community Oversight Board, which has expressed a dire need for additional staff to provide community support and handle the work of processing an ever-increasing volume of complaints, requested nine additional positions this year. The mayor gave them four in his proposed budget. During a budget conversation hosted by CM At-Large Zulfat Suara, CM Allen praised the COB for providing one of the most thorough justifications demonstrating the need for every position they requested. Two CMs submitted budget “wish list” items that would have taken positions or recruitment bonuses from MNPD to free up resources for COB positions. CM Allen’s substitute budget provides one additional COB position and takes no resources from MNPD to do so. Overall, an odd result coming from the “most progressive Council” in Metro history.
There are some proposed amendments that would take funding from one department to give to another (for some reason, Parks was targeted pretty heavily this year), but I don’t anticipate that many of those amendments will pass. Moving departmental funding around – particularly if that department is MNPD – is about as close to a poison pill as a CM can get. CM Ginny Welsch’s amendment to move $15 million from MNPD to the Barnes Fund for affordable housing, for instance, is utterly doomed. If history is a guide, the amendments that do pass will likely be those that either take money from non-departmental sources or make exceedingly marginal changes to departmental funding, somewhere in the range of $125,000 or less.
A common complaint from CMs is that the budget timeline simply doesn’t leave them with enough time to make sweeping changes to the mayor’s proposed budget, or to the Budget & Finance chair’s substitute (see, for example, this tweet from CM Colby Sledge). I certainly agree that the Council should have, and would likely benefit from, more time to analyze both proposals. However, I don’t believe that having more time would increase the willingness of the Council, as a whole, to make controversial decisions about resource allocation.
And I think that suggesting that time is the limiting factor obscures the real barrier: Council is fundamentally uninterested in moving positions or programmatic funding from one department to another. CM Allen, the Budget & Finance chair herself, captured this sentiment perfectly in a recent budget discussion with CM Suara, saying, “I’m not sure I can say that this department deserves to grow while this one shrinks.” Setting aside the fact that departments rarely “shrink,” and definitely not in a year with massive investments in additional positions, I would argue that this is exactly the job: picking winners and losers. Moving resources to where they’re most needed.
But, for whatever reason, the Council doesn’t want to choose winners and losers. So, they look to other sources of funding, like reserves or contingencies the Finance Director has squirreled away with the knowledge that the Council will want to make some budget modifications. And those sources dry up quickly, particularly if you have to deal with any unexpected budget shortfalls, as we’ve seen with Metro Nashville Public Schools this year.
In a strong mayor system designed to put the Council in a reactionary posture, the aversion to making tough decisions about resource allocation effectively means the Council is reducing its own power by choice. For all the complaints of the way the system disadvantages the Council, I think they have more power in the budget process than they give themselves credit for. Whether they’re willing to exercise that power – well, that’s up to them.