I rang up a longtime observer of Metro politics to see what he thought about the latest attempt by anti-tax advocates to get a charter amendment before voters that would repeal last year’s property tax increase.
“It’s a shitshow on steroids,” he said.
That’s an apt description. For two solid weeks, the Davidson County Election Commission has been able to do little more than hold one paralyzed meeting after another as they try to figure out how not to get sued and what to do with the lawsuit that’s already been filed against them, and to determine what parts of 4 Good Government’s charter amendment petition might actually be constitutional enough to put on the ballot. The last time this played out in the fall, a court found that significant parts of a petition weren’t legal and could not be placed on the ballot.
In one corner, you have attorney and 4 Good Government leader Jim Roberts and most of the conservatives in Nashville, incensed at the property tax increase passed last year when COVID threatened to blow a hole in the Metro budget. In the other, you have the Nashville Business Coalition and most of the city’s establishment, not thrilled by the tax increase but also wary of passing a measure that could kneecap Nashville’s ability to govern itself.
There are six parts to the provision, but two stick out as being especially problematic. The first would cap property tax rate increases at 3 percent per year and revert the city’s tax rate to the 2019-20 fiscal year rate. Not only would this likely force big cuts to school and police budgets, it also likely violates Tennessee constitutional prohibitions about retroactivity.
The second would change the rules on recalling public officials, allowing an officeholder to be booted with just 10 percent of voters signing a petition. It also bans this hypothetically booted officeholder from appearing on the ballot in the subsequent election to fill the seat. That means, for example, in District 2 — where Kyonztè Toombs beat DeCosta Hastings by a margin of 130 votes out of a total of 2,571 in 2019 — just 257 people would be required to remove Toombs from office and keep her off the ballot. As At-Large Councilmember Bob Mendes points out, it would likely put a target on any elected city official who pissed off a vocal minority of citizens, liberal or conservative. While conservatives would love to get Mendes, progressives would surely target Steve Glover and others, plunging the city into an endless series of recalls.
So how did we get here?
Conservatives are furious at Mayor John Cooper. They’ve already failed at efforts to have him recalled, so they want to not only change the rules, but also prevent Cooper from defending his seat. It seems more than a little troubling that — though a mayor has to get more than 50 percent of the vote to win — just 10 percent of voters could effectively remove them from office. It’s a veto enacted via an extreme minority.
But just as important, conservatives can’t win elections in Davidson County, so they have resorted to attempting to change the charter to achieve their political objectives. At most, out of 40 seats there are five to seven conservatives on the Metro Council, depending upon the issue, meaning they would never have the ability to roll back the property tax increase and impose a cap. But through a ballot measure in a low-turnout election, they might be able to whip up enough anger to get 51 percent of the vote.
And chances are the Davidson County Election Commission, the only Nashville public office where Republicans are a majority, will send this to the voters. Having purged two Republicans deemed insufficiently conservative — Emily Reynolds and Jesse Neil — the county GOP and newly named DCEC chair Jim DeLanis have been working furiously behind the scenes to grease the path for the referendum to make it to the ballot. After former Tennessee Supreme Court Associate Justice and Republican Bill Koch — who had been representing the election commission as outside counsel — gave DeLanis an opinion that the Baker Donelson attorney didn’t agree with, DeLanis declared Koch an adversary and sought new representation. Ultimately he and the Republicans settled on James Blumstein, a Vanderbilt law professor and longtime conservative legal activist.
DeLanis has now spent three meetings carrying water for the 4 Good Government group. He has alternately sparred with Metro Legal Director Robert Cooper and given extra time for Roberts to badger the commissioners with dire warnings about what “the people” are expecting from them. It’s one thing to sympathize with the group’s anti-tax position — it’s another entirely to drag public meetings out four hours to get in the weeds with Cooper over case law and arcane pieces of the Tennessee Code Annotated.
And all of this, including Roberts’ preemptive suit to require only 9,000 or so signatures as the threshold, is happening before the commission has even voted whether to put the measure before voters.
There is a real question regarding whether 4 Good Government gathered enough signatures. Currently, the answer is “barely,” with the group turning in roughly 200 more verified names than the 12,142 most agree are required. However, election attorney Jamie Hollin — who has sued the Davidson County Election Commission and won twice in the past four years — pointed out a number of flaws in the petitions at Saturday’s meeting, including the fact that the commission had likely ignored its own rules in at least one case. As of press time on Monday, DCEC staff had begun counting and verifying the signatures again.
By Thursday, the commissioners might be able to get past the signature issue and on to whether the proposed charter amendments are even constitutional. But that decision is likely to be fractious, and there is sure to be litigation, no matter the outcome. And to add another degree of difficulty to all of this, there is probably no way to hold an election before the Metro Council approves a budget for the next fiscal year, casting even more confusion on what exactly voters are being asked to repeal, given whatever our new tax rates may be.
It’s a bouillabaisse of lawyers, activists, legal arcana and outrage.
In other words, it’s a shitshow on steroids.
