Emily Evans
For this week's print issue, I sat down with Metro Councilwoman Emily Evans to talk about her effort to reduce the size of the Metro Council and extend term limits for its members. Evans has renewed a petition drive to put the proposal to voters on the August ballot.
An abbreviated version of our conversation appears in print. Here's the full transcript:
A while back, you referred to what's coming as a sort of existential crisis for the council — maybe that wasn't the word you used.
No, that is the word [laughs]. So the crisis is that in September of 2015, we're going to have a new mayor, a new vice mayor, and no less than 27 new council members. We're tracking towards a government that changes over 100 percent every eight years.
You mean because every year a couple more council members
... join the class that is termed out with the mayor. So in 1999 when Bill Purcell was elected mayor, he was joined by 19 new council members. So we've been coagulating around the mayor's term, for a host of reasons, but those are the facts. And so that what we're tracking to is a government that turns over every eight years — which, no matter what you think about term limits or government or the council, is not a good thing, under any circumstances.
Why not?
The legislative body is kind of like the relay team for large issues. So, this is true at the state, this is true at the federal government. So whoever is in the executive branch can work on, pick your difficult problem, like education or mass transit. They can work on that for eight years, but eight years isn’t really long enough for most issues. So you need to be able to transfer that knowledge and that experience to the next mayor and the best way to do that is the legislative body. We don’t have that anymore. It’s like the sun rises in the beginning of the mayor’s administration and it sets with the administration and there’s no continuity from one administration to the next. And I think that’s true today, when you’re talking about 30 council members every eight years or 35 or whatever the number grows to I think it gets worse.
What do you imagine a council with, say, 30 new council members and a new mayor — what does that look like? What happens?
It takes, I think, a couple years for people to really get their footing on complicated stuff. You need to go through a couple of budget cycles to understand how that works. You need to have re-zoned a couple of properties to see how that works. It takes you a couple years to really know any understand what’s going on. So in the period between when you’re elected and when you get your footing — and it’s going to vary, right, some council members are not going to have a zoning request for four years, some are just not going to be interested in the budget — but the learning curve is generally around two years. So you’re talking about a window in which, really, anything could happen because people aren’t necessarily educated and don’t have a lot of experience.
And zoning is probably the most important place where that’s the case.
Do you think it’d be fair to say this is the worst time in Nashville’s history, perhaps, for there to be inexperienced people dealing with zoning?
I would say that’s the case, yes. 27 is the votes needed to pass a bad zoning bill. So if you’ve got a zoning request and maybe you have a good lobbyist on it and you have 27 brand new council members, the chances of you being able to convince them to vote for it even though it’s not a good idea are much higher. And then add to the fact that the Planning director is leaving. So you’ve got a lot of void being created here.
I know one answer to this is that voters consistently don’t want to do it, but just as a principle, why not just extend term limits?
It’s a practical problem. Voters won’t support it.
You would just extend term limits if you could do that on its own.
I would say that if you don’t change the size of the council, you probably want to get rid of them altogether.
The council worked just fine when there were no term limits. You had core group of people who were the thought leaders within the body, and then you might have these bit players that would come in and out. But with term limits, you don’t have that. Everyone is there for a very short period of time.
Nashville is obviously growing, and one of the tensions right now is how to do that without leaving people behind — neighborhoods, demographics or however you slice it. Isn't there an argument that the way to deal with that might be more representation, not less, to make sure people don't fall through the cracks?
If representation was just a math exercise, then we ought to just get rid of the council and have everybody vote on the Internet from home. But representation is about leadership, it's about experience, it's about problem-solving. And the question is, does more make that better?
And I don't think the answer to that is yes. More experience makes that better. More thoughtful people make that better. But just sheer numbers of people showing up twice a month at the Metro Council, that doesn't make it better. I mean, if that's the case, why don't we raise it to 50? Let's be New York. Or 60? Or as David Manning suggested, 100? Because it doesn't matter.
By the way, as someone who covers these meetings, 100 members is not exactly what I'm advocating, but I do think it's interesting to think about. Why not go the other way?
Quality representation is derived from the quality of the person you elect, OK? If you have a good representative — a good, honest, careful public servant — you'll have good representation. And it doesn't matter how many people they represent because they'll represent all those people to the extent necessary to do the job.
Take, for example, [former state] Sen. Douglas Henry. Eighty-five years old; 200,000 constituents. I can't think of an event or an activity that he did not show up to when he was invited. I can't think of a phone call that he did not return. He was an extraordinarily dedicated public servant, because that's what he did. And that's how everybody should approach it, not, "Oh, well, I have 17,000 constituents, I can't possibly do the work for 18 or 19 or 20." That's not good representation…
The change isn't even going to be that dramatic, you're saying?
It's not. We're talking about adding about 9,000 constituents. You'll pick up a third of the adjoining districts, or a sixth from each side or something like that.
Last year the minority caucus was opposed to this. Have you spoken with any of those members again?
I've spoken with a few members. I was actually invited to present on April 13, and then disinvited about a week ago. So I've never had the opportunity. I would love it. But I've never had the opportunity to address the minority caucus.
The main concern, when I spoke with the members of the minority caucus last year, seemed to be that minorities are underrepresented as it is: If you shrink the council, that will exacerbate the problem. Councilman Fabian Bedne was saying this in particular — that when he ran, he was kind of an outsider, and he had that experience of having to try to run for office as an outsider, either demographically or outside the political world. If you shrink, he was saying, that it makes it harder for people who are not already plugged in. What's your response to that? Why are they wrong?
Go back first to the math, which is we're not talking about changing these districts a lot. You're not talking about seeing a significant amount of requirements for your campaign.
Running as an outsider is generally a good thing in politics. That's how I ran too. I had the same problem. Women in particular have a problem plugging into the political structure, so I know exactly how he feels. It takes a little bit more work, it takes a little bit more time, but as evidenced by the fact that I got elected and he got elected, you can do it.
The question of minority representation and how the size of the council affects that isn't really an argument that holds up when you look at most American cities. In fact, it looks like the smaller the council, the more clout African-Americans have in their city councils, and women too. So you look at a city like Atlanta, which is about 53 percent African-American, but 67 percent of its council is African-American. They have 14 members. Charlotte, N.C., is 45 percent black, 45.5 percent of its council is black, and it has 11 [members]. So it would seem that actually the concern is misplaced.
Now, I think I know why that is. I think it's because we're all using pretty sophisticated software that produces districts that will, all things being equal, create an elected body that looks like the city. Every city appears to do that, and we do that too. We've always done it.
The other thing I’d point out too is if you look at black mayors in America, 50 percent of them come from their city councils. That’s the route they take. For white mayors, it’s 30 percent.
So it’s easier for a white person to hop right to mayor, or it seems to be from those numbers…
From business, education, military…
...as opposed to working up through the legislative branch.
Exactly. And a city council gives an African American candidate the opportunity to raise his profile, to build his base, or her base, to do all the things you need to do as a substitute for being an insider as we just discussed.
There’s the question of, is a smaller council easier for the mayor or a lobbyist to kind of have their way with. You and I have talked about this before, the system as it is is set up to have a strong mayor and that’s not gonna change either way. But with that said, relatively, why doesn’t a smaller council make it easier for a mayor or a powerful lobbyist?
So, before I was elected I was the president of the Nashville Neighborhood Alliance and before that I was just a volunteer neighborhood activist. And I would get involved in sign issues and land use issues and tree ordinance and stuff like that. And it would be me and usually a couple of other people fitting that effort into whatever other stuff we had to do with our day. There was no money for studies or photo copying or economic impact, nothing like that. So I learned then, and I still believe this, that the large council is detrimental to grassroots, particularly neighborhood activism. Because on the other side of these issues, are indeed lobbyists and the mayor, with unlimited resources. They will spend the resources on a 40-member body, they will spend the resources on a 27-member body. The question is how can you match those resources? And the only way to match that, I think, for a citizen activist like I was, is if you have less people to get in touch with.
I don’t think it makes it easier for the mayor, I don’t think it makes it easier for a lobbyist. I think it’s neutral for them, but a positive for grassroots.
Is this just a one-woman show here? Are you getting people to help out, whether it's professionally or just volunteers? What's the campaign look like?
[Laughs]
Note, the subject is laughing.
The campaign part of it was what I'm laughing about. It's volunteers. We hope to pick up some endorsements, which will help as we move along. We're getting some help from [PR/lobbying firm] the Calvert Street Group. Darden [Copeland, managing director] is a friend, a personal friend, and he's ... being a personal friend [laughs].
I take that to mean you're not paying him much?
If anything, yeah. We're raising money for the out-of-pocket stuff. We're raising money for most things, like mailing and stuff like that.
So like we talked about, voters have rejected term limits multiple times, but this is kind of a new offer. And I was with you last time around when you were pitching it to some people, but you said you were at some events last night. What’s the response you’ve been getting?
I think people are coming around to the crisis. The existential crisis. Last year, we didn’t have a fixed number on how many new council members we had. Because Josh Stites, Chris Harmon, and Brady Banks hadn’t made their decisions and it wasn’t as clear who would have serious opponents. And now we know that the situation is a little bit more dire than even I had thought would be the case last year. So the response to that is, ‘that can’t be good.’
You know, even if you think the Metro Council isn’t worth the time of your day and even if you don’t like government, even if you feel that way, you don’t think that’s good. We’re not France [laughs]. Where you dispose of your government periodically and replace it with another.
What else is important about this?
I think people argue, "Well, look, the 40-member council has worked, so what's the problem?" And for the last 50 years this city has been the beneficiary, essentially, of economic activity draining out of the upper Midwest and the Northeast into the South, as automotive manufacturing has relocated here, as health care has arisen as a major industry. And until really about now, most of what we have done as a city and as a council has been to manage growth, largely through zoning activities, codes amendments and stuff like that.
And we probably haven't — and I think the mayoral candidates point this out regularly — done as good a job on the challenges of a mature city. Transportation, education, affordable housing, all of those things. Those aren't things that get taken care of in a four-year term, or the five or six years in which you're really focused on your work because you're not a rookie and you're not a lame duck. Those are things that take 20 years of work.
So you think it's possible that right now we're forcing people out right when they're about to start what would be their best term as a council member?
Yes! Absolutely! Absolutely.
This next term for a lot of council members who are term-limited could be some of the most productive and exciting work they do, because they would be building on this history of experience going back eight years. That's missing. When people say, "Well, it's worked," I would argue on some things it hasn't. Hasn't worked at all.
