Does a fiscally sound Metro government necessarily mean Mayor Phil Bredesen has been a “fiscal conservative,” as he described himself during his final State of Metro address last week?
No more, perhaps, than a healthy set of teeth necessarily has to belong to a healthy eater. After all, even the worst junk-food junkies can manage to escape cavities.
With just four months remaining until Nashville voters go to the polls to elect a new mayor, Bredesen is clearly trying to author his own obituary, spin his legacy, and generally turn around the notion that he has been an intense spender during his tenure as Metro mayor.
“The big-spender label that often gets hung on me as mayor is uncomfortable, and, frankly, offensive to me personally,” he said in his address to members of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce and other civic and political leaders.
But as secure as Nashville’s position is in the world of municipal finance—and it is, according to the ratings agencies that monitor the fiscal health of cities—Bredesen may have a hard time escaping a reputation for being willing to secure new tax money and spend it liberally.
The truth, as the saying goes, is usually somewhere in the middle. In analyzing the mayor’s tenure, the critics are often too harsh, failing to give credit to Bredesen’s proven ability as a consensus builder who has brought respect to a city that had little when he took office in 1991. But the pro-Bredesen spinners, including the mayor himself, probably paint a rosier picture of his financial tenure than he may deserve. In other words, there is plenty of bias to go around.
On the one hand, the evidence of Bredesen’s major spending looms large around the cityscape. It cannot be ignored. That is not to say the city faces financial ruin.
On the other hand, there is the “right kind” of spending for which Bredesen’s critics don’t give him credit. The anti-Bredesen activists tend to forget the whopping $433 million the mayor has secured for Metro schools and the city is still spending on new and updated facilities. “We have definitely stepped out” on education spending, Bredesen recently told the Scene, “but I make no apologies for that.”
Despite his defensive plea last week to be regarded as a “fiscal conservative,” Bredesen, too, is a politician who hasn’t shied away from advocating a tax-and-spend approach. Nashville could simply raise its tax rate to equal that of some of Tennessee’s other major cities, and “we’d have another billion-and-a-half dollars of borrowing capacity,” the mayor recently told the Scene in a story about the fiscal health of Metro.
There are schools. There are professional sports. There are houses for those sports. And, further, there are sweetheart deals that go along with bringing Predators and Titans to Nashville. The city, for example, won’t see a penny of the millions corporations are expected to pay to have their names on the stadium and arena. The record of spending is there.
There is also evidence that Bredesen has been willing to forfeit frugality for the sake of expediting projects. Perhaps the most notable—if the least recognized—example of that was the mayor’s decision to purchase the ailing Church Street Centre for the new downtown library.
After a library site committee recommended that the city’s new library be built on the site of the abandoned downtown mall, the Metro Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) and Bredesen began negotiating to buy the property and ultimately struck an $11.75 million deal.
In the process, the city aborted independent appraisals that were being conducted on the property, which was estimated to be worth anywhere between $3 million to $20 million, depending on who was doing the estimating.
The property appraisals were aborted even though Metro lawyers say that “as a matter of routine practice,” city officials in charge of purchasing real estate for public projects should have independent appraisals performed on the property. Even Bredesen told the Scene at the time it’s probably “the rule” that appraisals are performed beforehand.
But, Bredesen said, Metro went ahead and made the deal because the agreed upon figure was less than the company’s original $15 million asking price, and the figure was within the city’s budget.
“We just felt the best thing to do was to just go ahead and get it done,” Bredesen said.
Meanwhile, critics of the deal said, it was especially important to pursue appraisals because Metro and the building owner had been battling in court about the value of the building.
A former development director for MDHA, Bill Freeman, and Metro’s property assessor, Jo Ann North, criticized the move as irresponsible. “There’s not a person in this city who would buy a home without getting an appraisal. That’s just the bare minimum,” Freeman said, adding that abandonment of the appraisals “violates the intent of local and federal purchasing guidelines.”
The mayor has acknowledged that there is plenty of fat in Metro’s annual budget, but also admitted that he hasn’t concentrated on cutting it because of the political difficulty. In addition, he acknowledged, he’s spent his time instead on larger projects.
The crusty Metro contraries are wrong. The city’s not in the poor house. But neither is the mayor’s own characterization of himself entirely fair. Nashville taxpayers may join Bredesen in their pride of the city’s growth and development, but they won’t soon forget how it came to be.
