Briley Mum on Paying for Proposals in State of Metro

Metro Nashville Mayor David Briley opened his State of Metro speech Tuesday with a promise about not making promises: "This is not going to be a speech about promises. This will be a speech about progress."

Then he spent 45 minutes making promises, and very little time explaining how exactly those promises would be funded. That isn't shocking since he faces re-election in a few months, and the State of Metro is a gift of a high-visibility event for the incumbent, and the mundanity of finances will be revealed Wednesday when Briley sends the budget to the Metro Council.

The only proposal Briley made that had its funding explained is the addition of two new codes inspectors who will be focused exclusively on short-term rental properties and will be funded entirely by an increase in the permitting fee for STRPs.

Other than the venue — the Grand Reading Room at the Nashville Public Library downtown — the 2019 speech had little in common with the one Briley gave a year ago, coming as it did on the heels of l'affaire du Barry. Then, Briley was understated, almost gloomy, in the wake of the unprecedented series of events that brought him to office; plus, he had to delay a cost-of-living increase for Metro employees (again) and urge department heads to tighten their offices' belts.

Tuesday, Briley said the juice was worth the squeeze, announcing his $2.33 billion budget would fund a 3 percent cost-of-living increase for Metro employees and a 6.4 percent increase in starting pay for police officers, and bring every Metro employee to at least $15 per hour, echoing statements he made in March. He added that the budget also includes funds for a 3 percent raise for Metro teachers and MNPS support staff, though he conceded he has little to no control over what the school board does with the money once it's allocated from the city's coffers.

Briley said education was his top priority and gently chastised "infighting adults," a less-than-subtle reference to the hardly contained tension on Bransford, and called back to a memorandum of understanding inked  proposed in March that Briley said gives him "unprecedented," though not unlimited, oversight of the school system.

But like much of the rest of Tuesday's speech, none of that is new information, as the mayor used his time to draw attention to programs he's already announced or alluded to, such as the Nashville GRAD initiative, which will fund scholarships and academic advising for MNPS graduates who go on to matriculate at Nashville State Community College. After HCA gave $100,000 to the program, the mayor said the budget kicks in another million.

Briley vowed again to add at least 10,000 affordable housing units in the next decade as part of the Under One Roof 2029 program, which, he said, received effusive praise from fellow mayors as well as U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who, according to Briley, left him a congratulatory voicemail.

In the realm of public safety, beyond the aforementioned raises, Briley said the budget directly allocates $100,000 to the Safe Clinic of Sexual Assault Center. 

As for the controversies — or political missteps, if you prefer — that he's faced in recent months, the mayor just ... didn't really talk about them. There was no mention of cherry trees in his glowing praise of the NFL Draft. And while he talked about the plan to offload the city's downtown parking meters to a private firm, he only did so as part of a broader point about technology and outside-the-box thinking with regard to infrastructure, a point which also included vague references to plans with TDOT to do ... something? ... regarding "effective transit" on Dickerson Pike and on the corridor to Vietnam Veterans Parkway.

Hey, but the man had jokes! He said something about "Parrotheads" being downtown for the Jimmy Buffett concert that was coincident with the draft, and tried to make a reference to it being "5 o'clock somewhere," but even he admitted he didn't get the joke (did you guys know politicians don't write their speeches?). He said he told Jay-Z that he had "99 problems, and 50 of them were electric scooters." (This joke, to put it mildly, did not land.)

In the peroration, Briley said, while Nashville had been called "the It City" by outsiders (had y'all heard that?), it needed a new name that it could give itself: "The Most Equitable City." Even speaking to a friendly audience that largely agrees with him on, say, honoring the slaves who built Fort Negley, increasing access to city contracts for women- and minority-owned businesses and eliminating discrimination against the LGBT community, the new nickname didn't pop the crowd. (the most sustained round of applause, for what it's worth, came when Briley urged the state legislature to reject the bills seen as unfriendly to LGBT folks.)

Briley certainly laid out his priorities well — education, public safety, equitable prosperity and infrastructure — but there were precious few wholly new initiatives and almost none of the nuts-and-bolts that often prove to be the contentious part of budgeting.