At the Nashville Public Library downtown this morning, Mayor David Briley began the 55th State of Metro address — the only one ever delivered by an unelected mayor of Metro Nashville — by quoting his late grandfather, Metro Nashville's first mayor, Beverly Briley:
“I do not feel that I have to convince you of the price we will pay at some future date if we do not meet our responsibilities as they occur. … We must not only provide for today, but we must plan for tomorrow."“I do not need to remind you that some of the problems we are trying to solve today are magnified by our own failure to act in the past.”
The annual address is typically a joyous-seeming occasion — regardless of whether it should be — where the mayor unveils his or her budget proposal, spun as an airtight plan for hope and progress. It was just a year ago, after all, that then-Mayor Megan Barry stood in front of Bridgestone Arena and pitched her mass-transit plan, which included light-rail routes on five major corridors, and said she was ready to go put a shovel in the ground herself.
But it would've been hard for Briley to pull off that kind of vibe today. After all, a lot has changed since a year ago.
Briley was only obliged to give a speech this morning because Barry resigned just two months ago amid a scandal surrounding her affair with the former head of her security detail. The transit plan she proposed, and which Briley campaigned for after taking office, was crushed at the polls earlier this week. And the budget Briley just submitted to the Metro Council isn't pretty. Astonishingly, even amid what are supposed to be prosperous times, the city faces a $34 million revenue shortfall; the proposed budget falls short of the Metro Nashville Public Schools funding request by $40 million and would not fulfill a cost-of-living raise for Metro employees.
Asked yesterday ahead of the speech just how we ended up here, Briley told the Scene, “It’s a combination of things."
"It is the fact that we’ve lost some state revenue," he said. "It’s the fact that there were some miscalculations made in terms of what property tax revenues would be after the reappraisal — and it wasn’t one or two things in that regard, it was several things. The state funds for public education are going down as well, on top of losing the [Hall income tax] money. We have debt service obligations that are going up this year, and then on top of that we have the lowest tax rate we’ve ever had. So Metro’s tight budget is a direct benefit to everybody’s take-home pay. They got more money in their pockets. But it just means we gotta be prudent and manage our way through this, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Others would no doubt want to talk about the years of corporate tax breaks the city has handed out as part of economic development deals, or the fact that Metro is fronting the money, via revenue bonds, for a $250 million Major League Soccer stadium that the team is supposed to largely pay back over 30 years.
In any case, things are tight now, and Friday's event was not a celebration. Beyond the political and fiscal turmoil, the city is less than two weeks removed from the Waffle House shooting that left four people dead. James Shaw Jr. was in attendance this morning and received a standing ovation, along with his friend Brennan McMurry, for their heroism during the shooting. It was an uplifting moment in what was an otherwise sober and at times somber speech.
"The budget I recommended to the Metro Council this week was not the budget I would have put forward in a perfect world," Briley told the crowd packed into the library's Grand Reading Room. "I wish we could have done more for our hard-working Metro employees and more for our schools. But it’s my job, and this government’s job, to manage the circumstances that we’ve been dealt, live within our means and think creatively about how we do things. This year that means tightening our belts and keeping taxes low."
In light of the transit referendum results, Briley called on the city to "move past our divisions."
He didn't mention Barry by name, but alluded to the unusual transition he was a part of earlier in the year and choked up a bit while thanking his family for weathering a strange few months.
"2018 has already been an unusual and very challenging year for Nashville, and we’re only four months in," he said. "That’s been true for my family as much as anyone, and I want to thank my wife, Jodie, and our son, Sam, for supporting me and putting up with me in these new circumstances."
Briley is campaigning to keep the job for at least another year, vying against 12 other candidates in a special mayoral election for which early voting began today. Whether he or any of the candidates will truly reckon with how a booming city ended up in a budget crisis, or what it will take to get out of it, remains to be seen. But as for the state of Metro, it was written on the mayor's face this morning.
