From a small committee room outside Metro Council chambers, the view is clear: A smaller council would be bad for minorities, bad for outsiders who already struggle to be heard in city politics — and thus bad for Nashville.
That's the position of the council's minority caucus, whose members say they unanimously oppose a proposed charter amendment to reduce the size of the council. They say it would make their number disproportionately smaller and raise the barrier to entry into local government, for would-be candidates and constituents alike.
"I'm surprised that many people don't see it," says Councilman Fabian Bedne, the city's first and only Latino council member, and acting caucus chairman on the day the group agrees to openly discuss the issue with a Scene reporter. "I suspect that it has to do with the fact that when I ran for office, I was myself an outsider, and so it was harder for me to run. And the people that don't seem to see that issue are people that don't necessarily have that condition."
The proof, Bedne says, is that the caucus members all arrived at the same conclusion before they'd even said a word to each other.
"There is something about our life experience that clearly makes it transparent to us that the shrinking of the council is going to make it harder for regular people, minorities, women, neighborhood people to run for office," the District 31 councilman says.
The proposal is the brainchild of Councilwoman Emily Evans, who is pushing a petition drive to get a charter amendment on the November ballot after the council rejected it in June. The amendment would shrink the council from 40 to 27 members (with three at-large) while extending term limits to three terms. Evans says the extension is what matters to her — she has called the current limits "the single worst thing that's ever happened to the Metropolitan government."
But noting that Nashville voters have twice rejected extending limits, she frames the new proposal as a compromise. In exchange for giving council members more time in office, there are fewer council members. That gives constituents who are happy with their representation what they want, she argues, while giving those frustrated by the council what they want.
To the council's minority members, that looks naive at best. They counter that it would give voters — especially minorities — something they've already rejected (extended term limits) along with something that would leave them worse off (less representation).
As much as he dislikes term limits, Councilman Walter Hunt says they have created more opportunity for minorities to get into office, simply by forcing council seats to come open every eight years. From his perspective, extending term limits while at the same time shrinking the council could be a regression.
"Before we had a bunch of Caucasians, and they would stay in there for 20 years," he says.
Evans insists that her main motivation is fixing what she sees as the term-limits problem. As many have pointed out, however, a recent mailer seeking petition signatures focused solely on the size of the council. Specifically, it declared that "Nashville needs a more efficient Metro Council" and urged recipients to "support a modern and more efficient Metro Government."
To increasingly vocal opponents, the shrink-the-council push is either a sign of the proposal's small-government conservative roots, or a cynical game of musical arguments designed to feed constituents only certain parts of the proposal to gain their support for the whole thing.
Still others see the focus on a smaller council as troubling in itself. They fear a smaller council would be more susceptible to lobbyists and outside interests — another point on which the caucus and Evans disagree.
"When we're talking about efficiency," Bedne says, "the question should be, 'Efficiency for who?' "
At the meeting, Councilwoman Jacobia Dowell attacks the case for the proposal, rejecting its talking points one by one. For example, she notes that the recent mailer compares Nashville's Metro Council to those in other cities that have separate city and county governments (like Atlanta and Memphis); and that it compares the number of constituents council members represent with the number represented by, say, state representatives who have staff.
When it comes to minority representation, the current council includes 10 African-Americans — Dowell, Hunt, Jerry Maynard, Lonnell Matthews Jr., Frank Harrison, Scott Davis, Sandra Moore, Erica Gilmore, Edith Langster and Karen Johnson — and one Latino member, Bedne. Evans has answered arguments that her proposal would skew that representation in the wrong direction by noting, among other things, that five of the 11 minority caucus members were elected "in districts with minority African-American or a very bare majority," and that Bedne was elected in a white majority district.
But caucus members say that eliminating seats on the council not only means fewer opportunities for them to run, even in majority-majority districts, but also increases the cost of elections, leaving minorities and lower-income candidates at a disadvantage. That's why they're about to start pushing back hard against the proposal.
"We are getting ready to get the churches, the NAACP, everybody, Rosetta Perry [founder of The Tennessee Tribune], all the African-American newspapers involved," says Councilwoman Karen Johnson. "Trust me, it's getting ready to happen."
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