May 2, 2008

City Paper to Mayor Dean: Commit Political Suicide

The City Paper urges Nashville Mayor Karl Dean to try to overturn the will of the people by challenging the city charter provision that requires public approval via referendum of some (not all) property tax rate increases. But the paper gets it wrong about who "showed up" and who didn't when the issue was debated:

Two years ago, the city politically progressive set did not show up for the biggest public policy battle ever waged at the ballot box in this city. Anti-tax advocates led by master grassroots organizer Ben Cunningham successfully brought in a petition drive to put the issue of Metro property taxes on the ballot.

Specifically, Cunningham's referendum asked Metro voters if they wanted to restrict Metro Council from ever raising their property taxes unless it was sent to a referendum of Metro voters for approval.

Despite the concept being a total public policy folly, it received little to no appreciable opposition from any quarter of Metro government or from other quarters of local leadership in the community. Former Mayor Bill Purcell said little to nothing about the measure, and the members of the Metro Council - many still sitting in their seats - wouldn't lift a finger to public campaign against it.

As I wrote during last year's Nashville mayoral campaign, "The charter amendment giving Nashvillians the right to vote on property tax increases may be the single most popular tax law on the books in Nashville, as voters overwhelmingly expressed a desire for more participatory democracy and more control over tax rates."

The simple fact is that either the group the City Paper calls the "politically progressive" represents less than 23 percent of Nashville voters, or a chunk of them voted for the tax-limiting amendment.

I predicted the day after voters passed the amendment in November 2006, that the city's political establishment would go to court to overturn the amendment, and that may indeed happen some day.

But even though there is conflicting legal opinion as to whether the state constitution permits such referenda, Karl Dean would be committing political suicide to challenge the amendment in court, and he'd be taking a majority of the city council over the cliff with him. Consider this: the amendment is the law until successfully challenged in court and the challenge sustained through the appeals process - and that legal challenge can't even begin until after the Metro Council passes a property tax hike and either refuses to submit it to a referendum and forces the tax-limiters to file suit, or sends it to a referendum and forces the executive branch or some of those "politically progressive" types to file a lawsuit.

Either way they go, it will be seen as an attempt to overturn the expressed will of the people of Nashville for the purpose of ramming through a tax increase without getting voters' approval as they expressly demanded, or for the purpose of imposing a tax already rejected by voters.

Legally, "progressives" who object to the amendment's injection of a little more democracy into the tax process in Nashville may have a leg to stand on. Politically they hold a loser hand for by seeking to overturn in the courts what the people of Nashville overwhelmingly voted into law would forever mark themselves as rejecting the will of the people they are supposed to serve.

If Ben Cunningham's charter amendment had passed with 50.01 percent of the vote, it would have merely changed Nashville's city charter. But it passed with 77 percent of the vote. That changed the political playing field in Nashville.

Unless Nashville's Metro Council and Mayor Karl Dean want to commit political suicide, I suggest they get about the business of learning how to run the city government with the resources and revenue they already have.