Metro Council finally gets its Meals for Deals back

My blogging on Metro Council's Meals for Deals goes back 6 years, when I argued that prohibiting organizations and individuals from providing CMs meals was not a be-all-end-all for guiding CMs to conduct becoming, but it is a fair expectation. The lion's share of Metro employees do not expect to be catered to by outside agencies looking to network. They either bring or buy their own meals.

So, I have never understood the resistance from CMs like Charlie Tygard, Ronnie Steine Greer, Rip Ryman, etc. to being required to provide their own food, too. It is disingenuous and naive to act like influence would not enter into the equation, but Meals for Deals is definitely not the worst CM entitlement.

Well, tonight, the council approved on third reading a bill co-sponsored by CM Tygard, CM Phil Claiborne, and CM Anthony Davis to bring Meals for Deals back:

This ordinance would allow the acceptance of meals, beverages, and food of a value not to exceed $25 from a single source in any calendar year. The acceptance of the free food or drink would be required to be disclosed on the annual benefit disclosure statement filed with the Metropolitan clerk. The provisions in the ethics ordinance regarding the acceptance of promotional items not to exceed $25 in value and the acceptance of tickets to events not to exceed $100 in value from a single source in a given year are not changed by this ordinance.

Go buy a famished council member a meal. You've got 25 days left in this calendar year to spend $25.00 on each. Some of them have been working so hard for a half decade to get this perq back.

Roll Call Vote on Meals for Deals Bill

Here is how the Metro Council Members voted last night on BL2007-78, which was thankfully defeated:

Aye (to free meals): 9

Jerry Maynard (bill co-sponsor)
Lonnell Matthews (bill co-sponsor)
Frank Harrison (bill co-sponsor)
Darren Jernigan (bill co-sponsor)
Phil Claiborne (bill co-sponsor)
Edith Langster (bill co-sponsor)
Jim Hodge (bill co-sponsor)
Parker Toler
Sam Coleman (bill-cosponsor)

No (to free meals): 23

Tim Garrett
Megan Barry
Charlie Tygard
Ronnie Steine
Michael Craddock
Mike Jameson
Erik Cole
Jim Forkum
Rip Ryman
Jim Gotto
Bruce Stanley (bill co-sponsor)
Anna Page
Keith Durbin
Eric Crafton
Emily Evans
Jason Holleman
Sean McGuire
Greg Adkins
Randy Foster
Carter Todd
Bo Mitchell

Abstain (from voting on free meals): 5

Walter Hunt (bill co-sponsor)
Sandra Moore
Duane Dominy
Erica Gilmore
Vivian Wilhoite

Absent: 3

Pam Murray (bill co-sponsor)
Karen Bennett
Carl Burch

District 19's Erica Gilmore was originally listed last night as "not voting," which also counts as "absent." In this morning's roll call tally she is moved from the "absent" category to the "abstain" category. I wrote Ms. Gilmore an e-mail yesterday opposing this bill. Once I hear back from her on her reasons for voting as she did, I'll pass the information along.

UPDATE: The single sentence response I got from Ms. Gilmore today: "Thank you for sharing your position."

Metro Council Defeats Meals for Deals on First Reading

Metro Council turned back an attempt to water down ethics in Metro Council by voting to defeat BL2007-78. A roll call vote was called for and the tally was 9 for the bill, 23 against. The bill received 2 less votes than the actual number of members co-sponsoring. I look forward to seeing the roll call results in the morning. It is rare for roll call vote to be called and for a bill to be defeated on first reading.

Thanks to Council Member Michael Craddock, who pulled the bill--which would have permitted members to accept free meals from constituents and interest groups--from the consent agenda so that it could be debated by the Council. In his comments, Mr. Craddock told the Council that he did not get elected to get a free meal and said, "It's cold turkey," referring to the original Ethics Bill that eliminated free meals for council members. At-Large Member and Professional Ethicist Megan Barry joined Mr. Craddock in describing BL2007-78 as a "step back." She told the group that she did not think that any member could be bought for $25.00, but she argued that the bill does create the perception among voters that members are being bought.

Speaking on behalf of the bill co-sponsors, Vivian Wilhoite argued that debate on the bill was a "waste of time," and that BL2007-78 would "make it easier to pick up a cookie" off a constituent's table and eat it without worrying about whether it constituted a free meal. She did not explain the calculus for judging why anyone with half-a-brain and an honest motive would question the ethics of an elected official eating an Oreo.


UPDATE: I took a second look at the roll call votes on a replay of tonight's meeting and it appears that District 19 member Erica Gilmore did not vote on this bill.

Who Will Be the Nosh Police to Monitor Meals?

Council Members Erik Cole and Rip Ryman are carrying through with plans to allow groups to patronize Council Members by providing them meals by bringing their measure up for first reading tonight. Here's the food provision in the very long ethics bill:

Employees ... shall not accept meals, beverages, food, free or discounted admissions, tickets, access to events or travel expenses from any single source of an aggregate Value in any calendar year in excess of One Hundred Dollars ($100.00), provided that an employee may accept from the sponsoring organization, on behalf of himself and a guest, free or discounted admissions, tickets or access of a face value in excess of One Hundred Dollars ($100.00) if the event is generally recognized as an annual fund raising benefit sponsored by a non-profit organization.

To put it in clear terms: Council Members will have a meal allowance of up to $100 each year from patron organizations that might step up to feed them on meeting nights. Currently, Council Members are responsible for providing their own meals during meetings, which sounds both appropriate and easier to police. If the bulk of Metro employees have to provide their own meals during their work days, why should Metro Council Members be any different? If you believe that being a council member and feeding yourself is too difficult, then do not run for Metro Council.

Metro Council's "Meals for Deals Reprised" Ethics Bill Deferred Indefinitely

And properly so.

Putting Political Patronage Right Back on Council's Steam Tray

I cannot believe this is coming up again, but Metro Council will be seriously entertaining the idea of outside groups feeding them free meals (not to exceed $100) on meeting nights. If bill co-sponsors like Erik Cole and Rip Ryman do not now see the problem of letting patronage stick its nose back under the Council tent and if they are truly blind to the possible appearance of conflicts of interest, then they may never get it. They have been feeding each other since 2005; they should just keep doing that.

She Would Cut Off the Nose to Spite the Face

District 5 School Board candidate Kay Brooks says that she is not pleased that Metro foots the bill for laptops for School Board members. She would prefer that “a not-for-profit or community group step up and supply them.”

What is it about Metro governance that attracts local yokels who either do not understand or do not care about the petty improprieties that eat away at the fabric of government accountability and integrity? Remember the Meals-for-Deals take in which private groups were paying for Metro Council members to eat on meeting nights, while some of those groups stood to gain from Metro Council action? Remember how when government officials start receiving gifts like Titans tickets and movie passes from private sources they start throwing around the “we-cannot-police-this” excuse in order to undermine ethics reform?

Now, Kay Brooks, if she stays in control of her seat after the August election, would have private groups pay for School Board laptops. The implication is clear to me: private groups, which have interests in School Board decisions, would be giving gifts (of around $1,000 per seat!) to nine people vested with protecting the public interest in education. Gifts received from certain non-profits connected with certain private interests would predispose School Board members to vote favorably with those private interests on future decisions before the Board. Why isn’t this dilemma clear to Kay? If she has her way, School Board members could only accept these private gifts and avoid a conflict of interest by recusing themselves whenever a vote involving the interests of the private group came up. All nine members would have to recuse themselves. That means that votes could not be taken on matters that involve the private gift-giver; in some cases the lack of a vote on a contentious matter involving the gift-giver could itself be a conflict of interest.

But the problem is more profound. Kay Brooks is essentially arguing that we take the ability to hold our School Board members accountable out of the hands of Nashvillians and that we put it into the hands of a smaller ring of private groups and School Board members themselves. Finding a “not-for-profit” or “community” gift-giver does not make her argument any more palatable. There is nothing more inherently moral about a “not-for-profit” as opposed to a “for-profit.” In fact, the former has been known to be used as a smoke-screen for the latter, even when it is “for the children.”

If tax money pays for the computers, then taxpayers keep hold of the right to demand responsible and ethical behavior on the School Board. If private money pays for the computers, then taxpayers have less power over their School Board representatives, and private groups have more influence over education policy. In the name of saving some tax money, Kay Brooks is asking us to sacrifice our claim and our resort to demanding accountability from our representatives. That is a price too high for me, and it represents another reason to vote for anybody but Kay Brooks in District 5.

Nashville Association of Realtors Shows Metro Council The Way

Hats off to those Realtors for providing food at the Salvation Army instead of at last night's Metro Council meeting. Council member Ronnie Greer could not have been happy about this in light of his recent belly-aching. Propriety is a tough pill to swallow.

Wake Them Up When September Ends

Almost as mystifying as the Council's brush off of ethics in June and September is the near total blogger silence on the Council's handling of the ethics recommendations. Many area political bloggers were all over the Council's budget considerations during the summer. I mean: they were thicker than flies on a rib roast; even the ones who do not live in Davidson County. Mostly conservative bloggers, they were ready to hoist Mayor Purcell's head on a pike just outside some suburban cul-de-sac for even suggesting raising revenues. Of course, many of those same bloggers failed to include in their head hunt the conservative Council members who flip-flopped and voted to pass an alternative tax increase (Enclave already told you about one who even signed a no-tax pledge but voted for the increase anyway). So, that might tell you how much they purely value character and ethics.

You might not participate in the blogosphere, but I have for months now, including reading multiple blogs daily. I believe that many political bloggers have an inflated sense of self-importance, promoting themselves as journalists telling the true story that mainstream media will not tell. I do not question the idea that in some cases, political bloggers force more attention to uncovered news. But I also believe that in general the story behind blogger's stories is that political bloggers are selective themselves in the attention they give to politics. And by that, I do not mean selective in the sense of writing on local vs. state vs. federal politics; I mean selective in the sense of a partisan bias for playing up some news and ignoring other news.

The Metro Council's ethics issue is a case in point. Outside of Enclave's coverage of Council member Charlie Tygard's June move to defer the ethics recommendations, I do not recall any other blog dealing with it. Nobody else raised a single red flag, despite the fact that the move to defer came no more than 2 or 3 weeks after the Capitol Hill ethics crisis exploded in the mainstream headlines. And boy, those conservatives bloggers milked the latter crisis for all it was worth, which makes me think that they were simply using the issue of ethics as pretense, pretext, and prelude to bludgeoning a particular party's officials (not that Tennessee Democrats did not deserve some kind of comeuppance). My guess is that some Council members' conservative standing on the Council makes them immune to criticism among many in the local blogosphere.

And now that we are deep into September, the blogosphere remains bereft of any coverage or criticism of the Council's seeming aversion to standards and last night's cursory consideration and vote to defer indefinitely. I am aware of only two bloggers who wrote on the Council antics either before or after the circus: myself and Bruce Barry at PiTW. Oh, one conservative blogger did give the slightest attention to the matter, but it was only to strike an easy target: Ronnie Greer's dopey statement about wanting to eat. Besides it confirms my perception: this conservative blogger merely used Greer's devotion to his appetite as an occasion to pour his contempt of liberals into the public eye (the linkage assumes that Greer is "liberal").

If taunt is the single most substantive form of response that conservative political bloggers have to make on ethical issues in the Metro Council, then one has to wonder whether they ever rouse when local politics fails to fit their own agenda. Oh, well, September is nearly at an end.


09/21/2005, 4:30 p.m. Update: Addition to list of conservative bloggers commenting on the ethics deferral now includes Blake Wylie at Nashvillefiles.com, who posted his criticism later this afternoon.

Death By Deferral

Last night the Metro Council once again deferred consideration of the ethics reform bill, but whereas in June they deferred it until September, in September they deferred it until the 12th of never.

In fairness to the Metro Council, I did not hear the debate last night because I did not attend the meeting and Metro 3's live coverage of it was obviously knocked out by the Howard Building's recent sewerage problems, but the admittedly sketchy reports in the Tennessean and in the Nashville City Paper this morning do not look good. Council members did not give themselves a deadline for reintroducing the bill, and common sense says that when one does not set deadlines, one does usually not feel obligated to deal. Deadlines make for discipline, and this Council does not seem to care for discipline.

Marathon discussions were held on the budget during the summer, because Charter deadlines would not allow the Council to defer or outright kill the Mayor's budget. However, now that our Council is left with a significant decision in their own hands with no external pressure (because they obviously don't consider people's low opinions on the propriety of elected officials as "pressure") all they have to spend is a measly 45 minutes on it. 45 minutes. After a three month hiatus to "have more time" to study the recommendations, Metro Council members mustered less than one hour turning the ethics proposal aside and putting it behind them. Council member Randy Foster even had the audacity to propose an amendment that would have gutted and field-dressed the ethics recommendations by allowing Council members to select the very group that would have monitored and governed their behavior. Who is this guy kidding?

I would, of course, like to see more of the recorded debate before I write this Council off entirely. But given Ronnie Greer's "I-ain't-voting-for-nothing-that's-going-to-keep-me-from-eating" approach to ethics legislation, I am not expecting that the short debate rose to landmark heights in the history of council oratory, either. You know, I never demanded that much from them; some simple and clear measure of accountability would have satisfied me.

Tonight We See Whether Ethics Matters In Metro Council

It is hard to believe that it has been a little over 3 months since Metro Council member Charlie Tygard introduced a resolution (which passed by six votes) to defer consideration of the independent Ethics Task Force's reforms until now because he preferred to focus all of his energy on the budget fight. But the time is upon us as the Metro Council has the bill in its sights on second reading tonight.

According to the Tennessean, Council member Tygard (along with 12 other members) could not be reached for comment on how he intends to vote tonight, but he did not seem too concerned about Council ethics in his June speech in support of deferral, as he claimed that most members seemed to be "behaving" themselves. However, he may have been a little distracted at the time by his focus on leveraging money in the Capital Budget from neighborhood-friendly repair of sidewalks in the Urban Services District to car-snarl-friendly street improvements in the General Services District. He eventually did succeed in persuading the Council to move $2 million from repair of city infrastructure to outlying parts of the county to spend on road repairs.

As for other Council members, the Tennessean score card has 12 as uncommitted and 14 as pledging to vote for ethics reform. One of the uncommitted, Council member Ronnie Greer, seems to believe that his appetite is more important than the mere appearance of favoritism in Council's feedbag initiative, which I have affectionately called, "Meals for Deals." I don't want to make too much of Meals for Deals, since it is one of the more minor improprieties of gift-giving, but Council member Greer's response to the Tennessean--"I ain’t voting for nothing that’s going to keep me from eating, That’s crazy, see, rich people can do that kind of stuff, see"--does not exactly inspire us to put him in the ethics reform column, especially if Council member David Briley moves to add the prohibition against Meals for Deals to the ethics bill, which he sponsors. I'm not sure where Mr. Greer gets off thinking that Council membership entitles him to a free meal, even if it makes him reproachable, but that attitude is a bit hard to swallow.

Our District 19 Council member, Ludye Wallace is one of the uncommitted, and he told the Tennessean that the ethics bill is

just a lot of paperwork. I think it’s creating an opportunity for members of the council to violate, because I don’t think some of the areas of the ethics bill, you’ll be able to police them, all the reporting, all of what you can accept, what you can’t accept.

That does not sound hopeful for those of us who desire ethics reform. I still am unable to fathom why the whole "we-cannot-police-this" argument seems to keep popping up in this Council. That excuse has become a worn-out mantra during various bill debates. Look for it tonight, too. But every time you hear it just keep asking the rhetorical question, "If the Council cannot police its own members, then how can we possibly expect Council members to police themselves in the absence of ethics reforms?"

09/20/2005, 4:05 Update: Bruce Barry over at PiTW also reflects on tonight's consideration of ethics reform and another Council member's stupid comments as reported in the Tennessean.

Ethics And The Metro Council: Banning Meals-For-Deals Is An Appropriate First Step, But Only The First

September is upon us. That means it's time for the Metro Council to consider the question of ethics that they deferred at the end of June because the majority of them wanted to focus singularly on the budget rather than to multitask and to pass meaningful ethics legislation sooner rather than later. Unless they vote to defer it again, they are going to have to so something with their own Ethics Task Force's recommendations.

The first step at least 21 of them appear willing to take is to ban business and other private associations from providing their meals on Council nights. Unlike the current Council practice of accepting gifts over $25.00 without publicly reporting those gifts, the free meal program is not a huge influence-peddling mechanism. One free dinner from Group X is not nearly the same as accepting free Titans game tickets from Group Y's Personal Seat License or Season Suite arrangement. Therefore, the biggest ethics test for the Council is not this one. The biggest one is down the road: Council-at-Large member David Briley's bill requiring the Council's public accountability on gifts over $25.00.

In the meantime, I endorse the current bill that would ban free meals from private groups. It is an appropriate first step that at least indicates that members are willing to appear above reproach. I am disappointed to see that groups with whom I am sympathetic--like the Arts Commission, neighborhood associations, the education association, and Tying Nashville Together--chose to participate in the meal-for-deals program. I understand the logic of tapping into power networks, but the propriety of the tap-lines should have been questioned. Rather than raising red flags and asking hard questions, many groups just went along for the ride.

Having said that, I hasten to add that banning meals-for-deals does not go far enough as an ethical corrective. The Ethics Task Force did not even bother with it, because it represents such a piddling amount of money compared to unreported gifts to Council members. I hope that Council members Michael Craddock and John Summers and the other 21 sponsors of this bill aren't using it as a bone thrown out to us so that they can say they voted for meaningful ethics reform, while at the same time they both riddle Council member Briley's ethics bill and decimate the recommendations of the Ethics Task Force. Council member Charlie Tygard's resolution to defer ethics discussions to September was not a hopeful sign in June; even so, let's hope the meals-for-deals ban is a portent of important reform to come, rather than simply window dressing to cover the unchecked flow of gifts to Council members.