Metro council passed a budget this week. I'm not sure anyone was happy about it. 34% property tax increase, a bit more than John Cooper's budget, but with more funding for needed services. It was the best option available, IMO.

But in one major way, our council failed us.

Our council failed to listen to the thousands of constituents that asked our government to divert funds from the police into essential services like schools, healthcare, housing and the arts.

Not only did they refuse to divest, they voted to increase the police budget, restoring funds that @mendesbob had removed.

They couldn't even keep it the same. They insisted on increasing the budget to hire new recruits. They cut step raises for Metro employees to pay for it.

So, if you're keeping score, instead of shifting money from the police to pay for essential services, they shifted money from essential services to pay the police.

This is, in my opinion, a complete failure of government. The people spoke, and the council (as a whole) did not listen. In fact, they thumbed their noses as their constituents.

When the city projected a shortfall of between $200M and $300M in April, MNPS was asked to cut $100M from their budget for the year. No such ask was made of the police/criminal justice system.

MNPS closed three elementary schools to help fill that gap, which will further increase class sizes and over burden facilities and teachers.

The majority of the council ignored us last night, including my council person, @Bradford4D13, who said in his explanation to constituents: " I do not believe we are sacrificing money to schools when we give five times more to them than we do to police."

If you think we are not sacrificing our schools right now, ask those three elementary schools that just closed. Ask our teachers. Ask our parents. Ask our kids.

I'm a supporter of Russ, but I think this vote to add back additional funding to the police was wrong, both in principle and in relation to what Nashville has said it wants.

What we can all agree on: this budget process is hot garbage. Many council members have spoken on this point.

So, how do we make it better?

I'd like to see participatory budgeting adopted by our city. I'm still researching how this works and what version would work best for Nashville. I would welcome the opportunity to work with any of our council members (or any of you!) to understand how to make it happen.

I'd like to see more public hearings and meetings, and to go along with that more participation from the public. I hope that participatory budgeting would encourage that.

I'd like to see @GinnyWelsch's amendment from the meeting broken out into manageable pieces so that the community and council can put real thought behind how to make those things happen.

I'd like to see more time between the proposal of a budget and its adoption.

I'd like to see a better procedure in the city council for considering the budget and voting on it. The current process is complicated, overly time consuming and creates dead-ends that keep all proposals from seeing equal time.

Mostly, I'd like to see the council given the time to hear from constituents, and I'd like to see them listening.

Shulman and Glover both complained about constituents with concerns other than police funding not being heard at the public hearing, and I'm absolutely sure that's true. That's not an indictment of the @nashpplsbudget group. It's an indictment of the process.

So, do we need to amend the charter? Let's do it. How do we make it happen? Do we need to approve a participatory budget process? Awesome, let's do it.

We need a combination of community activists and council members to move this forward. Who is up for tackling this on the council?

I know I've been tweeting about this a lot, so I wanted to close my thoughts on it with this thread. I have much to learn about how this all works, but I'm raising my hand to say I want to be involved to figure out solutions. Probably more work offline than on for a while.

One last tweet to tag some council members that I hope might be interested in this work (besides the ones I've already tagged above): @Delishia4D29 @toombsfortwo @Sledgefor17 @SyracuseMetro15 @zulfat4council @SeanForFive @freddieoconnell @DaveRosenbergTN @angienashville