Former District 29 Councilmember Delishia Porterfield decided to run for an at-large seat after serving one term as district councilmember. She took the risk of losing her seat on Metro Council and ended up receiving the most votes among the eight at-large candidates in the run-off election last September.
In an interview with The Contributor, Porterfield explained that while she deeply cares about her district, a district councilmember receives very neighborhood-specific requests. She felt she would be more effective if she could fully concentrate on fighting for working people by looking at employee wages, equity, and progress with a countywide focus.
You are the chair of the powerful Budget and Finance Committee. What is the role of that position?
Yes. I’m so excited and thankful for this opportunity. The chair facilitates all of the Budget and Finance Committee meetings. If there is new legislation coming before the Metro Council that has a fiscal implication, it goes before our committee. As chair, I’m the person who facilitates that. I’m frequently meeting with someone from our finance team to keep abreast of where we are in regard to the financial landscape of our city.
Metro has a multi-billion dollar budget at this point and the way our budget process goes is that the mayor proposes a budget, and the Metro Council proposes a budget. If the council cannot agree on a budget, the mayor’s budget passes. I believe it’s only been one time in history that a mayor’s budget passed.
Let me be clear, we have a strong mayoral system and most of our costs at Metro are fixed costs. The Metro Council’s substitute budget is based on the Mayor’s budget, and we’re making small changes to the Mayor’s budget. I believe historically it’s been less than 1 percent of the budget the council has been able to successfully move around. The budget chair is the person who facilitates that process. [To do so,] the chair will come up with an alternate budget to present to Metro Council for consideration that takes into consideration what the other 39 councilmembers are advocating for. The goal is to figure out how to do the most good with the finite money that we have and that we can reassign or reallocate.
Do you expect any significant changes in this first-year budget of the new Administration?
I don’t know about significant changes. We have fixed costs at Metro to ensure the departments keep their lights on and their employees get paid, and so on. We try to prioritize some of the programming, but we don’t have as much wiggle room as people think. But even 1 percent of a multi-billion dollar budget is a lot of money that we can move around.
I definitely want to be as thoughtful as possible and make sure we get as much community input as possible, so that we can hear from people and hear what their priorities are and determine how many of those priorities we can weave into our city budget.
What are some of your main focus areas for this term?
I ran my campaign based on a heavy focus on working class people in our city, including our retirees. That’s been and still is the biggest focus for me. Our city is booming when it comes to tourism, and we’re very thankful for the money that tourism brings into our city. But you have to balance that piece with the people of Nashville.
When you have the people who are working to keep our city running, the people that during this past winter storm have been working around the clock to make sure the shelter stays open, to make sure roads were safe, people who responded to water main breaks, people who are picking up our trash. When those people can’t live in the city that they make such big sacrifices for, that’s a big problem. I want to help figure out how we bring some balance back to make sure that the people who make Nashville what it is are prioritized and taken care of. I want to make sure we look at employee pay, so people who make this city work can afford to live here. We also need to make sure schools are properly funded and that we get the levels of funding from the state that we need.
I want to look at what we need to do to address affordable housing in the city. While we have been addressing affordable housing and making contributions to the Barnes Fund, we have not been able to keep up with the need and the demand, and we have to figure that out. I recently watched the documentary that Nashville Public Television aired (Aging Matters – Unhoused). It was amazing, and it was eye-opening. I believe many of our neighbors who are housed don’t fully understand the weight of the housing crisis in our city. So, one priority for me is making sure that we’re looking at and addressing housing to include our unhoused neighbors to make sure that we have accessible housing at various income levels.
Transit is another big focus area that I’m looking to support this year. How can we make transit more accessible for people to ensure it’s implemented in an equitable way to include people who don’t live in the core of the city?
To sum this up, my main focus for this term is on affordable housing, equity, transit, and how we can create a Nashville where marginalized communities, working families, retirees, people from lower socio-economic status can thrive in. And that we can all thrive in.
It’s only been a little over three months into this new administration. But where do you think you are most aligned with the O’Connell Administration?
The mayor has a heavy focus on transit right now and multi-modal ways of access in the community. I think we will have a lot of alignment there.
In what areas may you differ from the O’Connell administration?
That’s a tough question. I don’t think that the mayor has been in office long enough for us to really see the direction he will be headed in. When a new administration comes into office, there are a lot of initiatives they’re picking up from the previous administration. So, early in a new term, a lot of things that you’re seeing are things that may be wrapping up from the previous administration and are not necessarily what this administration will be focused on [moving forward]. So, at this point in time it’s too early to really see whether or where there will be division between this administration’s values and my values.
What is a strategy that you think Metro could implement to help alleviate poverty?
We received a report from Metro Social Services that talked about the upward mobility in Nashville. People born into poverty in Nashville are most likely to die in poverty. We don’t have a lot of upward mobility here. We need to figure out how to break the cycle of poverty people are born into. I’m interested in working with our Social Services Department to help determine what’s needed to make that change.
Another area I am focused on is making sure that Metro General Hospital has the proper funding it needs. I believe healthcare is a basic human right, and people should have access to healthcare. Metro General provides healthcare to people regardless of their economic status, regardless of whether they have insurance, and regardless of their ability to pay. General is the people’s hospital and needs a new hospital [building]. We are looking at what that means and where it should be located to make sure the community continues to have access to our city hospital.
What else would you like to add?
Councilmembers don’t have all the answers, but when we work with our communities to try to come up with strategies and policies to solve problems together, that’s when we work best. So many people have great ideas, but they don’t always bring those to councilmembers. For example, I sometimes see on Twitter (X) where a person posts a great idea, and I wish that person would have reached out to me or another councilmember and gave us this idea prior to a [final] vote when we could have [still] done something. Officials don’t have all the solutions. We try to do the best we can. But when we work together with the community as much as possible, we set ourselves up to have better outcomes.