Talk:Metropolitan Council of Nashville and Davidson County

Salary information is badly dated. Council members now receive more than that.

The error originated in an article in The Tennessean dated from October 2005, if the salary was raised prior to that. I've put a notice at the top to notify the reader that information in this article may be out-of-date until I can find a source saying that council member salaries were raised from $15,000. Daniel Bush 17:52, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Are you sure council members receive more than that? I have an article from The Tennessean as recently as April 2006 still saying council members receive $15,000 annually each. Daniel Bush 11:00, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Special Elections
The statement "Originally, when a seat in the Metro Council became vacant, a by-election would be held, but this practice was ended in 1994 with an amendment to the Metro Charter, after it was felt by-elections had become too expensive. The vice mayor has appointed individual at-large city council members to fill in for departed members." cannot be true as a special election is being held today to fill the District 18 seat vacated by Keith Durbin. I deleted the sentence until someone can source it. TNplinko (talk) 17:26, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The Metro Charter was amended in 2007 to mandate special elections. Google records this of a December 2008 article from The Tennessean, which is unavailable without paying for access to the newspaper archives. It summary says "Under a Metro Charter amendment that voters approved overwhelmingly last year, a special election must be held to fill a vacancy in a district council seat ..."

A visit to the Metro Charter page on the city website, which mentions the Charter being amended on November 8, 1994 with regard to vacancies, combined with scanned news articles used in a long legal opinion by then-Law Director Karl Dean, which shows a scanned ballot for that election, confirms the statement in the article was true when written.

Hopefully this confirms for you the veracity of the statement, but seeing as how the sources involved have expired since then, it might be best to leave the information out for the moment. Thank you very much for your concern. Daniel Bush (talk) 03:26, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I completely agree that the statement is correct, though it left me with the impression that the current policy is an appointment. Perhaps we should put back the original statement and add your citations for the reversion in law. Also, I edited D18 membership to reflect that it is currently vacant (pending runoff), though not sure how this should actually go in the table -- perhaps both the old and new with a footnote? TNplinko (talk) 22:18, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

It seems that the 1994 amendment did preclude special elections, but did not empower the vice mayor to appoint a replacement. Instead, the seat remained vacant until the next general election. The vice mayor would, customarily, appoint one of the existing at-large members or neighboring district member as the district's designate to handle constituent issues. TNplinko (talk) 06:49, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
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