Now That Nashville Approved Local Hiring Mandate, Opponents Rethink How To Stop It

A coalition of construction and business groups is meeting Thursday to discuss how to respond to a new Metro charter amendment.

Amendment 3 created a local hiring quota: Contractors must now hire Davidson County residents for 40 percent of the work on large publicly funded construction projects. 

The coalition argues there aren’t enough local workers to fill the quota, which means public construction projects will be more expensive and ultimately cost taxpayers more money. But it didn’t get that message across clearly enough before the election, says John Finch, the coalition’s spokesman. Nearly 58 percent of voters approved the amendment.

“I’m confident that many of the people who voted in favor of this really just didn’t understand it,” he says. “If they’d understood the unintended consequences, I really think a lot of folks would not have voted for it.” 

At the coalition’s upcoming meeting, Finch says it will discuss whether to pursue a lawsuit. Contractors sued over a
similar requirement in Washington D.C. Or it might
follow Ohio’s lead and appeal to the state legislature to ban local hiring preferences altogether. The latter, Finch says, is ”
probably a very appealing avenue.”

But the group that came up with this amendment says it wants to work with contractors and the Chamber of Commerce to come to a consensus on what the details of this quota should look like — for example, how hours will be tracked, how Nashville will enforce the mandate, whether Metro will fund new training for local workers. Then, says spokesman Ashford Hughes, they can present those recommendations to Metro Council for a vote.

“If the Chamber will bring in the construction industry, the builders, the business coalition, we are more than willing to sit down and have conversations,” he says. ”
But if the conversations don’t happen, then it’s going to be us versus them.”