Nashville Voted To Give Poor People, Locals New Construction Jobs. But the State GOP Blocked It.

(In These Times) Last summer, with the backing of regional labor leaders and community groups, the city of Nashville approved an ordinance requiring large, municipally funded construction projects to devote 10 percent of their hiring to low-income residents. The ballot initiative, which also stipulated that 40 percent of such hires should reside in Nashville’s Davidson County, came amid an historic surge in building projects in the city’s downtown area.

Last year, the New York Times reported that more than $2 billion worth of construction projects that developers have initiated in the city are poised to reshape Nashville’s skyline. The local hire ordinance, known as Amendment 3, sought to make sure that the city’s poorest residents saw some benefit portions of the city’s building boom by leveraging the Nashville’s government’s contracts with private businesses in an attempt to reduce local poverty, which stands at nearly 20 percent for adults and at roughly 30 percent for children in the Nashville area.

Yet within weeks of the ordinance passing into law, Republicans in the state legislature introduced a bill to roll back Nashville’s new law and prevent other cities in the state from implementing anything like it.

In September, a Republican representative also requested that the state’s Republican attorney general issue an opinion on whether the city law was legal in the first place. After the attorney general’s office asserted that the local-hire rule indeed violated a state law that governs licensing, the bill to invalidate Nashville’s new law moved steadily through the legislature. .............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/19009/republican_prohibition_on_nashville_municipal_local_hires