If Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke wasn't aware before, he learned this week the city council he is working with in his second term is not the same one he worked with in his first.
Generally, in his first term, if the administration wanted something, the council made it happen. Council members Carol Berz, Moses Freeman and Chris Anderson were in practical lockstep with the mayor, and Council members Russell Gilbert, Yusuf Hakeem and Jerry Mitchell were largely supportive. Getting to five - the number of votes to pass a proposal - was not difficult.
Now, Freeman, Anderson and Hakeem are gone, all three replaced with council members who don't mind offering a little more skepticism to the Berke administration's plans. That, in turn, allows more of a wary eye to be cast by all council members, the new ones who need to be convinced and those before who were willing to go along to get along.
A case in point is the council's refusal this week to vote on a rejiggered social services contract that was a crucial part of the mayor's nearly 4-year-old Violence Reduction Initiative (VRI). No council member made a motion to vote on the administration's two-year, $600,000 contract proposal with Father to the Fatherless, and a previous motion to defer a vote for a week so more questions could be answered died for want of a second vote.
The new contract would have changed the social services plan largely from helping adults who say they want to go straight after a life of drugs, crime and violence to helping teens before they get too deeply involved in gang activities. One caseworker, apparently, would have been kept to work with adults.
Having been given the changed proposal just last week, council members didn't believe they had enough answers about what all was to transpire and why. Berz, importantly, asked about the credentialing of the people who would be working with the youth. Several council members said during and afterward that they had sought the mandated quarterly reports and/or rates of success of the social services contract but hadn't received them.
Later, Mitchell, the council chairman, said the information had been requested to come to council members but said "that has not been permitted to happen."
Ponder that for a moment.
For some reason, the Berke administration - we must assume - has not permitted the very people who signed off on the social services contract to see how that contract is faring, to judge whether it is worthy to continue (or to end) and to determine whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.
Further, two days after the non-vote, council members learned the previous social services contract had expired in November, and Father to the Fatherless had been volunteering its services since then.
That said, we wonder why the administration hadn't informed the council of this fact late last year, why it couldn't have briefed the council it was working on a new approach and asked for a brief extension of the current contract, and what liability might have been involved had an unfortunate incident occurred involving someone the VRI program sent to the then-contractless program.
It's no secret VRI has met with only mixed success despite its ballyhooed rollout - and repeated mantra that success would take a while - in March 2014. Although gang crime was down in 2017, gang-related shootings were about the same as they were when the program started.
About a year ago, Berke, then seeking his second term, his administration and several council members began repeating the mantra that VRI now was "just another tool in the toolbox." It was no longer the city's major way of dealing with gang-related crime but one of many. Some council members privately told Times Free Press editors of their skepticism about its eventual success.
That the city has many tools in its toolbox to deal with gangs is good strategy. That the administration wants to put an emphasis on youth before they become gang members makes sense. Why then, could the city not keep any VRI-related tactics it deems helpful, declare the initiative itself essentially over and offer the council a researched, measurable, properly staffed plan to help youth that involves many different agencies?
That, it seems, is where the administration and the new, questioning council both seem to want to go but without directly saying so.