Councilman wants to amend grant awards

At-large Councilman Charlie Tygard wants to take a second look at how Council awards grants to nonprofits. File

Metro At-large Councilman Charlie Tygard says he wants to give money to some of the organizations left out of Metro’s new nonprofit grant awarding process.

“I think the process is much better than it has been in the past to take the politics out of it, but by the way this one category was handled, politics did enter it,” Tygard said.

Earlier this month, the Mayor’s Office recommended $2 million dollars worth of grant awards in three target areas: Community Service, Domestic Violence and Education/Aftercare. But Tygard, in a meeting of the Metro Council’s Budget and Finance Committee on Wednesday, said the panel that made the recommendations for the Domestic Violence section used different criteria.

In years past, Council members have allocated money to groups in their districts and two years ago, each member was actually given $50,000 in community infrastructure grants to spend. This year, however, the Mayor’s Office thought a more transparent process was needed.

“It seemed to us that it became a process where [a nonprofit group] knew the Mayor or they knew the Council or they knew somebody,” said Metro Finance Director Richard Riebeling. “We felt there needed to be a process created that gave everybody equal footing and that’s what we think we’ve done with this.”

Tygard said that all three panels should use the same process. The Metro Council has to approve the grant awards as recommended by the Mayor’s Office.

Yesterday, Tygard said he’s going to file an amendment to alter the funding awards before the Council votes on the issue next week.

He illustrated the Domestic Violence recommendation as an example of why the amendment is needed. Once the organizations had been scored, the Domestic Violence section refined its process to focus on some key areas such as shelter services. However, Tygard said this section had a panelist who was also a board member of the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee that received $196,170.

“There was an individual, who I’m sure is an honest and caring [individual], and did what she thought was right, but by being on the board in one of the agencies in that category that received a large amount of money and the fact that the discussion was steered towards changing the way the grants were given as opposed to the other two categories, obviously raises some questions,” Tygard said.

The Director of the Division of Grant Coordination, Tiffy Barnett, said the person did recuse herself from voting on the awards or from discussing anything concerning her organization.

“We were building the airplane while we were flying it,” explained Barnett, acknowledging they have some issues to work out for next year.