Is the Mayor Buying Votes With Your Tax Dollars?
Mayor O'Connell's $735,000 grant to TIRRC is about more than immigration.
Since our report last week on the Mayor’s allocation of $735,000 to the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition in this year’s budget, Republicans across the state have drawn attention to the matter.
First the Tennessee Star picked it up and then Senator Marsha Blackburn chimed in, tweeting, “I urge the Metro Council to reject this. Anti-ICE groups like TIRRC should not receive a dime of Tennesseans’ hard-earned money.”
House Speaker Cameron Sexton followed suit, tweeting, “Metro’s budget request of $735k for TIRRC could be in violation of Tennessee’s no sanctuary cities law.”
Fox17 asked the mayor about the grant and whether “public money will go to undocumented immigrants.” O’Connell responded with typical word salad.
The story has become all about the city’s open support for TIRRC, and less about O’Connell’s naked purchase of votes. But as we made clear in our initial reporting, TIRRC Votes – the political arm of TIRRC – endorsed and campaigned on behalf of Mayor Freddie O’Connell in 2023.
I don’t know about you, but by my estimation, the story here concerns a mayor who is blatantly purchasing votes from a lavishly funded NGO.
Additionally, the mayor’s support for TIRRC creates major political risk for those that object to the expenditure, warping the electoral calculus for would-be candidates. Support TIRRC or else you will have to fight against the $10 million war chest the organization has at its disposal.So, how deeply entwined are the two organizations?
Independent auditors have flagged financial-control failures at TIRRC in each of the last three years, including back-to-back qualified compliance opinions in 2022 and 2023 on the ARPA funds Metro routed to the group.
Those same audits also describe the two organizations as operating under "common control." In other words, TIRRC fronts the staff, supervision, and overhead costs, and TIRRC Votes reimburses its share based on how much of each employee's time goes to political work.
Since 2021, TIRRC has transferred more than $755,000 in direct grants to TIRRC Votes, on top of cost-sharing reimbursements that fund shared staff and overhead. As a reminder, TIRRC reached 470,000 voters during the 2023 election in support of their slate which included Mayor Freddie O’Connell.