The D.C. Council voted to decriminalize Metro fare evasion on Tuesday after considering the legislation for more than a year and a half.

The bill won resounding support from most of the Council, but Councilmember Jack Evans, who also serves as the chair of WMATA’s Board of Directors, and Chairman Phil Mendelson, both voted against the measure—and stoked something of a fiery debate beforehand.

Since 1978, D.C. law has made fare evasion a criminal offense punishable by a $300 fine, a ten-day jail sentence, or both. The legislation instead makes jumping the turnstile a civil offense, penalized by up to a $50 fine. The D.C. Council passed the measure on a first vote 11-2 in November (but, as with all D.C. law, it needed a second vote to pass).

Councilmember Charles Allen, who heads the judiciary committee and has been a strong proponent of the bill, argued that people should not end up with a criminal record for skipping out on a $2 fare. “There’s no world in which if you don’t drop a quarter in the parking meter, you walk away in handcuffs,” he told DCist in October. Data also shows that Metro’s fare evasion penalties don’t affect everybody the same way. The Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights found that during a period of more than two years, the overwhelming majority of citations issued for fare evasion—91 percent—were given black people, 72 percent to black men in particular.

Metro, for its part, has strongly and vocally opposed the measure from the start. According to the agency, it loses millions every single year as a result of fare evasion. On the Metrobus system alone, Metro says there were 9.3 million cases of fare evasion in the first 10 months of 2018 (bus drivers record people who don’t pay their fares using a button on their dashboard). That adds up to $25 million annually in lost fares. Metro tweeted that around 80 percent of those fare evasion cases happen inside D.C.

Last week, the Metro board wrote a letter to the Council urging them to vote against the measure and pointing out that ramped up fare evasion enforcement has coincided with a reduction in crime across the system. The board also wrote that Metro police often stop people for fare evasion and end up arresting them for outstanding warrants—one patron, they say, was stopped for squeezing through fare gates and ended up being arrested for an open warrant for sexual abuse, and another for an open warrant for first degree murder. According to the letter, police very rarely arrest people for fare evasion alone; they arrest people for committing other crimes like assaulting a police officer trying to cite them, or refusing to provide identification.

But the Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association, which defends many low-income people in the District, says that its lawyers do often represent people who are “arrested, taken into custody, and prosecuted for fare evasion alone.” In a letter to the D.C. Council, Betty M. Ballester, the president of the SCTLA, writes that in the experience of the association, “fare evasion is frequently the only basis for arrest and the only offense charged.” The Association’s clients often cannot afford the “indirect costs” of being arrested and charged, which often means being held away from their responsibilities for an extended period of time, according to the letter.

On the dais Tuesday, councilmembers hashed out all of these arguments and more. Jack Evans, particularly impassioned, said he knew the measure was a “feel good thing” that would probably pass, but he insisted that the bill would be financially crippling to Metro, and that the agency already usually doesn’t arrest people for the offense.

Chairman Phil Mendelson said that, whichever way you slice it, fare jumping is “stealing,” and stealing should always be a crime. He introduced an amendment to the bill that would continue to classify fare jumping as a criminal offense, but preclude jail time as a punishment.

Other councilmembers, most prominently At-Large members David Grosso and Robert White and Ward 3 representative Mary Cheh, argued that an arrest record still has a negative effect on people’s lives. Mendelson’s amendment failed.

“I’m sad that Metro’s losing money, but I’m more sad about what’s happening to black people,” said Councilmember Robert White.