Q. I’m struggling over what to do with this sentence: “The issue was not only the lack of funding for the new sports center, it was also about who gets to participate in city government.” I was told that this is a comma splice and that I should use a semicolon instead, but doesn’t the part before the comma depend on what follows the comma, making the comma the right choice? Please help!
A. That first part is in fact an independent rather than a dependent clause, which may be easier to see if you add a sentence between the two parts of your example:
The issue was not only the lack of funding for the new sports center. Besides, that was old news. It was also about who gets to participate in city government.
But a semicolon can seem unnecessarily formal, and a period might be too abrupt. If you’d prefer not to use either of those, and you’re worried about being accused of comma splicing (though your original sentence is a borderline case and perfectly acceptable for most types of writing), then consider omitting the second subject and adding but to make a compound predicate:
The issue was not only the lack of funding for the new sports center but also who gets to participate in city government.
(Note that simply adding but to your original example, after the comma, might seem like an option, but the result would be awkward.)
See also CMOS 6.49, on the use of commas with sentences that feature correlative conjunctions of the type not . . . but and not only . . . but also.