From tonight's community meeting: developers present elevation sketches for 6th and Garfield

Mountains? The north face of the development seen from the northwest

It was a sparsely attended meeting this evening at Morgan Park Community Center due to the rain, Vanderbilt basketball on TV, and limited communication, but a handful of Salemtown Neighbors looked at developer drawings and discussed questions they had about a proposed 6th and Garfield row house development. Topics covered included the garbage truck access/location of trash carts, the placement of garages, and the installation of pervious concrete to meet stormwater standards in the parking areas. Developers noted that they made an effort to include brick and masonry in the facade after receiving a request at our previous community meeting. Those in attendance were generally fine with the plan as presented.

The style is not my cup of tea, but given where we are as a neighborhood and the general design of row houses, I'm realistic in my expectations. I also believe that the density is consistent with the North Nashville Community Plan. The proposal now goes to Metro Council for approval, including a public hearing, which it should sail through without comment.

MNPS Director failed to follow ethics policy, did not report gifts and favors and hired his own former employer as a consultant

Nate Rau reports that Metro Schools Director Jesse Register went 2 years without filing required disclosure forms:

After The Tennessean inquired about Register’s failure to file the forms, a spokeswoman for MNPS initially indicated he was not covered by the city’s ethics law or Dean’s executive order creating the disclosure requirements. However, Register’s employment contract contains a provision requiring him to comply with the city’s ethics law and Dean’s executive order.

Although his disclosure statements for the two missed years are now on file with the Metro Clerk, taxpayers remain in the dark about what gifts, travel, meals and tickets to events Register has received since he was hired by the district. Citing advice from the Metro Legal Department, Register left that section of the disclosure statements blank ....

Once the provision in his contract was discovered, Register filed the form for 2011 on Feb. 21 and the form for 2010 on Feb. 23.

On all three of his forms to date, Register has elected not to disclose trips, gifts, meals and other benefits provided to him because of his role as the director of schools.

This apparently looks infectious to Mayor Karl Dean, up until now Register's partner in education reform crime, because the Mayor's media herald, Gail Kerr, followed the story with an editorial distancing Dean from Register (Kerr even goes so far as to spin Dean as a reluctant Register supporter, much like he was once spun as a hesitant candidate for the Mayor's Office).

Just as troubling as the information about which Mr. Register is not being transparent in 2010 and 2011, is 2009 report that he hired former employer Annenberg Institute for School Reform and paid them $700,000 for consulting work. In 2011 the Annenberg Institute issued a report about MNPS that gushed in its evaluations of Jesse Register, according to the Tennessean. Register had recommended Annenberg to the school board to conduct the evaluations.

These events smell rank to me. The news is rife with conflicts of interests, and until we see the full ethics report, the conflicts could be judged as unethical. If Metro Nashville Public Schools is going to wipe away conventional education and implement "reform" (an ironic word when fraught with these ethical dilemmas), they better make sure that all of the analysis performed and the data collected is not tainted by favoritism and cronyism.

Music City Center financier facing a "public relations disaster"

Photo credit: The Petrelis Files

Goldman Sachs is getting hit again with a round of charges about its treatment of customers, only this time the criticism is coming from a Goldman insider, and devastatingly so. Greg Smith, a primary recruiter and intern manager who was with Goldman for the past 12 years quits the "bulge bracket" investment bank and explains why:

I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money ....

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival ....

Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail ....

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

This alleged lapse of moral integrity is being spun as a "public relations" disaster in the media, but it is more than a failure of protecting the brand. If Goldman really is acting like a predator, this is a profound moral failure underneath the fickle veneer of flackery.

Or "Muppet City Center"?

Mayor Karl Dean selected Goldman Sachs to be the primary financier of construction of the new Music City Convention Center, set to open in 2013. Metro Nashville is effectively a Goldman Sachs customer. Might Nashvillians also be among the "muppets" getting eyeballs "ripped out" by Government Goldman?

State venture capitalists who subsidize pro teams usually derive more benefits from those teams than constituents do

In her book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein observes that in the wake of disaster profiteering developed over the last 50 years, government has shifted from the role of an administrator managing contractors to "a deep pocketed venture capitalist" that provides seed money and becomes a customer.

Klein's point is particularly salient with regard to Metro Nashville's relationship to the corporate entertainment industry. The Tennessee Titans agreement organized by Phil Bredesen includes kickbacks to the team from Metro Water Services revenues and the Nashville Predators get to keep sales tax revenues from non-hockey events at Bridgestone. Metro Nashville does not treat these arrangements so much with an air of administrative oversight, but it projects itself an equal partner in the "private-public partnership," insisting that the hard-to-demonstrate economic impact is huge.

Sacramento, California is in the process of reviewing its relationship to the NBA's Sacramento Kings franchise with some of the same themes heard in Nashville. One observer notes the difference in findings on economic impact from different sets of researchers:

When the study is completed by paid consultants prior to the public money being spent, the benefits from sports are numerous are large. However, when independent researchers – who are not paid by professional sports teams or leagues – look for these benefits after the fact, evidence of more jobs and economic growth are hard to find.

Baade and Matheson offer three reasons the impact suggested by proponents of sports fail to appear:

• The Substitution Effect: Sports are just one form of entertainment. If the Kings didn’t play in Sacramento, the people in Sacramento would simply spend the portion of their entertainment budget currently dedicated to the Kings on something else (i.e. dining out, movies, etc…).
• The Crowding-Out Effect: Sporting events attract crowds. When people know those crowds are going to appears, those who are not attending the sporting event tend to avoid the general area. For example, Baade and Matheson note that the 2008 Olympics in Beijing failed to increase the number of tourists in Beijing in August of 2008 relative to what the same city saw in August of 2007.
• Leakages: The Kings do employ very high-priced labor. But many of those players probably don’t live in Sacramento. This means that the income earned by these players doesn’t stay in the Sacramento economy.

Given these three effects, the empirical evidence suggests quite strongly that sports do not create many jobs or generate much economic growth. And such evidence has proven to be quite persuasive. In fact, a survey of economists by Gregory Mankiw noted that 85% of economists agree that local and state governments should not subsidize professional sports. Mankiw also notes that only five issues have more agreement among economists.

I would imagine that elected officials who provide venture capital for pro teams are the ultimate winners for the influence created in attracting pro sports to cities. However, it really is a matter of devoting everyone's money to businesses that benefit a relatively small number of people.

HT: Jamie Hollin

Awaited community meeting with 6th & Garfield developers announced

Well, the details came in 3 separate association emails with some confusion about time and day, but Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association announced a community meeting with the development team of 6th and Garfield to finally introduce detailed sketches of their planned townhouses. While the developers expressed uncertainty about the design of the project at the first meeting, they pledged that they would have more community meetings to listen to feedback.

The next meeting is scheduled for 5:30, Thursday, March 15 at the Morgan Park Community Center. You can read more background on the 6th and Garfield rezoning request and previous community meeting here and here and here.

Association news about the actual details on this development have been plagued by misinformation. Your may remember that an original SNNA email characterized the 6th and Garfield development as "Baltimore Brownstones". On follow-up the developer denied in a first community meeting that he ever so characterized the build. So, I was not surprised that today's SNNA announcement was also fumbled.

Metro Water's enigmatic accounting

Follow the money if you can:

• Metro Water Services sent us a February bill
• We paid the February water bill on time for the exact amount
• Our March water bill arrived with current charges plus February charges MWS says are past due plus a late fee
• I checked our checking account and confirmed that our payment was sent to MWS on time
• I meet with customer service rep this morning and produce our last checking account statement that shows payment to MWS in February
• MWS rep tells me that MWS changed customer account numbers and they have since had problems like this
• MWS rep says that they cannot credit account for February payment until MWS accountants "research" where the money is
• I ask where the money could be if it was received from a checking account 1) under the same names and 2) in the same amount on the water bill (and even the MWS account number we designated payment to had the same numerals in the same order as the old number absent a dash and a dot MWS removed)
• MWS rep tells me that only the accountants know where the money is
• I wonder what I did to deserve losing about an hour of my life responding to MWS's accounting problem
• I continue to wait for MWS to tell me where they put our money

By the way, I took time to pay our March bill while I was at Metro Water Services, though I may not be able to confirm whether they actually applied the payment to our bill until the April bill arrives.

How professional sports teams conduct business like strippers

A sobering lesson for each of us who confuse fidelity to our sports teams with a two-way street or a tango:

Today, the Chargers are threatening to move to another city if they don't get a new stadium. Fans in San Diego are calling radio shows and writing angry blog posts, saying that if the Chargers left they'd feel devastated and betrayed. And that behavior is no different than that of most sports fans around the country. Every time our favorite team does something selfish, for purely business reasons, we take it personally. Because we want to believe that they love us as much as we love them. But they don't. They just rub up against whoever has the most money.

Go read the rest because it is worth your while.

HT: Brandon Valentine

Will Bar Louie bring Velocity homeowners the noise?

Will "sound clouds" quiet the revels of zombies?

Comments on the Velocity Homeowners elist indicate that the Bar Louie restaurant chain is not exactly endearing itself to its new neighbors with construction noise or the potential for music reverberations to pulsate up the building once it eventually does arrive in The Gulch. Residents above the planned restaurant are awakened at 7:30 each morning lately to the sounds of pounding and sawing construction down below.

Originally, construction crews told concerned residents that soundproofing inside walls and ceilings was not in the plans. A former Bar Louie employee told them that the company's brand includes mounting speakers inside the restaurant's ceilings and cranking up music with "thumping bass" until 2:00am. That conflicts with what BL owner Anthony Marougi told a Velocity homeowner who called their Michigan corporate office. According to Mr. Marougi, the company plans to put in "a layer of spray foam soundproofing on the ceiling" and hang "sound clouds" from the ceiling to absorb noise.

Bar Louie ownership has promised Velocity leaders that they will be coming to Nashville soon and they pledged to meet with leadership. We shall see whether the owners are good neighbors or homeowners might awaken at some future time to the noise of early morning "Kegs & Eggs Parties".

AutoZone Park: are ballparks sustainable?

The city of Memphis is exploring the possibility of buying their Minor League venue, AutoZone Park, which has not been the financial boon to the Memphis Redbirds baseball club that was promised. And, of course, the primary responsibility of cities nowadays is to bail out struggling sports franchises and not struggling families:

Housing and Community Development director Robert Lipscomb, who handles most major city redevelopment efforts, described the home of the Memphis Redbirds as a "key asset" and said his main goal is to make sure the proposal is a "good value proposition" for taxpayers ....

Memphis Redbirds Baseball Foundation treasurer John Pontius and chairman Ray Pohlman didn't return messages Thursday. The foundation owns the team.

In December, Pontius said he had been in discussion with Fundamental Advisors, the New York firm that owns the bonds used to finance the stadium's construction, to set a sale price for potential buyers.

A message left with Fundamental Advisors was not returned Thursday night.

Lipscomb declined to go into detail about how much it would cost the city to acquire the stadium or how long he has been studying the plan ....

City Council budget committee chairman Jim Strickland said he's open to a proposal but he wants to make sure any possible deal protects the city's financial position.

"Number one, the Redbirds and AutoZone Park are very important to the city," Strickland said. "Number two, the city doesn't have any extra money. It will be really important for me to review the details to be sure the lease payments cover the debt service and that the city is not obligated for the operating expenses. I'm skeptical because, are the debt service payments guaranteed by someone? I would assume this is a multi-million dollar deal. That's an awful lot of lease payments."

These are problems to consider as Nashville is discussing building a ballpark for the Nashville Sounds baseball club. Having a ballpark is not all opportunity. The "opportunity" also sets severe limits on what is possible. Memphis looks to be caught between between a rock and a hard place. Their obligation to their community dictates that they cannot commit to a blind bail out in lean times, but their commitment to the business of baseball won't let them let the Redbirds die. When does their situation turn unenviable?

HT: James

Dean's deal for Dolly joins list of corporate welfare arrangements

Last year Mayor Karl Dean announced a sweetheart giveaway for the LifePoint company: zero property taxes the first 4 years, markedly less than half of property taxes the 7 year after that, and only 75% of property taxes until year 15 of their lease. Last week Hizzoner announced another round of tax breaks for Dolly Parton's corporation and Gaylord Entertainment, that leaves me wondering how Nashville is going to fund our services with the tax dollars going out to big business:

When Dolly Parton builds her new water and snow park in Nashville, she's set to receive a pretty big thank-you gift in return ....

Friday, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean filed legislation [at the Metro Council] that would give Parton's company and Gaylord a 60 percent break on their property taxes for up to 12 years.

Nashville wants to offer that kind of deal because number released Friday show the park is expected to generate more than 1,900 direct and indirect jobs during construction, and 1,800 once the park is open. It's also expected to host 500,000 visitors a year.

It will generate $1.6 million in annual sales tax revenue for Nashville and the state.

And I'm sure that, once the park is finished, the State of Tennessee under the influence of entertainment industry lobbyists will break the promise of the millions coming back to Nashville by funneling those revenues back to entertainment industry interests on the hush-hush like they did with the Nashville Predators. However, right now the Mayor wants to sell this project for public support, so I'm sure he swears on all that is holy that Nashville is not going to lose any trickle-down sales tax revenue on this one.