The Hollin Effect (or "The difference 2 votes can make")

According to a report received from the Cleveland Park neighborhood e-list, Public Works has been in District 5 every day this week "cleaning up alleys and hauling off the junk". Reportedly, people have not witnessed Public Works tending Cleveland Park in these ways in the past. One resident checked with CM Jamie Hollin and found out that he had prompted Public Works' response after approaching the Mayor's Office.

On the one hand, District 5 neighborhoods are thankfully enjoying the benefits of replacing neglectful CM Pam Murray. On the other hand, why should it take a special appeal from a CM to the Mayor's Office to get help from Public Works in cleaning up illegal dumping in public alleys? Was Public Works ignoring direct neighborhood appeals when Ms. Murray was in office?

Won't be accused of putting the "social" in "social media"

This teachable moment brought to you by local-to-Nashville social media big-shot, Rex Hammock, who is seemingly tired of people finding fault with a new Twitter function unless they can actually alter that Twitter function with brawn and their bare hands:



If you decide to enter the heady realm of social media and have independent opinions, just beware of what you might eventually wade through. User feedback? We don't need no stinkin' user feedback!

Anger blows back on local press "assassins"

A number of elected leaders have expressed their anger over the unpleasant lashing out at Metro Parks and Roy Wilson by courthouse and columnist. Among those is typically mild-mannered Mike Jameson, who spoke truth to the power of the press:

Councilman Mike Jameson, who called Wilson “top-notch” in responding to constituents, questioned a recent column in the Tennessean that he said contained a series of unfair accusations, which seemed to come from anonymous sources.

“What I don’t appreciate and what I hope is not happening here is efforts to engage in character assassination by the press,” Jameson said.

To paraphrase Scottish author Alexander Smith: in their attempts to destroy Mr. Wilson's reputation, critics in the mainstream media only made a very human official seem more noble.

BREAKING: Roy Wilson's resignation letter to Metro Parks Board

Via Karen Y. Johnson (click on image to enlarge):

Dead CM walking

District 5 is in a kind of limbo this week with a newly certified new council member and with former council member Pam Murray considering a legal challenge. But Ms. Murray is back to her half-baked hyperbole in response to Monday's certification at the Election Commission:

to agree with this act of injustice is like sending an innocent person to the death chamber; and (it is with) this reason I cannot consent to this election

Did she get her choice of a last meal?

Metro Finance talking points against Parks derailed

The attempts at the courthouse and in the mainstream media to make Metro Parks and Recreation a pariah, in spite of the fact that budget overages occur in other Metro departments, look like they are coming apart at the seams. One does not have to be a fan of the way Director Roy Wilson has run the Parks to acknowledge the dishonesty of Metro Finance holding his department to a stricter budget standard than they do other agencies.

And Rich Riebeling's rationale that Parks' problem was not that they were over budget, but that that they did not keep his office apprised of the overages was contradicted by a Tennessean story yesterday:

Wilson said Mayor Karl Dean's administration knew about his budget problems months ago and even directed him to keep open the park facilities that contributed to the overages ....

E-mail records obtained by The Tennessean show that officials in Dean's administration knew about the department's budget issues in April, when a Parks staffer expressed the need for an emergency appropriation to make ends meet ....

In a series of e-mails April 1 and 2, Parks Assistant Director James Gray told the Finance Department that Parks needed a supplemental appropriation of $501,000 to balance its budget.

The Finance Department responded by demanding an explanation for why Parks not only missed its savings target, but also needed an emergency appropriation.

That appeared to contradict an assertion made earlier by Metro Finance Director Rich Riebeling who has indicated there was a lack of communication between Wilson and the Finance Department about the overrun.

So, Riebeling could have dealt with this last April instead of waiting until October to make a spectacle of problems that could cost Nashvillians park programming.

Between you and me, I wonder if this whole sorry episode of tying Wilson to the courthouse whipping post for sins that other department heads commit was orchestrated to take attention away from months of criticism that Metro Finance was getting over budget overages and fiscal challenges of the proposed convention center. If that was the case, it seems to have backfired with a late-breaking press finally excavating damning correspondence, instead of letting Gail Kerr frame the debate for the Mayor's Office.

Here's the Tennessean's video coverage of the council committee meeting last night on Parks overages. You're in for a treat at the end, as Roy Wilson finally gets his chance to go toe-to-toe publicly with Rich Riebeling, who seems both smug and rattled by the charge that his department once approved what they now question:

Sheriff Daron Hall once again embroiled in charges of cavorting with prejudice

Aunt B has deeply-held concerns about the company the Sheriff's Office is seeking to keep with news of his latest anti-immigration faux pas concerning the controversial Center for Immigration Studies:

This marks the second time that Hall was scheduled to speak to white supremacist groups (the first being his lovely trip to the CCC) ....

But let’s bear in mind that, if he had not been called on it, our sheriff was ready to fly to Washington D.C. and speak about 287(g) on a panel in which he was the only non-CIS participant (Steven Camarota, Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies, and Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies, Center for Immigration Studies, were scheduled to be the other two panelists and Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies was to moderate). His participation gave that panel legitimacy and a hook that would have brought the media. And he would have been sitting there talking about the wonders of 287(g) while Camarota and Vaughan were prepared to speak about how studies may show that there’s less criminal behavior among immigrants than there is the general population, but really, immigrants (of all stripes) “have relatively high rates of criminality.” (Quote directly from the press release touting Hall’s appearance.) ....

That old stereotype set off NO warning bells in the Sheriff’s office?

This is exactly how CIS is designed to work–to mainstream noxious ideas.

You knew somebody from the Mayor's staff would wear the white hat and save the day for beleaguered Parks staff

Here Rich Riebeling comes to save the day:

The board approved a plan that will layoff off five Parks workers, while also asking Metro Council for an emergency appropriation of $850,000. More workers could face layoffs in the near future, as the Board will decide in the coming weeks how to cut $200,000 from its recreational and cultural wellness programs.

Most of the cuts approved by the Board are administrative and lead to no layoffs or service reductions to the public. In fact the plan, presented by Metro Finance Director Rich Riebeling, one of Dean’s top aides, will lead to no service reductions at parks facilities.

A parks board member kindly sent me the details on staff cuts as well as some rather cryptic references to line item cuts that make me wonder how programming at the community level will be affected. It's great to hear that park-level staffers are not going to lose their jobs, but are the patrons of our parks going to lose community center hours and programming options because of this schedule of budget cuts?



It's only fair to ask, did the Mayor's office put this much effort into convention center budget line item cuts when MDHA allowed the intangible public relations budget to run hundreds of thousands of dollars overbudget?

Mayor's Office takes near north Nashville out of TDZ

Originally the state and Metro Council approved a Tourist Development Zone to capture extra sales taxes for the proposed convention center with a northern boundary of Jefferson Street, like so:



This made no sense to me, since convention goers wouldn't be likely to stray too far north of Downtown. It's not like Farmers' Market is a tourist destination; it's mainly for the locals.

However, the Mayor's Office has recently proposed to shorten the northern reach and extend the western reach of the TDZ to pay for the Music City Center:

The seven-member building commission Thursday approved new boundaries unveiled by Metro Finance Director Richard Riebeling that exclude these areas, establishing the Cumberland River as the eastern border, Charlotte Avenue as the northern boundary and the Interstate loop as the southern edge.

The zone’s western border, meanwhile, has moved approximately two miles down active West End Avenue, as project leaders aim to collect revenue from the numerous hotels that dot the corridor. Collectively, the territory now encompasses 2.8 miles, but it exempts car dealerships and other businesses that clearly don't cater to tourists.

Seattle news site gives up advertising for non-profit journalism

Inevitable in many discussions I have about local journalism are quizzical responses to my suggestion that an untried model for sustaining good reporting pioneered at a few places elsewhere is 501-c-3. Last month Seattle's local news site Crosscut.com announced its conversion to non-profit status and enumerated the benefits:

In the summer of 2008, I began to suspect that an advertising-only model for revenue was not going to support high-quality journalism. The migration of advertising to the Web had slowed and the rates were staying low. The board weighed further investment against other models, notably the public-broadcast, member-supported model. We engaged Mike Crystal, my longtime colleague as publisher of Seattle Weekly, to look into the nonprofit model, noting encouraging examples in other cities .... Late last year, the board and owners voted to shift to this new model, and the owners of Crosscut LLC generously donated all assets of the company to the newly formed Washington state nonprofit corporation, Crosscut Public Media.

Setting all this in motion has taken some time as we assembled a new board, the case statements, budgets, and business plans, as well as securing our tax-exempt status and lining up early seed funding. Last November, we had to furlough much of the staff while we regrouped. Our contributing writers, now about 40 strong, continued to produce fine stories, and you readers have stayed with us and helped the site to grow. Another factor during the past year has been the very unsettled media landscape, particularly after the Post-Intelligencer stopped its print edition and many journalists were cut adrift by layoffs at other publications.

That landscape is still tossing about and discovering new fault lines, but I do think that one clear model (among several) that has emerged is the Crosscut model: serious about quality journalism, independent, nonpartisan, broad in its range of topics as well as geography and demography, and dedicated to "journalism in the public interest" as a mission-driven, community-supported nonprofit. This model has greater stability from three sources of income: annual memberships, grants and major gifts, and advertising and sponsorships. (No government funding, though; a difference from public broadcast.) Diverse sources of revenue translate into greater sustainability and flexibility. Community ownership means mission-driven and not tempted to be sold to other owners or out-of-town companies.

As an editor, I love the new framework for picking stories and writers and focusing coverage. In the commercial context, particularly in Web journalism, there is great pressure to run stories that get a lot of hits (gossip about Sarah Palin, for example), and also to do stories that reinforce a niche that advertisers covet (technology breakthroughs, for instance). Now those pressures are reduced, and we can think primarily of running stories that the public needs to know, including somewhat longer and therefore more nuanced stories that lead people out of their comfort zones.

Nashville really has a limited number of alternatives to the traditionally funded media. The Tennessean still operates on the wilting advertisement and subscription model of news gathering. So, does its competitor SouthComm, which also may be leaning on the state to infuse its source of venture capitalism in the near future.

We don't have a non-profit alternative news source here in middle Tennessee but there are plenty of models for founding one:

There are similar efforts around the country. The closest parallels are Minnpost in Minnesota; VoiceofSanDiego in San Diego; the St. Louis Beacon; the New Haven Independent; NewWest in Missoula and other Rocky Mountain cities; TheTyee in Vancouver, B.C.; and Chi-Town Daily News in Chicago. The general definition of these sites is: all-local, Web-only, locally owned, news-oriented (as opposed to ideological sites), publishing daily, and broad range of topics.

Private investors won't assume the risk of the new convention center, so why should Metro government when it doesn't directly serve Nashvillians?

Blogging CM Emily Evans cuts through the finance jargon and gets down to economic brass tacks on the undue risk Nashvillians will have to assume with a new convention center:

Goldman Sachs preliminary financing structures clearly articulate how much risk professional investors are willing to take. They seem to think that the hotel and tourism revenues will only support about $200 million in debt. For the rest of the purchase price - about $400 million - risk must be transferred to someone else. In the case of the convention center, the someone else is the Metro general fund.

The hotel "best and final offer" demonstrates a similar amount of risk aversion .... they are reducing their risk to a level they find business-worthy and are not willing to assume full responsibility for the profit and loss of the enterprise. With the hotel manager/developer unwilling to take risk, someone must be found to whom we can transfer it ....

A convention center and a hotel are now for the most part deemed too risky for professional investors. They are unwilling to invest because they see the possibility that they may lose all or some of their money. The reason they would lose all or some of their investment is because the project will not produce the necessary revenues to support operations and debt service without some sort of external support .... The fact that a project like this cannot support itself makes it, by definition, not feasible.

3 votes ahead and tweeting like its 300

Council District 5 challenger Jamie Hollin finished last night unofficially 3 votes ahead of Pam Murray (542-539), but he responded to the news that there are still 4 provisional votes remaining to be counted today with some misplaced swagger:



As unethical and presumptuous as incumbent Pam Murray has been over her tenure, I took note of her measured and circumspect response to the Tennessean overnight, which stands in marked contrast to Hollin's overconfidence:

It's close, and I'm thankful to all my neighbors, and I'm just waiting for the outcome.

Even if Murray's attitude is staged, she still presents herself with more grace in possibly losing her long time seat than Jamie Hollin does in possibly taking it from her.

Whose votes are they again, Mr. Hollin? Yours? We'll see when votes are certified and we get past any possibility of legal challenge. And even then, doesn't your service on the council actually belong to all of your constituents in District 5?

NewsChannel5 rushes to judgment on District 5 race?

NewsChannel5 seems guilty of declaring the District 5 race when only 3 votes separate Jamie Hollin and Pam Murray with possible provisional ballots left to count. Just throwing "unofficial" in the headline doesn't change the misleading message that CM Murray has "lost her seat," when she's 4 provisional votes, a recount, or a court challenge away from keeping it:


The news channel refers to provisional ballots in the text of the story, but the headline is over-the-top and irresponsible.


UPDATE: NewsChannel5 should take some journalistic accuracy pointers from WSMV, which declared the District 5 race most accurately as "too close to call," and wrote a headline consistent with those results:

CP tweaks rush-to-judgment headline with 3 votes determining District 5 unofficial results

SouthComm reporter Joey Garrison appeared to be the first reporter to call the District 5 results even though only 3 votes separate challenger Jamie Hollin from recalled incumbent CM Pam Murray. I called the Metro Election Commission around 8:40 p.m. and asked them if the unofficial results (542-539, Hollin) broadcast on Metro Channel 3 represented all the votes cast. The official who answered the phone told me that the results were unofficial because there still might be uncounted provisional ballots yet to be received. So, it appears that the City Paper's initial headline was more of a rush to break the news first without consideration of possible provisional ballots:



After the question of the rush-to-judgment was raised on Twitter, the CP lords quickly tweaked the headline to be less a projection that Hollin had won:



This looks like the election is going be a long drawn out process to me, and we may not know who wins for some time with a 3-vote-margin preliminary result and possible ballots still uncounted.

Why blog about council members anonymously?

The polls closed in the Nashville's first recall election several minutes ago, and we're waiting to see the results of the challenge to Pam Murray's tenure on Metro Council. In the meantime, consider the Districtfive blog, which is dedicated to addressing Murray's foibles and vices. The latest post answers questions on why its authors prefer to remain anonymous:

if you have been paying attention, you will note that there have been allegations of harassment against Ms. Murray, even prior to the beginning of this recall election. CM Karen Bennett had concerns for her safety after she stepped up to assist District 5 residents that were not getting adequate representation from Ms. Murray and filed a police report. Additionally, as tempers flared during the rezoning debate about Cleveland Street, a rash of cars parked in and around the condominiums where her opponent lives came up with broken windows. Meeting participants that challenge Ms. Murray have found R-rated comments written in the dust on their vehicles when they exited to the parking lot. As juvenile as this seems, it does send a profound message about the personal level to which Ms. Murray takes disagreements and raises concerns about how rational future responses may or may not be.

Ms. Murray has, of course, filed counter claims. One of her claims is that a constituent called her employer in Detroit about her. Nevermind that a constituent has little other option than to call Detroit if they want to try to reach Ms. Murray.

Interestingly, Ms. Murray has actually engaged in the very behavior she accused others of. One constituent reports that both the boss and the Board of Directors at that individual’s employer have been contacted by Ms. Murray to discourage the constituent from speaking out against the Council Member.

These intimidation tactics can be effective. It is our hope that anonymous blogging can be, too.

BONUS: An Enclave retrospective of coverage of Pam Murray's tenure on Metro Council.

Beaman Park: Gateway to Danger

Betsy Phillips does what neither the mainstream press nor CM Sam Coleman seems willing to do: look at the crime statistics at a park where Mr. Coleman says guns need to be permitted as deterrents to hypothetical crimes. Not only does she find little to substantiate CM Coleman's incitement to violence, but she finds that the crime stats in the community surrounding the park are so low as to make his knee-jerk fear mongering over rural areas a rude joke.

A girl can spend her lunch hour looking at the police crime statistic map and discover that apparently not one violent crime was committed against anyone in these parks last month. Not one. (Though woe to the person trying to get to the park at the end of Neely's Bend! Bring a gun to the park, for sure, but don't worry about needing it once you get there.)

But you know, maybe all of the residents in these areas (who are just poised to pounce on park visitors at any moment) were busy in October. So I looked at the crime stats--again, available from the police department, and again, available to anyone with a lunch hour. And while they're not broken down to park level, I discovered that, in all of 2008, there were a grand total of three violent crimes committed in Beaman Park's zip code.

The whole zip code. Three violent crimes.

Well, I can see why we need to carry guns in Beaman Park. You're lucky to get out of there with your life.

Compare & Contrast: Rich Riebeling vs. David Manning on Planning Capital Projects

Why is Dean Finance Director Rich Riebeling prone to spend Metro money before planning for new Metro facilities, given the previous Finance Director's common sense explanation in 2007 that thoughtful planning should always precede spending capital revenues on big ticket items?

Now consider this dispatch from a neighborhood leader who attended Tuesday night's community meeting with Rich Riebeling regarding the Finance Director's intention to shell out $14 million to purchase a former car dealership to house the West Nashville police precinct with no planning:

Mr. Reibeling, the Metro finance director, answered [neighbors' questions]:

1. There were no detailed drawings or site plans for the Frensley property and that he didn't want to spend any more money on planning. That they had already spent money on planning the Horizon Building and that those plans would basically serve to PLAN the Frensley property.
2. He didn't know how much money was available for planning.
3. He didn't know how much we had spent on planning for the Horizon location already (we've heard around $50,000 has been spent on planning for the Horizon Building and that council has approved a total planning budget for the project of $500,000).
4. Basically he had no intention of spending any more money on planning the Frensley site before it went to council for a vote, that he "knew" it would come in under the $14 million that was appropriated.

One of the reasons the last council loathed David Manning was because he demanded careful planning before authorizing spending as Charlie Tygard put it for a "3, 4, 5, or 6 millon dollar crime lab" while resisting attempts to dicker with council over $500,000 to plan for the multi-million dollar projects. It seems to me spending $500,000 to help avoid paying an extra $3 million would be a good thing, although old school politicians like Tygard seemed to disagree. The current courthouse finance crowd seems ready to spend big development and construction dollars without a lick of planning on the new West Nashville police precinct. That should satisfy development-happy patrons like Mr. Tygard, but it is not good for the community around Richland Creek.

Tiny Cat Pants determined not to lose park services to Metro Council budget cuts

Aunt B. is furious over this season's Metro war on Parks & Recreation:

I knew that there had been some ridiculous overages in the Parks department, because it was oh, so important to have golf all winter long.

But until today, I didn’t get that the people who would be let go as a result of this fiasco were not the idiots who let this happen, but people like the awesome guy who came out after we’d completed our walk [at Bells Bend Park] to check on us and ask us how things went. He’s in charge of the park programing and he would get laid off, and his boss would have to cover Bell’s Bend and Beaman Park, which would basically give her enough time to be a glorified janitor at both places.

This really sucks, and not just because Bell’s Bend Park is my favorite park in the system.

It sucks because it’s unfair to ordinary people. It’s unfair to the ordinary people who work for the parks, who couldn’t control or have any say in whether things were properly reported to Metro, but it’s also unfair to those of us ordinary people who enjoy the parks. Because the golfers got to golf all winter, we don’t get to have enough staff?

And seriously, at what point do the big wigs fall on their swords and lay themselves off rather than always looking for the people lower down who can be cut?

Anyway, call or write your council members.