Enclave

Progress in the last Salemtown association meeting

2012-01-31T22:03:00.000-06:00

That association meeting I attended last week went better that I thought it would beforehand. The officer seeking to rewrite sections of the by-laws dramatically only brought up one of her proposals for discussion, but the group seemed to lean strongly against it.

The proposal mentioned was to cut the number of membership business meetings from one per month to one per quarter, based on weak attendance in some 2011 meetings. 5 people present spoke against cutting meeting frequency, 4 were members and 1 was a police officer, who made the same argument I have before about regular meetings: they build strong ties between neighborhood watch and community policing. The point that cutting our membership meetings could weaken the association was particularly persuasive from MNPD officers who work constantly with associations across the city.

No one except the president spoke in favor of cutting the frequency of meetings.

I came away feeling positive about these events. While the discussion confirmed my belief that that monthly meetings are more productive than quarterly ones, it also reinforced to me that group process is more important than top-down fiat. I genuinely hope that people continue to come to association meetings each month and chart the course of Salemtown Neighbors as a diverse group.

Ravitch: Did anyone explain a failed Nashville education policy to Obama?

2012-01-31T18:26:00.000-06:00

Education historian Diane Ravitch points to the self-contractions of the White House education policy and mentions Metro Nashville Public Schools as a cautionary tale:

Teachers must have been excited when they heard what the President said then because he showed that he really understood the dangers of high-stakes testing. He said:

"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Teachers must have been jumping for joy when they heard this, because they know that states and districts have been reducing the time available for the arts, history, civics, physical education, everything other than the tests of reading and mathematics. That excellent teacher-blogger Anthony Cody pointed out in his review of his speech that the President was "blasting his own education policies."

Do you think that President Obama just doesn't understand that Race to the Top has encouraged states to double down on high-stakes testing? Maybe he doesn't realize that the strategies of his administration rely totally on test scores. Do you think no one from the U.S. Department of Education has explained that merit pay has been tried again and again and has never succeeded? Did anyone tell him about the Vanderbilt study of 2010, in which Nashville teachers were offered bonuses of $15,000? Did anyone tell him that those big bonuses didn't lead to higher test scores?

Don't wait for anyone at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce or One Nashville to explain this to the President of the United States. I am sure that they're dumbfounded that the profit motive did not automatically transform teachers into magicians who could increase test scores like market ratios. Testing in Tennessee assures that our children learn at less profound and sustainable levels. Putting the onus all on teachers ignores the systemic problems that stifle childhood learning.

Ominous cops: not exactly community policing

2012-01-31T16:35:00.000-06:00

Ominous and grim news from Los Angeles for all those concerned about free speech, assembly, and dissent:

The LA Police Department, known for its brutality and corruption over the years, and the U.S. military conducted joint “tactical exercises” in downtown LA this week ....

According to a Department news release on January 23, “Multi-agency tactical exercises are to be conducted during evening hours around the downtown area January 22-26, 2012.”

“The Los Angeles Police Department will be providing support for a joint military training exercise in and around the great Los Angeles area,” the release stated. “This will be routine training conducted by military personnel, designed to ensure the military’s ability to operate in urban environments, prepare forces for upcoming overseas deployments, and meet mandatory training certification requirements” ....

“Lastly, safety precautions have been taken to prevent risk to the general public and the military personnel involved. As such, this training is not open to the public,” the Department concluded ....

Joint military exercises have also been conducted over Boston, Massachusetts and Little Rock, Arkansas over the past six months.

These joint military training exercises become very ominous in the wake of the repression of the Occupy movement by police departments throughout the nation.The crackdown on the First Amendment by the cities of Los Angeles, Sacramento, Oakland San Francisco and others across the country is apparently part of a nationally coordinated campaign by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement agencies in collaboration with local police departments.

How long before we see troops staging military training with Metro Nashville cops?

Developer requesting mixed-use zoning change in Salemtown has not discussed intentions with the neighborhood

2012-01-29T22:57:00.001-06:00

The Planning Department sent out a notice to neighbors in Salemtown affected by a request by the owner of two adjacent properties at 6th and Garfield. The developer submitted the application for rezoning almost 3 weeks ago, and this is the first time many of us are hearing about the request. I have yet to talk to anyone here who has heard from the owner or applicant. Metro Planning, which is currently reviewing the application relative to the community plan, describes the request thusly:

Hmm.
A request to rezone from the R6 to MUN district properties located at 1628 and 1630 6th Avenue North, at the southeast corner of 6th Avenue North and Garfield Street (0.27 acres), requested by R.J. York Homes LLC, applicant, Ray C. Nathurst, owner (case number: 2012Z-005PR-001)

Planning has placed the rezoning request on the Planning Commission meeting agenda for February 23, 2012 (at the Howard Office Building, 2nd Av, S). MUN ("mixed-use neighborhood") zoning requires structures to be built closer to the streetside of properties with parking in the back. While mixed-use sounds like a noble urban plan, it does not (as far as I can tell) specify the kind of retail (if any) allowable. Without knowing the developers' intentions it would be premature to support this plan. Moreover, we do not know whether it fits the last North Nashville Community Plan that a number of us living here helped inform.

I will post more information here as it is made available.

Allegations of wrongdoing taint the Farmers' Market

2012-01-29T20:46:00.001-06:00

The potential for a black eye at a North Nashville mainstay:

The Nashville Farmers' Market Board asked for a detailed review by the Metro Department Finance Thursday after questions of how the market operates.

An examination found billing irregularities, inconsistent lease agreements, discrepancies in alcohol revenue and lack of policy enforcement.

But I thought Salemtown was the "next hot spot" 5 years ago

2012-01-29T13:00:00.001-06:00

In 2007 real estate reporters called Salemtown the next hot spot, so hot, we were already "on fire":

Up-and-coming 27-year-old developer Jeremy Gearheart seems like a good match with Salemtown, an emerging neighborhood near downtown where he's building single-family homes and putting down roots by buying and rehabbing an old home.

Gearheart is finalizing plans for eight upscale brick brownstones at Fifth Avenue and Garfield. He recently finished three new homes with historic designs at Clayton on Sixth Avenue North.

Those homes go from $289,000 to $348,000 and recently won the city's Preservation Award for infill projects from the Metro Historical Commission of Nashville and Davidson County.

"This area is on fire," Gearheart says. "I'm fully invested in it."

Apparently, our status as the next hot spot in 2007 was just a false alarm. This morning the Tennessean reports that now it's for real; we are the next hot spot:

Salemtown [is] a long-neglected neighborhood near downtown Nashville being discovered by residents and home builders who see it as the city’s next redevelopment success story ....

“This is a very cool, exciting place. It’s the next hot spot,” says Josh McLean, a principal of Kenner McLean Development, who compares Salemtown to other neighborhoods that have experienced a renaissance, including Germantown and, across the Cumberland River in East Nashville, Lockeland Springs.

As I hear it, the real estate reporter at the Tennessean did not even know that Salemtown existed before he was contacted to do this story. We moved to Salemtown in 2004, and I can recall the news media discovering us at various times over the years: 2005, 2006, 2007, etc. So, perhaps the journo is referring to himself as being neglectful of Salemtown. Nonetheless, they have discovered us again.

Pioneers & Manifest Destiny

More troubling to me as a Salemtownie is the reference in the story to our neighborhood as "pioneer territory" along with the screaming colonial headline: "'Pioneers' take over Salemtown". The idea of "pioneers" summons other ideas like civilizing natives and subduing frontier. Pioneers do not just settle, they also drive out other indigenous communities. Because of those connotations, I find pioneer metaphors for urban community redevelopment appalling.

Salemtown is not the wild west or Fort Apache. When we founded a neighborhood association here we sought to acknowledge and to celebrate the class, ethnic, and social diversity of Salemtown. The idea that those of us who have moved here more recently are "pioneers" is at odds with that purpose. I am fortunate to share Salemtown with people who have lived here all their lives, who can remember working at the old Werthan Bag factory, who remember walking to class at the old Fehr school, who have looked at the block-by-block march of hip Germantown northward with a keen sense of loss of their own community. I have no desires to "take over" the neighborhood from them. Recently I found working side-by-side with folk who have lived in Salemtown for decades on our 3-year streetscape project very meaningful. If I were a pioneer I would not even see the value of their perspective or at least I would extol economic growth as the value that trumps all other values, especially "old-fashioned" ones.

Salemtown has a community character beyond that of the "urban core" exalted by lifestyle wayfarers who see the neighborhood as a pass-through from one stage of their life to the next. Some of us have stood in front of the Planning Commission and the Metro Council and defended that character against homogenizing tendencies of the housing market. Whether or not it is (or was or will be) "the next hot spot" promoted by real estate reporters and developers, it is (and was and will be) our home, too. Any so-called "revival" or "renaissance" is always influenced by the past as well as the present and the future.

Sulphur Dell commercial somewhat misleading

2012-01-27T12:22:00.002-06:00

Dated last November, this commercial promoting a new ballpark at Sulphur Dell is listed as "made for The Friends of Sulphur Dell," a group led by Hope Gardens association president Jason Powell:

I already spotted a problem in the video regarding a website promoted at the end of the video: www.sulphurdell.com. The commercial is misleading at that point, given that the website is maintained by a group completely different than Friends of Sulphur Dell. Moreover, the Sulphur Dell commemoration group running sulphurdell.com has not embraced the new stadium concept at the old site and some of them have even expressed opposition when asked by the news media a couple of weeks after the commercial posted on YouTube.

Inconvenient questions about a new ballpark

2012-01-26T23:42:00.038-06:00

Last month while blogging on TSU homecoming and Jefferson Street shootings, I left out an intriguing comment from a citizen concerned about increased crime when outsiders cruise and hang out in the North End. A police officer present was trying to assuage concerns that spikes in crime during TSU homecoming were more chronic than others by saying that even Titans' games regularly result in higher incidence of crime. There is no way around crime spiking with increases in numbers of people attending events. Police at the very least prepare to deal with more car break-ins during Titans games.

At that point the citizen I mentioned brought up the proposed Sulphur Dell ballpark. Despite the spin of the most vocal local proponents that the community unquestioningly supports a new ballpark here, she expressed concern that building a ballpark would actually attract some of the same problems that TSU homecoming and Titans games did. It was an honest concern about Sulphur Dell that exists, unprompted, unorchestrated, unscripted. However, it was also a question that the "friends" and "champions" of a new Sulphur Dell ballpark are ignoring in the name of raising property values and bringing any growth, even if the growth might not be balanced or smart or secure.

For any action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Building a new ballpark at Sulphur Dell creates a contrasting set of problems that should be addressed in the open and without the influence of lobbyists. If those problems can be mitigated by effective community-based planning, the inconvenient questions are less likely to come up in settings that have nothing to do with ballparks.

UPDATE: Another point for community discussion that needs to be considered is the relative cost of Sulphur Dell land, whose 14 acres would cost $14 million according to the site study. In contrast the East Bank's assessed value and site costs for 80 acres are $8.6 million. It will be hard to convince taxpayers that they're getting the better deal at Sulphur Dell, but the only spin I've heard from proponents is how much it will help Hope Gardens, Germantown and the Jeff St business corridor. I can see why Friends of Sulphur Dell may be cautious about opening this up to a broader community discussion. They just keep getting strikes called against them.

Is Florida about to lower the boom on predatory pro sports owners?

2012-01-25T23:18:00.000-06:00

Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this refreshing story from the Sunshine State:

The pursuit of public funds for football stadiums carries with it certain obligations that wouldn’t apply if football teams would simply build their own buildings. In Florida, the powers-that-be previously passed a law requiring venues that receive public funds to discharge an important public duty: provide shelter to the homeless when the buildings are otherwise not in use.

To date, the three NFL stadiums located in Florida, along with numerous other facilities, have failed to comply. Now, a pair of Republican legislators hope to force the stadiums to comply — or to refund the public money previously received ....

It’s a great move. Florida has subsidized pro sports franchises with a clear expectation that the pro sports franchises will help the homeless. The pro sports franchises have pocketed the money while ignoring their obligations.

Can you imagine if the General Assembly or Metro government required the Titans and Predators to use the stadium and arena for broader public goods and for helping the disadvantaged when not functioning as sports venues?

Nope. Neither can I.

Here in Tennessee, we're so deliriously whipped by a dream that was pro sports Camelot that we will let them do anything they want with our buildings. They can decline huge concerts that would put money back in Metro coffers. When they do have concerts, they can pillage the sales taxes that should be going to Metro services with practically no popular backlash or legislative protest.

So, even the enlightened thought of catching up to Florida and attempting to require subsidized pro teams to give some of their publicly funded infrastructure back to the community seems like wild utopian ideation, unless we refuse to continue to go quietly into this imbalanced dystopia we've built handing team owners our money, no questions asked.

And don't expect to hear any talk of a new minor league baseball stadium being dedicated to anything public either.

Localizing President Obama's State of the Union

2012-01-25T12:00:00.003-06:00

I listened to Barack Obama's latest SOTU speech last night and thought it was an effectively safe, garden-variety election year SOTU, promising many things to various interests across the spectrum. There are things I wanted to hear but never expected to, which I won't go into here. But given the focus of this blog I was particularly interested in the responses of those audiences focused on urban issues.

The President touched on infrastructure:

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

One of the first reactions I saw after the speech was done was a statement from the President of the National League of Cities (via their Twitter stream):

In an election year, there is a tendency to put off hard decisions until the politcial climate is settled. But the American people and American cities cannot wait until next year for action. The economy has yet to recover, the middle class continues to shrink and Washington continues to play political gamesmanship.

"Congress and the Administration need to take a page from the nation's local leaders who are making very difficult economic choices everyday. We are glad the President agrees with us that it is time for Washington to work towards finding solutions and making the strategic investments in the infrastructure and human capital the nationneeds to remain competitive for decades to come.

“To everyone in Washington we say: Campaign on your record and not with people’s lives. It’s time to get to work.”

While NLC spread the responsibility for realizing high-minded talk about infrastructure around, the interest group representing the nation's Mayors laid most of the blame on Congress and gave the White House a pass.
Here is most of last night's statement by the U.S. Conference of Mayors President, who is also the Mayor of Los Angeles:

"Last week, nearly 250 mayors gathered in Washington, D.C. We conferred with President Obama at the White House and released a detailed report on the state of the cities.

"The report was clear. Nearly a fourth of the nation’s metropolitan areas – including my home of Los Angeles – will struggle for five more years to regain the jobs lost in the Great Recession.

"In his address tonight, President Obama showed the country that he will keep fighting for the investments we need to turn our economy around. At its heart, the speech was about renewing the basic bargain with the American middle class, especially those looking for work or struggling to pay their mortgage.

"Now it’s Congress’ turn. Congress needs to do its job.

"To put America back to work, Congress should start by passing the Boxer-Inhofe surface ransportation bill, a bill that includes the innovative America Fast Forward initiative.

"America Fast Forward is simple. It would accelerate the construction of locally-funded road and rail projects by providing flexible, low-interest loans from the federal government....

"Our cities cannot afford another season of congressional inaction."

The USCM response looked like it was written to compliment the President's speech, which also chided congressional inaction. It did not indicate that Obama could have addressed urban infrastructure more than he did. The Mayors may not have wanted to alienate the White House, while the League of Cities feels freer to stand for infrastructure on principal. Targeting Congress, which is less popular than communism, is safe right now primarily because they are so ineffectual.

But at least one commentator senses that Obama is not prepared to be bold on infrastructure either. The thoughts of a blogging urbanist came across my news reader early this morning:

The contributions of the Obama Administration to the investment in improved transportation alternatives have been significant, but it was clear from the President’s State of the Union address last night that 2012 will be a year of diminished expectations in the face of a general election and a tough Congressional opposition.

Mr. Obama’s address, whatever its merits from a populist perspective, nonetheless failed to propose dramatic reforms to encourage new spending on transportation projects, in contrast to previous years. While the Administration has in some ways radically reformed the way Washington goes about selecting capital improvements, bringing a new emphasis on livability and underdeveloped modes like high-speed rail, there was little indication in the speech of an effort to expand such policy choices. All that we heard was a rather meek suggestion to transform a part of the money made available from the pullout from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts — a sort of war dividend whose size is undefined ....

In the context of the presidential race, Mr. Obama’s decision not to continue his previously strong advocacy of more and more transportation funding suggests that the campaign sees the issue as politically irrelevant.

So, we are back to my first point that the speech was effectively safe, garden-variety SOTU focused less on what Obama will do for urban community and more on how he will navigate his re-election year. Those of us who live in cities will have to wager on the long odds that Congress will actually do something before November without the help of the White House.

Salemtown, Sulphur Dell, and Karl Dean

2012-01-24T20:04:00.003-06:00

At some point I'll get to blogging on the details of yesterday's association meeting regarding concerns I blogged about this past weekend. However, there were two rather remarkable revelations divulged that deserve their own space here.

Apparently, our new president has jumped in with both feet to support the Sulphur Dell ballpark. Less than a month into her tenure as the chief, she has joined an effort with Germantown, Hope Gardens, Buena Vista to form a tighter consortium to try and shift Courthouse sentiment (assuming it has ever really waned) back to the concept of a ballpark near Bicentennial Mall. She told us they are looking to brand the group with a hip name like "North Core". They have political heavyweights working with them (politics consultant and PR stud Mike Kopp's name was dropped), and they have a budget (our neighborhood association has yet to even see any 2012 budget proposals).

Salemtown Neighbors is on record having expressed a guarded openness to the ballpark project in the past, pending assurances that increased vehicular traffic would not undermine complete, pedestrian-friendly streets or our North Nashville Community Plan. If the association is to take a more unqualified, enthusiastic response supporting a paid lobbying effort for Sulphur Dell, then we ought be discussing this in open meetings and voting up or down to change our previous stance.

Despite being on the Executive Board, I do not believe that this is a decision that should be decided by executives alone since it affects us all. It would be out of character for us to become top-down. Moreover, all of us would like to see our quality-of-life enhanced by smart growth, but common sense tells us that not all growth is smart just because it makes developers more money. The community needs to be involved to the widest extent possible, and it is imperative now that we not reduce chances for discussions by cutting the frequency of our meetings as proposed.

The second interesting revelation at the meeting was that two of our newly-elected officers have been meeting with Mayor's Office officials and they have an upcoming meeting with Hizzoner himself, Karl Dean, in the near future. I think it is wonderful that the Mayor's Office is reaching out to Salemtown as they have not in the past. It would be super if our officers can convince him to set aside more in his future capital budgets to upgrade our antiquated sewer system or designate more money to parks and recreation so that Morgan Park Community Center can stay open longer hours for our kids, teens, adults, and seniors.

I'll keep an eye on these rapidly developing stories, but please send me any news you hear, too.

Local blogger exposes sexist emails allegedly sent out by MNPS male supervisor

2012-01-24T12:49:00.006-06:00

Over at Gemna Speaks, Gemna Holmes broke some rather provocative news regarding an email allegedly sent by Metro Nashville Public Schools Food Services Director Jay Nelson (I added the emphasis below):

Recently, a Metro Nashville Public School (MNPS) male supervisor sent an email to female subordinates that has gone viral. In the food service department, the female to male ratio is 9 to 1. An email with a cartoon depicting a caveman telling another caveman that he has decided to teach the woman to talk and asking “what harm can it do?” is not funny. Period ....

I contacted several MNPS food service staff members at area schools to ask them about their work environment which the email made me question right away. No one wanted to go on record for fear of losing their jobs but all agreed that email that I read was a glimpse behind the drawn shades of a school system that has become synonymous with devaluing its support staff.

Jump to Gemna's blog to see the offending cartoon and get more details. These allegations are chilling for MNPS given that they come on the heels of a complaint filed against Jesse Register for "overreaching" and attempting to "silence" MNPS support staff. What kind of climate do service workers weather under the MNPS umbrella?

By the way, this is not the first time Director Nelson has had his oversight scrutinized. In 2004, MSNBC found conditions in Metro school cafeterias in bad shape under his watch:

...unlike last year [when new crews popped in], there were no mouse droppings under food service lines. But mice still roam other parts of some Nashville school cafeterias.

But the Nashville school district had its most serious problems with food temperatures, worse than any other city we visited. When checking hamburgers, one of the most dangerous foods if not cooked thoroughly and held at 140 degrees, inspector Steve Crosier couldn't believe his eyes as the thermometer needle fell. It finally bottomed out at around 78 degrees.

Hansen: "How quickly does bacteria grow, bacteria that could make a kid sick at 78 degrees?"

Prof. Berg: "It grows really, really quickly. 78 degrees, 110 degrees, these are optimum temperatures for bacteria. Not for us."

Cold pizza may be a staple around college dorms, but health officials say it could pose a danger for a young child if not kept at 140 degrees to kill bacteria. At 60 degrees the pizza was 80 degrees too cold.

Prof. Berg: "It is that cheese. It's almost like a Petri dish with bacterial growth."

At McGavock High, inspectors saw something a lot scarier than cold pizza -- shards of glass mixed in with fruit in a cooler. Apparently, the light shield, the metal cover that goes over the glass dome shield, fell.

Jerry Rowland, Health Director: "I can't remember the last time that I saw an inspection where there was glass inside a food in a school cafeteria or in a restaurant."

Inspectors also found a fifty pound bag of USDA-donated flour in a storage room infested with bugs. Jay Nelson is the head of food services for Nashville schools.

Hansen: "Don't the people look around and say, this needs to be cleaned. This has bugs. This is rotten. This is at the wrong temperature. Before kids come in to eat in these rooms?

Jay Nelson: "Chris, I would have fully expected that happens. But as we can see it doesn't."

Hansen: "How can you guarantee that the next time we come down here, we won't see some of these very same things?"

Nelson: "Chris I'd be a fool to guarantee you that you're not going to see some of the very same things. What I want to see is our total scores of all the schools improving, and continually improving."

Maybe it's good news that the MNPS dining services brain trust is no longer having to defend alarming food conditions in its cafeterias. Is it too much to expect that Mr. Nelson find a way to stop imposing demeaning cartoons on rank-and-file workers?

UPDATE: MNPS's cartoon fiasco hits the airwaves.

Nashville schools as conduits for corporate revenue streams

2012-01-23T23:57:00.039-06:00

This plan to start charter schools in the more affluent neighborhoods of West Nashville strips any of the pretense that education reform is about giving disadvantaged kids better chances to succeed. Education reform is primarily about maximizing foundation grants and federal dollars and channeling them toward private education enterprise through the oversight of private boards of community movers and shakers

West Nashville is like one big land rush for entrepreneurs and influence-brokers:

A steering committee has formed to advance discussions on the West Nashville charter school concept. Among members is Metro school board member Michael Hayes, who represents the Green Hills area ....

“Every charter school is open now to families of all incomes,” Hayes said. “It just so happens that the first handful that opened, opened under the previous laws, which required that their student body come from ... at-risk families. Now that the law has changed, every school can take applications from children of any socio-economic group.”

Hayes added, “Diversity will be a key in any charter school’s push in West Nashville.”

But school board member Ed Kindall, who represents schools in some of the county’s most impoverished neighborhoods, said he would have diversity concerns about the West Nashville charter concept if it were proposed.

“This is was one of the fears that I had when the recent law was changed to allow all students to attend charter schools,” Kindall said....

Education observer Jim Horn called the emergence of Karl Dean's education policy "the arrival in Nashville of the new movement to turn schools and school services into corporate revenue streams". If that is so, the genesis of charter schools for affluent kids is the maturation of that movement.

Some objections to changes at Salemtown Neighbors

2012-01-22T22:46:00.003-06:00

I've been a continuous member of Salemtown's first neighborhood association over the span of its relatively short existence. We have had our ups and downs over the years, and like many local voluntary organizations, we've often endured on the hard work of a core cadre of leaders who could always use more support from the entire membership.

2011 was perhaps our most trying and least successful year. There were successes. Salemtown Neighbors was able to act quickly after the historic Fehr school building was declared one of Nashville's most endangered properties to get our council member to support preservation zoning with the help of the Historical Commission. We also raised enough money to meet planning department requirements when the legislation eventually gets to that level. We hosted volunteer community clean-up days. We kept our financial house strong.

Nonetheless, we were weak in hosting social and service events that would have both given back to the community and grown our membership. Communication could have been better, and our business meetings were poorly attended. Our membership numbers did not shrink, but they were flat.

I believe that we have a lot of work to do in 2012 to strengthen this association, and I am committed to support reasonable changes to turn us around. I am on the Executive Board and I intend to do what I can to help make things better.

However, our new president is proposing changes to our by-laws that I believe are rash and lack diligence for group process. Originally our president proposed that only one members' business meeting, scheduled for tomorrow evening, would be designated for the membership to consider her proposals. Fortunately, at a January 7 meeting, the Executive Board agreed that more than a couple of weeks were needed to consider the changes. Now we may have 2 months.

My strongest objection is to a proposal to cut the number of membership meetings from 1 per month to 4 per year (the Executive Board added an option of 6 per year as a compromise proposal). The proposed change assumes that business can be conducted over the website and via email instead of in monthly face-to-face meetings. Online communication is a great tool that I rely on for networking with a lot of people, but it is not a substitute in a community where we live close to one another for face-to-face interaction. Moreover, not everyone is as comfortable with online communication and some might have less access than others.

I believe that the new meeting proposal also ignores the important connections SNNA has built with Metro's community police officers. One of the ways we serve our community is to provide Salemtown with a monthly point of contact with Metro police. Likewise, we convey to the police that we are engaged in our own safety and security. In my opinion shrinking the meeting structure weakens the community policing relationship we have built over the years.

I also object to the president's proposal to amend the membership dues by-laws to allow members to substitute volunteer hours for dues. My family volunteers consistently in our community, so I'm not opposed to the idea of volunteer hours being used to meet membership requirements. However, there is no plan or structure or volunteer coordinator to keep up with volunteer hours in this proposal. It is no more than a concept, and a wishful one at that. I'm also not opposed to suspending the dues by-laws for 2012 and pursuing this on a trial basis. But re-writing the by-laws on an untested impulse absent clear management plans is drastic and risky.

There are other proposals to re-write or eliminate certain parts of the by-laws that for the sake of brevity I will not address here, but I believe that any plan to re-write the rules governing our association should be submitted to a by-laws committee to be considered, studied, and discussed. When our by-laws were written, it took a committee months to conduct research, to consider feedback, and to draft them. It took several weeks more to allow members to consider and then vote on them. I fail to understand why we are not pursuing the same group process and timeline for these proposals.

In spite of our lapses and challenges of the past, I hope that we will continue to be an association that maximizes participation rather than overreacting and limiting participation. Any proposal to change the fundamentals of our organization ought to be slow-walked rather than rushed through in order to foster participation and to get informed consent.

Look forward to seeing members tomorrow night at this important meeting!

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are my own. The characterizations are not meant to be those of anyone but me. That should go without saying, but I also wish to make it clear.

Salemtown crime update

2012-01-20T09:26:00.001-06:00

I learned yesterday from a developer that one of the neighborhood kids allegedly involved in a recent burglary spree here helped the other suspects by driving a motorized go-kart up and down streets and alleys, scoping properties, and tagging houses for break-ins. The teen worked with others to pass stolen goods along to a fence who allegedly would give the kids pot in return. The source of the information is Metro's flex unit.

I saw the go-kart kid a number of times in the past 6 months and didn't suspect him in those situations. Guess I'll change my tune.

Some had questioned the sincerity of the May Town proposal years before the project's own developers did

2012-01-19T23:23:00.001-06:00

Partners in the development team Jack May put together around two years ago to urbanize Bells Bend, build a "second downtown" on farmland, and suffuse the small community with automobile traffic with 1-3 bridges, allege now that Mr. May was committing fraud and exercising irresponsible conduct.

According to [plaintiff Jeffrey] Zeitlin, when he and William Kantz entered into a partnership agreement with the Mays, they were led to believe that Jack May was retired in Mexico and “would help fund the project.”

Zeitlin contends, however, several misrepresentations by the Mays ultimately led to the crumbling of the partnership and the development plan.

According to the lawsuit, the Mays made an “unconditional promise” to gift certain land in Bells Bend to Tennessee State University — land that the partnership didn’t own.

“The Defendants did not make the gift as promised to TSU and did not intend to make the gift when the Defendants extended the promise,” the lawsuit reads. “As a result, the Partnership’s good will and Zeitlin’s interest therein was damaged.”

Zeitlin makes a similar claim involving a bridge that Jack May told the city of Nashville he would “write a check” for, to help boost the proposed development.

The lawsuit also claims that the Mays added partners in breach of the partnership agreement and failed to account for Zeitlin’s capital contributions to the partnership.

The partnership may have been damaged by the alleged dishonesty, but many more Nashvillians would have been damaged had the deal not been narrowly defeated. Many of us on the anti-May Town side warned without fail that this concept was a Trojan horse destined to bring more harm than good.

Music City Center financier among the "10 Most Hated Companies in America"

2012-01-18T09:29:00.001-06:00

Despite their rank reputation for ill-gotten gains at the expense of ordinary people, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean no doubt sees Goldman as golden:

Goldman Sachs’ ... poor reputation was cemented when the government sued it for fraud in 2010. The firm settled with the government for $550 million, but this was viewed as little more than a slap on the wrist because of the bank’s immense wealth. And the fraud accusations have not stopped — they have actually accelerated. Goldman faces a set of suits over mortgage instruments it sold worth a total of $15.8 billion. The Federal Housing Finance Agency in September accused Goldman of misrepresenting the quality of $11.1 billion worth of residential mortgage-backed securities. In the cases in which Goldman has settled claims, the press has not always been favorable. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Goldman agreed to forgive 25% of principal balances on 143 mortgage loans to borrowers in New York, or $13 million of a total principal balance of $52 million. The $13 million is less than a senior banker at Goldman might make in a year. Perhaps those homeowners are part of the Occupy Wall Street protests against big banks, for which Goldman is the poster boy.

CRIME ALERT: police nab burglary suspects in Salemtown

2012-01-17T10:22:00.000-06:00

The only news source reporting on the arrest last week of a suspected Salemtown burglar is WSMV's Kevin Young:

Metro Police say two teens they arrested Friday admitted to committing seven burglaries in the Salemtown area near downtown.The juveniles, ages 14 and 17, were captured by officers investigating a break-in in the 1700 block of 5th Avenue North.Police say the teens admitted breaking into seven Salemtown homes during the past three weeks while working with Timmy Bufford, a convicted felon, who would give them marijuana in exchange for the stolen items.Bufford, 40, allegedly would advise the teens of which homes to burglarize while he would wait for them in his vehicle, a Ford Expedition. Bufford would then sell the stolen items from his home in the 1700 block of 6th Avenue North, police said.

A West Nashville friend tipped me off about this. We've heard nothing from Metro Police or the neighborhood association on this development. The neighborhood elist did report the following in late December:

A neighbor in the 1800 block of 7th Avenue North experienced a break-in attempt on Christmas Eve. The perpetrators first tried a crowbar and then attempted to enter through a window, setting off the alarm and causing the would-be burglars to flee. The attempted burglary was reported to MNPD.

It is not immediately clear whether this attempted break-in was related to the other burglaries. I'll update as I learn more.

UPDATE: According to police reports, another suspect was apprehended for burglary near Salemtown:

In a separate case, acting on a tip Wednesday officers located Steven Howard, 41, who was wanted on an outstanding burglary warrant for breaking into a Cheatham Place home last July. A latent finger print from a window sill matched Howard, a convicted burglar, who also has previous convictions for drug possession and theft. Howard, of Tennessee Avenue, is charged with burglary. He is being held in lieu of $10,000 bond.

Is Jesse Register union-busting to save a buck?

2012-01-17T08:48:00.001-06:00

Metro Nashville Public Schools officials won't confirm or deny, but Nashville's service employees' union, SEIU, charges that MNPS Director Jesse Register has tried to convince service employees to quit the union. SEIU has filed a complaint with the School Board:

"This is not a dispute over wages, funding, or benefits," said Doug Collier, President of SEIU Local 205. "Last year, the state legislature passed laws which affected teachers' right to bargain collectively. Dr. Register is now trying to use those laws – which do not apply to school support employees - as an excuse to overreach his authority and silence the voices of thousands of loyal city employees who voted to form a union."

Didn't Register already overreach a couple of years ago by using private contractors as advisers for privatizing public service positions, outsourcing the jobs, and effectively cutting the labor force after many workers were not rehired by those contractors?

Goldman Sachs exec sponsors opulent party in troubled times

2012-01-16T18:45:00.000-06:00

Goldman Sachs is the primary financier for Music City Center construction and an adviser to the Karl Dean's office on the funding the project. Because the local news media did very little questioning of Goldman's background or their checkered history in the bursting of the housing bubble, it has been left to bloggers to write about the shady and embarrassing news on Goldman.

That we can trace stories on the low ethical character of major company players continues to be Goldman's walk of shame even if it is not directly related to the Music City Center. The caliber of the company Metro hired matters. We should not divorce the pattern of hubris of this company from their business dealings with Metro. Each Goldman misstep elsewhere should be localized at least with the question of whether they might be prone to so misstep here, especially when we have a news media who are prone to ignore bad news in favor of the press releases issued from the Mayor's Office.

The latest news is that a Goldman Sachs executive held an obscenely opulent tween party for his daughter in Denver:

[Jeffrey Verschleiser] ... heads Goldman’s mortgage division now. And after cutting a mile-wide swath of losses through the American economy, helping destroy two venerable firms in Bear and Ambac, bilking the taxpayer for untold millions more (he is also named in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency for allegedly speeding bad loans onto securitization before they defaulted), Verschleiser is now living the contented life of a proud family man, renting out a 94-room hotel for three days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

It’s certainly heartening that Verschleiser is spending this money on his daughter instead of, say, hiring a busload of Jamaican hookers to spend the weekend lounging with him in a hot tub full of Beluga caviar. People ought to give their children the best, I guess. But there’s this, too: at a time when one in four Americans has zero or negative net worth, renting a 94-room hotel for three days for a tweenager party might already be pushing the edge of the good taste/tact envelope. Even for the most honest millionaire in Aspen, it would seem a little gauche.

We will see whether any lapses of good taste manifests around Nashville's trickle-down convention center project, a mechanism designed by and for elites without deep connections to the local community.

Still an arrogant nation on the wrong side of world revolution: an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam"

2012-01-16T10:32:00.001-06:00

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression, which has now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisers" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago, he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

Jim Cooper and the bloggers

2012-01-16T05:43:00.002-06:00

`I'll start at the end of Jim Cooper's meeting with a handful of local bloggers at Bongo Java Saturday. As Rep. Cooper wound up the meeting and left I hailed his communications director, Katie Hill, to follow up with questions I did not get a chance to ask.

I referred her attention to this week's Nashville Scene interview with her boss where he responded to the Scene's questions about the long awaited federal court house by criticizing the line-jumping that more influential Congressmembers did to get their projects through. I offered the feedback that inside moves that members made to check and out-maneuver one another is really not an issue of principal. Whether Nashville moves up or down in consideration is really an inside-baseball issue and that many voters expect our elected representatives to make the inside moves we cannot make to give us more of an advantage.

Rep. Cooper had already told our klatch that he wanted to return to a Congressional era in the past less dictated by ensconced Congressmembers pulling strings behind the scenes. I asked Katie rhetorically what era he meant, given that the DC of Jim Wright, Tip O'Neill, and LBJ seemed focused on back-room arm-twisting and influence.

Rep. Cooper had already told us that he considered high-visibility and independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to be ineffective on Capitol Hill. Right after he said that I chimed in that many in the Occupy movement referred to Sen. Sanders as effective at bringing more national attention to their cause. During my exchange with Katie, I suggested that some might consider Rep. Cooper's principled stand on the fight for infrastructure for their states and districts as ineffective. I was thinking in terms of the "Chicago Way": you don't bring a knife to a gun fight. I reiterated to Katie that these internal matches are not moral questions and to make them such might be considered "ineffective" by some who want to see infrastructure. However, I added, the issue of indefinite detention is a moral question.

Rep. Cooper had already responded to my question of whether he would support legislation to take indefinite detention out of the 2012 defense authorization bill by not really answering whether he would support it. He called indefinite detention a "murky, presidential powers/Supreme Court issue". He continued: "the current law on that is that if they are a proven terrorist or there are a lot of factors here that then they can be detained, but it is infinitely worrisome anytime it is a citizen." I would put it more strongly: it's not just worrisome, it's an absolute violation of basic human rights. Rep. Cooper called this a "gray area", and he argued that Congress has failed to make sense of this 'murky area". He mentioned the drone attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen on foreign soil. He seemed to suggest that we have been down the rabbit hole since World War II. However, he also insisted that President Obama is trying to get us away from this by winding down the war in Iraq. I did not get how this connected with defending the rights of citizens who are more likely to be indefinitely detained, who are more likely to disappear under this act.

Rep. Cooper had already given the Occupy movement its due after I posed the question as to whether their focus on jobs and wealth distribution was a diversion from the focus on the budget deficit. He handled the pitch ably. He responded that Occupy "balanced the debate". He tied his priority of "getting the budgets right" with helping people, and he emphasized that solving the budget deficit is consistent with the radical democracy of Occupy Wall Street. Rep. Cooper indicated that the deficit numbers are only important if they help or hurt the common people. But he did not address the question of how banks and other powerful finance interests were hurting people, only how Congress's lack of accountability was hurting people.

And that gets me back to a question that I raised with Katie after our time ran out with Rep. Cooper: there are larger moral issues here than the internal mechanism of Congress. The moral issues involve even more of a clear ethical distinction regarding indefinite detention or wealth disparity than they do regarding the privilege of congressional pecking order. If there ever was a time when Congress worked equitably, it was not just a matter of the internal clockwork. It was also due to a healthier, more progressive democracy outside.

In my opinion Jim Cooper should do whatever it takes to bring home the bacon to his district, but he should also focus more broadly on larger civil rights and economic challenge that have brought American democracy to a watershed. That is what I tried to convey to Katie before I left on Saturday.

19th Century neighborhood snapshots from newspaper archives

2012-01-15T12:50:00.000-06:00

From the Nashville Banner, Monday evening, July 18, 1881 (in the Downtown Library archives):

North Nashville
There were several fights in North Nashville yesterday between drunken negroes and trifling white women, yet no one received any severe injuries.

Suppression of the Causes of Vice
Selling whisky outside of house from the Thirteenth Ward* to Fisk University.
[At a meeting of citizens of the Thirteenth Ward at Freewill Baptist Church:]
"Resolved, That the beer garden as conducted in this portion of Nashville is very corrupting to morals, and in some of them the boisterous revelry and utter disregard of out Sabbath, make them great nuisances in the community"

East Nashville
There is no abatement in the nightly throwing of terpentine or coal oil balls by boys both white and balck. If it is not stopped great damage may ensue to such property.

*From Nashville Directory, 1881:

THIRTEENTH WARD--Beginning at the Cumberland river, northeast along L. & N. & G. S. R. R. to Marina and city limits to Cowan av., south along Cowan av. to Dickerson, southwest along Dickerson to Oldham, west along Oldham to Cumberland River, south along said river to the beginning.

Do Realtors want government subsidies without government regulation?

2012-01-13T14:01:00.000-06:00

Realtors need to be careful what they ask for. It is inconsistent to demand at once that government regulators need to drop oversight of their marketplace and that the government continue to pour in public money to secure the mortgages that supply Realtors more income. If you push hard enough to elect conservatives to help you release you to do what you want free of obligation to oversight, then there is no guarantee that those conservatives will not just keep going and take the government out of your business in the ways it benefits you too.

GOP Senator Bob Corker is a case in point:

Realtors in Nashville cheered when Senator Bob Corker told them the best thing government can do is “stay the heck out” of the housing market. But the applause stopped Tuesday as Corker outlined his plan to get the government out of the mortgage market.

It seems to me Realtors need to be more real about public accountability. They can't have something for nothing. If they want subsidies to prop up their industry by increasing mortgages, then they better accept regulations that protect consumers and elect the consumer-protecting progressives.

Democrat Jim Cooper celebrates conservatives supporting President Obama on charter schools

2012-01-13T12:09:00.000-06:00

Congressman Jim Cooper has been making the interview rounds. Yesterday he met with the press and characterized the feather in Obama's domestic cap as charter schools:

In domestic policy, it's amazing what you find here. If you talk to folks in Nashville, some of the most conservative folks in Nashville who are, for example, charter school advocates, real education reform advocates, are thrilled with Obama. Thrilled. And [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan has done a great job, and this isn't just Race To The Top money, but it's an amazing change in policy at the federal level with very little fanfare, that Congress didn't have anything to do with, really.

Those of us who are not "real education reform advocates", that is those of us who question the warping influence of venture philanthropy wealth in public education, are not quite as thrilled as the conservatives and Rep. Cooper is with President Obama move to the right. (Photo credit: The Entrepreneur Center).

Occupy locality

2012-01-13T10:58:00.000-06:00

While Occupy Nashville is having little or no effect on Metro politics, in other cities other occupy groups are at least motivating local officials to express municipal opposition to controversial federal issues:

Portland City Council chambers overflowed this afternoon with supporters of two resolutions that grew out of the Occupy Wall Street and anti-war movements.

Both are largely symbolic.

The first measure takes aim at military spending and responds to a call from local peace activists in October ....

A second resolution, piggybacking on efforts in Los Angeles and elsewhere, establishes "that corporations should not receive the same legal rights as natural persons do, that money is not speech and that independent expenditures should be regulated" in political campaigns. It takes aim at the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which allows unlimited corporate spending in elections.

Mayor Sam Adams, the sponsor for both measures, introduced the second rule by noting that not all corporations act the same. And, he said, "the world would be a better place," if more corporations in the world behaved like Portland corporations.

"This is about what kind of electoral system we want to devise for ourselves," Adams said.

Both resolutions passed 3-0.

20-30 years ago a number of cities not only made symbolic efforts to counter Republican policies of appeasement of apartheid in South Africa, they also made substantive efforts to divest themselves from companies that did business with the Afrikaners in power. Symbolic efforts like these by Portland are an important first step, which is more than Nashville is taking.

Interesting old map of North Nashville

2012-01-12T22:40:00.000-06:00

Middle Tennessee State is working with a Texas university's Civil War map project to locate 150-year-old defensive earthworks that might still exist around Nashville. While looking at one of the old maps online, I found it interesting that an 1891 reproduction of a Civil War map shows that the East Germantown bluff on which the Neuhoff Plant was eventually built (now the location of several shops, including the Nashville Jazz Workshop) was a steamboat landing 150 years ago.

CM Erica Gilmore asks the Mayor's Office for "transparency and openness" on the ballpark question

2012-01-12T00:31:00.003-06:00

Some of us have been raising red flags about negligible transparency in the Mayor's Office on a host of other issues (disaster response, education, Fairgrounds redevelopment, etc). Those of you who have been keen to the inappreciable openness should check out the third paragraph of CM Gilmore's letter to Karl Dean and prepare yourselves for the non-shock:

UPDATE: The Nashville Business Journal received a response to CM Gilmore from the Mayor's Office:

Dean press secretary Bonna Johnson said the decision on where the ballpark will go will depend not only on economic impact — the focus of the Populous study — but also the ability of Metro to acquire one of the three sites.

And that decision, Johnson said in a statement, will come after the administration decides whether to build a ballpark, for which there are “no firm plans.” A key part of any plan, she said, would be private participation by the Sounds in any financing deal.

“While we appreciate Council Member Gilmore’s input, it must be noted that we are a long way from deciding on a site for a ballpark,” Johnson said ....

On the issue of supporting north Nashville — a key aspect of Gilmore’s complaint — Johnson said the mayor has backed a number of public projects that benefit that area. The ballpark decision, she said, will “depend on what is best for the city as a whole.”

Wonder why the Mayor didn't respond to the CM's point about the need for more transparency and openness? So, the decision is still going to be staged on the closed set of the Mayor's inner sanctum, far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife? (Apologies to Thomas Hardy).

Mayor's debt refinancing deal quietly coming to council

2012-01-11T23:53:00.001-06:00

The Nashville Business Journal put it best when it said that Mayor Karl Dean is not only staving off cuts to the Metro budget by seeking to refinance Nashville's debt, but he is buying time in the hope that the economy will improve. The Mayor's plan to refinance finally comes to the Metro Council on Tuesday ~~on the consent agenda, which means it stands to be approved with other first reading bills with no debate unless a CM pulls it off for discussion~~ [see correction below]. As far as I can tell, no CMs have raised any questions about it and the press seems to be ignoring it.

As the plan proposes the refinancing of up to $280,000,000 as "in the best interest of the citizens of the Metropolitan Government," it is fair to ask how much the refinancing is going to cost us in the short-term. For instance, how much will the Mayor pay Metro's identified Financial Advisor, First Southwest Company, to pursue refinancing? What other costs or fees will Metro incur, and from what part of the General Fund will those costs or fees come?

These are lean budget times, but the Mayor did not help the our situation when he embarked on the largest capital project in Nashville history (Music City Center, which directly serves tourists, but not our local communities). For the time being he is paying for that construction with tourists taxes previously designated for the Nashville Predators. To compensate the hockey club, he has shifted money from our General Fund.

I have a hard time believing that the risk we face with current debt structuring is any greater than the jeopardy the Mayor put us in by embarking on the Music City Center project. Regardless, the refinancing proposal needs more consideration than either council members or news media is giving it.

CORRECTION: CM Emily Evans pointed out to me that this bill is actually a bond resolution, which means it will go on 1 vote rather than on a consent agenda for 3 votes. What that means to me is even less chance for council debate.

My hair cut

2012-01-11T21:46:00.000-06:00

I have had the same barber for 20 years now. That's longer than my first marriage and still ahead of my second marriage. He's an affable guy, and we talk about lots of things: our families, trips, sports, the nature of hair, but our conversations regularly visit politics. He's firmly moderate. I never really pull out the stops like I do online or with wiseguys, so our political chats are good-natured and agreeable even as I claim to be farther to the left of anyone in the shop.

Today he was telling me about a bad boat accident in Tampa several years ago involving a major bridge that killed several people. He explained that since then whenever large commercial boats pass under the bridge they must have one particular individual, a man assigned by the federal government, on board to make sure they navigate the channel under the bridge safely. No boat can pass without him. My barber was amazed at this man's power.

I replied, "The Libertarians would not like that at all."

He looked at me quizzically. "What's a Libertarian?"

I said, "They're those people who believe that anything that the government does (sometimes with the exception of military defense) is bad. They believe that we should cut back government programs and depend on the 'free market,' which they say can take care of everything. They hate government regulations, so I'm pretty sure they would hate the idea of one g-man overseeing the navigation process."

He shook his head. "Oh, yeah. Those guys. That's just crazy. I have to tell you, I used to work in an ambulance company, and it would be total chaos if the government didn't tightly regulate the paramedics. Go over to the hospital. The medical staff will tell you it is good thing that paramedics have standards they have to follow. No way would they put up with different paramedics following different procedures."

I interrupted him, "So, would it be sort of like 'Mother, Jugs and Speed'"?

He shot back, "Yeah! Can you imagine Bill Cosby bringing in patients to VUMC? Ambulance drivers would be doing just what they needed to do to make money and that would be it. They would be cutting corners and taking risks with other people's lives. Nothing would stop them from selling drugs if they wanted to.

He segued to his current projession: "Even I'm regulated when I cut hair and I don't mind. Someone has to make sure that people are doing the right thing and not taking advantage of others just to make a buck. The free market can't make sure because its purpose is only to help us make the bucks. Who has time to make sure that every business isn't taking them for a ride? I don't have that kind of time. That's why we elect a government: to do things we aren't able to."

I thought it was interesting that my not-so-liberal barber was able to articulate 2 or 3 activities that would break down into atavistic, avaricious chaos if a progressive government were not around to keep human flaws in check. Whenever I hear Libertarians speak they rarely address specifics, instead attacking the "nanny state" in vague generalities without any reference to the harm human beings can do other human beings outside of wicked government.

My barber is much more politically savvy.

Coffee with Coop

2012-01-11T09:33:00.000-06:00

Readers:

Congressman Jim Cooper has scheduled a coffee klatch with several Nashville bloggers this weekend and I've been invited. According to Rep. Cooper's spokesperson, this is intended to be "a frank conversation" where "no topics are off-limits" and "everything is on the record". I've got some issues I would like to raise if there is a chance, but if you have questions or comments that you believe should be posed to him, please either comment below or send me an email.

Part of my goal in blogging is to "crowdsource" important issues, so I'm always looking to the brainstormers who read Enclave because of their interest in hyper-local issues to help me out. As always, thanks.

The "Keep Karl Dean in Office until 2016" Act

2012-01-10T22:18:00.001-06:00

According to the Tennessee Leger Twitter feed the bill designed to extend Mayor Dean's last term of office (and use the higher visibility of the Courthouse as sweet leverage for higher office in 2016) was calendared today:

Notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, including any provision of a metropolitan charter to the contrary, the terms of the mayor, vice mayor and metropolitan council to be elected in August 2011 shall be extended to November 2016, or until their successors are duly elected and qualified in accordance with the provisions of this section. If any term limit would apply under a charter provision to a mayor, vice mayor or council member whose term is extended pursuant to this act, notwithstanding such provision, such official shall continue serving in such office as mayor, vice mayor or council member until a successor who is elected at the November 2016 regular election is duly elected and qualified. All candidates elected at the November 2016 regular election shall take office on December 1, 2016, and shall serve until their successors are elected and qualified.

Observers of Karl Dean's first bid for Mayor will recall that he was often marketed as the reluctant candidate who had to be talked into running. Ironically, the favorite attack tactic of unnamed sources in the Courthouse after his election was often to accuse his critics on Metro Council of aspiring to higher office.

I bet Hizzoner is not reluctant to be Mayor a little longer into the 2016 campaign season. The Courthouse will be his Middle Tennessee home-court advantage when he runs for Governor or US Senator.

Why the big mystery?

2012-01-10T18:29:00.000-06:00

Earlier today reporter Joey Garrison tweeted:

Skimming the [Convention and Visitors Bureau's] updated list of [Music City Center] convention bookings. There's a number of "confidential groups" unwilling to disclose their identity.

The lack of transparency reminds of the time when former Dean official Alexia Poe would not disclose names of companies who were interested in moving to a new office park development proposed for the Fairgrounds property. If they can't be mentioned, should they be counted on?

The one who doesn't like government is gearing up to work on Metro government

2012-01-09T23:33:00.001-06:00

Last autumn when media commentators were making rather strained analogies between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movement, placing the former as the left-wing counterpart of the latter, I tried to counter a lot of the spin in the social media by pointing to more significant differences.

The Tea Party broke with government establishment, but did not break with corporate establishment, which meant it really did not break with government establishment. The Tea Party was just the latest surge of right-wing political operations with lineage to groups like the Moral Majority.

Occupy Wall Street seems connected in time more with the international reaction (starting with the Arab Spring) to finance industry abuses and the hardships they've caused through puppet governments. OWS has yet to play government off against business as a Tea Party counterpart might. Many of the occupiers have exercised civil disobedience against government and businesses alike. Unlike the Tea Party, OWS has generally been organizing alternative governance ("General Assemblies"), not rejecting government altogether like the Tea Party libertarians. In many parts of the country OWS has even tried to stage alternative government within municipal government meetings with "mic checks".

In spite of this defending of Occupy Wall Street against spin that they are the Tea Party counterpart, I am baffled that in our city, the group that has been loud and clear about working to change Metro government is the Nashville Tea Party, while the group that is making no effort whatsoever to change Metro government is Occupy Nashville.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Occupy Nashville releases its 2012 plans, exclusively focused on the State General Assembly. No plans to focus on Metro Council or the Metro School Board. They appear to be ceding Metro government to the Nashville Tea Party.

Metro gives up plan to convert golf course to park

2012-01-09T17:37:00.000-06:00

Metro Parks Director Tommy Lynch issued the following statement very late last week via CM Karen Johnson's website:

we will withdraw our staff recommendation to the Park Board for the acquisition of the Nashboro Village Golf Course.

The very reason we have public meetings is to get the chance for community feedback. After last night’s meeting with residents in the Nashboro Village area, we agree with them that it is in the best interest of the community and the Parks Department to give residents in the area the opportunity to pursue private funding for the continuation of golf in the area. As well, the council member [Johnson] representing that district has pulled the legislation to authorize acquisition of the property.

Metro Parks will continue our efforts to fulfill the Open Space Plan as well as the Master Plan for Parks and Greenways in communities that welcome such initiatives.

Of course, Nashboro Villagers are entitled to relinquish public conservation to gamble that private golf course owners will take no legal action in the future to try to shrink or eliminate the current green space. But they should not imply that our public parks and greenways in other neighborhoods threaten property values while private golf courses do not.

Nashboro Village residents prefer to give up control of green space to private owner rather than gain more control over it through flipping it public

2012-01-06T10:53:00.003-06:00

Several hundred Nashville Village residents showed up at a community meeting sponsored by CM Karen Johnson:

A 144-acre golf course in Nashboro Village could very soon belong to Metro government, and not everyone's happy about it. That's because the city plans to turn all 18 holes into a park.

Those who live in the area feel that purchase and transformation will destroy their property values and ruin their neighborhood.

"I bought this house 11 years ago because of the golf course over there, and I really, I don't want a park," said Gary Petersen ....

2009 golf-course crime: Nashboro Golf Club witnesses
heard 4 shots before a 21yo was found dead on the 9th hole
"This is a nice, quiet neighbor-hood," said Peterson. "I don't want it to deteriorate, and it will,"

I live within a stone's throw of a public park, and it has had nothing but a positive impact on Salemtown. It has a playground and a community center both of which provide all sorts of leisure opportunities for all ages. The park is a popular place for walkers as it connects to the Greenway system and has scenic points with different kinds of flora. We use the park all of the time. I believe our neighborhood would deteriorate without such an open, green space available to everyone.

The whole notion that parks make neighborhoods deteriorate is not only illogical, but it is not supported by facts. It was irresponsible for NewsChannel5 to repeat an opinion about parks without fact-checking what parks have actually been found to do. Walkable open spaces enhance the real estate values of nearby development. Hence, they do generate higher revenues from property taxes. A California parks and recreation video provides details on the positive economic impact of public parks:

But public parks also create a more direct means of accountability both for neighborhood watches and for community policing. Private owners are not required to be responsive and accountable for crime that happens on their open spaces. And a private owner can eventually pursue rezoning to reduce the amount of open space rather than conserving it. Some Nashboro Villagers are touting a potential new owner; they better be careful what they wish for.

We are more vigilant of our park than we would be if it was privately owned and if we relied on someone else to watch it. Any time something suspicious happens or vandalism occurs we report it to the police and the parks department officials so that they can respond appropriately. Therefore, parks create a greater sense of community ownership and they foster personal responsibility more than a private golf course owned by someone else would. Maybe the Nashboro Villagers who oppose a public park prefer to stay out of the equation and let someone else take responsibility for green space, but I don't see how that fosters any kind of self-reliance.

My disagreement with these opponents of public open space does not mean that I believe that installing a new park is a wise idea in these lean budget times. Our park's community center hours and programs have been slashed and slashed regularly over the past half decade. We've had to suffer bored kids idling about the community and sometimes being destructive because they lack the constructive outlets that park activities provide. The Mayor's Office should not act irresponsibly by adding new staff, program, and management expenses that would further cut into the budgets of parks in other parts of Davidson County. It is one thing to argue that neighborhoods need more public open space. It is quite another to devote the resources required to manage that open space without harming other neighborhoods.

Developments at Meharry

2012-01-05T23:50:00.001-06:00

According to Historic Nashville, Inc. things are looking up for Meharry Medical:

Good news from Meharry! The storied medical college adjacent to Fisk University in North Nashville is in the midst of a $25 million building boom, including a $1 million, phased renovation of the historic Hulda Margaret Lyttle Hall, a former dorm for Meharry's now-defunct nursing school that stood vacant and deteriorating for the past 10 years. Established in 1876, Meharry was the first medical school in the South for African Americans. Funding for renovation of the 82-year old Lyttle Hall was provided by the National Parks Service, a stimulus-enhanced grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and private donors. For more info, visit

http://www.mmc.edu/administration/external_affairs/priorities.html

Historic Nashville, Inc. is a nonprofit that promotes the preservation of endangered properties in Nashville. Last year they identified Salemtown's Fehr School as one of the Nashville Nine most endangered historical structures.

As things stand, there is no "occupy the voting booth" in the lexicon of Occupy dissenters

2012-01-05T20:11:00.000-06:00

The blogger at Occupy Online's tumblr page maintains that the people who want us to participate in the rigged voting process are the very people that Occupy Wall Street is protesting:

I don’t want to vote…

and that doesn’t mean I should shut up. It means I refuse to participate in a rigged game. That means that I refuse to fall for the illusion of choice and stay silent and hopeful that some fallible, corruptible human will step into a position of power and remain faithful to his promises. I refuse to muddle my brain with campaign rhetoric and disappointing lies.

I know I am not alone. Try as they might to shame us into voting in their rigged game to feel like we are accomplishing anything, Obama proved to me once and for all that anyone who gets into power under our current regime is a puppet. Otherwise…why would they have ever been allowed to be in power?

Elections create the illusion of free choice. You and I are not the ones who select a president because the choices we have between 2 parties amount to the political equivalent of selecting paper or plastic (to paraphrase George Carlin). What I find remarkable about the Occupy movement is that it is focused on self-determination and reclaiming the democratic process. It is independent in the strongest sense of the word.

That reclamation project is why these folks hold their own General Assemblies, why they interrupt scripted government events with "mic checks," and why they take electoral politics with a grain of salt.

Flip the script

2012-01-04T23:53:00.000-06:00

Despite the hype and drama with which the media builds up the primary election season, the gravity of electoral politics is countered by broader-based social movement politics. Matt Taibbi's analysis is on target:

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

Word is that Barack Obama is trying to redeploy the community organizers around the country whom he relied on to win his first term. However, if they joined in the 2011 occupy uprisings are they going to settle for another GOTV effort that primarily benefits the 1%?

The Nashville Tea Party to take aim at Metro Council, and the Tennessee Equality Project wishes them well

2012-01-03T23:16:00.000-06:00

For as long as I've been following Metro Nashville politics, Ben Cunningham has been floating around the Metro Council preaching his no-tax message. He was able to convince some council conservatives to sign no-tax pledges. He was the catalyst behind the referendum that requires higher property tax increases to be approved popularly. Lately, Ben has blogged exhaustively on Tea Party activities around the country. The Tea Party focuses exclusively on the "evils" of government without respect to the evils of economic power, and it advocates placing limits on government regulation of corporate power. Consequently, it is supported by corporations, unlike Occupy Wall Street, which challenges the wealthy 1% and draws attention to class.

So, it was no surprise to me that Ben's latest project is the Nashville Tea Party (which has received criticism for not being actually based here in Davidson County) and the pressure it potentially might bring to bear on the Metro Council. Yes, Metro Council, which is already stocked with both conservative and progressive members who seem willing to give big business every break imaginable while generally ignoring the large majority who create but don't capture most of the wealth.

So, the presence of the Tea Party is not good for those of us in the community who do not enjoy the patronage of wealthy donors, who have to rely more on organizing and mobilizing human capital, who look to the grassroots in the absence of deep pockets. The lawyers and the lobbyists of Nashville's elite are legion. They do not require the Nashville Tea Party working to leverage even more breaks that defy the general interest.

Then, there is the Tennessee Equality Project who seem to be welcoming the Nashville Tea Party because they seem to believe that the qualifier "Nashville" makes them friendlier on the social issues:

Chris Sanders, an organizer of the gay rights organization Tennessee Equality Project, released a YouTube video Tuesday in which he said he expects the Nashville Party to “take a slightly different approach and tone” than the Tennessee Tea Party. He said he believes the new group will focus less on social issues.

The Tennessee Tea Party was roundly criticized in November for how the organization weighed in on the resignation of Massachusetts U.S Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat who is openly gay. “Good riddance you perverted sodomite POS!!,” the Tennessee Tea Party wrote on its Twitter account.

“Only time will tell how they will get involved, but I would expect a different tone coming out of this group than we’ve seen from the Tennessee Tea Party,” Sanders said. “As with any group of citizens that gets engaged, I wish them well.”

Wish the Tea Party well? Metro politics is conducted as a zero sum game: convention center construction took tourism taxes from the Nashville Predators/Bridgestone Arena, which took revenues from General Fund programs for the rest of us. Challenging economic times don't mean the Chamber of Commerce will not get their subsidies from Metro. They mean that parks, sidewalks, and libraries will get slashed. Stormwater fees are capped for businesses and stormwater projects that affect everyone else lag. It is already local government by the wealthy for the wealthy.

So, the Nashville Tea Party showing up to leverage more plums for Nashville's elite class is not good news from where I sit. Wish them well? Hardly. And I intend to do what I can to help them fail. Because if they win it means less resources and less services for regular Nashvillians.

I am at a loss to comprehend TEP's welcome mat. Perhaps Chris Sanders and TEP are willing to welcome the Tea Party because they do not see them as a threat. Maybe when it comes to harrowing class disparities and economic inequality of opportunity, TEP and Tea Party share common ground. As long as the social issues are not raised, as long as the Tea Party focuses on money, there will be no fight. There is still a lot of cash and private growth opportunities to be leveraged from Metro Council that lobbyists can pass around without letting the culture wars wreck the gold rush.

In the meantime, the rest of us are going to have to scrap and fight for any crumbs that might fall from the power brokers' tea service. Wish the Tea Party well? I don't think so.

How Barack Obama lost my vote on New Year's, 2012

2012-01-02T22:18:00.003-06:00

In 2008 I wrote here that the determining factor for choosing to cast my vote for Barack Obama in the Tennessee Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton was the extent to which he could shift away from repeating the conservative talking point that people were angry exclusively at politicians. All I needed was for him to acknowledge the populist point that corporations also deserved blame for the national anguish. I eventually voted for Obama in the primary (and then in the general election) because I heard him start to touch on the powers ordinary people were up against both inside and outside of government.

I knew he had his limitations. He still emphasized working with Republicans after America threw the bums out. His campaign contributions came from finance industry giants who dropped us into the recession. He wasn't the perfect candidate, and I did not expect him to be.

But 4 years ago I did not expect him to do what he did this weekend. In 2008 I never would have predicted that he would become more like George W. Bush on human rights than I had imagined he could. Jonathan Turley, a highly regarded constitutional legal scholar, sizes up the presidential damage:

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the [National Defense Authorization Act] ... with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country ....

Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely.

Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light ....

You do not “support our troops” by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the President. The “American way of life” is defined by our Constitution and specifically the Bill of Rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure.

In signing the NDAA, Obama crossed a line too far for me to consider voting for him again. I won't be voting Republican, but I won't be voting for Obama. Otherwise, I'm not sure what I'll do come the election, but I cannot ignore in the Obama Presidency what I could not tolerate about Dubya's. Obama chose Bush's Orwellian world over his constitutional obligation to defend our basic rights, to preserve the Bill of Rights. In the parlance of civil religion, NDAA is the unforgivable sin.

The irony here is that what I first responded so critically to--that Obama defined the national problem as exclusively that of the actions of politicians--is in 2012 the problem with the re-election of Barack Obama. It took a president to sign NDAA and fundamentally unravel our right not to be detained for speaking our minds, for nonviolent assembly, for social protest, for any reason at all. It took a president to make indefinite detainment without expectation of due process the law of the land. As he used to say in 2008, the politicians have become the problem. He is a self-fulfilling prophecy in 2012.

Enclave's 7th Annual Best and Worst Metro Services

2011-12-31T17:20:00.018-06:00

In last year's Best and Worst I offered some New Year's resolutions for each of the Metro Departments I covered. None of them were realized, so I won't even try this year. I did stay with last year's form of picking the 3 services whose activities got most of my blogging attention. I also continued the idea of tacking the rest of the mentionable departments after the big three.

Without further adieu, the best and worst of the services that are supposed to be of some benefit to us.

Metro Council
Surprisingly to me, there was a lot more good than expected from the council whose term ended with last August's elections. That council launched the nondiscrimination ordinance in the wake of the Belmont soccer coach controversy. That ordinance, destined to be blocked by the right-wing Tennessee General Assembly, prohibited Metro contractors from discriminating. Also good was the joining together of both council progressives and conservatives to stop Mayor Karl Dean's unilateral plan to demolish the racetrack after a huge, historic turnout to the public hearing. Not even Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors' draconian public hearing tactics could derail the results. To their credit, the council required any Fairgrounds redevelopment to include a bona fide, inclusive community planning process. Finally, CMs approved Mike Jameson to General Sessions Judge. Like I said, it surpassed my expectations.

On the other side, the council generally behaved like the cowed tools of Dean it has generally been. The Budget Committee followed the Mayor's budget hearing script, and they failed to properly review County Clerk John Arriola's inappropriate spending habits, which later blew up in the media, resulting in belated CM calls for Arriola's ouster. They also failed to do their due diligence on objectively filling a Criminal Court Clerk vacancy, instead approving the Mayor's hand-picked choice, Howard Gentry. Then there is the newly elected council, which looks like it will be more Dean-dependent than the previous council ever was. Having learned nothing from the Mayor's summer IQT debacle, the sheep herd moved to approve the Mayor's plan to allow LifePoint to pay no taxes for several years and reduced taxes up to 15 years in exchange for property that could have itself been incentive to relocate.

Noteworthy CM performances:

Emily Evans and Jason Holleman tried to bring back an equitable plan to remove cap on storm water run-off fees for businesses.
Jamie Hollin, who could plausibly qualify for Nashvillian of the Year, was the drum major for nondiscrimination legislation and struck a populist chord on the Fairgrounds preservation. He brought progressives and conservatives together in winning efforts, while being a gadfly for Mayor's Office and culture warriors alike. Any current CM who desires to be perceived as independent should look to Hollin.
Erica Gilmore expressed unqualified support for historic preservation of the Fehr School Building. She also took a leading role on the council's nondiscrimination ordinance. She finally put the African American Music, Art, and Culture back on the radar after being distracted by the Sulphur Dell ballpark concept.
Karen Bennett voted against nondiscrimination and then said she encouraged those who supported her vote not to take an online neighborhood poll on the nondiscrimination measure, even though the poll could be taken anonymously.
Jerry Maynard compared the Fairgrounds to crack houses and bristled when North Nashville talk show listeners called him the Mayor's "rubber stamp" on the air, prompting him to call them GOP "ringers". Also, Maynard had to scrub "lawyer" from his campaign website after it became clear that he was still suspended from practicing law.

Mayor's Office
The main feather in Karl Dean's cap had nothing to do with his re-election talking points to staged neighborhood meetings of "economic development, economic development, and economic development". It was signing the nondiscrimination ordinance over the protests of the local Chamber of Commerce and in spite of his past reticence to sign anything that regulated the "free" market. Sure: it seemed arbitrary and capricious given the story of his change of heart was a chance encounter with wealthy booster Mike Curb, but any time Karl Dean breaks from the Chamber it is beyond all doubt newsworthy and laudable. To his credit, Hizzoner also finally followed through on his longstanding promise to move the Metro Action Commission's main offices and utility bill support service to more accommodating facilities than Salemtown's old Fehr School.

And then there was the rest of the mess. Dean didn't visit Antioch after a February tornado, but he did carry on with a non-essential trip to Japan in spite of State Department warnings against non-essential travel. He announced a plan to reduce the size of North Nashville police force and to increase the size of the suburban force. The Mayor stuck to his plan to demolish the Fairgrounds Speedway despite mounting losses on Fairgrounds redevelopment and demonstrated public pressure against demolition. However, he never consulted the Fairgrounds staff for feedback before introducing his demolition plan. Obtained emails showed Dean staffers tried to exclude some preservationists from the public meeting process. When they were not trying to torpedo their Fairgrounds opponents, the closest Dean advisers accepted gifts of vacation lodging and other perks from a no-bid Metro contractor in violation of a 2008 executive order signed by Dean.

Meanwhile, the Mayor was expanding his staff. He hired former Bredenistas at prices that could have paid for more Metro services. He doubled his communications staff to "serve the needs of the media". The hirings did not sit well with all, given that in 2011 less than 250 stormwater projects completed after 2 years and road maintenance and repair needs were lagging behind. The Mayor also cut back the concept of a green roof on his expensive new convention center to a small fraction of the structure to save money. In July the Mayor lost a jury decision and in December he lost the appeal, both of which guaranteed that the convention center budget was busted. Dean told the press in June that "our citizens" expressed "overwhelming support" for a new convention center, even though construction never enjoyed more than 37% support in polls; last year construction only got 26% support.

Dean, a politically connected lawyer besides being Mayor, plead ignorance on news that fellow Democrat Phil Bredesen had leveraged the transfer of millions of dollars in non-hockey-event sales from Metro coffers to the Nashville Predators hockey club. Dean raided funds designated for services to pay for streets, parks, libraries, and public safety in order to subsidize professional hockey in Nashville because he had to redirect tourist taxes earmarked for the Predators to construction of the Music City Center. The Mayor's Office looked the other way while the Predators tried to extend a no-bid, noncompetitive contract with an NHL insider and while they lied about checking with other potential vendors. Finally on the sports front, Mayor Dean dropped $157,000 on a ballpark feasibility project, but he concluded in December that a new ballpark is a "luxury."

Karl Dean joined forces with GOP Governor Bill Haslam to offer the IQT company government subsidies, tossing 1,000 Canadians out of their jobs; because of their admitted failure to adequately vet IQT, they were shocked when the company declared it was not moving to Nashville. On the education front, the Mayor flung himself even deeper into privatizing, venture philanthropy trends in public education with Teach for America, charter school incubators, and "CEO Champions". He earmarked $10 million for KIPP Academy (charter) while bona fide public school infrastruture continued to crumble.

As for his re-election, Dean supporters criticized any opponents who dared politicize the 2010 flood, while the Mayor held campaign events under the banner of "rising" from the 2010 flood. Shockingly, the Mayor's re-election also solicited journalists to join his "community steering committees".

Metro Nashville Public Schools
It is rather depressing, as a public school parent, to say that I found nothing good about MNPS this year. I wish I could find a half-full glass.

Director Jesse Register signed a letter with wealthy special interest group leaders from Nashville's Agenda to oppose the state's plan to streamline teacher evaluations. Charter school and innovation czar Alan Coverstone held a North Nashville "collaboration" and in private school fashion did not invite everyone with a stake in North Nashville schools. MNPS's advocacy partner Stand for Children gave subtle indications that some interpret as moving against teacher unions as other Stand organizations have done in other parts of the country. An embarrassing YouTube video appeared in June that showed the SFC CEO telling an audience that his organization used the best lobbyists in Illinois to jam proposals down the throats of teachers unions. SFC Nashville waged its own campaign by endorsing Karl Dean for Mayor, in spite of the apparent conflict of interest. While my kid's underfunded North Nashville school suffered for a lack of computers, a Boston charter school company was spending over $100,000 (stipend + benefits) on each of its twenty-something MNPS charter school founders.

The best and mostly worst of the rest in no particular order

Metro Finance -- Rich Riebeling could not or would not project a cost for Fairgrounds demolition even though he was its most ardent advocate.
State Fair Board -- Emails showed that Buck Dozier lampooned a Fairgrounds redevelopment concept informed by the community and written by the Nashville Civic Design Center.
Convention Center Authority -- 10 months after CCA PR manager Holly McCall swore that the Music City Center budget would not go over budget, the Music City Center budget was blown by poor estimates on the value of land acquired.
Metro Water Services -- Scott Potter failed to respond to a West Nashville community leader who emailed her concerns about locating the West Nashville Police Precinct along the Richland Creek watershed. Only one community meeting was held on the matter after a number were promised to get feedback. And I learned some interesting information on vulnerabilities at Central Wastewater Treatment from a former security guard at MWS that makes me feel a lot more insecure.
Metro Health Department -- Cited Occupy Nashville for food health violations, then performed an about-face, telling the press that they should not have been cited.
Metro Police -- Stationed a not so inconspicuous van as "undercover dignitary protection" for former Bush official Donald Rumsfeld, who even after all of those years patronizing privatized black ops security companies can obviously no longer afford private protection.
Metro Night Court -- Magistrate Tom Nelson refuses THP request for arrest warrants on Occupy Nashville protesters, thusly defending their basic liberties.
Metro Planning Commission -- In Autumn, local company Yazoo Brewery teamed up with small Bells Bend farmers and produced their first line of beer made with locally grown hops, appropriately called "Bells Bend Preservation Ale". If it had not been for the Metro Planning Commission's narrow rejection of May Town Center, this buy-local project might not have happened. The rejection happened in 2010, but the ripples spread into the community this year.
Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods -- Played a Halloween trick on neighborhood association leaders by handing an alarm company all of the latter's contact info, which is now held by Metro under false pretenses.
Metro Historical Commission -- Kick-started the process to help Salemtown toward rezoning for the historic Fehr School building, a Civil Rights Movement monument.
Metro Planning Department -- Finally included a nondiscrimination provision on gender, gender identity and sexual orientations 2 years after Metro Council passed an ordinance requiring it and a few weeks after Mike Peden started emailing them, Megan Barry, and Jason Holleman about noncompliance.
Public Works -- Attempted to redesignate collector streets without any community input despite profound impact on pedestrian neighborhoods.
Davidson County Clerk -- John Arriola spent wads of public Benjamins on superfluous signs and SUV among other forms of malfesance.
MDHA -- Washington Post goes national with the agency's failure to start construction on low-income housing even after federal money was spent to buy the land and to build infrastructure.
Metro Legal -- Dismissed a spurious, stupid complaint by a supporter of Mayor Dean against Emily Evans after the supporter misconstrued a friendly chat as unfriendly.

Writing these each December becomes harder rather than easier. I keep looking for more progress in Metro, but it is a rare commodity.

Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods gives neighborhood leaders' contact info to corporate spammers

2011-12-31T11:56:00.008-06:00

The administration preceding Karl Dean's collected community leaders' contact information in order to stay in touch with the community about problems. That's what Purcell's Office of Neighborhoods told us. According to the Nashville Neighborhoods elist, leaders started receiving spam from private companies in October because the Dean Administration is making contact information available to any private enterprise that asks.

Here is an example of spam received late this year by neighborhood association contacts:

From: Starner, Gary
Subject: Neighborhood Watch Joint Effort
Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 9:42 AM

Dear Neighborhood Watch Member,

I received your email address from the mayor's office since you are involved with a Neighborhood Watch program. I strongly believe in home security and taking preventative measures to ensure the safety of ourselves and others. I believe it so much that I became a representative of ADT Security Services recently and wanted to introduce myself personally through this email.

From my understanding, Neighborhood Watch programs in certain neighborhoods meet regularly, whether it be monthly or quarterly. Having known this information, I would like to propose a sort-of "joint-effort" relationship between the two of us, making security and safety a top priority in our neighborhoods.

I would like to talk to you personally about it more over coffee or lunch if at all possible, but briefly, my idea consists of presenting at some of your Neighborhood Watch meetings why security should be important to each individual, and the solutions that are available from ADT. Whether your meetings are small or large does not matter. And just to show you how important security is to me, I'll even talk about other security solutions besides ADT that can offer safety to homeowners. I have spoken with the area's Community Coordination Police Officer and we are in the middle of working out the details.

Please let me know if you or anyone you know would like to contact me to schedule a brief meeting in which we'll discuss more joint-efforts. I can't wait to hear back from you soon!

Sincerely,

Luke Starner

615-566-0107 (Cell, preferred, leave a message if necessary)
615-743-0179 (Office, ask for Luke)
ADT Security Services
744 Melrose Avenue
Nashville, TN 37211

It may be perfectly legal to provide contact information to outside sources, but it also seems to violate the spirit of the advocacy role that the Office of Neighborhoods is supposed to be playing for neighborhoods. The Mayor's Office should be focused on effective public service delivery rather than on lending aid to commercial enterprise. And ADT is clearly exploiting the neighborhood watch alert system to pimp its services.

Susan Floyd, a long-time community leader, filed a protest with the Mayor's Office:

Oct 25

Dear Mayor Dean,

Apparently the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods gave their entire email contact list to a salesperson from ADT Security. I have had emails from several neighbors that received this same email, including our neighborhood group's email address. One neighbor contacted Scott Wallace from the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods and his reply was that they gave the list out to anyone who asked for it. (see email below)

Giving out an email list of neighbors trying to keep in communication with a government body created not only to serve the citizens, but to protect them, to a for- profit organization creates a breach of trust between the citizens and those they elected to protect them. It makes me wonder what other information has been given away to anyone that asks.

I would hope that the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods would rethink this policy and make immediate changes to prevent this email list from being sold or given out to other organizations.

Sincerely,
Susan Floyd
Vice-President
Donelson-Hermitage Neighborhood Association

On 10/25/2011 12:45 PM, Wallace, Scott (Mayor's Office) wrote:
Good afternoon,

Our main list is available to anyone that asks. If you like I can keep you updated but not make your information to the public.

Thank you,

Scott C. Wallace
Community Relations Coordinator
Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods
1 Public Square
Nashville, TN. 37201
(615)862-6000 office
(615)862-6001 fax
www.nashville.gov/neighborhoods

Another neighborhood leader, Jennifer Pennington, replied to Susan that she was disappointed that she shared her contact information with MOON given that her "very private" email and otherwise unlisted phone number had also received solicitations.

Some on the Nashville Neighborhoods list countered that the laws of transparency allow the Mayor's Office to share its gathered information with anyone who requests it. Others, like Trish Bolian, insist that transparency does not include the goals of commercialism:

the argument regarding transparency applies to elected or appointed officials in government. It should not apply in the way it was used here to neighborhood volunteers. There is a huge difference in the application of this. Additionally, this is a private business using neighborhood folks to try to increase their business...not someone seeking support of neighborhoods for a cause in behalf of the city. Transparency, to me, in terms giving out e mails lists of neighborhood volunteers is a non-applicable argument regarding a sharing of information that should not have occurred.

To have the mayor's office (Scott) state that they give out the list to "anyone who asks for it" is totally inappropriate.

At the very least, not warning neighborhood leaders that their contact information was public record so that they could choose not to divulge certain information was inappropriate. However, I have to agree that transparency laws exist for the public good, not for commercial purposes. I've attended community meetings where I've signed up on contact lists under the stated and express purpose that the sponsors (whether they were MDHA, Council Members, Metro Planning, Metro Police, or the Mayor's Office) would use it to follow-up on the topic of the meeting. Never once was I warned that the contact list was also an opt-in list to receive sales calls and spam.

The Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods under Karl Dean has consistently departed from service to the neighborhoods, and from 2011 going forward it looks like they are more willing to serve spammers than neighborhoods.

Another year-end tribute from Tennessean reporter Michael Cass for Karl Dean

2011-12-29T23:53:00.003-06:00

Cass ended 2010 with an homage to Karl Dean. His 2011 verse same as the first.

Last year he wrote the evocative tribute to the Mayor under the banner declaring Karl Dean "Tennessean of the Year." This year Michael Cass's retrospective on Metro politics is no less ingratiating. It places Mayor Dean at the center of the action, as vanquishing victor over any opponent, as well as the unqualified champion of several policy issues and one strictly personal one (you and me losing weight). Cass even minimizes the hits the Dean budget is set to take because of convention center land acquistion/construction overages that many have warned about.

Perhaps the most pandering and shameless homage to Karl the Conquerer is Cass's cast of the Mayor's Fairgrounds opponents as finally trampled in war despite an impressive series of populist battles won from 2010 to 2011:

[W]hen Dean didn’t lay out a specific plan for the property ... his proposal died at a Metro Council meeting that brought out thousands of people on Jan. 18 ....

While Dean lost that battle, he arguably won the war six months later, when Metro voters overwhelmingly supported his re-election bid on Aug. 4 and gave him another four years in office even as a large majority also voted for a Metro Charter amendment putting further restrictions on changes to the fairgrounds.

Cass's editorializing that Dean "lost the battle, but won the war", seems to assume that the only mission of Dean's Fairgrounds' opponents for the last half of 2010 into January 2011 was to beat Karl Dean in the August 2011 election. By any standard, let alone the journalistic standard, that assumption is a stretch. Many of us who opposed Dean's plan were clear about the victory in January. Few of us were looking for an alternative candidate to run against a wounded Mayor. So, where can Cass possibly get the idea that the Fairgrounds war was won by Dean in 2011?

In my estimation, Cass's reporting has tended to hedge against Dean opponents the longer this Mayor has pressed the Fairgrounds issue. First, he initially underestimated the turn-out of Dean's opponents at the Fairgrounds public hearing before conceding the actual high numbers that were being reported the night of the meeting.

Second after a 71%-29% landslide trouncing of the Mayor's demolition plan in August at the polls, Cass oddly reported that the Fairgrounds question divided Nashvillians while Karl Dean did not. Given the lopsided results, the Fairgrounds question was no more divisive than Karl Dean himself was. So, Cass is flat wrong about Dean winning the Fairgrounds war in August. He beat a handful of no-name candidates, one of whom was homeless (which hardly makes for a big campaign finance base to the obscene degree of Dean's). It is just as plausible to conclude that if the Fairgrounds question is the litmus test, Dean lost the battles of 2010-11 and the August war. And the community planning process that the council voted as the alternative to Dean's demolition is ongoing.

And readers should never let Cass live down that 2010 "Tennessean of the Year" homage. As much as it may have gained him friends inside the Courthouse, it should also be the context for whatever else he publishes on Hizzoner. It tarnishes his image.

The January victory of the Fairgrounds preservation group was almost a year ago. A long time ago. In my opinion, the Mayor's Office and the Dean supporters at the Tennessean are counting on the length of time passing and the shortness of public memory to bury the actual events leading to the defeat of the Mayor's demolition plans.

This history is contestable. Don't let them re-write it.

Occupy SouthComm: Nashvillian of the Year has overlooked skeleton in his closet

2011-12-29T16:40:00.002-06:00

A month ago, I expressed my concern that SouthComm writers had a bit of a double standard when it came to populism: arms-length with Fairgrounds preservation minions; full embrace of Occupy Nashville. The one-sided love climaxed last week with the Nashville Scene's declaration of Night Court Magistrate Thomas Nelson, "Nashvillian of the Year, 2011".

Now, I applaud ~~Judge~~ Magistrate Nelson for turning back overzealous Tennessee highway patrol officers in their overzealous attempt to punish and violate protesters. In my upcoming Best and Worst Metro Services post I mention Night Court as one of the higher points of service delivery precisely because of Nelson's actions.

But SouthComm's relatively untempered allegiance to Occupy Nashville and those who have served it in government has tunneled them into a narrow passage on such an ambitious award as "Nashvillian of the Year".

Today SouthComm writers appear to be walking back their supreme vote of confidence in ~~Judge~~ Magistrate Nelson, given a letter to the editor that disclosed a less-than-flattering picture of ~~Judge~~ Magistrate Nelson's handling of arbitrary and capricious bail he set for some demonstrators who were doing nothing more than holding an overnight vigil. Were they holding it on state property? No. They were holding it at the Metro Courthouse, which begs the question: if Occupy Nashville had occupied the Courthouse rather than Legislative Plaza, would the Nashvillian of the Year have granted a request to jail them?

Inconvenient authority member got the hook

2011-12-28T19:56:00.001-06:00

SouthComm a few weeks ago on Sports Authority deliberations about LP Field upgrades:

The renovations — first proposed in October — will be funded through bonds backed by the $2 seat-user fee. The Titans have asked that the Metro Council add another dollar to that charge as well.

"In working diligently … we can get the best deal we can get. We commit to get the best deal for this building we possibly can. We will stay within this budget and get it done. We have always tried to do things … the right way without spending too much money," Titans Vice President Don MacLachlan said.

Nevertheless, authority member Rusty Lawrence pressed MacLachlan on whether the team would come out of pocket to pay for any overruns.

"There won't be a cost overrun. … We'll come underneath. Trust me," MacLachlan said. Later, Titans CFO Jeneen Kaufman said the team would come back to the authority in the event the project is over budget.

SouthComm today on said authority member:

It appears outspoken Nashville Sports Authority member Rusty Lawrence has not been re-appointed to the authority.

UPDATE: SouthComm walks the story back with comment about nebulous mayoral intentions:

Mayor's office doesn't have an announcement on whether Rusty Lawrence will be reappointed to the sports authority. His term ended Dec. 19.

Nashville not ranked among most charitable cities

2011-12-27T23:10:00.000-06:00

I take "rankings of cities" lists with an appropriate grain of salt, but local news media and city marketers inflate their importance when Nashville gets highly ranked and they ignore them when Nashville fails. So, it is important to point out news that you probably will not see in the local news media: Nashville did not make the list of "most charitable US cities," either in 2011 or 2010 (the year of our 1,000-year flood).

What is significant for me about our city failing to make the list in 2011, is that this year the news media marked the first anniversary of our flood with narratives about exemplary ways our city responded to the catastrophe. The celebration of local voluntarism does not bother me. What does is the comparative tone the media gives Nashville's volunteers, as if other communities are not as impressive or as strong.

Last May, for instance, WPLN reporter Blake Farmer speculated that Nashville serves as inspiration for rescue/relief response to tornadic catastrophe in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. I responded thusly:

If anything, our experience of coming out the other side of the hells of destruction that other people are in or just entering ought to give us pause, the humility to figure out what we can do to support them, not promote ourselves. And using New Orleans again as our own personal foil is both ignoble and revolting. We should expect more from ourselves and demand better from local journalists.

Likewise, for these national rankings of most charitable cities: the fact that we do not make them ought to give us a sense of modesty, perhaps a sense of shame that our journalists and PR flacks overestimated our comparative worth in the charitable world in the name of commemorating our response to the flood of 2010.

Just like we continue to believe that our volunteer and donor spirit has worth beyond these year-end rankings that do not include Nashville, so do we need to accept that the same spirit does not need to inspire other cities (and distract attention from their response) to have worth.

The real threat to our children goes ignored by education reformers' "report card"

2011-12-27T13:15:00.000-06:00

The Nashville Chamber of Commerce, the preeminent and wealthy business lobby group, released their latest "report card" on Metro Nashville Public Schools. I only found one mention of poverty and it was in reference to Teach for America, which the Mayor indicated last May is a stop-gap for the loss of professional teachers due to budget constraints. The report's two comments on "low-income students" are relegated to an appendix and a glossary like footnotes.

Conversely, I found no references to wealth or the upper class. Such omissions insinuate that affluence does not have influence over the quality of education of truly advantaged students.

While the Chamber of Commerce may slight the ill affects of poverty on student achievement and try to shift more blame to teachers and families, some observers refuse to ignore destitution and pauperism as real threats to student achievement. Strong assumptions about and faith in the American meritocracy hinder real reform based on guaranteed equity of opportunity:

The first step to education reform, then, in the U.S. is to acknowledge some sobering realities about our society as we move further into the second decade of the twenty-first century:

Childhood poverty in the U.S. (about 22%) is both relatively high when compared to other countries similar to the U.S. and inexcusable in the wealthiest society of all human history.
Upward mobility in the U.S. has not materialized, and remains something to which we should aspire—but is not something we have achieved.
The economic and equity gap between the top 1% and remaining 99% is growing, and thus threatening our goal of meritocracy. That 1% maintains disproportionate control over wealth in the U.S. and by extension disproportionate control over politics, commerce, and (most significantly) public discourse. The 1% must perpetuate a faith among the 99% in meritocracy as a reality to preserve their status.
Childhood poverty is a subset of adult poverty, employment, and wages. Even if we decide to address childhood poverty and the conditions of those children's lives, to ignore adult and family conditions is to ignore childhood poverty still.

Ignoring the reality of the underdevelopment in the communities of many public school students and denying widespread paucity and the shrinking middle class, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce is not engaging in authentic education reform, but merely morphing a new separate-but-equal system oblivious to increasing income disparity. Rich kids will keep getting smarter; poor kids will be held back.

Occupy Nashville was never really Nashville to me

2011-12-27T01:55:00.002-06:00

Both print press outlets, the Tennessean and SouthComm (via the City Paper), are giving generally sympathetic coverage to "Occupy Nashville" this Christmas season, in keeping with the dominant script about Occupy Wall Street.

Over at the City Paper reporter Steven Hale waxed melodramatic:

While Occupy factions around the country have continued to face harsh crackdowns, the Nashville encampment has endured. Having declared multiple victories over the state, their claim on the so-called “People’s Plaza” remains intact. And for the time being, Nashville remains occupied.

The Nashville occupiers have endured without ever taking on the machine of Metro Nashville. So, how can reporter Hale conclude that Nashville itself remains occupied? A state-owned square remains occupied in a national organizing context that may be shifting away from tent cities in municipal parks.

The Tennessean account is at least more realistic about the intentions of the occupiers in Legislative Plaza: ON is not focused on separating corporate influence on Metro at all. Instead, they are holding out for January, when the General Assembly will once again convene. Yet, the question remains, why call it Occupy "Nashville"?

If I may deviate from the media script for a second: before Occupy Nashville appeared on the scene demanding the separation of corporations and government while leveraging no observable separations, 11,000 Nashvillians organized to leverage a referendum to check Mayor Karl Dean's unilateral grab of the community planning process on the question of the Fairgrounds. The Mayor was set to make a lot of influential suitors in various industries richer at the expense of the democratic process. That was until he was turned back convincingly both by petition and by the ballot itself.

Those dissenters did not receive the sympathetic media attention Occupy Nashville has in the waning days of 2011, but they were no less grassroots, no less democratic, and no less significant than ON. I have been waiting for the Occupy movement to have an impact on Nashville remotely as large as the Fairgrounds preservationists did. I'm still waiting.

Where will Stand for Children - Tennessee stand in 2012?

2011-12-26T02:51:00.000-06:00

Earlier this month, Stand for Children - Tennessee had a strategic planning session for 2012, and then about a week ago they held a fundraiser/holiday party. I don't know exactly what they have up their sleeves for next year or how much money they raised to help them implement their plans.

But before you buy into this organization's stated commitment to children, take a look at how they operate in other states:

It seems to me that children's issues have been used as a Trojan Horse to sneak in other economic and education policy agendas that have little to do with children's issues. Stand for Children - Tennessee is a partner under the Metro Schools umbrella with the local business lobby group, Nashville Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has been influential in the growth of local charter schools, in increasing investment opportunities for for-profit initiatives, and shifting the discussion away from debilitating poverty and to teacher performance.

We need to pay attention to SFC - TN in 2012 and monitor whether they go the troubling direction of other Stand organizations and bow to local special business interests instead of to the grassroots.

May Town team breaking down and confirming suspicions of some

2011-12-24T15:32:00.001-06:00

According to [plaintiff Jeffrey] Zeitlin, when he and William Kantz entered into a partnership agreement with the Mays, they were led to believe that Jack May was retired in Mexico and “would help fund the project.”

Zeitlin contends, however, several misrepresentations by the Mays ultimately led to the crumbling of the partnership and the development plan.

According to the lawsuit, the Mays made an “unconditional promise” to gift certain land in Bells Bend to Tennessee State University — land that the partnership didn’t own.

“The Defendants did not make the gift as promised to TSU and did not intend to make the gift when the Defendants extended the promise,” the lawsuit reads. “As a result, the Partnership’s good will and Zeitlin’s interest therein was damaged.”

Zeitlin makes a similar claim involving a bridge that Jack May told the city of Nashville he would “write a check” for, to help boost the proposed development.

The lawsuit also claims that the Mays added partners in breach of the partnership agreement and failed to account for Zeitlin’s capital contributions to the partnership.

This is not the first time questions have been raised about the business dealings of Jack May or the advantages he enjoyed with the help from others. In 2008, we learned that long-time office holder Democrat Gary Odom was able to obstruct the Governor's Office from closing a tax loophole that allowed business partners who were related to each other to escape taxes in the billions on property and in the hundreds of millions on profits. Odom helped the May brothers make a killing on their business. A reporter observed, "May and the rest of the Bells Bend development crowd gave campaign cash to Odom, who then gave it to Democratic lawmakers running for reelection, who then voted to make Odom their new leader in the House."

When the Bells Landing team did not get the vote they wanted from the Metro Planning Commission after Jim Gotto (a GOP advocate for the Mays) called to end debate after a long public hearing in order to vote, they requested special consideration from Planning for another vote. May Town Center opponents squeaked by with a single-vote win, but if they had so lost, the chances were slim that they would have garnered the same reconsideration. Luckily, according to one witness present at the meeting to vote on a re-vote, the developers backed down when they saw they did not have the votes present:

Observers said Jack May stood in the audience talking on his cell the phone before the meeting and seemed to be scanning the commissioners present. There did not appear to be sufficient votes present in favor MTC. Immediately before the meeting started, he walked over to the staff table and asked that his proposal to reconsider be withdrawn. Shortly afterwards, some two dozen opponents from Bells Bend adjourned to the parking lot for strategy discussions.

After the 2009 Planning Commission vote, editorializing stories curiously appeared in a local African-American paper making claims about community support without reference to data. Likewise, some on Mays' team selectively applied polling data on the question of developing Bells Bend without reference to the whole picture. Advertisements went out indicating that Jefferson Street would be revitalized by May Town Center, but according to one neighborhood leader, Jack May seemed to distance himself from the ads during a West Nashville community meeting sponsored by Emily Evans.

These events have been characterized by bobbing and weaving by developers from the beginning. We shouldn't be surprised to see that, as the Bells Landing team fractures (we may never know the exact constitution of the team), they begin charging one another with deception. Many of us who opposed May Town Center insisted all along that we were being sold a bill of goods rather than a viable community plan.

Trading history for cash flow

2011-12-22T17:39:00.000-06:00

Could hardly believe my eyes when I read this Texas story:

A city commission granted its highest historic designation to LaGrave Field on Monday, which will allow for property tax breaks if the minor-league ballpark is ever improved.

The Historic and Cultural Landmarks Commission voted 8-0 to approve owner Carl Bell's request for the "highly significant endangered" designation, which has typically been granted to much older properties.

The current LaGrave Field, where the Fort Worth Cats play, opened in 2002.

Should Bell want to develop or renovate the stadium, the project would be eligible to receive an exemption on the city's portion of the property taxes ....

A city report said the property met the "cultural significance" criteria for the designation.

The current stadium was built in 2001. It has the 85-year-old dugouts and the base anchors at 2nd and 3rd base from the original field, which was demolished in 1965. Otherwise, there are no historical structures left.

If you have any regard for the importance of historic designation, this story ought to make your skin crawl. It's more about money than history.

(The stadium as of yesterday is now in foreclosure and it is scheduled to be auctioned off in a couple of weeks).

West Precinct constraints prohibit community development

2011-12-22T10:28:00.000-06:00

Former Mayor Bill Purcell was not perfect. He made mistakes. Among those I would not include ignoring community-based growth. In fact, Mayor Purcell pitched the dramatic increase of associations as a feather in his cap. He backed it up with a robust Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods.

No so for our current Mayor.

The community-relations angle of the installation of the new Metro Police West Nashville precinct has been botched from beginning to end. The Dean administration was widely criticized for overpaying auto dealer Bob Frensley, friend of CM and Mayor's Office alike, for the property. Community leaders warned that the property was flood risk at a meeting where they were roundly dismissed by Dean's right-hand man, Rich Riebeling. Lo, and behold, a 1,000 year flood sent a clear message to everyone but Karl Dean, who remained unbent on the precinct placement.

The latest botch: the community affairs facilities of the new West Police Precinct can barely accommodate the West Nashville community groups registered at Metro. In their first outreach correspondence to West Nashville, Metro Police sound more like sheep herders than community affairs officers:

From: Chick, Twana D. (MNPD) [mailto:twana.chick@nashville.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2011 4:57 PM
To: Undisclosed recipients:
Subject: meeting with leadership teams at New West Precinct

Good afternoon:
I would like to schedule a meet-n-greet type of gathering here at the new West Precinct Community Room with the leadership teams of the various groups. I need to gauge how much participation there would be to see if we should have one meeting or two. There are 104 registered community groups. We only have 134 chairs in our new community room.

My first proposed date is February 7th from 5:00p.m.-7:30p.m.

Could ONE PERSON from each group please carefully respond by changing the subject line to: Feb 7, YES, 2 (if you wanted to bring a contingent of two from your group), Feb 7, YES, 4 (if you wanted to bring four people) and so forth. If your group leadership could not do Feb 7, then the subject line should be: Feb 7, NO. The term “group leadership” is intentionally broad and left up to your discretion.

All I am going to initially do is count persons and gauge interest. Sign in the email body with your group name only so I can tell which groups have responded. Don’t put anything more in the email body because I’m simply moving them to a folder for counting purposes.

If you are a business, I want to do businesses together at a later time.

I will tally responses until January 1. Don’t worry that you’ll get left out – I’m just doing this to gauge interest because I have no idea what to expect. I hope I’m not flooding your inboxes. One of the issues I hope to work on is getting email addresses organized so you don’t receive too much from me. Thank you for your patience.

Here is a sample:

Have a wonderful day!

Sgt. Twana Chick
West Precinct Community Affairs Coordinator

Given the stated capacity of the community, the precinct space seems inadequate to the task of accommodating local groups on occasions where they might need to meet together with the police. There is no room for growth of more community groups in West Nashville at the police precinct. While the blueprints for the new precinct may have included elements to stem any future tides from a flooded Richland Creek, they did not include provisions to spur a rising tide of community organizations.

Maybe that is because Karl Dean, unlike Bill Purcell, appears to take no pride in stimulating the growth of community-based organizations.

HT: Mike Peden

LifePoint sails through our tamed Metro Council

2011-12-21T11:42:00.003-06:00

Ronnie Steine, who in the past has been the Mayor's own little straw boss on the Metro Council, is fond of repeating the mantra over and over that council should not debate bills on first reading, but let them get into the committee meeting process and then debate them on second. The problem with that option is that the hand-picked, loaded committees where the really important stuff gets decided tend to discourage disagreement and dissent. Like some out-of-sight-out-of-mind, coal-stoked furnace in the basement, they are engineered to burn off anything not beneficial to the Mayor's Office. By the time the important ordinances get to second reading, unless there is a well-organized popular front against them, opponents who are not silenced are pushed aside by the lotus eaters on the council.

The LifePoint legislation, up for second reading last night, is a case in point. It is a bill that affects all of us in that it hands land to a private company tax-free for a number of years on the illogical basis that it will increase our tax revenues. Questions that CMs raised earlier were put to bed last night:

The Metro Council, on a unanimous second of three votes, gave preliminary approval of millions in financial incentives to Brentwood-based LifePoint Hospitals as a way to lure the company’s headquarters and its 400 employees to Nashville ....

Leading up to Tuesday’s vote, some council members were skeptical whether the deal constituted true economic development worthy of a significant tax break.

No member even bothered to go through the motions of the challenge for the good of democratic process. They just rolled over for Karl Dean, perhaps the most undemocratic Nashville Mayor in memory. His little straw boss on council is wrong: the only process operating at the Courthouse is the figurative cinerator in the bowels of the Mayor's Office, fueled by outside lobbyists. The committee system is an extension of that, designed to kill resistance.

What counts today as front-page journalism at the Tennessean

2011-12-17T13:50:00.003-06:00

There are so many stories of import to our local communities that the local daily could have put on the front page today. What did they lead with? Klout scores.

Do you know what Klout is? No? You don't count then.

Jesus! Well, you gotta have Klout this instant!

The highest attainable Klout score, 100, is owned by only Justin Bieber. If he is the ideal you strive for you got to go out and get more Klout now. Don't wait. Never mind that this is the "next big thing" marketed to a fickle clientele that yesterday preached that you needed a stable of Facebook friends, a bevy of Foursquare badges, and whatever else you do, GetGlue.

But I'll wager that this Tennessean story has nothing to do with reporting news and more to do with what seems to be a pattern which I noted last August of the newspaper picking and promoting the voices in local social media it assumes to be legitimate. Instead of conducting investigative journalism to excavate news that actually affects us, the Tennessean is using these select voices to promote itself and, admittedly, "to protect its brand". The editorial thrust at the Tennessean seems to be networking and generating a web of influence that will support Gannett's corporate wish list. In September a Tennessean editor even indicated that one of the reasons her company sponsors a local social media conference was to poach other companies' employees.

If you are focused on rising up the pecking order of influence in this town, the Tennessean is defining how you can do that and providing you free publicity fluff as you do. In the mean time, the newspaper is ignoring legitimate local news and is generating a vacuum that those of us who are not plugged in are going to have to step into if we want to disseminate news and information here. And the fact that the Tennessean is defining which voices count most in Nashville's echo chamber of influence makes our work that much more marginalized, and hence, that much harder.

But if Justin Bieber is your ideal and you want some clout at the local paper, you got to have your Klout this instant.

Police, TSU working on changes for 2012 homecoming in wake of 2011 Jeff St violence

2011-12-15T21:57:00.000-06:00

I arrived late at tonight's North Nashville community meeting due to a conflicting neighborhood association function, but I was at CM Erica Gilmore's meeting long enough to learn of several changes that will be made at next year's festivities. We already knew from the last Salemtown Neighbors meeting that Metro Police are planning on closing down significant parts of Jefferson Street to auto traffic. That plan was reiterated at tonight's meeting. Police representatives also told the meeting that any time large groups of over 8,000 gather in Nashville, they always encounter higher incidence of crime, regardless where the gathering is.

The biggest news tonight is that TSU officials told those present (I estimate around 50) that they are already working towards making changes for next September's homecoming festivities. A TSU committee is said to be focusing on possible changes, with few specifics to share now. However, they do intend to contract the time of the parade from its current 3-hour duration to something shorter and to lower the number of entries marching. They also plan to move the reviewing stand to allow easier access and egress.

Recommendations also came from the community:

Eliminating bottlenecks that cause delays in crowd moving up and down Jeff St
Designating side streets off Jeff St "one way" to discourage "getaways"
Working on changing culture & values in neighborhoods; confronting kids' misbehavior
Increasing community policing in the neighborhoods

I continue to believe that TSU can make its most positive contribution by including neighborhood leaders in the process and by finding productive opportunities to involve North Nashville high school students in the events. TSU needs to work on community buy-in to mitigate chances of crime at future festivities.

President Obama made history today for all the wrong reasons

2011-12-14T22:49:00.000-06:00

Barack Obama went today where no one to the left of Joe McCarthy has ever gone before in refusing to veto the controversial National Defense Authorization Act, which destroys our constitutional protections against being detained indefinitely (even for life) by military forces, and it guarantees that any of us can be apprehended without just cause or guarantee of due process. Once this becomes law none of us is free:

“By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side.”

The far-reaching detainee provisions would codify indefinite detention without trial into US law for the first time since the McCarthy era when Congress in 1950 overrode the veto of then-President Harry Truman and passed the Internal Security Act. The bill would also bar the transfer of detainees currently held at Guantanamo into the US for any reason, including for trial. In addition, it would extend restrictions, imposed last year, on the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to home or third countries – even those cleared for release by the administration.

Truman never caved to McCarthyism. Obama is poised to do so. My sense is that people most likely to be violated by US military forces are not conservative critics of government, whom Obama has courted and appeased, but progressive dissenters of current federal policy. I fear for social movements the likes of Occupy Wall Street.

West Police Precinct opens Wednesday amid unresolved questions about flood risks

2011-12-13T23:06:00.003-06:00

One community leader not likely to get a personalized invitation to Wednesday's ribbon-cutting ceremony for the West Police Precinct is Trish Bolian.

In spite of the fact that Trish was prescient about the fall out of Mayor Karl Dean's decision to locate the precinct in a refurbished car dealership near Richland Creek, her requests for information on plans for the police station and flood plain mitigation have been ignored both by the news media and by the Dean administration.

Trish, one of the neighborhood leaders who correctly warned the Mayor's Office that a major flood would would be catastrophic for the building (as it ultimately was on May 2, 2010), read Tennessean reporter Michael Cass's story last March on a flood team that the Mayor put together to gather information and make recommendations under the direction of Metro Water Services' Scott Potter.

Trish responded to the Tennessean story the next day by emailing the following to Cass (CC'ed to Potter):

Michael, I am writing to you both to commend you for the article you wrote yesterday "Flood team seeks way to keep city safe" and to ask that you do another article on this topic to answer some questions that have not been answered till now regarding the relocation site of the West Nashville Police Precinct to the former Frensley property on Charlotte.

I have included photos taken on May 2 at this site (and would be happy to share a video also shot that day with the full sound effect of raging water) if you would like to have it.

The questions I would like to ask about your article are these:

1. Is this "team" the same one that was referred to in an article by S. Toone regarding "Agencies unite to develop flood preparedness plan"? That article mentioned that the meeting was to be held on Feb. 22. No mention was made of time, place. It also mentioned that "government officials will meet with....neighborhood associations on Feb. 22 to begin the process of developing the plan". I am the President of the Hillwood Neighborhood Association and a founding member of an organization connecting many neighborhood associations together. I never got any notice nor did anyone post any specifics regarding this meeting on the multiple neighborhood associations website leading me to form the conclusion that no one was notified. Kathy Baker, former president of the Hillwood Neighborhood Association for 4 years, placed many calls, sent multiple e mails regarding specifics of this meeting. No specifics were ever obtained despite much effort. I placed a call to the Mayor's office and was told that I would be connected with the person in that office coordinating this meeting. This was on Friday before President's Day. Till now (though I left a detailed message) I have never gotten a call back. Needless to say, from my perspective there was no input from neighborhood associations on Feb. 22 or any follow-up meetings on this topic.

2. In yesterday's article you state: The Metro Council voted unanimously in December to ban development in the floodway, and any new construction in the flood plain now has to meet a "no adverse impact" standard, meaning it won't result in increased flooding. The new police precinct is partly in the floodway and in the flood plain. As it stands now, a wall is to be erected around the front of this building to try to keep this site from flooding in the future. At the Feb. 2011 meeting at Cohn School regarding this police precinct relocation, I asked how construction of this wall would affect areas on the other side of it such as Pep Boys (where people were rescued by boat) and subsequently down into the Nations where eventually 81 homes are to be bought by the city due to flooding. Answer: basically that no one knew but they didn't think it would create a problem. Common sense dictates that if flood water can't go where its force is pushing it (against a stone wall) it will keep moving to the place where there is no stone wall...right into Pep boys and that shopping area and into The Nations.

How can construction of this police precinct at this site meet this Metro council ban?

3. Your article goes on to say "Potter said the city will look at ways to store and absorb water ......and move critical services out of harm's way, including utilities, POLICE STATIONS....".

IN THIS CASE WE ARE NOT MOVING A POLICE STATION OUT OF HARM'S WAY WE AE SPENDING WELL OVER $14 MILLION DOLLARS TO PUT IT THERE right in the very site the above photos were taken! How can this be?

Of course, the NES station on Briley totally flooded as well, people were rescued from the roof and 27 bucket trucks were lost there and I constantly watch the rebuild there on the same site..looking more and more each day like it did before the flood.

I really would urge you to write another piece regarding this matter. As late as today, crews are busy at work at the former Frensley site spending tax payers money to build a police precinct (2nd largest in the county) and where the new police chief says that there will be enough parking to store extra police cars! How can any of this happen when the flooding prevention folks say "we are moving critical services OUT of harm's way...including POLICE STATIONS"!

I asked Trish if she ever got a response from either Cass or Potter and she told me that she never did. Having the reporter and the MWS bureaucrat ignore her after she specifically detailed for them how she and other leaders were ignored earlier strikes me as insult to injury. For her part, she continues to feel that people in influential positions cannot tolerate inconvenient questions. I cannot help but agree with her. Unless it fits the dominant narrative, generated by Dean's communications office and parroted by journalists, reality-based dissent is ignored.

As best I can tell, the "community meetings" played up in the reporting actually amounted to just one meeting held in late July for the purpose of making a PowerPoint presentation (which made no reference to the West Police Precinct in sections on Richland Creek). It appears that the primary means of collecting public feedback is not meetings but an online SurveyMonkey survey that allows people to to rank "five main criteria used to evaluate damage reduction solutions". It seems predetermined, minimalist, and controlled. If it does not mistakenly assume that everyone concerned has online access, then it is designed to limit rather than to encourage public response.

Wednesday Mayor Dean will go on ignoring West Nashville concerns about the flood-prone building on Charlotte Pike by tying it up with a pretty ribbon, which he will then cut in order to open the precinct up to whatever the future holds. And somebody from the Tennessean will no doubt be there to convey the festivities exactly as they are staged.

UPDATE: Trish's email mentioned the mitigation efforts at the new police precinct possibly pushing future floods on to surrounding properties in the Charlotte Pike area. Here is video of the May 2010 flood that hit a Pep Boys franchise near the precinct property. All of the water that flooded the old auto dealer in the still photos above would have to go somewhere else.

Rather than treating the Charlotte Pike flood plain as a natural barrier and not encouraging further development, the Dean administration seems content to build and then displace future flood waters elsewhere. [H/T Charles Maldonado]

Those who commemorate Sulphur Dell do not advocate building a new one

2011-12-12T23:17:00.003-06:00

When City Paper reporter Joey Garrison interviewed me for this story, I told him that it was strange to me that the Mayor reportedly favored building a new ballpark at the historic Sulphur Dell stadium site, and yet, the community of fans, players, and aficionados associated with the ten-year-old Sulphur Dell nostalgia group remained largely silent on the concept.

The group founded to promote a new Sulphur Dell ballpark did not seem to have connections to old Sulphur Dell fans. "Friends of Sulphur Dell" seemed to operate on its own (unless you count a reported connection to the Nashville Civic Design Center) while the commemorative Sulphur Dell group chugs along reminding us of our history in North Nashville.

So, I was not surprised to read in today's Tennessean that a number of Sulphur Dell old timers do not support a new Sulphur Dell ballpark.

I still find it curious that the Mayor's Office expressed early support for Sulphur Dell when there was relatively shallow community support for it; unless, it was negotiating misdirection intended to take attention off the thermal site or off the rising expense of moving PSC metals off the East Bank. In those cases I get it.

2011: the year Occupy joined the American mass protest tradition

2011-12-10T13:19:00.000-06:00

A year ago this month civil disobedience began in Tunisia and then suffused other Middle East cities. By autumn Occupy Wall Street dissenters marched across most major American cities. What a year 2011 has been.

It is not as simple as "Take me out to the ball game"

2011-12-08T19:45:00.000-06:00

I'm working my way through these ballpark proposals that were made to the Mayor's Office recently, and I'm thinking through them before writing a response, although my views on financing are predictable.

Speaking of financing ballparks, for those of you remotely interested in these issues, take a look at the attention that City of Miami has drawn from the SEC for allegedly agreeing to finance 80% of their pro baseball team's new stadium without first doing their homework on the team's financials:

SEC subpoenas to the city and Miami-Dade County are seeking a long list of documents and records, including those involving meetings and communications between government officials and executives with the Marlins and Major League Baseball ....

The $634 million retractable-roof stadium, set to open for the 2012 season, has been controversial from the start because more than three-fourths of its costs are being borne by taxpayers. More recently, Miami city officials raised concerns about having to pay the county $2 million in property taxes for adjacent parking garages operated by the Marlins ....

Investigators also want records about the Marlins' ability to contribute to the stadium complex's financing, the team's revenues and profitability, and whether any Marlins employees gave "any payments, loans, campaign contributions or any offers of anything of value" to city, county or state government officials ....

Stadium deals generate a baroque labyrinth of financing, cash-flow projections, and financial impact models that hide more truth than they reveal. They require time, resources, and specialized intelligence to digest. Shielding the time-consuming, energy-sucking financial jargon is the thin veneer of trite, peppy messages prepared by PR firms, repeated by politicians and blindly recapitulated by "Friends for [Whatever] Ballpark" that never really explain exactly what is happening in the maze of legalese that is a nearly perfect money distribution system when not watched.

Yahoo! Sports' writer Jeff Passan is even more pointed and direct about what happens to the money in the maze:

Until now, the Marlins were another rich corporation trying to get richer on the backs of its fans. Teams everywhere do it. Cities kowtowing to those that want them to pay for stadiums is as commonplace as it is abhorrent.

The Marlins pushed the limits on exactly how much a team can hold its city hostage. They cried poverty and threatened to move unless they got a new stadium while refusing to disclose their financial records – records that were later leaked and showed a team swimming in tens of millions of dollars in profits and funneled millions more to a corporation run by team owner Jeffrey Loria.

Miami-Dade County commissioners nevertheless voted 9-4 in favor of taking out loans that will cost the county $2.4 billion over 40 years to help build the stadium .... Critics across south Florida panned the deal, which gives the Marlins all stadium-related revenue.

The cautionary tale for Nashville is that instead of acting like the wealthy and influential partners who eventually do build a new ballpark are doing us favors, we should be observant of how the deal plays out and who the winners and losers are, especially in those neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity.

Beyond the bumper-sticker slogans we encounter as these plans pan out, what we don't know can hurt us.

Road trippin'

2011-12-08T00:32:00.000-06:00

Nashville's mean streets:

One of every two county roads is littered with potholes and is in need of repaving, according to a report provided to Metro Public Works in October. While 47 percent of the county’s roads are in poor condition, just 22 percent are in excellent condition, according to the report.

Public Works officials say they were not caught off guard by the news and have a plan in place to aggressively begin patching potholes across the county next year. But even with a significant increase in the department’s paving budget by Mayor Karl Dean’s administration, Metro continues to fund only a fraction of what is necessary to keep the county’s roads in good shape.

Translation: the Mayor's Office increased the paving budget in the wake of 2010 flood damage but not nearly to the degree (alongside federal funds) that was needed in light of a 1,000 year catastrophe.

While the knock out blow might have been the Great Flood, the Metro budget has been pummeled by cuts since Karl Dean took office. Even when Public Works gets enough money to try to catch up, someone else's department is losing to compensate.

And if we cannot even raise enough money to patch potholes, how can we ever expect to implement complete streets projects that accommodate pedestrian and bicycle traffic in a more sustainable context?

The larger point

2011-12-07T23:08:00.005-06:00

One thing you can say about the debate over Mayor Karl Dean's paradoxical plan to give LifePoint tax breaks for a move over the county line to get back a few tax revenues: at least it hasn't been conducted like last July's IQT relocation debacle. Before Canada realized it, Nashville offered IQT subsidies to lay off 1,200 Canadians. Before the news media realized it, social media reported that IQT shuttered completely. Before Karl Dean realized it, IQT announced that they would not be coming to Nashville.

At least in the case of LifePoint, it feels more transparent than it did with respect to IQT, which finally declared bankruptcy in November, and is now facing government pressure to meet its financial obligations of worker compensation.

While LifePoint does not stand to be the same unmitigated embarrassment, the buckling blow to the Mayor's narrow, unexamined thrust of economic development, it generates a new set of obstacles that can hurt an administration that just claimed that it had no clue that the state orchestrated the diversion of sales taxes from Metro coffers to the Nashville Predators. For all the times we're admonished to trust the Mayor's access to information, he seems to come up clued out when the chips are down (cue IQT).

The most glaring obstacle is the Dean Administration's readiness to overbarter in order to sate commercial desires even at the expense of the balance that reason brings. One prominent Nashvillan described the LifePoint deal to me thusly, "Giving away an eroding resource to move less than a few miles into our county. If they needed consolidated space, then that alone should be enough incentive." But Metro is bound and determined to pile up special-interest incentives at greater future risk to service to the rest of us.

Consistent with past unwillingness to rock Rich Riebeling's boat, the Tennessean reporters editorialized the move as a "victory for Davidson County" and a "significant boost" for the area on north of the Williamson County line.

They also claimed the move will "boost" Metro tax revenues, even though the Mayor's bill before the Metro Council (co-sponsored by CM Sean McGuire, CM Brady Banks, and CM Karen Johnson) requires LifePoint to pay 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. At that rate how can the Tennessean reporters claim that LifePoint is going to "boost" our revenues with any journalistic credibility?

Incidently, The council could also give LifePoint a break on personal property taxes for roughly $50 million worth of computers, software and other equipment (like "supplemental HVAC," a.k.a. "extra air conditioning for computers") that will go into the data center that it plans at the new building. What computer equipment lasts 15 years?

So, the other obstacle to this project is the Mayor's own logic behind how revenues work. With a decade and a half of paying no or very few property taxes on their property, how is LifePoint supposed to be bringing new revenue into Davidson County coffers? Depending on when LifePoint takes up occupancy, Karl Dean could be done with his last term as Mayor by the time the healthcare company starts paying any revenues to Metro.

But Hizzoner insists to all those media who will listen with unconditional regard that deferred scratch is better than none at all:

“If this project didn’t exist – if we didn’t do this arrangement, they would be paying no taxes. So you’re talking about taxes that only exist because we’re doing this deal. And then you start talking about the things that come from this deal.”

Dean says jobs will flow from construction of the headquarters, spurring restaurants and shopping that could lure other investment. And Dean says jobs in the healthcare sector build on one of Nashville’s core strengths, saying “LifePoint could be anywhere they want to be.”

Again with benefits for the restaurant industry? That was a talking point used to sell Music City Center, too.

This seems like just another expansion of the Dean bubble, a small chimera in a sequence of capital plans--convention center, fairgrounds redevelopment, new ballpark among them--that form a slickly marketed, yet profoundly ungrounded dream of a common good.

LifePoint looks like one more notch on the baton of a Mayor who would someday be King. But after IQT, can we have faith that the Mayor has thought out this process carefully or that Nashville won't be fooled again?

Silence is golden

2011-12-07T11:57:00.001-06:00

Longtime Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Michael Silence is among dozens of people laid-off in a pre-holiday style that one media commentator aptly described as "Scroogified" on Twitter. I have had the pleasure of reading his column, "No Silence Here" for years, meeting him face-to-face on one or two occasions, and I can say without a doubt that Michael's support and even promotion of my blogging has been a personal buoy to me.

Having said that, I also acknowledge that he and I do not see eye-to-eye on a host of issues. Nevertheless, if you ever read his responses at KnoxNews.com to something I've tapped out you would barely be able to see that.

When I heard that his entire compendium of work at No Silence Here would eventually disappear into the ether, as if his good work had never been done, I went looking for a memento, a keepsake for myself to remind me of what a noble man Mr. Silence is.

Posted below is what I am keeping for myself. I'm posting it not to use Michael's words to convince readers that I am a nice guy but to show you all what I am going to miss: Michael's nobility toward a lightning-rod blogger with whom he disagrees.

Journalists and social media

Source.

I'm hardly the brightest bulb on the planet. In fact, on a good day I'm only dimly lit. But it didn't take me long in 2002 to figure out blogging was a great listening post. And it was clearly a forum to give people a voice who otherwise were voiceless. In 2004, we expanded that forum for online voices by creating No Silence Here, which cruises along to this day.

So I took interest in a posting by Mike Byrd of Enclave, a blogger I've respected and followed for years. His post criticizes his hometown newspaper, The Tennessean. I'll comment on the subject more broadly. I know little of the issue he writes about.

Byrd writes: "The more journos use social media to defend their product rather than act for the sake of the common or a principled good, the more they slip from a seat of legitimate gatekeeper of information. Hence, we need social media and blogs in particular to get information past the disingenuous branding and the flackery of the Tennessean. Reporters already crowd Twitter for specific reasons and hawk their product to many, many audiences. If we fail to strive to keep social media an authentic alternative then it will be colonized via this generation of acquisitive journalists by government power and corporate money. It will be sapped of its peculiar and distinct potential."

A valid point, but I would argue instead we need both. Social media and the traditional press are checks and balances and ferrets for news and information. And that makes journalism better. Do we need to sell some stuff along the way? You betcha. I've got a seven-year-old to feed and educate. That's a reality, too, for the wide array of bloggers who eagerly accept advertising. Byrd raises a valid concern, though: Don't lose sight of the mission: keeping people informed with facts, not spin. And I would add along the way, the kissin' cousins make each other better.

Posted by MICHAEL SILENCE on September 30, 2011 at 8:03 AM |

Metro Council finally gets its Meals for Deals back

2011-12-06T21:56:00.002-06:00

My blogging on Metro Council's Meals for Deals goes back 6 years, when I argued that prohibiting organizations and individuals from providing CMs meals was not a be-all-end-all for guiding CMs to conduct becoming, but it is a fair expectation. The lion's share of Metro employees do not expect to be catered to by outside agencies looking to network. They either bring or buy their own meals.

So, I have never understood the resistance from CMs like Charlie Tygard, Ronnie ~~Steine~~ Greer, Rip Ryman, etc. to being required to provide their own food, too. It is disingenuous and naive to act like influence would not enter into the equation, but Meals for Deals is definitely not the worst CM entitlement.

Well, tonight, the council approved on third reading a bill co-sponsored by CM Tygard, CM Phil Claiborne, and CM Anthony Davis to bring Meals for Deals back:

This ordinance would allow the acceptance of meals, beverages, and food of a value not to exceed $25 from a single source in any calendar year. The acceptance of the free food or drink would be required to be disclosed on the annual benefit disclosure statement filed with the Metropolitan clerk. The provisions in the ethics ordinance regarding the acceptance of promotional items not to exceed $25 in value and the acceptance of tickets to events not to exceed $100 in value from a single source in a given year are not changed by this ordinance.

Go buy a famished council member a meal. You've got 25 days left in this calendar year to spend $25.00 on each. Some of them have been working so hard for a half decade to get this perq back.

Lurking in tonight's council consent agenda

2011-12-06T18:38:00.002-06:00

Even as the NBA is about to start a truncated season, our neighbor to the west, Memphis, has positioned itself to sue its professional basketball team, the Grizzlies and the league for any revenues it loses to this year's work stoppage should the loss require extra taxes to pay expenses. In the past few weeks, the Nashville news media has covered Metro Nashville's plan to fund improvements to LP Field without reference to the real question of how we would pay for these improvements in the case of an NFL/Titans work stoppage.

Here is the council analysis of the bill for stadium improvements on tonight's consent agenda (the latter term means that the bill will be lumped in with other bills on first reading and passed as a bundle rather than debated)

This resolution approves the issuance of taxable public improvement revenue bonds in a principal amount not to exceed $28 million to finance improvements to LP Field. The original bonds to finance the construction of LP Field were issued in 1996. The Titans have identified a number of capital improvements they believe are necessary to keep the facility comparable to other similar facilities ....

The total cost of these new projects will be approximately $25 million. The estimated useful life expectancy for the improvements, averaging 18 years, is as follows:
• Elevators and Fan Hospitality Areas – 30-plus years
• Sound System – approximately 15 years
• Video Boards – approximately 15 years
• LED Ribbon Boards – approximately 15 years
• Control Room – approximately 10 years ....

The new bonds to be issued for the capital improvements will be taxable since they will be paid from the ticket tax revenue .... In order to build a capital fund for future needs, the Titans have requested that the ticket tax be increased to $3 effective for events scheduled on or after August 1, 2013, which is the subject matter of Ordinance No. BL2011-40 on third and final reading. This will allow funds to accumulate at a rate of approximately $900,000 per year for future improvements. The council would need to issue additional bonds if and when the seat replacement project is initiated.

In the event the ticket tax revenues are insufficient to pay the debt service on these revenue bonds, Metro is pledging its non-tax revenues. These revenues include, but are not limited to, permit fees; franchise fees (cable, gas, and telephone); fines; court clerk fees; forfeitures and penalties; charges for services; and revenues from the sale of surplus property. This is the same backstop revenue pledge for the convention center debt. However, the pledge of the non-tax revenues for the convention center bonds is subordinate to the pledge to the sports authority for stadium and arena revenue bonds. Further, this resolution provides that the additional one dollar tax levied by Ordinance No. BL2011-40 effective in 2013 would be used to pay any debt service deficiency before the non-tax revenues are used.

Because the quasi-public capital expenses on the Mayor's agenda continue to expand and because money is often shifted around in a kind of shell game where insider knowledge brings greater influence and fiat, it is important that we keep up with these details.

UPDATE: Council approved as expected. Disappointing to me: council progressives seem to cede all questions of equity in capital spending to conservatives, a couple of whom raised questions regarding future drops in ticket demand and getting greater obligation from the Tennessee Titans to assume an equitable amount of risk to that which the public assumes. If council progressives are not afraid of the wrath of the Mayor's Office what are they afraid of in seeking greater equity?

Convention center costs barreling overbudget, gaining momentum and risks after second courtroom loss

2011-12-06T16:11:00.005-06:00

In July, Mayor Karl Dean and his MDHA minions lost a jury trial they hoped would hold the line on the low-ball offer they made to Tower Investments to get land for the new Music City Center. They might have low-balled the figure to hold down costs to make the convention center project sexier to the Metro Council, but they lose they did.

Now they have lost their appeal of their July failure to a judge, who upheld the jury's decision:

The Metro Development and Housing Agency, which was in charge of acquiring land for the Music City Center, hoped Circuit Court Judge Joe Binkley would reduce a critical July jury verdict in the contentious eminent domain case against development firm Tower Investments. Instead, Binkley agreed with the jury’s verdict that MDHA undervalued the land, which the city condemned and took from Tower to construct the new convention center south of Broadway.

Binkley rejected motions filed by MDHA seeking a new trial or to have the $30.4 million jury verdict reduced.

As a result, the convention center’s land acquisition budget remains busted, and the budget for the entire $585 million project will be left with a razor-thin contingency. A spokeswoman for MDHA did not rule out a possible appeal, opening the door for the 2-year-old case to be dragged on even longer.

“I don’t reasonably disagree with what [the jury] did,” Binkley said from the bench, citing state law that allows a judge to grant a new trial if he “reasonably disagrees” with a jury verdict. “And I do not find that the evidence preponderates against the verdict. I approve the verdict.”

Metro Finance Director Rich Riebeling, who is one of Mayor Karl Dean’s top aides, declined to comment as he left the courtroom.

So, was Karl Dean's right-hand man, Mr. Riebeling evacuating quickly to avoid having to answer tough questions about what might have to be cut from the Metro budget to pay for this monument to the tourism industry or was he headed out to figure which groups of constituents might be least angered by cuts to their basic services in exchange for a colossus that looks bigger every time we count the costs?

The Mayor's Office is in a catch-22. The Music City Center Authority swore emphatically that the project would not go over budget. If Metro appeals Tower again and loses, the budget-busting costs grow absurdly astronomical. And what have they salvaged for the other two legal cases they have to fight over land acquisition? They have already redirected tourist taxes that were subsidizing pro hockey to cover this project. How will they keep their promise? How can they if they risk losing another trial with two others in the pipeline? Metro's other budget items have been drastically cut over and over again, so how will we pay for these convention center losses and still benefit from Metro services?

What separates Democrats from Republicans?

2011-12-06T14:02:00.000-06:00

The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachman has a few dumb ideas doesn't mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that the belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders.

--Matt Taibbi, Griftopia

I'm still surprised when I hear people whom I consider bright, who call themselves progressive robotically repeat cliches about government getting out of the way of business. The Tea Party is more mainstream than many would care to admit.

Death of urban progressivism

2011-12-05T16:31:00.001-06:00

Sometimes it is nice to see an argument I've been making for a while validated by others:

Sure, two or three decades ago, there may have been some truth to the notion that the American city is a union-driven bastion of populist progressive economics. But today, while cities may still largely vote Democratic, they are increasingly embracing the economics of corporatism. The result is that urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatization Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”

It is not just the question of support for labor that shows a severe case of the emperor's new clothes. Labor unions can be divided and conquered with empty calls of "jobs, jobs, jobs" without reference to how jobs are created or their quality.

The false pretense of urban progressives is also exposed by how funding mechanisms like tax-increment financing are deployed and whose benefits are consequently maximized.

Mayor Karl Dean has not used tax-increment financing to build and maintain infrastructure dedicated to broad public benefit (unless you define a library tacked on to the larger scale Bellevue Mall redevelopment as "broad'). He has used it exclusively for economic development to give millions to private enterprise to finance construction of the hotel connected to the Music City Center, and he has given indications he could use TIF to build a new ballpark to convince the Nashville Sounds to stay. In this city it is wealthy corporations who benefit most from TIF financing with the assumption that some overflow benefits will trickle down to the rest of us.

In other cities, like Chicago, some are warning about the damaging effects of trickle-down TIF on neighborhoods:

A report released by Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel’s appointed TIF Taskforce states that “the existence of TIF districts increases the individual tax burden on property owners both inside and outside of TIF districts.” All city residents have to pay more taxes every year to build this pool of development money.

TIF money is intended to help create economic development in low-income, blighted neighborhoods. But instead, city officials often give TIF dollars to multimillion dollar corporations based in the downtown area — entities that least need the assistance.

For example, documents on the city's TIF website indicate that the City awarded the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) $15 million in October 2009. Chicago's TIF website also shows that United Airlines was awarded a total $31.3 million in TIF money in two different deals in September 2009 and October 2007.

Faced with cuts to libraries, mental-health clinics, and police-station closings, residents do not understand why money can be found for downtown corporations, but not for crucial neighborhood services.

I am at a loss to explain how trickle-down economics--the mantra of Ronald Reagan (called "voodoo economics" by his Vice President George H.W. Bush)--is now embraced by Democrats and progressives. Nashville is thick with supporters of trickle-down TIF. But it is almost like we mimic Chicago as our model of top-down, corporatist development.

Karl Dean telegraphed these commitments at the beginning when he maintained that his campaign troika of economic development, education reform, and public safety would take care of neighborhood issues on the back end. However, community development has been an afterthought to unbalanced, top-heavy growth, and neighborhoods seem worse off than they were when Dean first became Mayor. That is hardly progressive.

And don't even get me started on the sales tax revenues regressively redirected--without Courthouse protest--to the Nashville Predators ownership and away from Metro services to pay for our infrastructure.

A recipe and a North End cultural history of "Kalb Hollow" (Germantown/Salemtown area)

2011-12-04T16:58:00.000-06:00

Nashville blogger Thomas Horton relates a family story and a recipe his father produced when forced to come up with a meal to prepare in a pinch. His father called the dish "Kab Holla" based on where he grew up during the Great Depression:

Kab Holla is how Dad pronounces "Kalb Hollow," which is the nearly forgotten name for the neighborhood where he grew up, about half a mile north of the State Capitol in Nashville. Today, it's called "Historic Germantown" and is undergoing urban pioneer regentrification, but when he was a boy during the Great Depression, it was a scrappy, tough neighborhood whose German Catholic backbone was the Church of the Assumption on Seventh Avenue.

My father went to the Assumption School starting in 1937, the sixth of eleven children. His family home was a tiny three-bedroom shotgun house just down the street from the Church, not far from Morgan Park. His own father was a violent ne'er-do-well and gambler who couldn't really hold a job, with some very questionable associations. His mother worked as a switchboard operator at the Hermitage Hotel and was the principal breadwinner for the family. His two sisters, both considerably older, handled the cooking and cleaning. Food was scarce, and my father grew up hungry more often than not ....

Many times ..., there was no lunch, and on such days, he and his equally hungry little friends would commiserate after school in the fields of Morgan Park. One day, his buddies hatched a plan.

Each one of them was to return home briefly and steal something from their family kitchen. They would build a fire and cook the purloined food, and share the bounty together.

What was most most common in these 1930s Nashville kitchens were potatoes, and most of the boys just nabbed a potato or two from the family bin. One boy had a couple of pennies, and bought a stick of butter at the corner market. Another boy only made away with an onion. My father was the hero of his group: he went home, opened the icebox, and miraculously found meat. There was almost two pounds of bologna, and he nicked three thick slices and took them back to the field. Their ringleader had obtained a frying pan, and over an open fire in Morgan Park, eight boys, aged six through nine, cooked these stolen goods, and shared the meal equally between themselves.

While I posted this as a matter of historical interest for our neighborhood, go read the rest of Mr. Horton's fascinating account.

Enclave to donate blog ad revenues to Cumberland River Compact

2011-12-02T09:04:00.002-06:00

I have a long-standing practice at Enclave of donating any Google Ad revenue checks I receive to worthwhile local non-profits, particularly those in North Nashville who give so much back to the community. You can click on the "Donations" tag below to cull posts on past donations. You make those donations possible by clicking on ads.

Having recently received a check from Google for my blog ads, I have decided to donate those funds, $100, to the Cumberland River Compact. The Cumberland River forms one of our community boundaries here in the North End. The stormwater that our yards don't retain runs directly into the Cumberland's watershed. The Compact is a non-profit that works with all interested organizations and individuals "to help ensure that our rivers and streams continue to provide us with clean water, bountiful crops, healthy fisheries and abundant recreational opportunities." Since our lives here are connected to the river, CRC expresses worthy goals that deserve our support.

Mud and gravel from construction run-off choking streets
about 7 blocks from the Cumberland River (Salemtown)

And they no doubt can give back to our community. The North End continues to experience a robust clip of construction projects. Some builders need to be reminded of CRC's point that the main pollutant of our Cumberland River is silt and dirt from our properties. We have responsible developers who effectively manage their stormwater run-off, but we have some who do not.

Having an organization so interested in our watershed that they can be partners with us in making sure that the water that flows out of our neighborhoods and into our river is as clean as it can possibly be is an underestimated benefit. Builders can help with inexpensive preventative measures ("smart growth") and neighbors can help by installing simple rain gardens that retain and filter water. The Cumberland River Compact facilitates both. Just last week I started installing a new rain garden in our backyard myself to manage our run-off.

So, I am pleased to supplement my yard work with this donation to this worthwhile non-profit. The check will go in the mail tomorrow. Thanks to Enclave readers who clicked on ads and made this donation possible. I hope that you will consider donating to CRC as you are able. Even if you are not able to donate, they are available to advise you on measures to conserve run-off and preserve our watershed.

Burn notice

2011-12-01T23:58:00.001-06:00

A disaster that had been waiting to happen:

Multiple emergency units responded to a large structure fire Thursday evening in East Nashville that sent one person to an area hospital.

The fully-involved fire was reported before 8 p.m. at an abandoned fire hall near the intersection of Gallatin Road and Douglas Avenue.

The building itself has been vacant since 1989, but it had been recently deeded to a non-profit organization called NEON, affiliated with former Metro Councilwoman Pam Murray ....

The district's Metro Councilman, Scott Davis, says Murray is the vice president of NEON, and she had planned to use the building for an art center.

The seeds of destruction of a venerable old building were planted years ago by Metro Council.

News media construction of the North Nashville brand

2011-12-01T21:28:00.000-06:00

Following a police scanner or keeping an eye on Nashville crime Twitter feeds tell me that crime occurs in every part of Nashville. It may be an anecdotal observation, but over the Thanksgiving holidays there were regular reports of crime in east, south and even west parts of Nashville and much less in the central and northern parts of the city. Nonetheless, crime often gets disproportionally attributed to our side of town.

As alarming as the recent Jefferson Street area shootings during TSU Homecoming were, they were no more numerous than crime I've heard of in other parts of Nashville. And yet, the news media has a reputation here in our part of town for generally linking North Nashville with crime, including crime that does not happen here.

That reputation is sustained in the 2010 update of the North Nashville Community Plan, which is based on community feedback. According to "Chapter V - Implementation" (p. 261):

North Nashville stakeholders began to think about the speciﬁc actions that could be taken to improve the condition of residential neighborhoods. Of the 50 ideas from the implementation discussion, the following ... were determined to be the most important priorities ....

Improve the perception of North Nashville neighborhoods by working with local news stations on neighborhood geography to accurately report the location of crime incidents. Currently, crime that occurs in other parts of Nashville is reported as being in “North Nashville”, increasing the perception that North Nashville is dangerous.

Old prejudices die hard, but media prejudice against North Nashville needs to die soon.

Fehr School update

2011-12-01T16:10:00.000-06:00

I received an email from CM Erica Gilmore this morning that her sponsored legislation to rezone Salemtown's historic Fehr School building to preserve it from demolition or drastic exterior alteration is now in the pipeline and moving toward council consideration. First, it has to go to the Metro Historical Zoning Commission before the last Planning Commission meeting in February. Then it has to be approved by the Planning Commission before going before the council for three votes.

Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association raised about $670 to pay for the planning costs of publicizing the proposal and advertising public hearings. We also have a petition just in case we need one. It has been personally gratifying for me to see the community rally around this project.

Getting this legislation passed all commissions and council will be a real boon to our community's sense of history and our quality of life.

The high price of influence and re-election

2011-12-01T12:30:00.001-06:00

The Crane Watchdog on the Mayor's re-election haul:

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has filed the final reports covering his recent reelection campaign, and our Dean Campaign Finance page has been updated. Dean's top 10 contributors remain unchanged, with Nashville law firm Bass Berry & Sims his top all-time donor (as a contributor itself and as the employer of contributors). Bass Berry & Sims acted as bond counsel for the $624 million public financing of the Music City Center.

Recent significant contributors to Dean include Auto Zone, Nashville real estate company Southeast Venture, and several country music industry figures. Three members of the Music City Convention Center Authority – Marty Dickens, Ken Levitan and Luke Simons – gave money to Karl Dean in the latter stages of the campaign.

Nashville Scene reporters: desperately seeking the slew

2011-11-30T23:07:00.002-06:00

Ever since Occupy Nashville started taking on Governor Bill Haslam (or maybe it was since one of their reporters was arrested during one of ON's post-curfew occupations), the boys and girls blogging for the Nashville Scene have joined in one undeviating chorus of support for Occupy Nashville. That string continued today with an indulging Jeff Woods post and a post by Steve Haruch on outside coverage of the protest at Legislative Plaza.

What grabs my attention in this media love affair for a local protest that has not done much to protest locally (as in "protesting Metro Nashville itself") is the contrast of it to the circumspection, ambivalence, and snootiness that Scene bloggers expressed during the debate over Fairgrounds redevelopment, which occurred over the past year and a half.

You may recall that the Fairgrounds tensions ratcheted particularly over the question of whether citizens were being excluded from the Mayor's top-down planning process, and they piqued over charges that local proponents of Fairgrounds Speedway demolition did not really come from the grassroots, but were astroturfed by supporters of Karl Dean. You may also remember that opponents put the question of their grassroots credentials to rest at nearly every turn, especially one Metro Council meeting night where literally thousands showed up to speak against the Mayor's plan during public hearing.

Nonetheless, from their Pith in the Wind perch, Scene reporters were unmoved by such popular opposition in 2010-2011, until Occupy Nashville came along. Compare, for example, Haruch's dulcet post today (celebrating ON bringing together people across the political spectrum) to Jim Ridley's irresolute post on the New York Times coverage of the public hearing. Whereas Haruch frames media coverage in terms of ON's purported big tent, Ridley seems to be in full-blown denial of the long-reach populism driving opposition to the Mayor's plan. Ridley claims that the Times brings light to a debate which has been all about heat. The only heat Haruch frames of Occupy Nashville--with the aid of MSNBC.com--is the warm "bridge-building" glow of "southern hospitality." Ridley invokes "carpetbaggers." Rereading these epically vamped accompaniments leaves me searching for Tara and Twelve Oaks in the protests.

A year ago yesterday Ridley and Haruch tag-teamed a post promoting a YouTube video that alleged that Fairgrounds Expo vendors supported the Mayor's redevelopment plan. A week later the Nashville Business Journal reported a poll that found that 98% of the vendors opposed Karl Dean's plan to send them to Hickory Hollow, which was supported by the astroturf redevelopment proponents before they flip-flopped to advocate tearing down the speedway.

One of the astroturfers, Keith Moorman, was hand-picked by the Mayor's Office to speak for Fairground redevelopment in a video intended to persuade the Metro Council (long before the public hearing) that Dean's community support was strong (which the 2011 Fairgrounds referendum proved to be false). But rewind the tape at Pith back to the comments section of a 2007 Haruch post where Ridley (a.k.a. "Mr. Pink") praises Moorman as a populist everyman who has "piqued interest" of his community. I'm convinced the scripted astroturf started at that very moment.

I wish I could recall a post where a Scene writer embraced populism half as vigorously during the Fairgrounds brouhaha as they have during the occupation. But Ridley called voting against the Mayor voting for the status quo. Former editor Stephen George accused the grassroots of being hollow PR and naked cynicism while giving a pass to the Mayor's propaganda squads. Tracy Moore lavished link-love on a pro-Dean neighborhood blog while ignoring many of us on the other side. Betsy Phillips looked forward to a Dean-proposed park surrounded by impervious parking lots.

To a person, they seemed loath to advocate for balancing wholesale privatization and redevelopment with a community-based planning process. But now, forthwith, populism counts. Accountability to the 99% suddenly matters where it did not last winter in the heated halls at 12th and Laurel.

Meanwhile, some of us support both an open and accountable Fairgrounds planning process and the occupation of public spaces to make corporations and government more accountable to the people. It is a more consistent position.

UPDATE: More on the astroturf of redevelopment proponents who did not attempt to present a balanced picture of where the community stood.

At the business end of Guns N' Roses

2011-11-29T08:34:00.024-06:00

It doesn't really matter if you like this aging hard rock band or not. Whether you have tickets to see them this weekend at publicly-owned Bridgestone Arena or not, it's all good.

The real question is how much bling do you think the Nashville Predators will make off this non-hockey event that should have been going into Metro Nashville coffers in these tight budget times? How many revenues originally pledged to pay for Metro services like schools, libraries, and parks in order to land an NHL club will be going into hockey club owners' pockets?

Deniable Dean?

2011-11-28T08:47:00.001-06:00

Before Thanksgiving I posed the hypothesis that if Karl Dean did not know about the plan to send millions in non-hockey-event sales taxes away from Metro coffers and to the Nashville Predators hockey club then he is either inept of willfully ignorant. According to a late-breaking NewsChannel5 report last week, it looks like more of the latter:

But we've now discovered that they've actually pocketed almost $6 million, and there's another $4 million waiting for them to claim. It's all thanks to a lobbying effort on Tennessee's Capitol Hill.

"I just was a lobbyist, so I put the bill into the legislature," said Nashville attorney James Weaver.

Weaver is the man who went to Capitol Hill to get more of your money.

He's a longtime supporter of Mayor Karl Dean and a former lobbyist for the Nashville Predators.

After the team signed a lucrative new contract with the city in 2008, Weaver now admits he got state lawmakers to send them even more taxpayer money.

"We found out after the legislation had passed," Dean told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

But his longtime ally had a different suggestion.

"It was a public process," Weaver insisted. "Again, the bill was debated in the House, debated in the Senate, passed by both by large margins and signed by the governor."

Does Mayor Dean really expect us to believe--given general claims that mayors possess specialized knowledge of the ins and outs of financial dealings that we are not privy to--that he had no knowledge of a public process of state legislation that redistributed tax dollars to private enterprise? Karl Dean is a lawyer, for crying out loud.

Reporter Phil Williams also found that former Nashville Mayor, former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen inserted language into two different state bills that made the transfer of millions to the Preds possible. Dean worked for Bredesen when the latter was mayor, and a slew of Bredesenistas came to work for the Dean administration--at significant cost to taxpayers--after Bredesen's gubernatorial run ended.

The symbiosis between Dean and Bredesen (both of whom are Davidson Co. Democrats to boot) suggests to me that Dean would have had to have known that the fix was in on these bills. He cannot reasonably claim any deniability unless he simply kept himself willfully ignorant.

The part of this investigation where Dean's ineptness may slouch through is NewsChannel5's finding that MDHA hocked a sweetheart real estate deal to a local business in the convention center footprint that also had personal and influential connections at the Convention Center Authority. If the Mayor's Office prompted special assistance for one business it would be corrupt enough, but the very act of putting MDHA back in charge--after their mishandling of the Music City Center publicity deal with Dean ally, PR firm McNeely, Pigott, and Fox--is stupid and incredible.

Low-wage families require more assistance than just moves to new neighborhoods

2011-11-27T22:30:00.000-06:00

A 15-year study of families who moved from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods finds that they did not necessarily enjoy access to greater opportunities:

[The "Moving To Opportunity" study group’s] special mobility assistance didn’t enable families to gain and sustain access to high-opportunity neighborhoods. Although many moved to better housing in safer neighborhoods, few moved to neighborhoods served by high-performing public schools. And few spent more than a year or two in low-poverty neighborhoods. Rising rents, problems with landlords, and difficulty finding the next apartment all pushed families back to less desirable neighborhoods.

In other words, they didn’t really move to opportunity. It turns out that helping low-income families find, afford, and hang on to housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods requires more help than anticipated. Building on the lessons of MTO, mobility assistance programs in Dallas, Chicago, and Baltimore are now offering more hands-on help (with both the first move and subsequent moves) so families they serve can move to and stay in safe neighborhoods with good schools and abundant opportunities for both kids and adults.

It seems to me that helping low-income families move to greater opportunities requires governments to spend more money providing and sustaining supportive infrastructure (parks and libraries) and truly public schools. Also, without some sort of regulations on the apartment market, I don't see how working-class families will survive higher-income neighborhoods, where the atmosphere is more of a free-for-all than fair-value.

The political salience of local protest outside the bounds of elections alone

2011-11-26T13:07:00.000-06:00

I've been consistently beating the drum that local protest movements (like "Occupy") need not lead to election results in order to have political merit, despite claims from critics all over the spectrum to the contrary. Out of Oregon comes news that protesters are having a profound affect on municipal policy matters without need of political parties or the ballot box:

Two weeks after Portland mayoral candidate and state Rep. Jefferson Smith publicly challenged Portland to move some of its money to local credit unions, Mayor Sam Adams this morning said he would pursue the cause.

The mayor's comments came during the public testimony portion of Wednesday's regular Portland City Council meeting and follow on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement and related protests against national banks. The city of Seattle this week adopted its own "responsible banking" resolution in response to the same forces.

The city of Portland has tens of millions of dollars in Wells Fargo, one target of protesters' discontent. But it was unclear as of Wednesday what specifically Adams would do differently ....

Todd Olson, the Portlander who introduced the topic during public testimony at City Council, said following through would allow the city to "address the gross inequity that brought 10,000 Oregonians to the streets of Portland six weeks ago."

This is a textbook example of how local protest groups should target city councils and Mayor's Offices to leverage real changes that move capital from powerful Wall Street banks to local institutions with larger local bang. It is not the first time cities have departed from federal policy to leverage positive change at home. 2 decades ago cities conducted an end-around President Ronald Reagan's support for South Africa and its apartheid government. By the end of the 1980s almost 100 US cities had divested from companies doing business with South Africa.

Likewise, cities are setting new headings due to Occupy Wall Street's fight against corporate malfeasance even as the Obama Administration is doing little to regulate the finance industry. That fills an under-utilized niche that politicos and party wonks ignore or hand over to others with conflicts of interest. The American Prospect has more:

"Banking is now a salient political issue," testified Olson before the city council. "Where local governments choose to bank is a political and social act."

It sure is. Now. And it would take a hearty dose of self-delusion to think that Occupy Wall Street hasn't contributed to creating a moment where wonky discussions of credit union collateralization are perfectly normal. That's true even if the folks in Zuccotti Park aren't the ones churning out white papers. That's how change politics works. And if Bloomberg thinks that "things aren't working well," another option would be for him to help figure out sensible responses, instead of chiding Occupy Wall Street protestors for not presenting end-to-end solutions wrapped in a bow, without anyone else's participation. That's a rather sad view of how change happens.

Hopefully, this trend will spill over to protesters here in Tennessee, and we will start to see pressure put on Mayors like Karl Dean to stop Metro Nashville investments in our abusive and malfeasant finance industry (the Dean Administration climbed into bed with unseemly Goldman Sachs to finance the new convention center).

Metro Health Department flip flops on Occupy Nashville citation

2011-11-23T08:27:00.003-06:00

First, Metro Nashville cited Occupy Nashville for feeding the homeless and told them to close down their kitchen. Then, according to an ON supporter, Metro Nashville told the local media that their kitchen shouldn't have been cited:

According to [Metro Health] spokesperson Brian Todd, Occupy Nashville can feed anybody they want to, as long as they aren't selling food. He denied that the kitchen had been shut down and compared it all to tailgating for the Titans and said the only issue was whether or not the food was being sold. Since food has never been sold by Occupy Nashville, there should be no problem, right?

Except, Occupy Nashville still has the problem of the official citation, the one with the box checked that reads, "Your permit to operate a food establishment in Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County is suspended effective this date," so today Occupy Nashville representatives tried once again to determine what it all meant and what they could do and not do in order to avoid more citations or even arrests or eviction of the entire occupation. By the end of the day, a curious story would emerge from Metro's Director of Public Food Safety, Todd Crozier.

It seems there should never have been a citation issued in the first place. According to the explanation given to Occupy Nashville today, "somebody, possibly the state of Tennessee," filed a complaint and requested an inspection. The inspector sent was new on the job and wrote the citation based on standing regulations, unaware that Occupy Nashville has been granted an exception to the requirement that they only feed members of their own group.

The blogger goes on to say that she believes the Governor's office is behind the citation, but even if that is true, Metro Nashville officials are still responsible for assigning an inspector and citing the camp. And it looks fishy to me that Metro bureaucrats are responding to these concerns in the news media rather than corresponding with ON directly to fix these problems. Even if Bill Haslam himself filed a complaint, the Metro Department of Health is culpable for following up, including deciding on the front end that the complaint bears no merit and releasing ON instead of leaving them confused, hanging on and holding the citation.

The simplest explanation here is not that Governor Haslam is able to manipulate Metro machinery even to the fine point of sending a noob prone to cite Occupy Nashville. The simplest explanation is that Metro Nashville screwed this inspection up and then launched damage control and spin in the Tennessean. That fits the Dean Administration MO.

However, anyone bent on seeing a conspiracy here should consider the possibility that part of Mayor Karl Dean's aspiration for an-office-higher-than-Mayor may include pinning the rap for his own boner on a Republican administration. Occupy Nashville should avoid the appearance of partisanship by perpetually focusing too exclusively on Bill Haslam when Karl Dean's administration is in play.

Under-the-table state deal allows Predators to sap millions from non-hockey sales taxes on city-owned arena

2011-11-22T11:45:00.005-06:00

These are exactly the multi-million-dollar under-the-table deals that you have to worry about when the city and the state grants subsidies to pro sports teams:

That part about Garth Brooks is particularly disturbing. The country music star came to Nashville to help the city by raising funds for flood recovery. The Nashville Predators flipped the huge sales tax windfall (which could have gone to the city to help with flood recovery) into private income. On top of that they justified the gain with a lie: that they had to rearrange their schedule to accommodate Brooks after Brooks had worked around to help them. That they would exercise guile about a charity event is particularly loathsome in my book.

But who paved the way in state government? Based on a Twitter exchange I had yesterday with Phil Williams and Scene reporter J.R. Lind, I gather that Tennessee Democrats (Gary Odom?) had some legislative oversight of the bill that hustled these provisions in on Metro's contract with the Preds. But it looks like former Governor Phil Bredesen's revenue department also had a hand in this, although the revenuers seem to deny to Mr. Williams that they have relevant records (much like the Predators' front office denied having the paper trail that CVB had).

And the Dean Administration? If it comes to keeping up with how their home team conducts its NHL business with influential state Democrats they look inept or willfully ignorant. They may not be at fault for the funneling of vast sums of government revenue to sports enterprise, but they also seem to have done nothing to safeguard tax revenues by calling public attention to questions of where sales taxes from events might come and go through the CVB. Then again, Karl Dean has never struck me as the kind of Mayor who wants to count on public attention or support beyond that which he receives at election time.

UPDATE: NewsChannel5 announced today (Wednesday, Nov 23) that reporter Phil Williams will divulge the identity of the individual(s) who leveraged millions in non-hockey sales tax revenues for the hockey club on their 6 pm broadcast.

Karl Dean's bad form: Mayor's Office robbed Peter to pay Paul to pay Judas

2011-11-21T18:29:00.001-06:00

The fact that Nashville is doing what none of its sister "hockey towns" is doing--subsidizing arenas for their pro clubs--is lousy enough. I agree with those of you who may be irritated by propping up athletics aristocrats in lean budget years.

But a tidbit buried deeper in this news is far worse than the fact that we bend over backwards to cater to corporate welfare. The Preds have been made accomplices in Karl Dean's mission to transfer Metro wealth in the form of tax revenues from the services devoted to streets, parks, libraries, neighborhoods and public safety to construction of the Music City Center.

Essentially, the Mayor's Office is raiding the General Fund (which pays for the services we demand of our local government in exchange for our taxes) to cover losses in subsidies to the Nashville Predators that were being paid by tourist taxes now redirected to construction of the Music City Center:

city leaders say it’s time for a change [in paying the Preds $7,800,000 out of the General Fund], especially considering the stress on the Metro budget. Amid whispers of a possible property tax increase, Metro Councilman Lonnell Matthews said it would be difficult to justify continued subsidies for a professional hockey team out of the operating budget.

Until last year, the subsidy was funded by tourism taxes and fees, but that revenue now goes to pay the debt for the new convention center.

Many of us warned over and over again that regular Nashvillians would be the truly disadvantaged of the convention center construction project, because our services would eventually be cut to obligate General Fund revenues to pay the huge cost. Rich Riebeling connived quite a shell game to cover the Music City Center drain on our resources without appearing to pay for construction with the General Fund. But that is exactly what has been happening.

It is time to shelter the General Fund services we enjoy from being bled out by Music City Center pipe dreams. The Mayor must end the subsidies to the Nashville Predators. If he does subsidize hockey the money should come from tourism taxes.

Knee-jerk corporate response in Nashville to proposed relief for overextended principals and teachers

2011-11-21T09:14:00.001-06:00

After the state agreed to ease up on overworked educators and streamline the unrealistic teacher evaluation process, the Music City mogul class flushed apoplectic:

Keel Hunt, a public relations executive on the steering committee of Nashville’s Agenda, said education reform has emerged time and again as a focus for the group and Nashville. He is one of 29 people who put their names to the letter — others were Metro Nashville Director of Schools Jesse Register and Orrin Ingram, president and CEO of Ingram Industries.

Their letter contends that changing the evaluations could jeopardize the Race to the Top grant.

“I hope (the letter) helps underscore the importance that these people feel this issue has,” Hunt said. “It’s very important to stay the course. ... This is very important work, and there is broader interest in school success that goes beyond what one or two people feel.”

Nashville's Agenda has proved itself in times past to be a tool of wealthy special interests here while branding itself a product of democratic process. It was not too long ago that neighborhood-based leaders were at odds with Nashville's Agenda over the latter's "top down process that began with A-List financial, business and community leaders". I am not surprised at all that the organization wants to "stay the course" in the public school pressure-cooker that produces more opportunities for privatizing than it does for educating.

Apparently, Boss Register is willing to follow this course no matter how low teacher morale drops. He has cast his lot with the pecunious elites.

Education reformers attempt to soft-pedal embarrassments by revising history

2011-11-20T21:41:00.002-06:00

On its Facebook page, Stand for Children - Tennessee promoted its organization's assimilation of the Education Equality Project (popularly associated with celebrity John Legend) and in the process exercised a revision of its own history:

Unlike some reform groups that frequently challenge teachers unions, Stand For Children, founded in 1996 in Oregon, has prided itself on generating local support and collaborating with unions as it promotes legislative change. That reputation was challenged this summer after the group was revealed to have lobbied aggressively against Illinois teacher unions to get a reform bill passed.

Jonah Edelman, Stand For Children’s founder and CEO, said today that the new partnership with EEP would help the groups extend their influence in more states, particularly southern states where the influence of reform groups has been less strong.

“Together, we’re positioned to shape the national debate on public education while building powerful statewide organizations across the country that will make a profound impact for students, from the state capitol to the classroom,” Edelman said in a statement.

That is an interesting gloss on what happened in Illinois and a complete omission of what happened in Oregon. Mr. Edelman is obviously using the occasion as another form of damage control to the embarrassing mess he and SFC left of their track record.

Observers acknowledge the common values that bind Stand for Children to the more conservative and dominant elements of Democratic Party culture, which share affinities with Republican politics:

The most engaged in this neoliberal education campaign are organizations focused on school choice: Democrats for Education Reform (and their 501(c)(4), Education Reform Now Advocacy), Education Sector, and the Progressive Policy Institute; as well as service-oriented groups like New Leaders for New Schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Green Dot charter networks, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, Stand for Children, the New Schools Venture Fund, and even the leadership of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

These groups, it should be stressed, are very careful to avoid being characterized as politically on the Right or affiliated with Republican political efforts. Their collaborators, however, do not show any such reluctance. Right-wing, free-market think tanks have joined with neoliberal education groups in pushing for choice and privatization policies. These right-wing think tanks and similar organizations are active in every state, and many more are pursuing a national agenda. Together, these groups have launched a potent attack on the progressive foundations of American schooling, and they are framing this attack as a “civil rights struggle.”

After years of hammering home the theme of “failing public schools,” the campaign is now increasingly focused on teachers’ unions and the existing system of teacher education, preparation, and certification.

Stand for Children - Tennessee plays up school choice without leaping in with both feet to the constellation of other conservative values, but they do not forswear any challenge to teachers. They have fallen silent on recently publicized ambivalence toward teacher evaluations. Whether SFC cares to concede it or not, they have built strong ties to anti-union groups, and they leave open the option of going after teachers as they have elsewhere.

In Los Angeles, as the teachers' union joined Occupy Wall Street, Stand for Children joined the opposite side, a coalition of otherwise disparate non-profits (like the United Way and the Urban League) committed to education reform. The reformers, backed by corporate donations in contrast to the grassroots empowerment of occupiers, encouraged an ad campaign addressed to the union a couple of weeks ago: "Don't Hold Us Back".

The campaign drew the appropriate retort from a local teacher:

Of all the factors that have contributed to the struggles of our students, we the teachers, THE TEACHERS, are the ones “holding students back?” Not the economy. Not the crime. Not the violence. Not the hunger. Not the fragmentation of the nuclear family. Not the lack of medical care and fresh food in the South Central community in which I work, but me, the teacher.

They really spent thousands of dollars to buy this ad, buy a webpage? Couldn’t the money used for this ad have helped the students that are hungry and homeless stay in their apartment for one more month, get that tooth taken care of?

Who are the experts in what is best for students? Educators or billionaires? Teachers or journalists? Unions or astrotorf orgs? I may be a parent, but when the doctor tells me how to take care of my daughter, I yield to the expert. When her 5th grade teacher shared his expertise on how to approach her math work, I listened and implemented. Parents play a huge role in the success of their children but we each have our own job to do; and it differs.

SFC LA is not an isolated case. Seattle's SFC has endorsed school board candidates who are financed by union-busting venture philanthropists in the Great Northwest.

In all of these cases, Stand for Children may not appear to be in full-blown assault of teachers unions, but they are aiding and abetting forces aligned against public school teachers. I also worry that one day they may find it more convenient to mobilize against Tennessee teachers than stay noncommittal toward them.

Nashville occupiers suspect faux-NES van of stalking & surveilling them

2011-11-19T08:16:00.003-06:00

UPDATE: The Scene reports that the undercover van belongs to Metro Police, who decided for some odd reason that they needed to provide Donald Rumsfeld extra special coverage when he was speaking in Nashville.

Today, Metro Police spokeswoman Kristin Mumford told the Scene that it was actually undercover Nashville cops:

The van was a Metro Police Department undercover vehicle that was part of the dignitary protection plan for Donald Rumsfeld. Given his obviously controversial status, and the police department hearing talk of possible disruptions to his visit, officers were assigned to proactively work to ensure everyone's safety.

Because everyone knows Mr. Rumsfeld cannot afford to pay for private security himself or avail upon his buddies whom he hired to go to Iraq as private security contractors.

Can anything good come from public housing? Verily.

2011-11-18T11:50:00.000-06:00

If you followed yesterday's national "Day of Action" by Occupy Wall Street, you are aware that there were lots of dramatic moments: occupiers bottlenecking all points of entry to the New York Stock Exchange, California sit-ins at Bank of America, arrests in Atlanta and Portland, and marches and/or bridge occupations in several cities. Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the entire day occurred when giant projected images appeared on New York City's Verizon building towering over a scheduled concluding march across the Brooklyn Bridge (by a crowd that was estimated to be between 32,000 and 45,000 protesters).

Protest messages and themes were projected on to the large building from a hidden location that kept both police and news crews guessing. The light show provided an uplifting contrast to the mood of the protest, and the surprise of this ballsy tactic capped off the effectiveness of the day perfectly.

But more impressive than the tactic itself was the story of how the projectionists gained access to a place seemingly outside the suppressing clutches of NYPD. That access was granted by an unlikely hero who generally does not have the power to grant access for others to much of anything else:

Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours. I didn't say much more. I received surprisingly few calls, and most of them seemed not quite fully there. But then I got one call from a sane person Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three.

I spoke with her on the phone, and a few days later went over and met her.

I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got.

Her parting words were, "let's do this."

She wouldn't take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she'd been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened.

"I can't charge you money, this is for the people," she said.

She was born in the projects. She opened up her home to us.

She was in there tonight with her 3 daughters, 2 sisters. The NYPD started snooping around down on the ground while the projections were up, it was clear where we were projecting from, and inside it was festive.

"If they want to come up they're gonna need a warrant!," her family was saying. "If they ask us, well, we don't know what they are talking about!" They were really brave and cool.

In my opinion there is a common human tendency to root for the underdog, and Ms. Vega's story is that she was the underdog who made possible Occupy Wall Street's highest moment in an already high-flying day of action. Yesterday was historic and a working-class mom helped add a bold exclamation point.

Defective detectives up to the devil's business

2011-11-18T09:30:00.004-06:00

When I read that detectives from police intelligence enter a church where dissenters have sanctuary and shelter, take inventory of the protesters, and pump a women's shelter volunteer for information on her clients, I have a hard time not seeing ~~the KGB's~~ Homeland Security's finger prints. And when I learn that the pastor has to spirit protesters out the church's back door because an unknown person is snapping photos of people who come out the front, call me conspiratorial if you like, but I believe authorities are instigating some sort of treachery. A couple of days ago I maintained that DHS and FBI should focus on real threats to homeland security instead of targeting occupiers in Nashville. The atrocious actions of NYPD sustain the widely held perception that orchestrated suppression is spreading:

“It is disconcerting that they would actually enter the sanctuary,” said the Rev. James Karpen, known as Reverend K, senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, on West 86th Street. “Here we had offered hospitality and safety, which is our business as a church; it just felt invasive”....

About 46 protesters had spent Wednesday night in the church. Just before 6 a.m. on Thursday, as the demonstrators began to stir before a major downtown protest, the two men in plainclothes came to the church door and asked the doorkeepers if they could use the bathroom, according to Mr. Karpen.

Instead, both men entered the sanctuary, one remaining near the door while the other advanced down the aisle, apparently counting the demonstrators in the pews, according to a witness who reported the episode and who asked his name not be published because he feared harassment by the police.

One of the men then went downstairs to a homeless women’s shelter, run in cooperation with B’nai Jeshurun, a local synagogue, and asked for information about who was sleeping there, said Elissa Weiss, the volunteer on duty ....

A demonstrator then confronted the men and asked them to write down their names and badge numbers. One identified himself as Detective Kevin G. Clancy, who according to 2006 police records is assigned to the intelligence division of the New York Police Department. The men then left.

“They are welcome to come in if they just say who they are,” Mr. Karpen said. “We have never had that kind of issue with the police before.

I appreciate that the pastor is "disconcerted," but implications of this level of surveillance are frightening and enraging. The direction local police seem to be taking goes down the road to perdition. If this country so goes, there is no return.

UPDATE: DemocracyNow hosted a discussion on "New Military Urbanism," during which a legal observer of Occupy Wall Street noted the absolute brutality that increasingly characterizes policing protesters in cities:

"I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested... As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, 'I need to get in. My daughter's there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, 'Move on, lady.' And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head," says Smith. "I walk over, and I say, 'Look, cuff her if she's done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, 'Lady, do you want to get arrested?' And I said, 'Do you see my hat? I'm here as a legal observer.’ He said, 'You want to get arrested?' And he pushed me up against the wall."

If police administration naively assumes that they will not reap bitter fruit one day from the seeds they are sewing today, they are sorely mistaken.

Animating the enormous advantage of the 1% (or is that the 0.01%?)

2011-11-16T19:44:00.000-06:00

An impressive, insightful Guardian production:

Beating up protesters is much easier than plugging potential security breaches in local utilities

2011-11-16T11:47:00.007-06:00

Last week I had an interesting chat with a former security guard employed by Metro Nashville contractor Wackenhut to guard the Downtown water treatment plant near Salemtown. He told me that he believed the potential for catastrophic, lethal chlorine spill was real because the system does not have tight oversight.

Reportedly, the FBI is supposed to be regularly testing the security of the chlorine railroad tanker cars that deliver the concentrated toxic chemical during the water treatment process, but he never saw any conducted. He said that chlorine leak alarms went off several times in the small control building next to the tankers while he was on duty and that the building is supposed to be airtight, but on a number of occasions security personnel had to don gas masks while responding to the alarms.

Whenever there was a leak on-call "specialists," some of whom did not act like they knew how to resolve the problem, responded, according to the former guard. He also confirmed what has been reported in the past by others: the complex is remarkably vulnerable to sabotage given its proximity to Downtown Nashville.

Sandbagging tankers against the 2010 flood.

It has been frustrating enough watching what looks a tragic accident (or act of terrorism) waiting to happen get attention from outside sources while Metro, state, and federal government officials seem to ignore the threat. A major chlorine spill would be a catastrophe for Downtown and both sides of the river. However, what I find even more galling is to watch how government misdirects its security forces away from real threats and toward innocuous inconveniences like the modest protests of dissenting citizens. Take the Department of Homeland Security, which assisted the Tennessee Highway Patrol's misguided crackdown on the relatively small Occupy Nashville protest. Give the protesters credit. They've fought the battle of Legislative Plaza against the state, gone to jail and won in the courts, and been acknowledged across media (along with overwhelming public support) for their perseverance.

Nevertheless, the committed followers who continue with the group beyond Governor Bill Haslam's bumbling heavy-handedness do not seem to expand. Moreover, ON has really not done much to occupy Nashville or otherwise live up to their name. They have not shown the slightest interest in occupying Nashville's Courthouse or the Chamber of Commerce or Gail Kerr's writing cubicle or the windmills of Jerry Maynard's mind or any other place of local political influence in Nashville. They've picketed NES and staged a street play at CCA. Today they're going to occupy the Tennessee Tower. They've basically given Mayor Karl Dean (a Democrat with political aspirations) a pass. None of this is to slight the alternative democracy they're trying to run in the form of General Assemblies.

But really, was their nonviolent unwillingness to leave state-owned public property worth the attention of Homeland Security or the FBI or any other federal agency sworn to protect Americans against enemies, foreign and domestic? DHS overstepped its boundaries in assisting Bill Haslam's act of stepping on his own feet in the ON crackdown. Why are they not more focused on finding terrorists who might strike in Nashville or on securing vulnerable targets like the chlorine tankers at the Downtown water treatment facility?

Now we see reports that agencies like Homeland Security and the FBI may be coordinating responses with city halls across the country to suppress popular backlash against Wall Street and the financial industry. I have to wonder, given that President Obama broke his campaign promise to close George Bush's oppressive GITMO detention camps, whether the White House might actually be encouraging municipal and state-sponsored gagging of dissent as well as the compromise of universal human rights at home.

I notice this morning that Juan Cole is worrying about it, too:

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let slip in an interview with the BBC that she had been on a conference call with the mayors of 18 cities about how to deal with the Occupy Wall Street movement. That is, municipal authorities appear to have been conspiring to deprive Americans of their first amendment rights to freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Likewise, A Homeland Security official let it slip in a phone interview that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had been strategizing with cities on how to shut down OWS protests. The FBI is said to have advised using zoning ordinances and curfew regulations, and to stage the crackdown with massive police force at a time when the press was not around to cover the crackdown ....

What these two reports show is a high-level conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to protest peacefully.

When will we see Occupy Wall Street protesters hooded, dressed in orange jump suits, and sent to Guantanamo for military trials? When you let the government act without regard for the rule of law toward foreigners suspected of terrorism, you open yourself to be treated the same way if the rich decide to sic their police on you (it is mostly their police).

Chapel Hill, NC cops suppress OWS protesters who occupied
an abandoned building to perhaps start a free clinic
-- KATELYN FERRAL AND MARK SCHULTZ

Sounds like the FBI is too distracted with aiding local police--who in turn act like paramilitary thugs toward nonviolent protesters--to spend much time testing for security holes at strategically significant utilities like Metro Water Services. I would agree with those who argue that if Homeland Security is coordinating these crackdown efforts against Occupy Wall Street, then we are not very far away from the day when we will see protesters rounded up and detained GITMO-style. The federal security apparatus, whose overseer is the President of the United States, needs to keep its eye on the ball and focus on potential local threats that are real. It should avoid micromanaging protest response as if it were quelling hostile coup d'etat. It ought to fix holes in the system rather than rolling back the civil rights of Americans.

Mike Jameson wins well-deserved General Sessions judgeship

2011-11-15T20:41:00.001-06:00

Here come the Judge: