Mike Jameson Becomes the First Council Member to Buck Karl Dean in Defense of Neighborhoods

Mayor Karl Dean continues what looks like an administration against neighborhoods, and CM Mike Jameson seems to have had enough of that. Jeff Woods relates what happened yesterday during a Planning Department budget hearing:

Jameson then launched into an attack on the Dean administration, suggesting the new mayor is tilting unfairly toward developers. Dean has appointed a new planning commissioner who is seen by some as too cozy with developers.

To look at the “seas of asphalt and pavement” across Nashville, Jameson said, and “to suggest that the neighborhoods are somehow winning these wars” and then “to take from us one of the few advocates [Planning staffer David Kleinfelter] we have on the planning staff to help us win reasonable negotiated compromises is a real, real setback.”

Go, Mike, go. All of our worrying may be wasted on Charlie Tygard if the real threat to neighborhoods is the Mayor's Office. My vote for Dean may not have mattered any more than a vote for Bob Clement would have in the end.

Oh, and by the way, Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors looks to be knee deep in this mess, too, given her position on Council and her marriage to one of the developers that Kleinfelter tangled with and lost to over providing a neighborhood with a sidewalk. Can we hope that she will be embody leadership for the Council that is fair and balanced with respect to neighborhoods when her family profits from pro-development, pro-growth initiatives?