Karl Dean Not So Green After All

Mary Mancini untangles the knot that Mayor Karl Dean has created of the previously approved, previously funded Riverfront development plan, and underscores some fairly unsavory consequences for Nashville:

[Karl Dean's new Riverfront plan] counters the recommendations of the Green Ribbon Committee and flies in the face of the Mayor’s repeated goal of making Nashville the “greenest city” in the South. There is one site - ONLY ONE - that would restore green space to land that is currently contaminated brown field. If we’re serious about addressing the contaminated areas of the riverfront (as the urgency of our storm-water plan and repeated pressers from the Mayor’s office suggest that we are), we need to address the brownfield.

Even the the work of one of the centerpiece initiatives of the Dean administration is undone on the East Bank by the Mayor's own departure from the approved plan.

Moreover, if the new Dean designs are mobilized, the Mayor will show himself to be a poor, callous money manager:

although MDHA can promise all day long that they’re going to eventually install the features of the original plan, there is no money guaranteed after year two. Which means putting a project into Year Three is the same as putting it on the shelf for.ev.er….The only way this sequence makes sense is if the Mayor doesn’t intend to ever put in the Adventure Park. And given that he’s referring to the sequence designed over 16 months with the input of a thousand Nashvillians and a half-million of our tax dollars as “a kiddie park,” that’s exactly what his intent seems to be.

So, this is perhaps one of the most significant development projects the Mayor will handle in his tenure, and Dean is not in the green with respect to good environmentalism or to sound oversight of money on Riverfront development. I would like to know where his priorities honestly lay.