Mayor Karl Dean on April 30:
Standing inside Hartman Park, on the north side, Dean told a small crowd of revelers who truly made for such a speedy recovery, in true Tennessee fashion.
"It wasn't the federal government .... It was the people of Nashville!
Mayor Karl Dean on May 1:
Man-hours aside, the T-shirts, telethons and a string of Garth Brooks benefit concerts raised more than $14 million. Foundations and non-profits chipped in a few million more. But that is a fraction of the $600 million the Federal Emergency Management Agency has pumped into Tennessee.
Mayor Dean acknowledges FEMA is paying many of the bills.
Mayor DEAN: The story in Nashville is not that we did it alone. The story of Nashville is that we had help, but when things got hard our citizens got down to work and helped themselves and helped each other.
Given that the federal government is paying for a number of Metro programs supported by this Mayor (charter schools, healthy diets, etc), it seems disingenuous for him to attack Washington DC from the stump.
I heard McNeely, Piggott & Fox called the producers of the HBO series, Treme. They actually got Karl Dean an audition to play a character who was instrumental in rescuing people during the big New Orleans flood.
ReplyDeleteProblem was, Karl could never look the camera in the lens.
So, the producers said "no."
Though one of the producers kept Dean's head-shot. Karl may get a call-back to play Igor in the remake of Young Frankenstein.