Deep Thought: making campaign promises she cannot ethically keep

If Sarah Lodge Tally honestly agreed to abstain from all votes regarding the new convention center because her law firm represents Metro in the real estate litigation, how would she have any power at all to fulfill her promise that she will support the new convention center on the Metro Council?

Sarah Lodge Tally and her law firm benefit financially from her support of Music City Center construction

Sarah Lodge Tally rose a bloody big stink about CM Jason Holleman not supporting the Music City Center and lest we think it's all about fawning on Hizzoner, the Tennessean reports that she has some flesh in the convention center game beyond political ambition:

A candidate in a high-profile Metro Council race could have a conflict of interest on some matters involving the Music City Center, which she has criticized her opponent for not supporting.

Attorney Sarah Lodge Tally, who is challenging Councilman Jason Holleman in District 24 in West Nashville, works for Miller & Martin, the law firm handling convention center land acquisition for the Metro Development and Housing Agency. Miller & Martin has collected $1.6 million in legal fees from the city

The stand of Sarah Lodge Tally looks even less principled now.

Maybe a couple of you Megan Barry supporters can help me out here

I'm a recovering supporter of Megan Barry, so I may not be able to be objective about this, but can someone remind me of how in the last 4 years CM Barry has been "protecting neighborhoods"? Defining herself primarily as beholden to business I get. But in what ways can she claim to have protected neighborhoods as she does in her campaign ad?





Whether I get a response or not, a clue to answering my query may be found in a separate ad where Barry says she is "involved" in her own neighborhood:





So, I guess she's been there for her neighborhood, but I'm still unclear as to how she has protected anyone else's neighborhood. I've documented relevant parts of her voting record at length here on Enclave and I don't see protection in her votes. And frankly, a lot of community leaders are involved in their neighborhoods but that does not set them apart as having council power to influence QOL.

Cast my ballot yesterday

Only 2 votes cast.

No real choices for Mayor and Vice Mayor and neither Dean nor Neighbors deserve my vote (I voted for Dean last time around). The at-Large incumbents have behaved like either tools or tanglefoots. The at-Large challengers have not presented any viable alternative. They look to be either cookie-cutter conservatives or selectively progressive Deanie babies. The "good enough" this time was not to waste votes on those who have not represented my interests.

Silly stuff a politically-motivated restaurateur says

Hillsboro Village godfather Randy Rayburn opened mouth and inserted foot in support of council candidate David Glasgow, who to my knowledge has not separated himself from the powerful restaurateur's pubic fallacies:

Just a reminder ...[about] a reception ... for David Glasgow who is running against Berkley Allen in District 18 ....

I would remind you that we don’t need a strident, vociferous, engineering version of Emily [Evans] on our Council opposing Mayor Dean’s policies and programs. Our business community has known for years that she equates being supportive of business and economic development programs as being anti-neighborhood interests. We know that Jason Holleman helped recruit her and lobbied to move her into District 18, as he and his Crafton/Evans cohorts have done in several other races. We don’t need a new member of the Anti-Dean Gang to slow or thwart our city’s next four years. There will be new, unanticipated challenges along the way. We need to limit their head count numbers now.

Thank you for considering your efforts to hold this seat. David was appointed by Mayor Dean in 2009 to the Tourism Board where he has become an even stronger supporter of our Mayor.

Sounds like Mr. Rayburn fancies a submissive council to the point that it informs oddball conspiratorial connections he sees between non-conforming council members who have different voting records. (Crafton and Holleman in the same boat? Really?) He was apoplectic enough in 2009 at CM Evans' criticism of the Music City Center project to try to disqualify her opinion because she had not created jobs like he said he had. The recent attack on Burkley Allen sounds like more of the same foolishness.


UPDATE: I was sent this screenshot of one of Randy Rayburn's Facebook comments to Emily Evans in 2010 where he quotes John Wilkes Booth's infamous assassination exclamation. Why?

Tanaka Vercher separates herself from Mayor Dean over accomplishments she did not earn

The mailer in question.

Council incumbent Duane Dominy's allegations that his opponent Tanaka Vercher and Mayor Karl Dean are taking credit for District 28 improvements have gained traction with a television news station analyzing some tapes of community meetings and observing Vercher and Dean no where to be found:

Mayor Dean crashes and cashes lowly district races to make Metro Council comply

Re-elect Karl Dean is working hard to shield the Mayor's Office from the embarrassing opposition he faced from council members late last term. They brought the Mayor right down the low road of at least 3 district campaign fights where CMs didn't comply with King Karl 100% of the time. Dean usually projects the high road, but this time he is wading right into the fray. Consequently, he looks a little desperate and like he is pining for votes that he cannot muster himself regardless of who sits on the council.

Fliers that Hizzoner has mailed so far:

Sarah Lodge Tally, paid for by Re-elect Karl Dean

Dean would have his way with West Nashville via a fellow blue-blood brahmin.

Page Turner, paid for by Re-elect Karl Dean

Omitted: "the Mayor ignored the Antioch community task force"

Tanaka Vercher, paid for by Re-elect Karl Dean

He tried to help Antioch by forcing a flea market they didn't want.

Any other Dean mailers out there for district candidates?

Four years gone and Karl Dean is now fronting neighborhoods

Karl Dean spent most of his first term evading neighborhood issues. In one of his only community meetings with neighborhoods the message was clear: neighborhood issues are swallowed by his campaign rubrics "good schools" and "public safety." Otherwise, any neighborhood issues were to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The once robust Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods shriveled to insignificance in the past 4 years.

But none of those facts have stopped the re-elect Karl Dean campaign from re-writing history in the last 9 months. Now his PR handlers have practically repackaged him as the neighborhoods Mayor. Here's the snail mail solicitation he is sending out:

This song and dance would have played better in 2007.

Neighbors for Hypocrisy

Remember how 35 members of Neighbors for Progress stood in a Metro Council public hearing last January and stipulated that their opinions of how redevelopment should occur at the Fairgrounds count for more than those of anyone else who lived farther away?

Well, it takes a lot of nerve for Colby Sledge and his gang to go outside of the Fairgrounds area to try and influence the re-election chances of a West Nashville CM simply because he did not agree with their opinions (or maybe they realize they can't beat the referendum and they're trying to pack the council with Deaniacs like Sarah Lodge Tally):

She ain't all glitter

A screenshot of the feature page of Glitteratti online magazine:

Click on to enlarge.

HT: Genma Holmes and Mike Peden

Another year of prosaic Nashville Neighborhood Defense Fund endorsements

Apparently the NNDF lobby group founded by former CM John Summers has decided to kiss the mayoral ring this year and give Karl Dean their endorsement rather than rocking the boat. And outside of their Burkley Allen endorsement, there really is not much in this slate that is inspired. The Mayor and Vice Mayor tabs leave me underwhelmed. Even NNDF's "urge" to the Mayor seems insipid even as it is devoid of any realism about this administration:

Hey, West Nashville, do you know what Sarah Lodge Tally meant?

Jeremy Kane did a bang-up job of live tweeting the debate between CM Jason Holleman and Bredesenista challenger Sarah Lodge Tally last night. At one point in the debate, Kane quoted Tally as saying of the West Nashville Community Plan, "Tally wants reasonableness and balance. Focused on collaboration." Does anybody know what she meant? Is there an unreasonableness or imbalance in the community plan?

The West Nashville Community Plan has been used by neighborhood leaders to resist building major bridges across the Cumberland to May Town Center sprawl slicing up and rendering communities in Sylvan Park and Charlotte Park pass-through neighborhoods. And the plan has been used to fight flipping a residential zone along 43rd Avenue North into an industrial one to expand blight a business had already created.

Sarah Lodge Tally is a product of the Bredesen mentality, a mentality which gave preferential option to industry rather than striking a balance between community and economic development. I just wonder what her notion of balance on the community plan would be. What would the implications for sprawl and industrial expansion through neighborhoods be if she had her way with the West Nashville Community Plan? Jason Holleman was specific about his planning concerns about the bridges for May Town in 2009. Is Sarah Lodge Tally going to be specific, too?

Hot buttoning the council candidates for office

Thinking back over what a useful resource the "Hot Button" voting record spreadsheet (linked in the previous post) is, I wondered if it would be possible to create one relaying the non-incumbent council challengers' stances on the issues. Also prompting my musing over this is that a couple of months ago I asked District 8 candidate Nancy VanReece to list a couple of issues she would oppose Mayor Karl Dean on. She balked at giving me an answer other than that I should not question whether she would be independent. I thought her reply was a cop-out, but I wished I had the time to attend her public appearances and document the issues she advocated to see if any of them would represent a hint of a break with the Mayor's Office.

So, I'm wondering now whether it might be feasible to set up a public spreadsheet on Google Docs and to "crowdsource" the publicly stated positions on various hot button issues of all of the challengers for the open council seats. Would it be feasible for those who have followed the campaigns and debates to help curate such a list so that voters can understand where the candidates stand? Or much like VanReece's response to me, are the positions that the candidates take in public so vague and noncommittal (some community organizers might call them "wishy-washy") that such a project would not be helpful and would be improbable?

One indication to me that such a project might be feasible is if the comment section below starts to grow with personal anecdotes on what voters who attended campaign events have heard candidates say. Anyone have anything to share? Keep in mind that anonymous comments may not be given the same benefit of the doubt as those made by people who share their real identities.

How they cast their votes

Gathered data so you don't have to

Neighborhood leaders Charlotte Cooper and Mina Johnson combed the Metro Council voting record for the last four years, and they culled the data into a comprehensive spreadsheet, which they published publicly on Google Docs. Jump to the spreadsheet to score your own council members and to help you decide whether they deserve your vote.

Thank you, Charlotte and Mina.

NAACP release: public forum next week for community to question Metro Council candidates and 1 mayoral candidate

Scroll document down to see candidates who have agreed to participate in this public forum:



It might not be Karl Dean's kind of forum.

A Tygard sign grows in Salemtown

One of my Salemtown neighbors has erected a Charlie Tygard-for-council sign. I figure that any home owner in an urban neighborhood who votes for sprawl-happy, developer-friendly Charlie Tygard should have to look at an LED sign from their house, since Tygard sponsored legislation to allow the brightly lit signs in high density neighborhoods like Salemtown.

How they vote is their business, but a closely-placed LED would be karma.

Candidates have a habit of considering the value of privatization without counting the costs

One of the more objectionable traits of the previous Metro Council (pre-2007) was their shameless tendency to funnel Metro "infrastructure" dollars toward non-profits as a way of pandering to and exercising influence over them. Karl Dean claims that he has reformed that process, and yet he still panders and uses them for influence.

Source: Dean campaign

An example is the way he recently delivered donated supplies from his campaign meetings to Second Harvest Food Bank with re-election signs plastered on them. So, I don't believe much has changed in the present term other than the Mayor's Office cues others as to the favored non-profits to privatize public services.

About those TEPid endorsements

I doubt very seriously that Tennessee Equality Project places much stock in my opinions of their political moves, but I'm thankful to have a blog to be able to note the curious logic of some of their endorsements. According to the Tennessean, they endorsed Karl Dean for Mayor (no surprise given that they held a campaign fundraiser for him long before his re-election campaign even launched). The curiosity here is that Karl Dean has made no effort to have Metro government join TEP's lawsuit against the state's suppression of the Metro non-discrimination ordinance (even more curiously, Tennessean blogger Michael Cass made it sound like the ordinance was initiated by the council under the influence of TEP when it seems to me that there were at least a couple of CMs leading the charge in the wake of Belmont).

Campaign spillover

I'm no fan of Tonya Jones. She is a developer / construction company owner who, when she was on the Planning Commission generally voted with developers. She organized and lobbied to kill clean energy legislation on behalf of the petroleum industry. She supported Charlie Tygard's plan to allow business-style LED signage in high-density residential neighborhoods. If Bellevue wants to hand their seat over to an anti-neighborhood tool of developers, she is it.

But Bo Mitchell was out-of-order at tonight's council meeting trying to turn a bill to deal with David Torrence's abuses of the system into a campaign debate about Tonya Jones. It looked a little desperate to me. It seems like there are more effective ways to find traction.

Jason Holleman not hated by some regardless of Jeff Yarbro's fail (with Karl Dean's endorsement) against Doug Henry

Over at Just Nashville, some commenters are sharing their admiration of CM Jason Holleman:

[Sarah Bellos:] I am a very active member of the community food security and urban food movement. CM Holleman has been a tremendous supporter of our cause and in actually asking what we need, not just assuming that as a politician he has the answers to what is happening and needed in our communities and to more effectively do our work. I believe we need more Council members like him and thank him for his service during the flood all across Nashville.

[Yvonne Eaves:] I have called West Nashville home all my life. During the last council election I did not support Jason. Four years later, I can honestly say Jason has proven to be a community leader. Jason makes an appearance at many community functions. He listens with his heart, he wants to serve is community. It it apparent that he is willing to do his very best for his district. I am proud to say Jason Holleman is my council member. I am even happier to say Jason and his family are good neighbors.