And this guy claims to be Mayor of all Nashville?

I do not think that the Mayor's Office realizes just how polarizing their justification for not planning rapid transit for North Nashville is. I do not believe that this administration grasps how their cavalier response expresses the idea that Nashville is not one city, but a fractured arena of interests competing for Hizzoner's good graces. Or maybe they get it, but they just don't care. Their cynical replies to a reporter are not even subtle in sovereign tone:

community activists and council members from North Nashville soon took up the chorus, suggesting their part of town was getting screwed yet again on a major public investment. As recently as April, state Rep. Brenda Gilmore floated the mention of a lawsuit if the route was not altered.

All were valid concerns. The problem, to the Dean administration, was that they were coming years too late. By that point, according to the mayor's office and Metro transit officials, foundational decisions about the project had been set in stone.

So, if North Nashvillians wanted bus rapid transit we should have bellied up to the trough with our power and money like the wealthy West End business interests and leveraged the Metro Transit Authority budget decisions in our favor. Never mind that it would have been more ethical for the executive branch to insure that infrastructure was distributed fairly around the city in the real absence of greater influence and wealth.

In truth, many of us who have attended these "public" meetings know that there are 1,000-and-1 ways to use meetings to mask and to misdirect. Procedural tricks are used all the time by those who have mastered rules and bylaws to allow hidden agendas under the guise of transparency with deniability intact (see the excuse, "All of the meetings were public", as if the public can attend all of the meetings along with every other public meeting Metro holds).

Now, claiming that we are too late to the party is part of the confidence game. The Mayor's Office has it both ways. This thing is only set in stone now because meetings and decisions were orchestrated to foster impenetrability. And now we are the chumps who did not see it coming. As if we ever could have.

In my opinion MTA has already pulled a fast one on us by not publicizing the alternatives analysis (and I don't mean modes of transit alternatives under consideration). Had North Nashville leaders been able to see the results for studies outside the east-west corridor, they likely would have been mobilized to fight Karl Dean's exclusive reservation of BRT for West End.

But in this administration's preconceived notion of Nashville as a social Darwinist theater of winner-take-all, such popular mobilization is discouraged.

Shamelessness and joblessness

Granted, the Tennessean made a campaign contribution to the PR effort designed to produce a favorable vote for Mayor Karl Dean on the Music City Center, but did reporter Michael Cass really have to end a piece on a North Nashville march against joblessness with the Mayor's talking points on the jobs the new build provided?

It was bad enough that Cass just repeated Hizzoner's spin while leaving out news that the Music City Center lost a court case in which Metro officials blocked out the addresses on lists of construction workers preventing a union from evaluating Karl Dean's claims that jobs would go to locals. And never mind Music City Center's shoddy method of counting the employed by merely counting the people who signed up for safety training beforehand. I do not only read perceptions that the Mayor's projects do not provide the jobs promised in the news media beyond the Tennessean, but I hear it in community meetings I attend and urban talk shows I listen to.

So, yes, it is bad form to report half-news as news simply in order to put Karl Dean on the right side of the joblessness issue. It is not like he literally rushed out to be a drum major in this march.

But to detract from organized dissent over joblessness by shilling once again for a Mayor who does not care about North Nashville community development or social justice is shameless. Cass's report should have ended closer to where he conveyed Brenda Gilmore's meeting with the Mayor. That's the most Karl Dean should have figured into the story.

Michael Cass should explain his decision to portray--unequivocally, mind you--the Mayor as an effective break on the joblessness that marchers believe is a chronic problem. Otherwise, the Mayor's communications director should have been listed as a contributor to this story.

On a possible legal challenge to the Mayor's bus rapid transit neglect of North Nashville

Apparently, I am not the only one who believes that Mayor Karl Dean's bus rapid transit proposal leaves North Nashville in the dust of Davidson County's economic disparities. North Nashville leaders more powerful than I am believe it, too; and strongly enough to consider legal action:

A lawsuit against the city could be in store if Metro officials don’t alter a proposed bus rapid transit project so that it steers toward North Nashville, according to a Nashville lawmaker.

“That’s certainly an option,” said state Rep. Brenda Gilmore, D-Nashville, who represents a large swath of the low-income, predominantly African-American area and is part of a group of a few dozen North Nashville residents concerned about the issue. “And there has been some discussion about that.

“Historically, North Nashville has just been neglected,” she added, stressing that litigation would be a last resort and that the group hopes to work with Mayor Karl Dean to address the concerns. “It’s pretty clear that wherever BRT has gone across the nation, businesses, housing and amenities have sprung up immediately. We would like to see some of that wealth spread.”

Gilmore, who plans to reach out to Dean in hopes he will meet with the group, said any lawsuit from the group would have an “economic disparity” focus but didn’t elaborate further on a potential cause of action. She cited legal action in Los Angeles she said led to the re-routing of a BRT line to include a low-income neighborhood there.

Even the possibility of litigation underscores what was bound to be a hurdle for a proposal to place the 7.5-mile East-West Connector from 5Points in East Nashville to White Bridge Road by way of Broadway and West End Avenue.

This route cuts through affluent West End-area neighborhoods such as Richland and Whitland – which happens to include some of the project’s loudest critics – but doesn’t deviate from a straight line to include the low-income area north of Charlotte Avenue.

Three things come to the fore in this article:

1. We should all acknowledge the lingering effects of racism and classism on the uneven economic development of west Nashville and North Nashville. Prejudice and class consciousness influence the quality of development, the extension of infrastructure and the flow of money across both ends of town even if individuals may not themselves be intentionally prejudiced against people of color or the working and lower classes. It is not unfounded or unsubstantiated to argue that economic disparities endemic to the ebb and flow of capital benefit west Nashville more than North Nashville. Neither is it untoward to argue that individuals are often prompted and limited by such a system. Karl Dean's transit policy perpetuates the racist and classist system insofar as it makes little attempt to serve the masses of Nashville's humanity in North Nashville. In my opinion, North Nashvillians have a case against this BRT plan.
2. The Mayor never faces tough buck-stopping questions himself. He always farms out the harder, uglier stuff to underlings. Other people take the falls. Nothing ever sticks to him. Likewise, with BRT. One of his two communications shills on the Metro payroll referred the Tennessean to the Metro Transit Authority, even though Karl Dean treats BRT like a signature policy when credit is involved and when bold vision is the tagline. The Mayor, who is the Tennessean's two-time "Tennessean of the Year", should be more accountable to North Nashvillians left behind by his new transit idea. Given the way he ducks difficulties, I'm not betting he will, especially if a suit is filed.
3. In attempting to defend MTA against charges that transit policy is biased in favor of affluent neighborhoods, the CEO unintentionally sustained the point that those neighborhoods enjoy better infrastructure due to their enjoyed wealth. David Lipscomb gets better bus stops because the university has the money to pay over and above what Metro does to provide them. (Recall that Green Hills' Julia Green Elementary got iPads for their 3rd graders after parents raised the funds and Metro matched the donations.) And which stops are likely to be better maintained? Ones that reflect the most basic investments or ones with a bankrolled quality ? Again, the point here, unfazed by MTA spin, is that wealthier west Nashville communities enjoy better infrastructure precisely because they are wealthier. Economic development continues to be uneven and prejudicial, rather than mutual and impartial.