CM Duane Dominy overcomes popular dissent with an assist from a progressively challenged Metro Council

That sound you hear from Metro
Council? It's the sound of inevitability.

You should have seen this coming March 2012 when the Metro Council handed conservative CM Duane Dominy a 22-15 2nd reading win--in spite of strong community opposition--on a bill that protected the big real estate investment of Hickory MC Investments, which plans to build a new asphalt plant on the doorstep of an Antioch subdivision. Even an indefinite deferral a few weeks later only bought the wealthy property owner's lobbyist Thomas White more time to erode opposition from the generally spineless Metro Council.

Emboldened over the summer, CM Dominy rehatched his bill to permit the new asphalt plant. He brought it back for third and final reading. The community opposition Facebook page reported insider info a few days ago that "the lobbyists for the asphalt plant have been working hard for 4 months" and that those lobbyists "told the council that we had basically gotten used to the idea and are no longer opposed." Gotten used to the idea of exposing susceptible neighborhood kids to cancer and asthma risks? Gotten used to endangering the preservation of fragile wildlife and the watershed? What would be council progressives' defense for supporting the blacktop mongers? That their convenient greenness does not encompass environmental and health jeopardy outside their own districts?

Predictably, weak-kneed and campaign-financed Metro Council voted with Dominy and the lobbyists tonight, 30-4. The minority of 4 were CMs from districts near the proposed plant. Naturally.


UPDATE: the tweet I linked in last paragraph above was originally from CM Fabian Bedne's account. According to Twitter it no longer exists. I wish now I would have made a screenshot of it before it was taken down. But CM Bedne did tweet that evening that the 4 CMs voting against the plant were those from near the plant. In the future, I will screenshot his tweets whenever I link them here.

Asphalt plant expansion opponents are mobilized

A couple of months ago CM Duane Dominy caused a community firestorm around Franklin Limestone Road by introducing a bill to expand asphalt production among the neighborhoods there. An opposition group was born and here is the latest from their Facebook page:

[May 9, in the wake of a Metro Council meeting that prompted a big community turnout] Don't get too comfortable y'all. There is another Metro Council meeting this month. We need to be ready to go to the Council meeting May 15 at 6pm. Since much wasn't done at the last meeting, I expect the next one to be longer. Get your black or dark blue shirts ready. I have some made up if anyone is interested.

[May 12] Ok as far as I know we are safe from a vote on the Asphalt plant til at least June or July. In the meantime, it would be great if you could talk to your neighbors about this issue. People need to realize that we very easily wind up with 3 asphalt plants within a mile of our homes. If they move to this new location, no one can stop another asphalt plant from going into their old location.

This community-based effort looks well-organized and red-hot. Part of the challenge of following up in the summer is that people go on vacation and get distracted by seasonal activities. Council meetings often fall off the radar. They should not let proponents of the rezoning legislation capitalize on the diversions that summer may bring.

Sign the petition against the asphalt plant

Nashvillians Against the Asphalt Plant

To be delivered to: Metropolitan Nashville & Davidson County Council

We, the petitioners want to ask the Council Members to vote No on BL2012-103 to allow an Asphalt Plant on Franklin Limestone Rd. Numerous issues which include traffic, health and environmental make this a danger to our community. There are other, better places to locate this type of business that don't put families in danger. Also, it would sit next to Mill Creek which is home to an endangered species.

We are trying to prevent the addition of a new Asphalt Plant in our backyards within a few hundred feet of homes with children and adults with breathing and health issues. The street where the Plant is proposed is already dangerous and a lot of slow moving Dump Trucks will make it even worse. Homeowners in this area have suffered enough with falling property values. When an Asphalt Plant moves in, property can fall as much as 45% an amount that would be devastating to homeowners in this area.

Jump to the petition.

CM Duane Dominy invites a hail of popular opposition with proposal to rezone for new asphalt plant

Around two dozen people showed up at Tueday night's Metro Council public hearing to fight a bill sponsored by their conservative council member Duane Dominy--and recommended unanimously by the Metro Planning Commission--to allow a third asphalt plant built adjacent to their neighborhoods on Franklin Limestone Road. Here are some of their comments:

We're just a working class neighborhood .... We have two asphalt plants, a dump, an airport, and rock quarry. That's enough. Let's put this one somewhere else.

-- A worker living next door to current rock quarry

When I bought my house my Realtor® took me around by Murfreesboro Road so that I wouldn't see the industry .... Now I'm a single parent. I am in foreclosure. I've had difficulty working with the challenges of this economy and the banking crisis. There aren't many interior design demands today. With the existing quarry I'm in trouble. If we have more industry, I really need to move but I can't afford to.

-- Interior designer living nearby

In the beginning [at the first community meeting] we started with 35 dump trucks coming in to Franklin Limestone. The second meeting we went from 35 to 75. I heard him say tonight that there was probably 90 movements.

-- Business owner adjacent near asphalt plant

I wasn't notified. My Treasurer went to the last meeting and he asked Duane Dominy if he notified me. He didn't. Or our association. He notified a couple within the 200' or whatever the minimum is, and he asked him to do it, and he said he would: he would notify all of the residents in the Piccadilly Square Homeowners Association. He never did that.

-- President of the Piccadilly Square HOA

I've taken care of children who deal with asthma, and it really boggled my mind .... I called the councilman and said, "This is a bad idea. How could you put an asphalt plant in a residential neighborhood?" When we talk to parents of kids with asthma we tell them, "Avoid smoking. Avoid irritants." Some of you have children ... grandchildren and elderly neighbors. Would you put your child near an asphalt plant? It doesn't make sense. These kids would continue to have wheezing.

-- Pediatrician who lives in near the quarry

I voted for Duane Dominy to stand up for this community in times like this and to represent us for our best good .... I think he's a great guy ... but we feel like we've been abandoned on this project .... You can bring the big boys in and they can represent the different aspects of it but none of that has been proven .... We haven't received any factual evidence of any of these things that have been said for it.

-- Treasurer of the Piccadilly Square HOA

I like to go outside and play, and I use Franklin Limestone Road every day when I go to school ... and I like to have my window down because I like to the feel the air and I don't want to have to breath all those toxic fumes and get risk of cancer or any type of disease.

-- A little girl who lives and attends elementary school near the plants

If we lived in a world where everything was equal, CM Dominy's rezoning request would be on life support after that beating. Association officers, business owners, the working class, victims of the housing crisis, a mobilized kid; even a pediatrician took on Dominy for possibly exposing kids to high toxicity levels. Unfortunately, the council is not a world where everything is equal, and this bill now passes into the Vice Mayor's committee chamber of horrors to give it the air of legitimacy sans developers before it heads for third reading and likely final passage. But it seems to me that Duane Dominy is now willing to squander any working class cred he built during the fracas over the Fairgrounds on the fat cats of asphalt production.

Oh, and there should be a special place in hell for anyone who promotes projects that expose children to toxic chemicals to which they would not expose their own children.


UPDATE: CM Dominy won't move his rezoning request to third reading until he has visited an operational facility to see "what those pollutions are"; except that he has already visited an operational facility in Shelbyville.





So, he can move his bill to third reading while promising he won't based on a technicality. Savvy?

Metro Council votes to urge Jesse Register to return to previous terms with service workers

The council passed a memorializing resolution earlier this evening, 25-9, encouraging Nashville schools Director Jesse Register to return to its previous practice of negotiating with the unions representing service workers and bus drivers. A month ago Mr. Register appeared to move on from the previous memorandum of understanding with the unions, encouraging employees to break from the unions and thus settle for a distinct disadvantage to the school district, which is not vested with protecting service workers' best interests ahead of those of district executives and corporate patrons of the district.

Tonight's resolution passed overwhelmingly. CM Emily Evans voted for it, calling Mr. Register's break with previous union arrangements "needless" and the breach between the district and the unions a "gratuitous fight". She described the MNPS decision to discard unions one "without any documented benefits for students". Council conservatives--who rarely stand with workers--were predictably cool toward the motion urging the school district to reengage the unions. Duane Dominy bemoaned the strained relationship between the district and its workers, but he based his opposition to the bill on the unfounded conjecture that it would cause greater strain.

SEIU photo of former MNPS board member
& current CM Karen Johnson
meeting with union members

However, there is not much more the council can do with a non-binding, toothless resolution to drive a wedge between the workers and Jesse Register than he has not already done himself. Mr. Register seems more engaging of  "CEO Champions" for his new "academies" than of the workers at the base of the MNPS pyramid:

Register ... [and] the school board’s “executive staff” decided to discontinue the MOUs entirely by deleting the school system’s Labor Negotiations Policy.

Register referenced Tennessee’s Professional Educators Collaborative Conferencing Act, which was passed by the state legislature last year and replaced teachers’ collective bargaining rights with “collaborative conferencing” ....

“In recognition of state law regarding teachers’ unions, and the non-binding nature of any MOU with support unions, my executive staff has met and voted to rescind HR 5.129, the Labor Negotiations Policy.”

The move didn’t go over well with SEIU Local 205 president Doug Collier.

“Dr. Register is now trying to use those laws — which do not apply to school support employees — as an excuse to overreach his authority and silence the voices of thousands of loyal city employees who voted to form a union,” Collier said in a press release.

The USW and SEIU sent complaint letters to Metro Board of Education Chairwoman Gracie Porter earlier this month.

Gracie Porter never replied publicly. At least there is no indication in online news searches that she did. I received tips a couple of years ago that Ms. Porter cast the deciding vote for Mr. Register's plan to privatize the service workers' jobs in exchange for the position of board chair. And no good deed goes unpunished, as SEIU had already canvassed for Ms. Porter during her campaign for office four years before that. I can understand how speaking out publicly on Mr. Register's rejection of unions might put Ms. Porter in an awkward position.

Given the district's terse reply to the media tonight, Jesse Register does not appear too receptive to the council's resolution. I am Jack's total lack of surprise.

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:

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.

All's fair in this council war: Barry replicates Dominy's initiative to save the Fairgrounds excepting the racetrack

CM Duane Dominy is not pleased with Megan Barry (a member of the Metro Council Dean Team, which includes Ronnie Steine, Anna Page, Rip Ryman, and Sandra Moore, also referred by local reporter Joey Garrison as the "Gang of Five"). CM Barry is bringing a bill that essentially saves the Fairgrounds another year, which was the purpose of a bill CM Dominy sponsored and deferred on November 16. The main difference between the bills is that CM Barry wants to demolish the racetrack and CM Dominy does not.

CM Dominy sent a letter to the Nashville City Paper and to the Council office for distribution late today. The letter is reproduced below (click on the images to enlarge), but the money section is the paragraph where he points out that the "Gang of Five" not only showed discourtesy not allowing deferral of his own bill, but they voted as a bloc to try and table his ordinance (which would essentially have killed it).

The council office e-mail to members is time-stamped 30 mins after the City Paper story reporting (but not reproducing) CM Dominy's letter appeared on the paper's website. A few minutes later Megan Barry replied by e-mail to the council membership, seeming to bristle about CM Dominy mentioning "courtesy," and she insinuated that his correspondence with reporters "hours before" she received the letter was an act of discourtesy.

It seems to me indignation flows both ways. Despite her statement to the Tennessean that the coterminous news of her bill and and of the executive memo stating the Mayor's plans were coincidental, the Gang of Five probably tag-teamed this bill with the Mayor's Office. Council action around big mayoral projects has moved like Secretariat, that is, like a "tremendous machine," since Karl Dean took office. To think that there was no behind-the-scenes action-coordination strains credulity.

I don't agree with CM Dominy on much, but I do agree that there is some Gang of Five hypocrisy (and I would add cynicism) here. They criticized Dominy for what they are doing with the latest bill, which not only resembles his, but compliments complements the Mayor's plans to privatize the Fairgrounds eventually.

Each one of the Gang of Five has advanced the Mayor's agendas with few questions asked the last 3 years, and this common commitment has meant an easy ride for Karl Dean up until now. For the new Fairgrounds bill not to be coordinated out of the Mayor's Office would be out of character. CM Barry would have to think us naive to believe that the Gang of Five and Mayor coming together so exactly was fortuitous.


UPDATE: In a pointed e-mail reply to Megan Barry's mockery of his "courtesy" last night, Duane Dominy counters that not only did she also go to the news media without consulting him on the Gang of Five bill on Thursday, but she also collaborated with the Mayor's Office in writing it. Dominy also reminds Barry that elections are over and he invites her to leave politics out of the Fairgrounds discussions. He also presses her again for a work session on the two bills together.

Like I said before, I would have to be a chump to believe that the Gang of Five did not work with Rich Riebeling and other Dean staffers on writing an ordinance the same day the Mayor's Office "called time out" on the Fairgrounds.