More broken promises at the Tennessean

Last June, the Tennessean made a concession to Metro Council (in exchange for defeating an ordinance that would have regulated delivery of their unsubscribed "free" editions) that employees from the newspapers' offices would do "ride arounds" with the delivery help and pick up unclaimed papers littering sidewalks and streets. The Tennessean is not keeping its promise in Salemtown.

I took the photo below this morning near my house. The rolled-up, plastic-packaged Tennessean at the foot of the steps in the background is yesterday's edition. The rolled-up, plastic-packaged Tennessean at the curb in the foreground was delivered on December 24, 2014.

The Tennessean is not keeping its promises to Metro Council. CM Megan Barry championed the defeat of litter regulations in our neighborhoods last June by describing the concession of the Tennessean to reclaim their unclaimed papers as a "good thing." This is the same Megan Barry who is running for mayor this year promising "not to lose sight" of neighborhoods by permitting economic activity to "degrade quality of life."

Well, as you can see, the Tennessean continues its quest to make more money by littering my neighborhood's public spaces with unsolicited advertising. Litter degrades Salemtown's quality of life.

Promises broken by the news corporation. Promises broken by the corporation's political patrons on the Metro Council. Promises broken all around.

Are we close enough to Nashville's new ballpark to spot the manure?

Aaron Gordon at Vice Sports engages in a scathing open dialogue with a New York Times article regarding Washington, DC's plan to subsidize a new soccer stadium for its pro-team. While Gordon's entire piece is worthy of your time and attention, I wanted to comment on his observations about the lack of promised economic development that was to come with the opening six years ago of a new professional baseball park.

It seems relevant to North Nashville's close proximity to the new Nashville Sounds' home, First Tennessee Park, which is promised to bring dramatic economic development to the Jefferson Street corridor and the nearby neighborhoods. NYT comments are in bold; Gordon's replies are unbolded:

City leaders say the 20,000-seat stadium will serve as a catalyst for economic development for this area of southwest Washington, the way that Nationals Park, home of the Washington Nationals baseball team, did for its formerly stagnant neighborhood just a few blocks north and east.

Amazingly, the second half of this sentence directly contradicts the first. It takes 12 minutes to walk from Nationals Park to the very tip of Buzzard Point. If Nationals Park—which cost $700 million of taxpayer money—was such a catalyst for economic development, why do they need to build another nine-figure stadium a few blocks away?

Maybe because it didn't revitalize anything.

This has been the case in other Washington neighborhoods after the city voted to approve major new public venues...

Oh, cool! I mean, if it's worked before...

...including the Verizon Center, home to the N.B.A.'s Wizards and the N.H.L.'s Capitals since 1997;...

That was privately funded by then-owner Abe Polin, so not really a public investment! OK, what else?

...and the 2.3 million-square-foot Walter E. Washington Convention Center, completed in 2003, in revitalized Mount Vernon Square.

Wait, seriously?

I lived in the DC area for eight years, including a year and a half in Shaw, which lies just north of Mount Vernon. The above sentiment about Mount Vernon being "revitalized" is the kind of buried horseshit you can only spot if you're close enough to smell it.

Granted, the cost of the DC baseball stadium in taxpayer money was about 10 times what First Tennessee Park is going to cost Nashvillians in taxes. The flip side of that: the logic unfolds that the economic development in DC communities should proportionately be 10 times what was promised for North Nashville neighborhoods.

However, nearby DC neighborhoods got zilch.

Let's focus on the DC developer's comment that local lawmakers may have rigged expectations too high in order to give the ballpark project momentum. Some of us have been shouting that from jump with Nashville's ballpark. But to the point: they rationalized after the damage was done by minimizing the impact of the new ballpark, saying it is "just a very small piece" of development in the neighborhoods. Will First Tennessee ballpark developers and team owners thusly walk back their spin in the coming years? Will they be minimizing the claims Hizzoner kept making in late 2013 about how a new ballpark will create Jeff St. "revival"?

(If they're honest, they'll acknowledge that our neighborhoods were developing and gentrifying well before a new ballpark rose to the level of anything above a nostalgic pipe dream).

Like DC, Nashville has a convention center that is not performing to the results promised. Nashville is getting half the projected hotel nights, and no doubt tourists will compete for parking spaces downtown with minor league baseball fans for parking spaces during the summer (Metro officials said they hope Sounds fans use shrinking downtown parking opportunities). When they aren't competing downtown they will be choking on-street parking in Germantown, Hope Gardens and Salemtown.

The logic of overrated convention centers also applies to subsidized ballparks:

The whole process is basically maneuvered by the business community — banks, hotels, retailers, construction industries, others who will profit while the city loses .... Cities’ corporate movers and shakers long ago figured out how to get their new centers or expansions without the voters having a say.

The rising $70,000,000 Nashville is giving minor league team owner Frank Ward does one thing above all: it minimizes his family's risk and it maximizes inflated income from ticket and merchandising sales. It does so at our expense, even though our own elected officials allowed practically no influence over the deal. In particular it allows Mr. Ward to sell luxury boxes to rich people from Brentwood and Williamson County who would be more likely to snap up real estate investments in our urban core neighborhoods than to patronize and to put their cash in the pockets of the locally owned businesses up and down Jefferson Street.





Again, regular make-ends-meet taxpayers are the losers in this scenario, because economic benefits pad the pocketbooks of the people privately invested in the ballpark and other nearby properties. The latter need no financial assistance. Little will come back to us regardless of whether this particular ballpark bucks the trend and the science that indicate that any economic impact of sports venues is negligible and fabricated.

I am still waiting for someone to stop cheerleading and to begin explaining to me logically how the ballpark makes our lives cumulatively better in Salemtown when the costs are frankly and fearlessly considered.

Mixed results still bedevil the question of the economic impact of sports venues on neighborhood businesses

First Tennessee Park is rising dramatically now between Salemtown/ Germantown and downtown. The next stages will be the mixed-use residential and parking garage that will effectively swallow the compressed ballpark facade. As all of this is unfolding, I continue to look around the country for economic impact information from other communities with new sporting venues.

The latest news is from Brooklyn (NYC) and it bears what seems to me to be a continuing theme of enigma:

When the Barclays Center opened in Downtown Brooklyn two years ago, some thought the arena would reinvigorate a section of the borough that had yet to capitalize on its potential, while others believed the neighborhood’s small businesses would meet their demise.

As the arena prepares to celebrate its second anniversary and host an expected 300 events annually, the impact it has had on small businesses appears to be mixed. Some of the stores that survived the seismic shift brought by the 18,000-seat venue report an uptick in patronage, while others remain unaffected ....

Some businesses were not equipped to adapt to the changing environs. According to one news report, roughly 100 local shops shut their doors in the Barclays Center’s first year.

Robert Perris, the district manager for Brooklyn’s Community Board 2, which includes the Barclays Center, corroborated that the type of businesses in the arena’s immediate vicinity has changed.

“It does seem that there has been a loss of some smaller businesses and an increase in some better capitalized businesses,” Mr. Perris acknowledged ....

“It does seem that the streets and individual buildings that have benefitted the most are the ones that can be seen from the Barclays Center,” Mr. Perris said. “It sort of requires a more adventurous arena-goer, someone who does their research ahead of time instead of getting to the arena and looking around and making a spontaneous decision where to go.”

Without more intentional action on the part of leaders, it seems reasonable for us to assume that First Tennessee Park will have the same impact: destablizing small neighborhood businesses and attracting high-visibility, "big box" corporations to Jefferson Street. Character could give way to high-volume (merchandise and traffic).

This information joins a growing compilation of reports of ambiguous economic impact around sports venues. In St. Louis new ballpark amenities are encouraging baseball fans to ignore once popular neighborhood businesses. Louisville subsidized a new arena that did not deliver the promised job growth. Minor league officials admit that, regardless of local claims to the contrary, baseball is not in the business of urban redevelopment. Indeed, the politicians have a track record of ludicrous promises invented to leverage subsidies for sports venues. Yet, according to independent research, there is no proven connection between pro sports subsidies and economic development.

So, with First Tennessee Park sprinting to its 2015 Opening Day completion, those of us who are its neighbors face uncertain prospects built on a shaky foundation of empty, unsubstantiated promises. On the one hand, we can assume that new businesses inside the development that includes First Tennessee Park will attempt to lure patrons away from existing Jefferson Street businesses. On the other hand, we have no idea what will happen to our quality of life when 8,400 commuters are "injected" into our residential area 70 times during the summer.

While the Courthouse and developers depict the ballpark as a rising tide that will lift all ships in our neighborhoods, it also has the potential, based on evidence, elsewhere to be a one-two punch to the gut.

Marshaled by mayoral candidate Megan Barry, the council refuses to discuss any downside to the Bridgestone dealio

In October CM Megan Barry characterized the problems that uneven growth causes in places like North Nashville as "growing pains" completely ignoring the historical prejudice and systemic flow of resources away from our neighborhoods. By minimizing the collateral shambles and planned blight caused by growth, she ignored how North Nashville has perennially been treated as a dumping ground for wealthy Nashville's refuse and as new territory for white settlement after real estate prices bottom out. Her answer to the "growing pains" is "transportation and affordable housing." Ironically, her last significant transportation vote as council member was to fund that $18 million sidewalk, exclusively serving downtown, while some Madison children walk to school in the street. Has she considered the limitations of calculating what gets called "affordable housing" in gentrifying neighborhoods?

Last night she also made clear that another option she would favor as mayor would be more of the same untamed corporate sweetheart deals that Karl Dean has become a rock star at ginning up while benignly ignoring North Nashville:

By turning this parking lot into a permanent [Bridgestone] fixture in the Nashville skyline, we are moving Nashville forward .... We are going to keep 1,100 Nashville jobs, but we are going to add 600 new jobs in Nashville with an average salary of $93,000 in which it increases our tax base for schools, for transportation and for public safety .... Let's be clear this is not a corporate giveaway.

Ms. Barry went on to soft-pedal one of the more alarming aspects of Dean's deal: Bridgestone can lay-off up to 20% of the 1,700 people it promises to deliver without losing its tax-free status with Metro. She said that "if Bridgestone fails to deliver" 1,700 jobs by the end of 2020, Metro can "claw back" a fraction of the taxes owed. But Bridgestone is still given leeway to shed 20% of this workforce and still be exempt from property taxes. The Bridgestone boosters are not being entirely honest about the risks of this deal. As one reporter put it, "Council members stayed away from discussing any possible downside to the Bridgestone deal."

The Orwellian dimensions of council supporters' comments about the Bridgestone deal are staggering. Bridgestone is not obligated to create any new permanent jobs. The company is praised for importing 600 out-of-state employees, but it can shed over half of the 600's filled positions and still keep its tax break. Supporters also tout Bridgestone's pledge to donate $150,000 to Metro schools. $150,000. That's it. They're getting a $56,300,000 hand-out from Nashville, and they're only pledging $150,000 to our schools, which I assume they can claim on their tax returns. Yet, in CM Barry's words, "this is not a corporate giveaway."

Another Orwellian moment was CM Barry's claim that the new Bridgestone building would be a permanent fixture in the Nashville skyline. Backing her up, CM Erica Gilmore said the HQ would "forever change" the skyline. The only real constant with regard to buildings in Nashville is that older ones are torn down to make room for newer ones, regardless of the history or need to preserve what is important to people here. Anyone who claims that there is permanence in Nashville's built environment is acting misleadingly and dishonestly. A new building downtown may be here for a long time, or it may give way to some future capital project subsidized by the mayor and ballyhooed by a blustery council.

Megan Barry is right about one thing. The new Bridgestone HQ is going to be a fixture, permanent or not, on the Nashville skyline that many will be able to see. Many in North Nashville who will never have the opportunity at any possible living wage jobs Bridgestone might catalyze will see it, too. And that is as close as they are going to get to the sense of entitlement downtown. The Bridgestone HQ sits on a far horizon for most of those who work their livings in this town. Average North Nashvillians will not be enjoying those $93,000 jobs even if the projected taxes on them eventually trickle down here and there like crumbs from the master's table.

And Megan Barry will continue to minimize the growth-induced plight of working people as "growing pains" that are somehow necessary when a city barters away its corporate tax base due to the Courthouse terror that companies might plead poverty and abandon it.

Bridgestone paid for the study that concluded that Bridgestone will bring billions to Nashville

Straight up, tell me: would you be more likely to rely on a study that was funded by a business that stands to benefit from the study's conclusions or a study that was conducted independently of the risk/reward to the business activity studied?

If you in the former group, you likely will have no qualms (like I do) about news of a study of the "economic impact" of a new Nashville Bridgestone headquarters:

Bridgestone Americas' decision to move its corporate headquarters to downtown Nashville will generate $1.7 billion in additional economic activity in Greater Nashville during the next 20 years, or $87 million annually, according to a economic impact report by the University of Tennessee-Knoxville ....

Bridgestone paid for the UT-Knoxville report.

I should point out that the original story on the study did not contain the last sentence about where the funding is coming from until I pointed the omission out to the news source. Omitting that information was effectively leaving off an important disclaimer that affects the trustworthiness of the study itself. Otherwise, people will believe that some professor conducted the research in pristine disinterestedness. To their credit, they added the disclaimer.

Go read the research "findings" for yourself, but I choose to believe that we are left wanting an independent, double-blind study of even such a slippery, subjective topic as "economic impact."

There were two other cities that Nashville beat out for the HQ. Were area researchers hired in those cities to tout the economic impact of a new building for Bridgestone? If so, the corporate pattern appears to be to use contracted university researchers to market the product.

Bridgestone subsidiary hired an African warlord to "squeeze out" profits as Bridgestone lost money

Jim Cooper and Megan Barry at Karl Dean's Bridgestone announcement.

On top of all of his other government handouts to corporations, sports teams and TV shows, Mayor Karl Dean plans to give the Bridgestone company $50 million keep its headquarters in Nashville. There is no promise of new jobs, but only that 1,100 existing positions in Nashville and 600 in other states would be relocated downtown. In exchange, Bridgestone does not have to pay property taxes for 20 years (even though politicians are fond of saying that relocating business mean more property taxes to pay for Metro services).

Got it? There is no requirement that new jobs be created, although the Tennessean gushed that Bridgestone is "welcome" to create some.

Thanks to Mayor Dean (and Republican Governor Bill Haslam) the international auto parts manufacturer will be squeezing profits out of this Nashville deal (after the compliant Metro Council approves) for the next 20 years, obligation-free.

My concerns about how we're going to pay for vital infrastructure in the future while Hizzoner hands out free candy to corporations is strictly a first world problem; although it is a problem that falls disproportionately on working class people. Bridgestone also has a significant third world problem: the company does not have a clean past on the human rights front.

In the 1990s, their subsidiary Firestone had financial arrangements with rebel forces in Africa lead by Charles Taylor who would eventually be convicted for crimes and imprisoned for crimes against humanity. ProPublica has a podcast on the "secret history" of Firestone's dealings. Here is an exerpt:

During this time Bridgestone is purchasing Firestone in a big corporate merger back in the United States. It's a disaster by many accounts, and Bridgestone was losing money. So, they're trying to squeeze profits out of anywhere they can, and if you're the manager of the branch that holds Firestone, you're looking to save wherever you can. And so, Firestone is now this plantation ... making no money at all. Losing money. And so, you want to get it to become this profit-making enterprise again. And you have this connection ... with the people of Liberia that you don't want to break .... After months of negotiation they reach a deal in January of 1992 .... It's a memorandum of understanding between Firestone and Charles Taylor's government .... Firestone says, "We'll come back and we'll start paying taxes ... to Charles Taylor. In return, Charles Taylor will provide them with security. Now keep in mind that Charles Taylor is running a rebel army. This is not a state. So, essentially, Firestone is hiring a guerrilla army to protect their investments and they are paying money to a guerrilla army, which is trying to take over a country .... At the bottom line, money gets moved around, and Firestone was contributing to the war chest of Charles Taylor.

Late in the podcast, the ProPublica reporter talks about the long-term consequences of Firestone's financial arrangement with the African warlord:

One of the most shocking things about Liberia, is that there is not a single person who has ever been convicted of crimes against Liberians in a war that left 200,000 people dead [from 1989 to 1996]. Where there was thousands and thousands of child soldiers. Where there was cannibalism and people were eaten alive, burned, raped. An entire generation essentially erased, and no one has been held responsible for that .... You can't make a direct connection between what Firestone did in the 1990s and the Ebola crisis today. What is true is that the Liberian civil war ... led largely by Charles Taylor absolutely destroys the country. And afterwards, the people who helped in that destruction ... are never held accountable. So, now they're running the country. So, the very people who destroyed the country are no in charge of rebuilding it .... Liberia received tons and tons of aid after the civil war ended. Where has that gone? Why hasn't the health system improved? .... It's very easy to make a link between the civil war and Liberia's current horrible disease situation with Ebola.

ProPublica makes it clear that Charles Taylor relied on the money he received from Firestone to build an empire that waged war on its own people. That war destroyed infrastructure and created deadly social conditions, which made the Ebola cataclysm inevitable.

Since Mayor Karl Dean is proposing that Nashville taxpayers subsidize Bridgestone's new skyscraper headquarters with public dollars, the company should be held accountable for political conditions it generates with subsidized wealth at home and abroad. We should be more circumspect before gushing about how good Bridgestone is for people and jumping on their bandwagon.

The new ballpark blows its $65,000,000 Metro budget and the casualties include our future services from Public Works and Metro Water

First Tennessee Park wants you to marvel in the glory of their beige bricks
as the ballpark construction budget hits a wall.
[screenshot from their Instagram account]

Last year Mayor Karl Dean, with a big assist from my very own council member Erica Gilmore, ramrodded the plan for First Tennessee Park through the compliant Metro Council with little or no discussion and minimal chances for community feedback. When it was suggested that the developer/owner Frank Ward be held liable for any budget overages beyond the $65,000,000 budget, CM Jerry Maynard called it "a poison pill", supporters wrote in letters not to stipulate such a responsibility on poor, cash-strapped Mr. Ward. The compliant council--with the enthusiastic support of 2015 mayoral candidate Megan Barry--absolved the Nashville Sounds club from any responsibility for cost overages.

And just like that, the mayor and the Metro Council encumbered the Metro budget for any obligation beyond the $65,000,000 of expense planned for project construction.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost for us, even those who so blindly hopped on the bandwagon without a second thought or a single misgiving. You see, the council stuck us with the bill.

The Mayor's Office admitted to the Tennessean that it will have to spend $5,000,000 more on the ballpark due to water lines, electric lines, and paving along its properties. Mind you, this is Metro government. They have all of the information on water lines, electric lines, and paving. They are people who are supposed to be able to see this sort of thing coming. You cannot convince me that they did not know. Either they kept themselves willfully ignorant or they considered anything over $65,000,000 as bad PR in the days leading up to the big council vote.

Ever since my family moved to Salemtown 10 years ago, we've known that the area has 100 year old water and sewer lines underground. Every time a development goes up here that knowledge is reiterated. Some developers have balked at the price of upgrading the antiquated infrastructure here. This is not some big unknown. If we knew that fact, if others knew that fact, does Metro Nashville (and more importantly Metro Planning, which informed the ballpark plan) have any excuse for not knowing that when it came time to proposing a budget?

Gilmore: refused to slow
the plan down to talk
things through

Of course, there are many who would have supported this plan sight unseen were the proposal $70,000,000 or $75,000,000 or $80,000,000 regardless of the damage to funding the delivery of the Metro services we actually rely on every day. The idea of community planning, of involving stakeholders in big capital projects in the process, is lost on these people. And I'm not sure that they understand the connection between increased expenses to pay for this luxury and the loss of income to sustain our basic services.

It is such foolishness, because that is exactly what Hizzoner's budget busters are going to cost us; delivery of services because the money is going to come out of other Metro departments; Metro Public Works, Metro Water, and Metro IT (Metro Water is already raided annually to pay off the Tennessee Titans' football stadium). Keep this mind: it will be bad form to criticize the failure of these taxed departments to deliver services in the future if you made no effort to slow down Erica Gilmore in 2013 when she brought this project to full approval less than three months even against the protests of her constituents that we need more time and community involvement.

Others of us were waving red flags about this plan and its unanswered questions as soon as the first community meeting ended. We warned that something like this could happen to put our services at risk. And, by golly, we were right. The Mayor's Office plans to raid other services that our tax dollars pay for. And here is not a thing we can do about it now. After all, Courthouse logic would say, "We've already committed so much money to this. We need to bite the bullet and see it through. Compared to $65 million, $5 million is chump change." And you know what? We, the citizens of Nashville, are the chumps. This was an open-ended confidence game from jump.

Playing Nashville like a dollar store guitar.

It is amazing to me that Rich Riebeling, the mayor's finance director, can claim with a straight face that he already watched the budget overages of the new convention center. So, he expected them in the ballpark plan. He said nothing about expecting the same kind of overages in the community meeting he at the Farmers' Market. And if he had the same realism regarding the ballpark, why did he fail to provide some cushion in his initial cost estimates? The only thing that I can figure is that he failed because he was just as willing to risk the future delivery of Metro services on First Tennessee Park as he was on Music City Center for the sake of wealthy developers.

The Mayor's Office rationalizes the overage by setting the economic growth ceiling even higher. The sky is the limit for these guys and no expense can be spared for Frank Ward, even though many of us understand that everything has limits. Unforgiving limits. Like those causing Metro Nashville Public Schools to teach some children in frigid portable buildings. See how it is? A minor league baseball owner lives high on the Music City hog because he is already rich while some of Nashville's kids shiver while trying to learn math or science.

Beyond the ballpark dreamers, will it truly be a boon for our North Nashville neighborhoods? We know it will be for Mr. Ward. One spellbound real estate journo relates the owner's plan for thousands of feet of restaurant and bar space to the "symbiotic relationships" retail space has will new ballparks around the country. The flip side of that symbiosis is that in other cities the restaurants and bars that already existed in surrounding neighborhoods are reduced to survival mode.

For all of these rationalizations that local businesses will prosper due to Metro Nashville dropping more bling on Mr. Ward's ballpark, residential and retail, one unwavering truth remains. Frank Ward will be competing with the businesses along Jefferson Street. He will try to pull customers into his complex to spend more in order to backload his government subsidized income. We are bankrolling his competitive advantage. It is that way with all professional team owners in this age. But don't take my word for it. Sports economist Victor Matheson makes the case:

Teams aren’t in the business of making sure to generate a lot of money for the local bar across the street .... They’re in the business of selling you the $11 beer ... once you’re inside the stadium.

In the end, Karl Dean and Rich Riebeling and Jerry Maynard and Erica Gilmore and Megan Barry and every other stadium supporter are hawking a bill of goods and a gallon of snake oil to justify spending tens of millions for what is nothing more than corporate welfare to keep a very wealthy real estate kingpin from pleading poverty and moving the team out of Nashville. As if we don't hear everyday how Nashville is such a hot commodity that people choose to stay without being bought and paid for. As long as we swallow the myth that rich big shots require our tax dollars we will simply look the other way as these budget busting overages continue to roll in.

We can choose to bury our heads in the sand under the pretense of supporting the local team and North Nashville, but how long can we afford to keep doing that?

 Play ball, Megan Barry?  Pay bills!

UPDATE: As of March 18, 2015, the expenses are skyrocketing $10,000,000 over the original budget projections. Karl Dean says that he will not raise taxes or float bonds to pay for it which means that the revenues will have to come from Metro services.


UPDATE: The Tennessean reports on July 17, 2017:

More than two years after the first game at the Nashville Sounds' First Tennessee Park, a new Metro audit says the final cost of the publicly-financed project ballooned to $91 million when adding the amount spent to make improvements to the surrounding area.

The same audit also blames an expedited, 13-month construction timeline as one reason the minor league baseball stadium overshot its budget for construction and land acquisition by around $10 million ....

The audit, which was finalized in April and presented by Metro Auditor Mark Swann to the six-member Metropolitan Nashville Audit Committee last week, was conducted after the stadium was built because the total cost significantly exceeded projections.

"It was basically 13 months from approval to opening day," Swann told The Tennessean. "When we were going through the billings, you could see where we were paying overtime for expedited deliveries."

You may remember that some of living around the ballpark site advocated a more deliberate, participatory, and slow approach to the gentrification project. Can't say we didn't warn you.

The gang of three and their weak tea

The last time we saw the 3 mayoral candidates--Charles Robert Bone, Jeremy Kane and Megan Barry--together in North Nashville it was 3 months ago for the town hall meeting held in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. In August and then in September I pointed out that none of three had said anything meaningful about how to deal with either the militarization of police or the problem of police brutality in predominantly African American neighborhoods.

I'm not aware of any promises or policy proposals that any of these candidates made on the subject in October. Now, after 100 days, on the eve of a grand jury decision on the shooting, with Missouri in a declared state of emergency and protests planned around the nation (including Chattanooga), these candidates made a second appearance in North Nashville this week. Nothing has changed. They still offer scant insight regarding what they are willing to do to deter a Ferguson from happening in Nashville.

Not only did they fail to address the question again, but their solutions for equality of prosperity leave something to be desired:

Bone, who spoke first, said investment and attention on downtown Nashville isn’t being felt in all neighborhoods, even just five miles from the city’s core, where the forum took place.

“In many respects, we sit 50 miles away,” said Bone, an attorney. “As a city, I think we should have the obligation to keep our foot on the gas, but at the same time to be very intentional about taking the investment and that prosperity that some of us are seeing and pushing it out to communities like Bordeaux and North Nashville.”

Barry...was unequivocal about the state of the city: “There’s a lot of work still to do.” She briefly spoke about economic investment, education, social justice and transit.

“Neighborhoods are what knit all of this together,” Barry said. “I will make sure the neighborhoods we cherish exist even though all that economic development is coming.”

Taking only a slightly different approach, LEAD Academy charter school founder Kane used his time on the microphone to recount his family’s involvement in underserved neighborhoods.

He said that while the candidates agreed on Nashville’s needs, the difference would be the solutions they pursue. He said he has the track record in the school he founded and in his community service.

He said he wants to make sure the city’s reputation for nonprofit giving, entrepreneurship and strong faith improves all places.

What each of these candidates is offering North Nashville is not bold. It is weak tea for our edification. The vision for governing our communities must be larger than the trickle down strategies of Mr. Bone. The next mayor has to do more than merely make sure that neighborhoods "exist" amidst exclusive prosperity, as CM Barry suggests. Mr. Kane's claims that philanthropy and entrepreneurship are answers to preventing the destructive side of economic growth seem short-sighted, paternalistic and unsound.

These are all just the extension of Mayor Karl Dean's policies and practices, which have not been good for North Nashville. No less significantly, they still do not offer anything to address police militarization and brutality, which are issues that continue to be important and unresolved to North Nashville residents. Do these candidates really understand their audience when they come into our community? They all seem more at home in West Nashville.

The gang of three minimize the disjuncture of Metro Nashville's financial investments in big business downtown and the shrinking resources for services to neighborhoods outside of the Courthouse sphere of opulence. Many of our communities are dislocated from the rising wealth focused on the tourism, hospitality and entertainment industries. Unchecked economic growth, leveraged by self-serving developers, tends to cause untrammeled gentrification of North Nashville neighborhoods, driving folks of more modest income out while dismantling diversity.

With that kind of dislocation, police may be more prone to mobilize to protect the movers and shakers if movements appear to protest the injustices. With whom will Metro Police identify in neighborhoods bypassed by subsidized wealth? What kind of patience and forbearance will cops show for people who orbit far and away from the inner bands of Music City influence?

We can be sure that Metro Nashville will protect its huge investments in Nashville's wealthiest private enterprises. Local government cannot afford to lose its corporate welfare wager. Will the police follow suit? How they will treat the 99% as well as dissenters remains open to question. But let us be crystal clear: they have the firepower to suppress popular dissent, especially non-violent civil disobedience, if they choose to; they have a militarized arsenal suited for urban warfare if necessary.

And Ferguson showed that when cops march against protesters a good number of innocent bystanders and local neighborhoods are dealt the unjust collateral damage.

For Nashville's mayoral candidates to continue to fail to address the capacity of Metro Police to exercise different standards in North Nashville neighborhoods than they do elsewhere indicates to me that none of them is truly serious about being mayor of all of Nashville.

Ferguson will stay on our radar. When will it appear on theirs?

What will the real impact of the new ballpark be on neighborhood businesses?

It is not clear yet what kind of establishments will occupy mixed-use spaces in the development that includes First Tennessee Park, but a popular new dining and retail complex at relatively new Busch Stadium in St. Louis indicates negative impact on established neighborhood businesses.

Small businesses up and down Jefferson Street and in Germantown supported building a new ballpark nearby hoping it would boost their revenues. Will it be the boon that they expect? Or will we actually lose businesses to new ones conveniently located on the First Tennessee Park site? St. Louis seems to be a cautionary tale. Ballpark Village seems to be luring customers away from other neighborhood establishments:

This season the crowds are bypassing the neighborhood bars… [Quoting bar owner #1]: “Everybody is down at least 20 to 30 percent if not more,” everybody that is except Ballpark Village. Crowds are just naturally drawn to the complex, which opened this year by the Cardinals and built with tax incentives and every intention of luring in baseball fans …. [Owners of successful neighborhood bars around the ballpark] sank in money for expansion in recent years. Now they’re cutting jobs. [Quoting bar owner #2]: “We’ve seen a decline in business for sure …. We’re going to have to ride it out. Cut back on staff a little bit.” [Quoting bar owner #1]: “… all of us really struggle … to keep our business and make it a success. So, when they did this, it just pulled that much more away from us.” Some owners now say their goal is just to survive the baseball season as Ballpark Village keeps packing them in.

"Just surviving" does not sound like a promising business climate for neighborhood bars and restaurants. If I owned a business in Germantown, I would be concerned about the prospect of "crowds bypassing" my establishment. Remember the dining and retail desert that settled in around antiquated Greer Stadium over the years. I hope the impact of a new ballpark is at least more positive for the neighborhoods than that.

Study: the jobs "created" by big municipal projects were never really "created" at all

Recently I cited a bunch of evidence that debunked the urban myth that building new ballparks results in net gains for economic development in neighborhoods. The prospect of economic development is one of the rationalizations used by Karl Dean's office to defend Metro's support of First Tennessee Park in its Jefferson Street location.

Another prominent rationalization used to defend Metro's financial support of the park--that subsidies create jobs for North Nashville--is open to debate in the wake of a study that finds that subsidizing capital projects does not do anything of the sort:

a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation suggests that the money [from public subsidies and tax breaks] only shifts jobs from one state to another and doesn't necessarily create them. State and local incentives rarely target the new and young businesses that actually do create jobs.

The subsidy escalation that states have entered has become a zero-sum game in which a largely fixed set of jobs shift from one state to another as companies search for the highest bidder. And even when new jobs are created, companies would likely have needed to add them anyway, and the cost per position to taxpayers can be astronomical.

The 2011 embarrassment of the failed move of IQT Solutions that Karl Dean went through a few years ago drove the point home that the "creation" of jobs in Nashville would cost Canadian workers their jobs if the company had not eventually gone bankrupt. To a certain extent common sense should tell us that the relocation of companies often comes at great cost to the places they leave. But studies help reinforce the point.

If you build it, they will relocate.

At last year's community meeting on the ballpark proposal, Dean's Director of Finance, Rich Riebeling admitted (perhaps in a moment of candor?) that Metro is subsidizing the project because that is how other cities do it. But otherwise, the refrain from ballpark supporters is that transferring money to private companies "creates" jobs; as if those companies do not use the money for purposes other than creating jobs.

How many livable wage jobs (I'm not talking about construction jobs, which end in a few months when the building is erected) are going to be created by First Tennessee Park? The latest research indicates that we will not see enough jobs to equal the $65 million investment that we are dumping into the development.

Boston will be Nashville's favorite mistake

It's just a matter of time for before the snowjob to expand convention centers hits Nashville, too:

The [Massachusetts] House overwhelmingly passed a $1.1 billion expansion bond last week. The Senate is scheduled to take up the legislation Thursday, after trimming $110 million from it over concerns of a giveaway to hotel developers.

President Therese Murray is a strong supporter of the expansion. So strong, in fact, that in a speech last month before the Boston Chamber of Commerce, she quoted verbatim the talking points of Massachusetts Convention Center Authority Jim Rooney, who says the expansion will vault the state into the top five convention destinations in the country and create thousands of jobs and $184 million of additional economic impact every year ....

Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration...said in a phone interview that convention space in the United States grew from 40 million square feet to 71 million square feet between 1990 and 2013, but tradeshow demand has been flat since 2000. Moreover, Boston’s expansion would occur alongside expansions planned or proposed in cities such as Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

“There is nothing Rooney can do to make Boston a top-five convention destination,” Sanders said.

Joan Eisenstodt, a Washington-based national event planner, said competition sometimes prompts convention centers to virtually give away space to lure conventions, which pokes a hole in so-called economic impact. She also said a bigger Boston center may actually amplify Boston’s current weaknesses, such as our growing congestion.

Nashville faces a perfect storm of 1) post-sexy-beast debt that will plague the next administration and drag down the Metro budget, 2) image-conscious politicians who will be tantalized by pretty new capital projects to pad resumes, 3) outside competition from foolhardy cities like Boston who are trying to keep up in the race to the next big thing. That convergence assures that Nashville will be before long looking to expand its brand new Music City Center.

Also, consider for a moment some of the logic behind the Mayor's new plan for an east-west bus rapid transit connector to serve the convention center. Music City Center has created more Downtown traffic congestion. The Amp is designed to alleviate that, which in turn, provides another rationale when MCC expansion is proposed by a future mayor. The Amp will likely free up room for even more congestion caused once future MCC expansion is approved.

These capital projects look more and more like vicious circles within which Nashville is suspended and within which taxpayers are trapped. When does it stop? Where do we reach the tipping point where the costs destroy the few benefits that trickle down to us?

And how long before Music City Center starts giving away space because their competitors are doing it? Not long. Try August. A convention of convention planners is getting a free ride from Metro:

Cities trying to keep their massive convention centers busy bend over backwards to bring Graham’s group to town.

Nashville isn’t charging a dime for using the new Music City Center. And the Convention and Visitors Corporation is spending roughly $1.5 million to provide everything from private concerts with country music superstars to Nashville-branded air fresheners in taxicabs.

CVC president Butch Spyridon says it makes sense to waive the rental fee and go all out.

“You’ve got to build a mousetrap to capture the money,” he says. “And if you want to be in the game, you have to be competitive.”

Convention planning. Nice work if you can get it, thanks to the sweetheart treatment planners get from municipal governments who choose to remain willfully ignorant about independent studies on convention trends. Money buys other "studies" to the contrary.

In the meantime, the drag on Metro services caused by Music City Center, the expensive albatross that many of us have been concerned about, is already here:

In its first year of operation, the Music City Center convention hall failed to meet projections for hotel bookings, saw its surplus revenue fund drop by nearly $8 million and had its bond rating downgraded ....

At a cost of $623 million, Music City Center, which opened in May of last year, is the most expensive civic project in Metro's history. The center, overseen by the city's Convention Center Authority, also triggered $245 million in public spending for the headquarters Omni Hotel.

The project's supporters remain confident and paint a different picture of Music City Center. They point to a self-reported economic impact of $125 million through March in addition to a wave of expensive hotel renovations and potential new downtown projects ....

However, the real challenge for the Convention Center Authority appears to be lurking in the next three fiscal years, when incentive payments for the Omni and debt payments for the center will escalate, while hotel bookings in those years continue to lag behind expectations. Hotel bookings are important, because the Music City Center and Omni incentives are funded with a series of tourist taxes.

Cheerleaders for Music City Center can spin their own "economic impact" numbers any way they wish. When Nashville's Mayor annually proposes slashing the budgets of Metro departments, we are not fooled by the spin. The benefits are not trickling down. Any impact is negligible for those of us on the outside of tourism looking in. The cheerleaders make their money off the taxes we kick in to provide free conventions for tourists. Of course, they are not going to acknowledge reality. To do so would cut against their financial interests in keeping public money flowing to their coffers.

In the meantime, get ready for future build outs. The tourism industry has an addiction to feed. The rest of us are the saps backing these transactions, watching our money flow into a bottomless pit of big boxes in need of future expansion. The spin cycle won't stop any time soon.

The president of the league to which the Nashville Sounds belong: baseball is "not in the business of urban redevelopment"

The Pacific Coast League executive appears to be on the same page with professional researchers (who find no objective basis for subjective claims that new ballparks generate greater economic development):

When Branch Rickey [III] talks about what minor league baseball brings to a city, he doesn’t talk about increased property values or the stimulation of downtown entertainment districts. “We’re not in the business of urban redevelopment,” Rickey says. “We would not profess clairvoyance on that front.” He prefers to talk about the fan experience. And when he talks about this experience, he just happens to talk about new stadiums.

From the Friends of Sulphur Dell to Jefferson Street merchants to council members to the Mayor to the Nashville Sounds front office itself, we have seen no shortage of contriving economic impact for North Nashville of this new ballpark. Anyone who has gone all in on this game of chance is doing so on the basis of a leap of faith that Jefferson Street will naturally redevelop due to "First Tennessee Field" (or just a bunch of new apartments to be built around the ballpark).

Some of the merchants and leaders on Jeff St. even seem bent on shoving past any future stage of modest growth of locally owned stores (like those we see around places like Germantown, Five Points and 12South) to large national chains other than the ones already existing on Jeff St.:

Keisha Beard, 48, whose family has owned the property that houses the spa for 90 years, sees the ballpark becoming a reality as a sign that Jefferson Street is ready to join the big leagues. "This is the last side of town that's not been developed," she said. "We're a college street — with TSU, Fisk and Meharry — and don't even have a major restaurant chain here. The students right here need more goods and services."

Sharon Hurt, executive director of community development group Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership, also welcomes growth opportunities but hopes any projects developers bring celebrate and embrace legacy of the once vibrant economic hub of the city's black community. "I don't want it to become so commercialized and capitalized that we lose the soul and spirit of the community" ....

"We've got Church's Chicken, we've got KFC, and we've got Popeye's — we don't need that anymore," Hurt said. "I would rather see more diversity like Chipotle, Panera Bread and Smoothie King.

This is part of the problem I have with those who dream of economic development: they do not seem careful about what they ask for. I would like to see a thriving Jefferson Street economy, but why not along the lines of an urban village with locally-owned shops and other offerings? Do we really want Jeff St. to boom like West End or Green Hills and their national chains? The charming and popular Magazine Street neighborhood in New Orleans finds itself facing the loss of its local character and struggling with the influx of national chains, which kill the neighborhood vibe.

Magazine St., which we enjoyed on our last vacation

Is that what we really want for Jefferson Street?

These exaggerated expectations are all part of the unrealistic view of the impact of a ballpark on hyperlocal economy. Hopes around here are irrationally bloated by the prospect of a ballpark divorced from awareness of the risks of new construction.

And yet, even the president of the Sounds' league remains sober enough to acknowledge that new ballpark construction does not increase property values or stimulate growth.

He seems to realize that wishful thinking won't alter reality. And yet, he can still advocate building new ballparks. There are those among us who could learn something from Branch Rickey.


UPDATE: As I update this post at the end of August 2015, Sharon Hurt is involved in a run-off as a candidate for an at-Large seat on Metro Council. She will probably win, which will give her a perch from which to achieve her expectation of chain-store development along Jefferson Street.

Given that August 2015 also includes the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans, I have been reading Roberta Brandes Gratz's "We're Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City." From Gratz's perspective, Magazine Street can still teach us about sustainable and smart development along the Jefferson Street corridor without reference to chain-store businesses and big-box stores:

World-famous Magazine Street is a national treasure, a remarkable six-mile stretch that, like the rule-defying traffic patterns of the city streets, contradicts many assumptions about shopping streets. It has rebounded in full force since the storms and serves as the model for shorter, more localized streets where rents are lower. It is the largest of the local shopping streets, passing through several different neighborhoods and attracting shoppers from out of town as well. This shopping street evolved without big plans, large developers, or cookie-cutter formulas.

In the 1950s and ’60s, when the car became more important than the pedestrian, many cities turned their primary shopping streets one-way—yet another of those mid-century trends intended to speed car traffic, to which New Orleans did not succumb. Only minutes from the central business district, Magazine is a two-way traffic street with only one lane each way, giving the street an intimate feel. Metered parking spaces line both sides. Pedestrians cross comfortably. Cars coming from the side streets edge across carefully without the help of traffic lights. Major thoroughfares with traffic lights cross at half-mile intervals. These are the signature New Orleans boulevard-like streets with two lanes of traffic each way separated by a median—the “neutral ground,” which is landscaped differently in each neighborhood. In its entirety, Magazine Street epitomizes what [Jane] Jacobs describes as a “close grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially.

Many of us believe that Jeff St is a Nashville treasure, but it can be more with community-based planning and development instead of the relentless eradication spurred by unchained growth under market forces alone.

Gratz also cites a 2009 study that included data from Magazine Street. The study concludes that locally business generates twice the sales of big-box stores and recirculates twice the revenue as that recirculated by chain stores in the local economy. I have no doubt that college students with their limited perspective of Jeff St history would enjoy more chain stores (with which they are acquainted) along the corridor. I have no doubt that Ms. Hurt, if she becomes a council member, will lobby the Mayor's Office to give tax breaks and other corporate welfare to national companies so that they will flip Jeff St into West End Av. That would be a total waste of an opportunity to help local businesses generate an economy that would recirculate resources back into our North Nashville neighborhoods at a faster clip than Target or Chipolte could. It would also be a total waste of the chance to instill the pride of supporting smaller-scale, locally-owned businesses.

Look who is giving Karl Dean some stiff competition in the contest to transfer huge sums of public wealth to private corporations

At a time when a state Senate finance committee has found that Tennessee revenues are down because of the sweetheart corporate giveaways, Republican Governor Bill Haslam not only wants to entitle the Sears Corporation to around $100,000 per job it creates here, but he intended to give away the Tennessee Tower, too:

In a script for Gov. Bill Haslam to read on camera -- prepared in 2011 by his Department of Economic and Community Development -- a most unusual offer was drafted to try to entice retail giant Sears to relocate its corporate headquarters to Tennessee.

The Sears effort was dubbed "Project Neptune."

"We're so committed to making your new home in Tennessee that we are prepared to offer you one of the premiere buildings in Nashville's thriving downtown," the script read.

"Our state office building, the Tennessee Tower, can be an instantaneous and immediate home for Project Neptune's corporate headquarters. This highly visible and historic building offers over 600,000 square feet of prime office space -- located conveniently across from Legislative Plaza and a stone's throw away from my office in the state Capitol."

Obscene corporate welfare is in no short supply here in Nashville, regardless of how strapped government budgets are.

What goes for NYC goes doubly for Nashville

New York City has a new progressive mayor to replace the neo-liberal Republican Mike Bloomberg, and noted architectural critic Michael Sorkin acknowledges the transition with an open letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio. I excerpt significant parts here because Nashville Mayor Karl Dean tends to mimic the "public-private partnership" approach to governance that Bloomberg exercised and at which Sorkin takes aim, calling it the "post-Reagan turn against government":

It's time to reintroduce communities into the planning process. New York must move beyond the oppositional model of planning that has too long dominated .... Although there is no contradiction in planning both inductively and deductively, our process is too skewed toward money and away from people: the capacity of neighborhoods to meaningfully participate in planning their own destinies—and that of the larger realms we all share—is fundamental. Wisdom doesn't belong to any particular group (although needs are best assessed locally), and a mayor must empower everyone ....

Let the de Blasio planning department pay better attention, return to the task of physical planning attuned to local desires, and more aggressively pursue architecturally significant outcomes. Instead of simply being the adjudicators of the circumstances for construction, our planners should produce more facts, more designs—and should set priorities that are both concrete and truly visionary.

For the past dozen years, the real power to plan has resided with the city's Economic Development Corporation, which, operating more like a private entity than a city agency, stands outside full scrutiny and control and acts as the mayor's creature. This tilt toward understanding government's role primarily as the facilitator of private initiatives has special consequences for the public realm—a space shared by the city's many publics—and it's time for a more transparent use of public money. There's something dispiriting about celebrating the fact that the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge Park was produced not by the Parks Department but by a special corporation financed by the inclusion of superluxe condos and a hipster hotel within it. Forcing the public realm to effectively produce its own revenues on the spot is a formula for assuring that the best public spaces will be in neighborhoods that can most afford them. The role of planning should be to equalize opportunity and community assets, and any system that either privatizes revenue collection or steers it too locally risks deepening the rift between our “two cities.”

The past two mayoral terms in Nashville drifted away from sustaining agencies in Metro government that advocate for community-based and neighborhood-based interests.

Says Dean: "Maximize tourism and entertainment"

Before Karl Dean took office and started remaking government into a public-private composite, the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods acted as an arbiter between the community and municipal departments. Now most of the energy is going to the Mayor's Office of Economic and Community Development, an intimate partner of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, which spearheads much of what passes for Metro policy. The Office of Neighborhoods has shrunk to the standing of PR gadget.

Consequently, Mayor Dean is experiencing blow-back from his seemingly singular dependence on economic development, and he is having to stave off questions concerning his spending on public infrastructure. There are perceptions that the Mayor is the Mayor of the more privileged parts of the city, but not of the entire city. Nashville has it's own reputation of being "two cities" to live down, but the leaders are not living it down gracefully. Take last week's Nashville Ledger:

Dean is quick to point out that the bulk of his spending plans have focused on basic infrastructure needs, such as sidewalks and paving, as well as projects that provide direct services to residents, including new police precincts, libraries, schools, parks, greenways, bikeways and open space ....

His capital spending plans have also invested $373 million in schools and allocated more than $40 million to improving Nashville’s walkability.

And a capital program begun in 2010 will spend more than $1 billion on a backlog of water, sewer and storm water infrastructure projects throughout Davidson County that were needed to preserve safe, clean drinking water.

But Hizzoner overplayed his hand. If I were Mayor and taking some heat for spending more on subsidizing big business than on serving the community, I would point out if I could how much more I have spent on sidewalks, library buildings and schools than the previous "Neighborhoods Mayor". To me it is telling that Karl Dean does not.

As for the spending on schools, what Mayor Dean failed to mention was that chunks of the $373 million went to aid his program of privatizing public schools by helping charter corporations and corporately-partnered "academies" effectively designed to limit public education for all.

Also, keep this in mind about the water infrastructure: it had been violating the Clean Water Act and getting negative attention from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation for years before Nashville made a concerted effort to upgrade components that predated Abraham Lincoln's administration. The Mayor was forced from the top-down to make changes to Metro Water infrastructure to avoid costly and embarrassing EPA fines that threatened the Nashville brand. There also might be a couple of Metro Council members who should get credit for their efforts at shepherding water upgrades and sensitizing constituents to the need for changes.

If Hizzoner really is not getting the benefit of the doubt on policy that seems focused on handing entitlements to wealthy special interests, then he has earned the reputation. The current planning process is overrun and corrupted by Mayor Dean's exclusive commitments to business over community. Developers continue to enjoy greater advantages over communities than ever before. Wealth tips the balance of power.

If reintroducing communities into the planning process and taking the spotlight off public-private partnerships goes for New York City, the idea goes doubly for Nashville. We have seen a 2-term stretch in which Karl Dean has acted like a mini-Mike Bloomberg and asserted business models over a more democratic community process that should have more influence over growth and development than currently allowed.

A glaring omission in Karl Dean's usual spiel about his priorities

I have blogged this Mayor since the beginning of his short but happy political life.

The constant refrain from him from launch has been: 1) public safety, 2) fully-funded public schools and 3) economic development. In 2007 in his first meeting as Mayor with neighborhood leaders Karl Dean doubled down on schools and safety as his primary means of addressing neighborhood concerns.

The Mayor has been willing to shutter and curtail other services to keep those three talking points in play. They are the fodder of both of his campaigns for Mayor.

The Mayor has proposed and launched the most expensive capital campaigns in Nashville history, principally serving business special interests, realizing his commitment to economic development. He has also articulated his ambitions to transfer public wealth to corporate pockets through privatization and tax breaks for the wealthy.

Entertaining visitors: good. Educating kids: bad.

Now that he has the term-limited security of not having to run for re-election as Mayor what is he jettisoning? Everything but his economic development plank:

We protected funding for schools and public safety .... However, that does not mean we can afford or should continue the sizeable year over year increases we’ve given the schools in previous budgets.

Note nary a murmur about the excesses of economic development. So, the Mayor, after six years in office, intends to start evaluating how much public education and our safety are costing Nashville even as the excesses of pandering to the business crowd seem more obscene.

How come Hizzoner refuses to reevaluate how much his wanton and promiscuous economic development policies are costing us?

Friends of Sulphur Dell founder tells news media that Jefferson St has "more than enough capacity" to handle more traffic than it already has

Pedestrians need friends, too.

Apparently the founder of the Friends of Sulphur Dell has already conducted his own traffic studies on car-congested, pedestrian-unfriendly Jefferson Street, and he draws his own conclusions about the impact of a new ballpark:

Other supports [sic] say Jefferson Street has more than enough capacity to handle the crowds. "We're also talking about off-peak hours for the most part," said Brian Heuser, a founder member of the Friends of Sulphur Dell. "It's a concern, but the overwhelming benefit here certainly outweighs the traffic concerns," he added.

But for some, a quickly approaching Dec. 31 deadline brings more reason for pause. "They may not have enough time to really complete a study to get a full look at what type of traffic really comes through this corridor," [Bill] Pittenger said. "I do think it is being overlooked."

Mr. Heuser's response to the news media does North Nashville a disservice. In any other part of Nashville, neighborhood leaders demand traffic impact studies on major thoroughfares be done before huge projects are approved. Why speculate about something he knows nothing about? The intellectually honest position is to say that we need to be thoughtful about this process and give it enough time so that the results of independent studies catch up with and inform our emotions for or against it.

I could just as easily resort to speculation the opposite way: assume for the sake of argument that Jefferson has "off-peak" hours (whatever "off-peak" means to Mr. Heuser). Traffic arriving on Jefferson St for ballgames and other ballpark events would extend peak traffic hours so that there would rarely be any break in traffic. Then Jefferson St becomes Nashville's latest version Hillsboro Road in Green Hills or Gallatin Pike at Rivergate Mall. Do we really need that kind of congestion during all waking hours of the day and night along this corridor?

But why can't we be more intellectually honest and demand a traffic study before jumping to conclusions? With Mr. Heuser's unabashed, uncritical, unrestrained boosterism we will never be able to leverage a complete streets project that would make Jeff St a corridor that works for walkable neighborhoods as well as for minor league baseball fans. As it is we cannot even leverage honest answers on the impact of a new ballpark.

A couple of quick Friday ballpark thoughts

During his speechifying on a new Sulphur Dell ballpark a few days ago, CM at-Large Jerry Maynard called the project the first major economic investment on Jefferson Street. For your consideration:

• It seems to me that the National Museum of African American Music that had been slated for the state-owned property at the corner of Jeff St. and Rosa Parks Boulevard (currently a parking lot) could have been the first major economic investment, but its leaders bailed on the site when Karl Dean allowed the project to languish and then declared that he wanted to move it downtown (after his Med Mart plan crashed and burned). How did CM Maynard respond? By supporting the Mayor and defending NMAAM's abandonment of Jeff St.
• Given the contaminated soil down the street at the 5th and Jeff intersection next to the proposed ballpark properties, I'm left wondering what lies in the soil at Jeff St. and Rosa Parks. Given that this intersection has been a magnet for gas stations, I'm tempted to search for what was on that corner before the state acquired it. It is pure speculation on my part now, but what are the chances that the soil there could be contaminated to the point where clean up would be too expensive to allow museum construction?

UPDATE: I'm not the only one peeved by the apparent wish of ballpark supporters that working people with families to support in the local community not be allowed to weigh in on a new Sulphur Dell.

In his zeal for a ballpark, Jerry Maynard rewrites our history

Last night I started a post on my impressions of yesterday's Sulphur Dell ballpark community meeting, but it is not in a place where I am satisfied with it. In the meantime, I have been reading the media coverage and noted this:

No one was happier Thursday than At-Large Councilman Jerry Maynard, who at one point before the meeting began, could be seen standing on a chair proclaiming strong support for the project and directing a crowd to pick up red Friends of Sulphur Dell shirts.

"In 2008, we formed Friends of Sulphur Dell right here at Farmers Market, with Freddie [O'Connell, president of the Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association, who was standing nearby] and all the neighborhood association and groups,” Maynard said, following the meeting. “And we didn't know if it was going to happen, but we fought hard for Sulphur Dell because this is the birthplace of baseball [in Nashville]. This is where it should be, the neighborhood ballpark. I'm so excited that it's going to happen. I can't tell you how excited I am. I mean, it's going to happen."

If Friends of Sulphur Dell started in 2008, it is news to me and I have been blogging on North End news since 2005. The group was not announced in Salemtown until 2010, and it was my distinct impression that it was being founded at that time. 2010 was definitely the year that Salemtown Neighbors was invited to participate. The website for Friends of Sulphur Dell was not started until 2011.

CM Maynard's claim that all of the neighborhood associations "fought hard" for a new ballpark in the area is an outright fabrication, misstatement, error and any other word synonymous with "falsehood". Salemtown Neighbors has always expressed a willingness to consider a ballpark as long as all of its questions and concerns were addressed. SNNA appointed me to be one of its representatives to the Sulphur Dell group.

On April 13, 2010, a few days before this group that would become Friends of Sulphur Dell convened at Farmers' Market, Freddie sent a message to the Salemtown Neighbors listserv about a Tennessean reporter incorrectly saying that everyone in our community supported a new ballpark at the early stage:

it seems like the narrative is already that the North End supports Sulphur Dell. He called me yesterday, and I explained that we were not going to take a position till after Saturday's meeting, if at all, and I'm glad he noted that in the story.

After I made it clear in the Sulphur Dell meeting that we were on the fence and that we had particular questions about traffic and parking, and when I asked that we set up community meetings, I stopped being included in the group's proceedings (assuming they had many more after that; the website went quiet in 2011 and did not become active again until August 2013, when news media reported that the Mayor wanted Sulphur Dell).

Where Jerry Maynard now gets the idea (or the gall) to misrepresent Salemtown's support, ambivalence or opposition to a new ballpark is beyond me.

His rewrite of our history is supported by nothing I can find in my records. I received an email saying that Karl Dean told a Hope Gardens resident in 2010 that Sulphur Dell was his preferred location. I was also told by an insider whom I trust that, while the news media was reporting Sulphur Dell as only one option among others the Mayor was considering, the push for finding grassroots support for Sulphur Dell that year came top-down from the Mayor's Office. Around that same time Freddie made it clear to me that he shared concerns the association had about negative quality of life impacts of a new ballpark on Salemtown. He also told me that if Salemtown Neighbors chose to oppose Friends of Sulphur Dell, then it would be a "stumbling block to the unified approach" the boosters were trying to project.

Obviously the council member at-large has taken that disingenuous approach to heart. I hope Freddie took the time yesterday to pull Reverend Jerry Maynard to the curb and to correct his fast-and-loose abuse of the truth in his zeal for a ballpark concept that may or may not be worthy. The record should be set straight.

The real-life impact of a new ballpark absent the unsustainable promises

A woman who has lived in the South Bronx for 35 years (the last 9 of which have been near the new Yankee Stadium) shares her experiences, and we fail to take heed of her view at our own peril:

There was no significant community input into how our neighborhood could co-exist with the new stadium. Our voices were silenced by elected officials who accused us of not wanting any development.

As a resident I have witnessed and indeed lived in the snarling traffic that consumes our neighborhood. As a taxpayer I strongly object to subsidizing garages to bring more traffic to an area that is trying to rebound as a good place to bring up children.

We were told the new stadium would bring economic development and a resurgence to our community.

I invite you to take a walk around the neighborhood and see for yourself if that has happened. Businesses have closed and the remaining ones are hurting as the Yankee organization has moved many of the services inside the stadium.

The NYPD has become super-aggressive on game days by blocking streets with no prior warning and posting police officers all around the neighborhood. Streets with posted signs of “no parking on game day” are closed off to the community while fans are charged to park on these same streets where parking is normally legal and free.

The sanitation trucks circle all day, emptying trash (this would be a wonderful service for residents!). The community is host to numerous parking garages and lots that are open only on game day and of no use to us otherwise.

Mayor Dean has already said that neighborhood input on Sulphur Dell will take a backseat to his own interests. Ballpark boosters already falsely throw charges at ballpark realists like me about how we just do not want development in our backyard ("NIMBY"). Some of us have been raising red flags about potential traffic and parking problems in our dense urban neighborhoods.

But I should underscore her observations that businesses are closing due to services provided inside the stadium development. We have not talked enough about the potential negative economic impact on area stores and restaurants due to the self-enclosed, self-sufficient organization of contemporary ballparks. They are more amusement parks and mixed-use retail than they are sports venues. Hence, they try to be all and end all for customers. Hence, they may pull customers away from Jefferson Street and away from Germantown. Local business owners should not be lulled or deceived into believing that more fans at a new ballpark will translate into a wave of patrons for them. This will not be like Oktoberfest (or Germantown Street Festival).

Salemtown and Germantown better start counting of the costs of the Mayor's plan as well as embracing its benefits. We better start paying attention to neighborhoods elsewhere who have these new sports venues in their midst. If we fail to vet the impact fully we will only be hurting ourselves in the long run.

A tale of two cities, one of which being Nashville

At the behest of an "invite-only" nonprofit Germantown resident and Cool People Care President Sam Davidson, describes how Nashville is staking fresh claims on emerging, young-adult-oriented industry:

Nashville may be a bit new to the startup game, but it’s growing quickly. Having been known for primarily launching music or health care companies, it’s now growing tech companies, consumer products, and entertainment ideas.

Kudos go to organizations like Nashville’s new Entrepreneur Center, working hard under the leadership of Michael Burcham to provide incubation, knowledge, and pathways to funding for people with a great idea. Chapters like the local Social Enterprise Alliance are also helping to network and support entrepreneurs with a desire to make a profit while making a difference.

Top-notch schools like Vanderbilt and Belmont pump young talent into the local economy. Belmont offers a major in entrepreneurship too. Wonderful climate and affordable living are icing on the cake!

Not sure I agree that we have a "wonderful climate". This past summer was brutally hot, and our extreme storms seem to be more extreme than usual (the 2010 flood, a case in point). But that is not the point on which I want to dwell here.

Instead, I want to draw out a couple of things. One is that Sam evokes the name of the Entrepreneur Center, which almost exactly one year ago took up an extreme right-wing Twitter campaign and called upon Nashville entrepreneurs to protest the popular grassroots movement Occupy Wall Street. People are still scratching their heads over that one. That EC would veer to one extreme gives them less credibility in my book.

The other point is that the startup industry seems to dominate online buzz here in Music City, and the spin is constantly promotional and echo-chamberish. The reality at the moment is that the venture capital enterprise is contracting, spelling a belt-tightening future for entrepreneurs. Hence, the more heavily Nashville relies on startups, the greater the chance our economy will contract with it.

Compare Sam's glowing representation of a wide-open Nashville to The Atlantic Cities' consideration of "slow-and-steady" San Antonio, Texas shortly after that city's Mayor, Julián Castro, gave the key note speech earlier this autumn at the Democratic National Convention. It provides a more sober, chastened assessment about the economic diversity required for recession-proofing:

In our interview, Castro acknowledged that the bedrock of San Antonio's economy was not in bright shiny venture capital industries (in fact, the city's information sector is shrinking), but rather in safe and conservative industries that were largely non-cyclical, and therefore recession-proof. He further conceded that the city was blessed by the most uncontrollable factor of all: geography. "We've got lots of affordable land," he told me, which helps keep housing prices low. The proximity to the border creates a "constant supply of labor [that] feeds the hospitality industry" and keeps wage levels down ....

The upside of slow-and-steady growth is that when the world is falling apart around you, you look pretty good. In fact, San Antonio was perhaps the most resilient city in the 18 months after the crash precisely because so much of its activity revolves around government. The downside of slow-and-steady growth is that, well, it's slow. San Antonio is not a rich metro.

Nashville is not a rich metro either, a fact borne out by declining revenues for Metro services in spite of increasing taxes and the prospect of a budget crisis that a number of locals agree is immanent. Time will tell whether Nashville and its startups are more resilient than San Antonio. But naively buying sanguine assessments about the future of startups here may be self-deceptive and wishful.