Press the Accelerator: is turning Metro employees into entrepreneurs a good idea?

The business of business has nothing to do with "addressing inequality". The business of business is to maximize profits, even if it means supporting or generating inequality. In the 1950s, businesses had to be forced to acknowledge the civil rights of African Americans. It was not a benevolent free market that incorporated respect for human rights. It was a combination of government coercion and popular and political movements that forced businesses to comply.

As I learn that Mayor Karl Dean through his Office of Innovation is "innovating" Metro employees to become entrepreneurial by means of a "City Accelerator", I am concerned, not excited:

Through the Entrepreneur Center, we help really smart Metro employees learn about these tools, and turn them into quasi-entrepreneurs ... inside of Metro government so that they can make their ideas real businesses and real solutions for our city .... During the accelerator two more cohorts of innovation fellows will create new innovations for Metro government

The problem with this is it sounds exactly like the Republicans' decades old saw that "government should be run like a business," which has been tried and failed so many times in recent history. Disruption and innovation are the latest fad jargon for what is going on in the tech industry, which moves like gang busters in Nashville. But when stripped of the hype, the ideas amount to warmed-over conservative shut-down of public goods guaranteed by a democratically elected government.

Innovators invariably look for a different set of rules outside of government regulations by which to be "free" and to operate on their own. Then again, so do many Republicans.

Entrepreneurs by definition are people who risk their own money in order to start a business or profit-making enterprise. (Never mind that Nashville's Entrepreneur Center is heavily subsidized). Governments in democracies focus on providing access to broadly shared goods, like clean water, public safety, preserved undeveloped green space, transportation options and right to assembly. At times those purposes are complimentary, at times they are not.

For example, privatizing public education invests venture capital dollars heavily subsidized by the Obama Administration so that investors can experience a return in the education marketplace while selecting and keeping the students the corporations want rather than providing equal education opportunities for every student (the very purpose of the idea of government-provided education). Regardless of student development and welfare the bottom line is to avoid risk and maximize financial benefits.

A problem with turning government workers into entrepreneurs is that they will logically act to maximize profit-making enterprise regardless of whether it meets the test of universal accessibility. When they come up against regulations, even ones designed to protect consumers from an indifferent and arbitrary marketplace, they might look for ways around them (as if savvy government bureaucrats have never done that before).

Worse than trying to do something more disruptive than the regs allow is insisting, as Director of Financial Empowerment Erik Cole does in the video, that innovation can work "within the context of poverty" to solve inequality. Look at companies with reputation for greatest innovation before you buy his logic. Two start-up ride-sharing companies--attempting to disrupt cab companies and the government rules that regulate them--do not seem to be doing much to end inequality in our lifetime (are they even disrupting it?)

But it can be too easy to forget that people make “instant” happen. And, generally, these people are not a traditionally stable workforce. They are instead a flexible and scalable network of workers — “fractional employees” — that tap in and tap out as needed, and as suits them.

It’s estimated that more than 100,000 of these jobs have been created, especially due to the largest on-demand mobile services: The ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, whose drivers provide alternatives to taxis and other forms of transportation.

The Uber-style model works when a company can turn that kind of disparate workforce into a reliable branded service. It’s not quantum computing, but after you click “buy now,” it falls to someone to do the hard and sensitive work of moving physical stuff around in the real world.

Uber says it is creating 20,000 U.S. jobs per month by allowing drivers to tap into its ride-hailing service in their local cities by renting a phone from the company (it used to be free).

And so, at its core, you might think of the instant gratification economy as a story about jobs — new kinds of jobs. Here’s how it works: People like to get stuff when they want it. And, because of smartphones and smart logistics software, deliveries can happen much more cheaply and quickly, especially in cities.

So, the availability of on-demand services generates more demand. To meet it, companies bring on more workers. And ultimately, finding one of these jobs — or often, more than one of them — can create living wages for people who might otherwise be out of work.

But it’s not all shiny happy job creation. It’s not terribly uplifting to think that the future of labor is delivering stuff to rich people.

That does not sound promising at all for low wage workers and homeless people. The expectation is not that workers achieve stability in the fluid "sharing economy" (or is that "service economy"?). The inflexible mantra is "stay flexible and scalable".  The goals of democratic government and the sharing economy work at cross purposes if the goals are equality, social justice and labor stability. If a few people actually achieve a living wage, it will like charter schools offering a way out of poverty to college for a small number of high school students, while the charter school corporations get rich.

I do not have a problem with innovating in government. One of the biggest innovators in U.S. history was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. I do have a problem with dismantling government programs and precautionary regulations under the banner of absolute freedom for private enterprise, especially the absolute freedom to evangelize government workers and turn them into drones who support business innovators more than they advocate for ordinary Nashvillians.


UPDATE: Beyond how business innovation actually changes income inequality is the specific question of Karl Dean's practices dealing with homelessness before the City Accelerator was a prospect. Last year, local pastor Jay Voorhees observed that the Mayor's Office has a poor track record on helping the homeless:

...outside of some basic lip service, Mayor Dean has not seemed particularly interested in the social safety net side of governmental services, and certainly not the challenges of the homeless community. In the days after the 2010 floods the mayor’s office was noticeably missing in trying to address the needs of the former tent city residents, leaving the question of how to deal with this population to a set of dedicated volunteers and clergy. The Metro Homelessness Commission has languished during the Dean administration, some of which can be attributed to its members, but part of which is reflective of a mayor who is more concerned with creating new business opportunities than assisting those who are down and out.

It is worth noting that Erik Cole, who appears in the video and makes comments supporting the use of business-oriented innovations to help the homeless, was appointed by Mayor Dean to chair the Metro Homelessness Commission (2008-2012). As council member, Mr. Cole always voted with the Mayor when it came down to spending that favored business interests.

Neither the Office of Innovation nor the Mr. Cole's Office of Financial Empowerment look like improvements on Karl Dean's general disinterest in policies of social uplift. It is hard for me to believe as the video claims that the Mayor has actually lost sleep over the problem of income equality given his past lip service without tangible actions. We cannot expect the City Accelerator to do anything more than help the involved business interests and the Entrepreneur Center.


UPDATE: mayoral candidate Megan Barry loves her some disruptive innovation. Her supportive comment on Nashville's bid on the city accelerator website:

Like Erik Cole, Council Member Megan Barry never bucked Karl Dean on policies that served business interests first. Her campaign for mayor seems to angle now towards a kinder and gentler mock-up of Karl Dean. She may actually lose sleep over income inequality. However, her campaign for council once promised to be a voice for everyone in Metro government and we see how that populist tone failed to materialize in real policy. I doubt a Mayor Barry would do much beyond lip service to the intention of leaving no one behind. I have never witnessed her hard-nosed enough to challenge the powers that be that leave people behind in the first place.

Mayor Dean's big, fat staff

We are going to be bombarded in lead-up to the the next local election by messages buoyed by funding from special interests who lust after a smaller, more pliable Metro Council to lobby. While there are segments of our community that are willing to seriously consider their bid to rewrite the Metro Charter in order to constrict popular representation at the Courthouse, I'm more worried about revenues Mayor Karl Dean dumps into a ballooning executive branch. This is a bloated staff:

Mind you, if the bid to reduce the size of the council is successful, district voters will only have 8 more people representing them than the Mayor has on a staff he pays to advance his pet projects. We're so busy pondering the question of whether a city Nashville's size needs one of the largest councils in the country that we're not bothering to ask harder questions about the financial drain of the Mayor's large staff. Here are three off the top of my head:

• Why does the Mayor need 2 (and in many cases 3) people to run his PR campaign? Janel Lacy had worked for Karl Dean for several years before former journalist Bonna Johnson was hired in 2011 as Press Secretary. Add to those two Courtney Wheeler, hired to direct the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods, who seems to coordinate the Mayor's PR in the digital social media. The times I have seen Ms. Wheeler attend community meetings, she spent a lot of time talking to the news media rather than to neighbors. That's three people coordinating the Mayor's talking points. Why does he require that many? Why are public revenues spent on 3 people to broadcast messages?
• Why do we need an "Office of Innovation" when the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods and Mayor's Office of Economic and Community Development have been charged before with the duties of the innovation office? This looks like a duplication of services, unless my past concerns about MOON have come to pass, and Courtney Wheeler is spending more time on pitching the Mayor's agenda and less time on coordinating service delivery to the neighborhoods. The other troubling aspect concerns the disruptive connotations of innovation, which Jill Lepore described this week in The New Yorker: the innovative culture advocates an "idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box". Mayor Karl Dean is not tolerant of criticism and he rewards loyalty. For his administration to plug into disruptive innovation is both predictable and alarming. For all the good this office might do, how is it disruptive to those of us not in power?
• Speaking of loyalty: what in the world is a "Director of Financial Empowerment" and why does Erik Cole qualify for the position? Never mind. I just remembered why.

Our Mayor is an executive who every spring questions whether Metro departments could operate on less money than what they had received the year before. Watching the way his own staff grows, I have to wonder whether he brings the hard questions to bear on his own department.

If he won't, then we should; especially as we are being lobbied to vote to cut our representation on the Metro Council.

Flunkilicious

When last we saw former "progressive" council member Erik Cole, he was having what looked like a celebratory dinner with Hizzoner and facing questions about his "grassroots" efforts to help the Mayor pass a budget. That capped a council track record of carrying the Mayor's water and polishing his apples and running media interference at Dean critics (including comparing, and speciously so, the banal project of building a new convention center with Civil Rights Movement nobility).

"Fealty with love .... Disloyalty with vengeance."

Now Mayor Karl Dean is showing how important unquestioning loyalty is to him by hiring Mr. Cole to run a new office funded by a foundation connected to controversial New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. No word on whether Mayor Dean held a formal job search and interviews with multiple candidates, but that is not the MO (including the previous hiring of Mr. Cole's wife to a prominent post in his office).

After Mr. Cole tottled off the public service radar at the beginning of last fall, I let drop my own questions about his leadership of a "grassroots" organization to support the Mayor that seemed primarily funded by the Mayor (Cole has yet to divulge Moving Nashville Forward's donor list). Now that he is back with the administration, and set up to work on future Dean campaign efforts, I believe it is entirely fair to pose questions again: what happened in Moving Nashville Forward that prompted such a lack of transparency on Mr. Cole's part?

Karl Dean, Super PACman

Nashville City Paper writer, J.R. Lind observes that the Mayor Karl Dean's budget never really needed the help in Metro Council that Moving Nashville Forward, for which Dean was the major donor, provided. Then Lind wonders what former CM Erik Cole (co-leader of MNF, married to a Dean appointee) will tell us about his operation as well as how that operation could help Hizzoner realize some future aspirations:

There were, Cole insists, other donors. Who are they? Well, he’ll tell us. Eventually.

Or will he?

Cole said he intends to create Moving Nashville Forward as a 501(c)(4) — the Jan Brady of the 501(c) portion of the tax code. These types of groups are, under the law, “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” and, unlike their more famous sister the 501(c)(3), can lobby for legislation.

For years, 501(c)(4) groups were forgotten, beloved only by the persnickety secretary-treasurers of neighborhood associations. But, thanks to a handful of judicial decisions, they have a fancier name — Super PACs. And that gives them a special status: They are under no obligation to release the names of their donors.

If Cole follows through on his promise to create this 501(c)(4) — and it’s curious Moving Nashville Forward wasn’t organized before now — Hizzoner will have sown the seeds indeed: not just for grassroots tax-increase support, but for unlimited expenditures for any future political aspirations.  

It is curious that there is no record of MNF's organization as a 501(c)(4) previously. How long were they going to let that go on after receiving such a large donation from Karl Dean, thus threatening the legality of their machine-like politics?

A familiar ring in this politics of non-profits

I have been reflecting on an interesting parallel, which I assume is purely coincidental, between the question of whether Moving Nashville Forward is a non-profit or a political action committee and confusion expressed here in 2011 over Stand for Children's (a non-profit) endorsing Karl Dean for Mayor.

According to MNF leader Erik Cole, his group is pursuing non-profit status that would permit them to keep the $26,000 that "Dean for Mayor" donated to their efforts to market Karl Dean's budget proposal in the run-up to the Metro Council vote earlier this summer. Cole told reporter Joey Garrison yesterday that his organization is listed as a 501(c)(4). Garrison could not find confirming evidence of MNF's non-profit certification. A source told me that according to the Tennessee Secretary of State's records, Moving Nashville Forward is not certified here as a 501(c)(4).

501(c)(4) is exactly the non-profit status that permitted Stand for Children to endorse Karl Dean for Mayor in the last election. Last year readers were wondering how a non-profit can endorse political candidate and keep its tax exempt status. SFC does it by maintaining two organizations under one roof: their 501(c)(3) cannot campaign; their 501(c)(4) can.

Incidentally, Moving Nashville Forward's co-principal, Francie Hunt, is the former Nashville Director at Stand for Children.


UPDATE: I cannot find Moving Nashville Forward listed in the Internal Revenue Service's Exempt Organizations Master File for Tennessee. That list includes 501(c)(4) organizations reporting to the IRS.

Is Moving Nashville Forward a non-profit organization or a PAC?

The Nashville City Paper caught wind of Karl Dean's $26,000 contribution to Moving Nashville Forward, which greased the Mayor's agenda by rebranding it as popular. The journos focus on the question of whether MNF is a non-profit organization (which would legitimate the huge Dean contribution) or a political action committee (a.k.a. "PAC", which would make the Dean donation dubious):

Moving Nashville Forward did not organize as a political organization [PAC] and is therefore not required to submit its list of contributors to the Davidson County Election Commission. None of its membership registered as Metro lobbyists either.

Rather, [Erik] Cole said the group is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit and would be filing a financial report with the Internal Revenue Service at the appropriate time ["would be" filing a financial report after the questions are posed?!]. He was unable to provide The City Paper with a full list of Moving Nashville Forward donors but said it represents the various stakeholders who publicly supported Dean’s tax increase. (Efforts by The City Paper to locate the group’s nonprofit certification online were unsuccessful.)

Moving Nashville Forward originated on May 14 with a press conference hosted by three of its members, including Cole, who issued an “invitation to any and all who want to join the effort.”

Leading up to the council’s definitive tax hike vote, the group’s activities included encouraging citizens to email council members to vote for the mayor’s property tax increase. The coalition also rallied supporters to pack the council chambers for the budget’s public hearing.

We're in line-blurring territory here, with non-profits-that-are-not-yet-non-profits packing council chambers in a fashion that that either PACs or grassroots organizations would with supporters to lobby Metro Council on a controversial budget proposed by a Nashville mayor whose political aspirations for higher office in Tennessee necessitate as many wins as he can notch.

Here are conditions, according to the state's Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance, under which Karl Dean is allowed to contribute his campaign funds to other organizations:

Whether an expenditure of campaign funds by a candidate is made for a political purpose depends upon all the facts and circumstances surrounding the expenditure.  An activity engaged in between elections by a candidate which is directly related to and supports the selection, nomination or election of that individual to public office is considered political activity.  An expense which would be incurred by an individual regardless of that person’s candidacy for public office is considered an expenditure for a nonpolitical purpose, except as allowed for the expenditure of surplus contributions.

ALLOWABLE USES.  A candidate with surplus campaign funds from an election shall allocate unexpended funds to one (1) or more of the following:

a.)    The funds may be retained or transferred to any campaign fund pursuant to Tennessee’s reporting requirements, except a candidate for local office shall not transfer surplus funds from such an account to a campaign account for the General Assembly or governor.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(1)

b.)    The funds may be returned to any or all of the candidate’s contributors as set forth in a formula or plan specified in the candidate’s disclosure of the allocation.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(2)

c.)     The funds may be distributed to the executive committee of the candidate’s political party.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(3)

d.)    The monies may be deposited by the candidate in the volunteer public education trust fund.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(4)

e.)     The funds may be distributed to any organization as described in 26 U.S.C.  170(c).  (Examples - church, schools, school booster clubs, veterans organizations.)  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(5)

f.)     The monies may be distributed to any organization which has received a determination of exemption from federal income taxation pursuant to subsection (3) or (4) of 26 U.S.C. 501(c), if such organization is currently operating under such exemption.  (Section 501(c)(3) includes any non-profit organization that operates exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, public safety testing, literacy, or educational purposes, or to foster national or amateur sport competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.  Section 501(c)(4) covers any non-profit civic organization operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare and also includes certain local employee associations when the associations’ net earnings are devoted to charitable, educational or recreational purposes. [emphasis mine])  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(6)

g.)     The funds may be used to defray any ordinary and necessary expenses incurred in connection with the office of the officeholder.  Such expenses may include, but are not limited to the cost of advertisement, membership fees, and donations to community causes.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(7)

h.) The funds may be distributed to any institution of public or private education in the state for the purpose of supplementing the funds of an existing scholarship trust or program. Please remember that state law requires that the organization to which you are making a contribution must have an up to date exemption from the Internal Revenue Service, in order for your contribution to be proper under this provision.  T.C.A. § 2-10-114(a)(8)

After seeing the Dean donation, an Enclave reader checked with the Tennessee Secretary of State and found out that Moving Nashville Forward is indeed not currently registered (as required) as a non-profit organization. If, in fact, MNF had been interested in the "promotion of social welfare", why would they have failed to register with the state in advance of the highly publicized campaign to pass the Mayor's budget? And, given the ethics rules, how do they qualify as a non-profit organization eligible to receive Karl Dean's $26,000 donation in the first place?

Look what leaps out from Mayor Dean's mid-year finance report

Moving Nashville Forward, the astroturf organization promoted most vigorously by former CM Erik Cole as a grassroots, organic community effort to support Mayor Karl Dean's tax increase, received over $25,000 from the Dean campaign to advance his mission:

That's a slab of simoleons.

I wonder who sprung for pizzas at Mafiaoza's earlier this month? Machine politics is alive and well in Nashville.

HT: Mike Peden

Mafiosi a Mafiaoza's

Boss Tweed, an American symbol
of machine politics.

The day before yesterday we stopped off at Mafiaoza's for pizza on our way to the Sounds baseball game and Independence Day fireworks show. During our dinner, we noticed that Mayor Karl Dean entered and joined a table of around 8 to 10 others we could not see from our table. We finished our meal and exited for the short drive to Greer Stadium. Curious myself but trying not to be to conspicuous as I left, I glanced around the table and spotted principals from the pro-Dean lobby group, "Moving Nashville Forward", including former Council Member Erik Cole and former Stand for Children staffer Francie Hunt.

Despite insinuations that Moving Nashville Forward was a grassroots effort of support for the Mayor's tax increases bubbling up from the community, I've tended to believe that they are a more cosmetic attempt to project the Dean Machine (which includes the Nashville Chamber of Commerce in my book) agenda as organic and hyper-local. I also concluded that MNF is an astroturf attempt to influence public opinion top-down without the appearance that the branding is engineered like a campaign. The endgame: clear any popular brush that might inconvenience Hizzoner.

The fact that Karl Dean was out celebrating with Moving Nashville Forward came as no surprise to me. Seeing the group festively together after easy passage of the property tax increase also seemed natural to me. Karl Dean should be breaking bread and giving thanks with the minions. The machine of Nashville politics is chugging along nicely for the man who aspires to offices higher than Mayor.

The Mayor's property tax hike proposal navigated rough seas during last night's public hearing

Watching the Metro Council's public hearing debate over the Mayor's proposed budget last night (on the second of three readings) was not different for me than any of the previous years' debates. Most of the advocates for Karl Dean's budget were Metro employees and outside agencies that would benefit from the proposal. That is typical and not at all inappropriate. The main difference for me was that for once the Mayor, who no longer is subject to Metro elections, is finally proposing a tax increase to fund services and payroll rather than pitching his usual slew of budget cuts. That energized a large group of public opponents, mostly conservatives encouraged by Republicans, who seemed to at least match the proponents in numbers.

I am not opposed to Mayor's property tax proposal, but for reasons too numerous to list here, I'm not a zealous advocate either. While more sympathetic with those who say we need more revenues to address our budget challenges, I also believe that the Mayor has not done much over most of his tenure to stop the free fall Metro services while committing to historically large capital projects and helping to sell off public education. So, I am both for raising taxes and sympathetic with the populist backlash that keeps reeling at the Mayor's Office.

Therefore, you may be able to guess where my impression of last night's meeting ended up. If not, I'll clarify. While I disagreed with most of their misplaced shots at government and their ridiculous calls for selling off and privatizing more government entities, I thought the opponents of the Mayor's budget were strongest where they articulated populist options to Dean's plan. One I heard several times was that council should formulate amendments to the budget that would only hike pay for police officers and teachers; a corollary to this was the argument that amendments should allow raises in pay of those workers at the bottom end of the Metro payroll, but not of the ones at the top of the Courthouse pyramid.

Conservatives rarely seem afraid to appeal to populism. That does not mean they get it right when they claim it. Liberals by and large seem uncomfortable with mass appeals. The vacuum they leave when they balk at populist appeals from the bottom is inevitably filled by opportunistic and angry conservatives. If the council progressives could ever stoop to take up the populist banner and make working class people their primary focus, they would divide and conquer. They would blunt conservative criticism of what appear to be elite commitments to public art and libraries. These don't have to be snobbish and condescending priorities. Liberals in the New Deal age were able to pull populism together with intellectual and artistic pursuits. It was never an either/or. Liberals in this age invite an either/or by shying away from populism and kowtowing to the wealthy and well-placed.

Former CM Erik Cole tried to brand his pro-Dean group, "Moving Nashville Forward" as a grassroots effort, but to me it came across as astroturf. Mr. Cole just happened to be the last one to speak in favor of the tax plan at last night's public hearing. As a CM Mr. Cole once argued that council decisions should not be subject to popular will. So, the fact that he has been blasting out emails encouraging people to wear t-shirts and pack the public gallery in the effort to lobby council to support Mayor Karl Dean looks cynical to me. Given his past ambivalence, I might call it a case of "populism envy" if not one of cynicism. In those blasts he also wrongly pointed out that Dean opponents did not offer any options (in fact, I just cited some of the more populist options that were expressed during the public hearing).

Council progressives can get all the support the want for funding the arts and the libraries if they would first be advocates for the working class and others pushed to the margins by Nashville's ruling class. Very few look comfortable doing that. The Mayor's plan is going to pass, but it is up to the council to include amendments that make a tax hike more progressive in the populist sense of "progressive" in order to bridge the gap between liberals and common people.

Former council critic of populism now embracing it to help the Mayor?

Monday morning former council member and husband of one of Karl Dean's appointees sent out an email blast across Nashville encouraging a populist effort, even though in his last term as CM he criticized populism to aid a scuffling Dean project. Here is Mr. Cole's "Moving Nashville Forward" email:

This morning, you read in the Tennessean about the Mayor's plan to move Nashville forward with a budget that invests in our schools, our neighborhoods and our city. You also read about a few folks who say no to everything , without ever presenting a plan of their own.

Now, it's time to make your voice heard. Here’s how you can help:

1. EMAIL all Council members with the subject line : "Say YES to Moving Nashville Forward." You can email them at councilmembers@nashville.gov , or find members' individual addresses here.

2. VOLUNTEER to help us turn out calls and emails to Council members. Reply to this email with your contact info.

3. JOIN US Tuesday, June 5 at 6:30 p.m. at the Metro Council Public Hearing on the Budget. Come, wear a T-shirt and show your support!

Finally, please share this email by clicking the icons at the top of this message. Don't forget to Like Moving Nashville Forward on Facebook and follow @MoveNashForward on Twitter.

Thanks so much for helping out. Your support and hard work will pay off for Nashville!

All the best,

Erik Cole
Moving Nashville Forward

You may recall the WPLN interview late in 2009 where Mr. Cole insisted that he would be unbowed by the historic turnout against the Mayor's fairgrounds plan comparing his unpopular support of the Mayor to those who marched for civil rights and to those who fought Hitler. His criticism of supporters of the fairgrounds and community-based planning came across to me as condescending when I originally listen to it, especially when thousands wrote emails and eventually showed up for the public hearing in "Save the Fairgrounds" tees to speak against the Mayor's proposal.

Apparently, what was not good for the goose is now good for the gander. I'm not saying that the people who support a tax increase are wrong. However, Mr. Cole seems to have a double standard on the question of populism and its uses; he does not seem as quick to bludgeon populist support of his issues by comparing it to the slowness of Americans to support civil rights and to fight fascism. Nope. He looks comfortable mobilizing support for his cause absent a single reference to his own past "caveats" about the popular will.

Gotto's stupid teabagger trick just barely nosed out the spoken inanities of a couple of progressives last night

There were some high-flying moments at last night's council meeting (like CM Mike Jameson quoting Christian political realist Reinhold Niebuhr during the opening prayer), but a couple of progressives' comments brought the meeting right back down to the lowest denominator. In my previous post on last night I underscored Jim Gotto's foot-in-mouth disease during discussion of honoring students for their "Don't Say Gay" protests.

But a couple of progressives did not exactly measure their words with respect to the truth before opening their mouths. First, in his speech to the council as a the shoo-in candidate for criminal court clerk, Howard Gentry said, as if it were a worthy goal:

I will run the office like a business.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the same logic that John Arriola used to run the county clerk's office and to run afoul of taxpayers. Arriola expressed an unfettered profit motive to bring money in. He marketed "gratuities" as "fees" (making people believe that they needed to pay for products and services they might not otherwise choose to pay for) and he monetized just about everything he did. He had stylish and hip new signs designed to lure more customers. He maximized and tricked out his ride to work. The profit motive runs business; the profit motive ran Arriola's tenure. In other words, Arriola was more CEO than clerk.

Shouldn't the officer of a Metro office be looking to run the office less like a business and more like an institution accountable for the public good? Gentry's comment was a clear pander to the business interests that dominate the Courthouse, but frankly the prospect is frightening.

The second inane progressive comment of the night came from Dean Teamer and outgoing CM Erik Cole, who contrasted Jim Gotto's self-reference of a Republican trying to hold a "corporate citizen" (assuming that corporations are individuals!) responsible, by trotting out this gem:

You now got a Democrat standing with developers!

Let's revisit CM Cole's recent past, shall we? He supported the Mayor's plan to build the most expensive capital project in Nashville's history, a developer's dream, the Music City Convention Center. He supported the Mayor's plan to sell off a huge tract of public Fairgrounds land to wealthy developers to make a lot of money on an office park. Even if Erik Cole ever stood against developers, those two projects alone bury any pretense of forward thinking opposition he ever expressed against untrammeled growth. But let's be clear: you do not get anywhere in the Davidson County Democratic Party without the habit of standing with developers. The most powerful and wealthiest Dems are in knee-deep with developers. For Cole to suggest otherwise is to concoct an urban myth. And it was pretty darn self-serving in what it implied about Erik Cole beyond its utterance.

I can always count on local progressives to give local conservatives a run for their money in the cringeworthy foot-in-mouth department.

Cole's cottages

An announcement on a council meeting from the Nashville neighborhood elist, which may be of interest to Salemtown since we are zoned mostly R6 (medium density residential intended for single and multi-family dwellings):

If the Metro Council had been more progressive on stormwater fees 2 years ago, how many projects would be done now?

I wonder how those self-styled progressive council members, Megan Barry, Erik Cole, and Ronnie Steine feel about their vote 2 years ago this month against a real progressive attempt to remove Mayor Karl Dean's arbitrary stormwater fee cap on businesses. I wonder what they think about the fact that less than 250 stormwater projects have been completed in 2 years. I wonder how many of the 3,200+ undone stormwater projects might be completed now had they opposed the regressive Dean fees and helped Jason Holleman and Emily Evans drum up more votes to draw the demands on paved-over businesses equal to less-paved residences:

Two years ago, Councilman Jason Holleman proposed a fee structure that would have charged commercial landowners in direct proportion to the amount of impervious surface they own.

While the current system caps the monthly fee at $400 for landowners with 1 million square feet of paved surface, Holleman's proposal would have removed the cap.

"Put simply, the more you pave, the more you pay," Holleman said, adding that his proposal would also reduce the monthly fee for owners of small and midsize commercial properties ....

"Obviously we need to do more, and the May flood highlighted how much infrastructure work there is to do to meet the backlogs and meet the needs of our citizens," Holleman said.

Finally, I wonder why the news media won't hold CMs who vote with the Mayor accountable for unrealized expectations.

More coming to light from Metro e-mails: State Fair Director did not take Civic Design Center plans seriously, ignored potential impact on Fairgrounds future

Local blogger Jay Voorhees analyzes those Metro e-mails that I posted on Google Docs and breaks news, previously ignored by Nashville's news media, that indicates that Buck Dozier and the former State Fair Director of Marketing did not take seriously the democratic process of collecting citizen feedback for planning and development last September:

Mr. Dozier and staff were not enamored with the report from the Nashville Civic Design Center. This report arose from public meetings on the future of the fairgrounds at the behest of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. During the “public” portions of this process there was criticism by those now known as preservationists that the there was inadequate opportunity for public comment. The report was supposed to guide the Fair Board and Mayor on future directions, ultimately suggesting that a master plan needed to be developed.

Click on image to enlarge

When the report was leaked to the press and then rushed into release, a former staffer emailed Mr. Dozier and asked, “Did you have to pay for THAT?” Mr. Dozier replied that the fair board was indeed charged for producing the report and that it cost around $30,000 to produce. “You can pick yourself up off the floor,” he joked when mentioning the cost. In a later e-mail he told another staff member that apparently they had paid over $30,000 to learn that “…Metro needs to hire a planner.” The report seemed to have little impact on discussions about the future of the fairgrounds.

Mr. Dozier has been accused by Fairgrounds supporters of deliberately running the facility into the ground. In that context it is hard to read these e-mail exchanges and not wonder whether he wasted tens of thousands of Metro dollars on a civic design process that he never took seriously. It also warrants asking the Mayor's council supporters like Megan Barry, Erik Cole, Ronnie Steine, etc. why they never bothered to ask what happened to the community-informed design process, but instead just went along with Karl Dean's bidding.

And there is something relevant here for North Nashville/Bicentennial Mall residents. When discussions for a new Sulphur Dell ballpark revved up before last May's flood, some of us involved in those discussions asked that the Nashville Civic Design Center be brought in to lead us through a community meeting process to answer questions, address concerns, and consider feedback. After I made several attempts to contact him, NCDC Design Director Gary Gaston replied to me by saying that he had been consumed in the Fairgrounds design meeting process.

He also said that his organization was conducting a design competition for the ballpark that would be presented to the community at the end of 2010 (presentation has yet to happen). NCDC has a ballpark event on its March 2011 calendar, but there is no indication that a community planning process will take place. However, if the ballpark development process emerges and follows the script laid out for Fairgrounds planning, North Nashville participation may be rendered a moot mockery by the wasteful courthouse elite.


CORRECTION: Gary Gaston asked me to correct one of the details in this post. He e-mailed that NCDC has not been conducting a competition. Here are his comments from October 2010:

We are working with our partners at the University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design to host a design studio of student projects on the topic of a baseball stadium. A group of 14 graduate students are currently analyzing two sites (Sulfur Dell and North Gulch) and will be designing baseball stadiums for each site. (The SoBro site was excluded because so much study has been done in that area already, and the city recently submitted a grant that would pay for a complete master plan for SoBro - we felt the idea of a baseball stadium would be addressed during that process).

Council vote tally on Sandra Moore's amendment to take the racetrack out of any Fairgrounds master plan

Council staffers do not usually allow roll call vote tallies to stay visible very long after votes are made, so getting a snap shot of actual votes is a rare thing. But thanks to an Enclave reader, we have a record of last night's vote on CM Moore's attempt to amend the Fairgrounds bill with language that would have left the possibility of keeping the racetrack out of any master plan generated when the Fair Board, Parks, and Planning Department meet with citizens.

Names that stand out to me of those voting "Y", that is voting not to give citizens the widest latitude in determining a master plan for the Fairgrounds, include: Megan Barry, Ronnie Steine, Jerry Maynard, Erik Cole, and Kristine LaLonde, progressives who rarely if ever vote against Karl Dean, who governs conservatively. Note that District 19 Erica Gilmore also voted with the Mayor's demolition plans.

As you can see by the results, Moore's amendment failed, and an alternative amendment sponsored by Jason Holleman, which calls for a community-informed master plan but removes a demolition mandate completely out of the bill, passed handily 29-11.

These series of events prompted several CMs to express words of support for CM Moore in spite of her defeat. Those attempts were practically thwarted when CM Barry lost her composure and rose to exclaim, "If you really do support Sandra Moore you would support her amendment!"

UPDATE: While CM Barry made CM Moore's amended bill a personal matter rather than a matter of political compromise last night, less than 2 weeks ago she expressed a different, stoic tone when asked about the prospect of having to lose the promise of racetrack demolition:

Megan Barry, the sponsor of a pending bill to tear the racetrack down, said if the council votes to save the speedway, then the park will be designed around it.

“I don’t think we’re doing anything we shouldn’t be doing, obviously, as things develop. If we have to change the plan, that’s part of what the consultant would have to consider,” Barry said.

Apparently, CM Barry was not as ready to roll with the actual punches last night as she said she was earlier this month.

Riebeling writes the budget and authors the bleak narrative of fairgrounds financials

CM Emily Evans pointed out in the comments section of a previous post that when the fairgrounds budget was written, the impossible projections were the cause of the bothersome results that the fairgrounds board reported last Tuesday to the council:

I gotta say that I am sort of amazed that, so far, the press did not write about the manufactured losses of the fair. Rich purposefully set the budget to lose money for the three years he has been finance director. In government, as in life, if you plan on losing money you most likely will. Someone will have to educate me on how blowing a wad of the people's cash is the "right thing."

No surprise in the press uncritically assuming the validity of the Mayor's Office projections. It's not right, but they keep doing it and there is not much we can do to stop it.

However, we do need to pass the word around that these low revenues may be "bleak" because the fairgrounds projections were originally rigged to fail. Budget projections are less determined by some invisible hand of the market and more by the very human, self-interested hands in Metro Finance.

Council has had the opportunity to question the fairgrounds projections every spring since Karl Dean replaced Bill Purcell, who refused to use the fairgrounds performance as an excuse to convert public land to private real estate for the sake of developers. But I do not remember members demanding realism from Mr. Riebeling in that time. Most of them seemed to go along with Mayor Dean without protest.

That attitude continues. One of Mayor Dean's courthouse loyalists, CM Erik Cole, did not bother to question Metro Finance's formula even as he gnashed his tweeth over a fairgrounds performance that did not live up to Mr. Riebeling's forecast:

What is much bleaker is the probability that Rich Riebeling, who has been lobbying for privatization of the fairgrounds since the Purcell administration, cooked up numbers that were designed to sink the fairgrounds as a public facility.

Deep Thought

Seriously; was there ever really a snowball's chance that CM Erik Cole was going to vote against the Mayor's convention center plan?

CM Emily Evans responds pointedly to CM Erik Cole's strained WPLN analogies

An an email to Erik Cole obtained by the Tennessean's Michael Cass, Emily Evans takes the District 7 CM to task for a couple of strained analogies:

Erik

I listened to your WPLN interview and was appalled at the implication that those who oppose the convention center, like the SEIU, can somehow be equated to those that opposed Civil Rights for African Americans or those who opposed intervention in the European theater during World War 2. There is no excuse for mentioning those things in the same interview let alone the same sentence.

The convention center is opposed and the petition drive is supported by working men and women who, after being abandoned by their traditional advocates in Council, now have to rely on more unconventional approaches to get their message across. The working people of this city know how the convention center will end up – costing them money and jobs – and they feel the need to speak about it.

When placing the relative trivia of municipal activities on the same plane as watershed events in human history you demean and diminish the achievements of the men and women who lived and died for their cause.

Disgusting.

Emily

I said my piece on the WPLN interview, so you know that I agree with CM Evans wholeheartedly. I'm also glad at least one CM is standing up to the steamrolling PR process of selling the convention center, even when the PR is high-minded platitudes about "populism and democracy."

CM Cole responded to Cass that those of us who are criticizing his analogy are failing "to see the caveats." On the contrary; his cautions were clear to me. I understand that he is warning against blindly following public opinion, but convention center critics like me are not suggesting that.

So, he's impugning us again. Not only do we have a mob mentality, but we're saps that don't grasp the nuance of his sophisticated claims about populism.

It's not that I don't see Mr. Cole's warnings about referendums. It's that I don't buy his linkage of popular concerns about the budgetary affects of a new convention center with segregationists or Nazi appeasers.

He appears to think that if he prefaces his remarks with the statement that he is in "no way" drawing a link that it somehow magically clears him to go ahead and make the link. The WPLN reporter did not introduce the subjects of civil rights or of World War II into the discussion. Mr. Cole did. Once they are out there on the table, the comparison is de facto regardless of any other rationalizations about what he actually meant.

The unchallenged utterance creates misperception. Blaming us by saying we don't get him won't change that brutal fact.

WPLN interview with Erik Cole only lacked allusions to torches and pitchforks

Last week's WPLN audio interview (attached to this story) of District 7 CM Erik Cole by reporter Daniel Potter sounded more the dance of two Music City Center sugar plum backers than it did a hard-hitting and revealing piece of journalism:

WPLN: So, another question that I think is interesting that comes up when we talk about democracy and populism is whether the council is elected to choose what's best for the city, and maybe in some cases what's popular in the city isn't necessarily what's best for it in the long term, sort of making people take their medicine even if it taste bad or something like that. Um, what's your thought there?

CM Cole: Well, I mean, I am in no way equating this decision to the monumental decisions of history, but, you know, if you were to look at civil rights and had taken general referendums in the 60's in this city we would not have had the kind of results we would want.

Let's just pause the tape right there. First of all Daniel Potter framed this line of query with a leading philosophical question (and assertion) about the risks of populism without any specific reference to any risks of allowing public opinion to inform the actual question of building a convention center.

Many of us who assert the need for public input into the most ambitious and risky capital project in local history would agree with the proposition that what is popular isn't necessarily the best. So, why did the WPLN reporter assume us all to be an uncritical mob of populists who believe unwaveringly in majority rule?

This is not a pointy-headed question of tyrannies of majorities. It's a practical question: how is Metro going to provide services to its clientele if it commits to building a convention center for tourists?

Worse still, reporter Potter already seemed biased to the idea that the convention center is our medicine. It's a leap for him to suggest that MCC is good for what ails us, when the treatment may make us sicker.

Initially, CM Cole seemed to deflect the question with the rational point that the issue of whether Nashville builds a new convention center or not is not morally momentous such that a mob might menace a minority. However, it all headed south with Mr. Cole's "but", after which he cited the Civil Rights Movement. In so doing, he minimized the human progress of enfranchising and empowering previously exploited minorities by equating their stride toward freedom with building a convention complex based on trickle-down economic models that keep Metro's wealthy patrons ahead of everyone else.

Erik Cole is a savvy legal services director who probably knows that a more appropriate historical comparison would be between responses to a present capital project and responses to a past capital project. It is patently ridiculous to even mention responses to any capital project in the context of attitudes toward a constitutional issue like universal human rights.

But he didn't stop with the pejorative comparisons. Next CM Cole implicitly compared convention center critics to anti-war isolationists and Nazi appeasers. Cue the WPLN audio:

CM Cole: If you took a referendum in the early 40's about whether or not we should go into World War II, you know, the result would probably have said, "Don't go."

Never mind that bankrolling a convention center is nothing like conducting hard-nosed foreign policy. So many soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice of dying in World War II, and to even introduce this in a cerebral dissertation on the limits of populism, instead of focusing laser-like on a pragmatic debate on MCC, seems a bit revolting.

Erik Cole seemed to understand the disjunction and he walked his argument back at the end of the audio:

And, of course, this decision is nothing like either one of those "monumentous" decisions but it does illustrate that there are times when you have to be able to weigh pros and cons with the best available data that's in front of you, and make a decision, and I feel like that's why my constituents elected me.

Or maybe he walked his argument back and then shoved it into the ditch. Why should the best available data exclude public preference for certain Metro services and citizen concerns about the negative affects of a capital project on those priorities? Convention center critics don't want to take CM Cole's responsibilities out of his hands, so I'm clueless as to why CM Cole fell back on trite council idiom that merely evades questions about price tags and risks to Metro programs.

Another MDHA Embarrassment at the Homelessness Commission

MDHA's Homelessness Commission Director has been put on 90-day probation by the commission for awarding a computer security contract without publicizing it to other companies. The Tennessean reports that Commission Chair Erik Cole admitted that the governing body--which includes former Vice Mayor Howard Gentry, current Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors, and MDHA Director Phil Ryan--failed to carefully supervise staff.