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.

Communication fail

If you, like me, got Erica Gilmore's only notification of the community meeting on a Salemtown SP this afternoon you may be scratching your head over her late-breaking communication habits. If you, unlike me, did not know about today's meeting because you are not a member of Salemtown Neighbors, then you should know that you have less than two hours to get ready for the meeting:

This postcard is very misleading about the zone change request. The developers are not only responsible for answering questions about this rezoning request. An SP requires them to get community feedback in order to gain community support for their request.

Not only is this communication late in the mail (postdated January 23), but it is deceptive in content.

I asked the Tennessean to stop throwing papers at our house. They did it anyway. On Christmas Eve.

Back in early November, I pointed out to our council member at-Large Megan Barry that the local daily newspaper was not ending littering Salemtown with its advertisements each Wednesday as she suggested they would back in June. The Tennessean social media person responded with contact info to stop delivery.

Despite my cynicism (expressed above) that the Tennessean would actually change their established pattern of ignoring my stop-delivery requests, I emailed the "tmc" account provided and asked them to stop Wednesday delivery.

For my diligence, this morning we received another unwelcome gift from a Tennessean delivery drone: the plastic-wrapped "free" Wednesday advertising edition of the Tennessean.

As the littering of Salemtown continues without any options to stop it, thanks to Metro Council elves, I recall CM Barry's argument on a warm June night for leaving the Tennessean alone to do what it wills:

The conversation [about controlling the unsolicited litter dumps in neighborhoods] has led to some really good things that the Tennessean is doing .... tonight I am going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just put this to rest” and I’m going to vote against [stopping unwelcome litter in neighborhoods].

What Megan Barry helped put to rest last June was any chance you and I have of controlling a vast polluting, dead-tree corporation that is more of an advertising agency than a news source. Is it because the Tennessean stands to provide her mayoral campaign with the kind of advertising (masquerading as journalism) she could not buy? That I cannot say for sure, although it stands to reason that not rocking the boat minimizes her risk of media hits and broadsides.

However, only an Orwellian can argue that dumping dozens of rolls of unwanted paper within a community trying to keep its streets cleaned up is a "good thing."

Lobbyist counsels against holding the council accountable for listening to public concerns

Leave it to a registered lobbyist to defend entitled council members against public criticism.

In response to a reporter's tweet tonight regarding a citizen's comments about CMs on their cells during council public hearing, James Weaver leapt to the defense of Metro Council:

Mr. Weaver has used a bit of honey, sometimes testing boundaries, in his efforts to lobby the council on various issues in the past, so I guess he should know how to sweeten the pot and to prompt council response. I'm not really worried about a lobbyist. What strikes me as unflattering is the idea that constituents have to pour honey (via patronizing lobbying and campaign donations) on council members to motivate responsiveness to their community.

An open letter to council member Erica Gilmore

Dear Erica Gilmore,

Last night's Salemtown association meeting certainly could have gone better. Not that we do not need to our council member to show up to our meetings. I certainly wish you had attended more during your term on the council.

But last night we got more of the same that we have seen from you in recent years, CM Gilmore. All you seem interested in now is doing the absolute minimum that you are required to do instead of going a few extra steps for ordinary constituents who are not big finance cash cows. We were not asking you to go an extra mile like the Mayor is in getting you to sponsor ballpark and luxury sidewalk resolutions.

Some of us merely want you to keep a neighborhood association president in the loop about Specific Plan requests. That's not unfair or unreasonable. SPs call for community input and yet you seem to be bent on minimizing community input.

It was not always like this. I remember early in your first term you made efforts to stay in contact with us regardless of where we were located in Salemtown. Remember the failed "Ardelia Park" development? That was blocks away from where I live, and yet you encouraged me to attend the community meeting on it.

What a difference six years makes. On Aerial Development's latest proposal you could have done the decent thing and asked developer Britnie Turner to confer with the president of Salemtown Neighbors last spring before seeking approval. Notifications would have gone out from there, which would have forestalled the criticism I heard last night regarding your lack of communication.

Instead, you lectured us on Monday and repeated ad nauseum that "communication is a two-way street". You never gave us a chance to go down that road. You let Metro Planning send out the post cards on a community meeting to residents within several hundred feet of the property, which covers a small geographical area as well as your proverbial ass. It gives you the ability to say that you did everything the law requires to notify the community.

But are the rest of us who are affected by this development supposed to have a special sixth sense to know when a developer approaches you to formulate a resolution that requires community input? Is that really realistic, given the information and access advantages developers enjoy over neighbors?

Nope. You never gave us a chance to go down the road. And frankly you did not come down that street yourself. Relying on the planning department alone is not good enough; as if it were not made sufficiently clear from all of the feedback you got back at last night's association business meeting (which Aerial chose not to attend). Planners have no skin in the Salemtown game.

Moreover, your subtle criticism that communication is a two-way street is bad faith. I receive global email blasts from you regularly on subjects that I may or may not be interested in. Sometimes those blasts contain rezoning and development information or information about community meetings. In 2014 I have been notified of a meeting on Jefferson Street HUD development and on the meetings concerning the new ballpark. But I received nothing directly from you on a specific plan in Salemtown. Metro planners like these plans because they want to see higher density everywhere regardless of questions other departments have about differences with the contexts of neighborhoods.

Aerial's plan promotes higher density, but it has also sent up red flags due to its differences with Salemtown context, especially since the property falls within Salemtown's conservation overlay.

So, why now do you expect me to keep tabs on this under-the-radar proposal when you have made efforts to notify me about others?

But you really hit an all time low last night when you resorted to insinuating that Salemtown Neighbors--which celebrates its 10 year anniversary next February as Salemtown's first association--is not representative of the views of Salemtown. You do not even know that to be true, because you never gave the association the chance to participate in the community discussion about this development. Your inference was spurious.

That kind of foolishness undermines the credibility of our own process, and ironically, since you have done enough to undermine your own. You were not going to hold a community meeting on the ballpark proposal until a fellow council member asked you in open meeting to do so. You stood in front of the council and vowed that your constituents opposed any requirements put on the Nashville Sounds ownership as part of a ballpark agreement, after a number of us argued to the contrary. You ignored requests to hold public meetings on the Metro Water toxic dump site near Salemtown and punted any advocacy you could do for the community to PR specialists at MWS.

For you, CM Gilmore, to try to cast aspersions on Salemtown Neighbors as if we have not over the years tried to represent fairly the interest of the neighborhood amounts to unbridled hypocrisy. Your lack of broader advocacy on the Aerial proposal indicates to me that you have given up representing all of us. The fact that you wrote a letter to the Metro Historic Zoning Commission asking them to re-hear Aerial's proposal, after the developers failed to appear before that body, shows with whom you have cast your lot, and it is not with Salemtown. The quick approval timeline last spring indicates an interest in minimizing community feedback. And you have the gall to suggest that we do not strive to be representative.

I understand that at this point you are likely just playing out the string of days in your last term as our CM. I understand that house flippers with some cash make more difference than voters do in that context. Even so, neighbors in Salemtown ought to have at least as much credibility with you as the outside developers who make no bones about wanting "to tear up some real estate" to generate more wealth to take out of the community:

Things could have gone better last night, CM Gilmore. Unfortunately, you missed your chance to make it better last spring.

Sincerely,
Mike Byrd

What can Brown do for SouthComm?

It has been a while since a local reporter wrote the following about lightning-rod education reformer, Michelle Rhee, so it is time to see how the 1 1/2 year old copy stands up to reality. Writes Andrea Zelinski, circa January 2013:

Michelle Rhee is an icon of the education reform movement. She’s pushed to hold teachers more accountable for students’ performance, busted open the doors of school choice and shaken up the education establishment. She’s also thrown a few elbows and drawn criticism for her style.

A Tennessee transplant, she is turning her attention to schools in her new state.

The polarizing former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor heads up StudentsFirst, an education reform organization she founded just as she began setting roots in the Volunteer State. The group has already handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to state-level political campaigns and a handful of local elections here, positioning itself as a force to be reckoned with.

Back when Michelle Rhee was a rock star, this kind of fawning coverage might have flown in spite of the protests of those like me who judged it to be a load of crap. Ms. Rhee was a celebrity, and aspiring news coverage seeks to hitch its wagon to a star above all.

Now, given what we have learned about the pitiful "movement" Michelle Rhee fabricated, the SouthComm interview appears to be folly without the slightest hint of courage to probe for the truth. One makes choices, and Zelinski's (or was it SouthComm's?) choice not to challenge Michelle Rhee is inane in light of the harder questions other journalists ask:

Rhee’s StudentsFirst campaigns have done little to animate parents. In Connecticut, an investment of about $700,000 produced a [Rhee head-liner] at the State Capitol ..., which drew only about 75 people. In Alabama, where StudentsFirst claimed 17,000 members, only about 20 showed up at a meeting she called at that state’s capitol.

Revelations about Rhee’s accomplishments while she was chancellor for Washington, D.C., public schools have also sullied her self-avowed reputation for “raising achievement”....

Darkening the pall cast over Rhee’s reputation is an unresolved cheating scandal on Rhee’s watch in D.C. The alleged scandals — and what, if anything, Rhee might have known about them — have never been adequately investigated....

the stench of questionable numbers is likely to follow Rhee wherever she goes, with any new appointment likely to prompt more questioning and investigation from journalists ....

Not only has Rhee’s reputation as a results-oriented school leader gone south, but her organization StudentsFirst is not doing so well either ....

StudentsFirst, the lobbying and political actions firm Rhee started, is shutting down its Minnesota office due to a “changing legislative climate” .... Reporters at Politico noticed the office closing too and added in its daily newsletter that StudentsFirst has “pulled out of five states and laid off six staff members as the midterm elections approach,” shutting down operations not only in Minnesota but also in Florida, Maine, Indiana and Iowa.

Additionally, the reporters noted, “The organization hasn’t brought in anywhere near the $1 billion that Rhee confidently predicted she would raise when she founded the group in 2010.”

On the other hand, what StudentsFirst seems to excel at is funneling campaign contributions from its undisclosed financial backers to lobbying efforts and politicians, who are mostly Republican and mostly incumbents. So much for being a “change agent.”

The contrast between Andrea Zelinski's ode and the latest point-by-point interrogation of Michelle Rhee's actual career could not be more stark. Keep in mind that SouthComm fancies itself as "alt" journalism, but all the "alt" that we can learn appears to be elsewhere.

SouthComm is in a difficult place. They hitched their wagon to Rhee's star instead of at the very least playing devil's advocate, and now that Rhee's star is fading they don't have a shred of credibility left on the subject of education "Rheeform."

The only option they have left to save face is to gin up a promotional interview with Ms. Rhee's replacement in the anti-teacher niche, Campbell Brown, and hope she "transplants" to Tennessee, too.


UPDATE: There was evidence out there in January 2013 that Michelle Rhee was nothing more than a marginal "Tennessee transplant."

Do campaign donations matter to community revitalization?

State Rep. Powell

During and after a town hall meeting held in South Nashville a little over a week ago, I received some email correspondence from Mike Peden about important questions he had for elected officials about the community impact of developments. The companies funding those developments, Advance Financial in particular, have political action committees that dole private campaign donations to candidates for public office. Mike gave me permission to piece together his emails here into a narrative for the sake of underscoring the influence that money has over growth that can undermine our quality of life.

According to Mike, elected officials in attendance included state representative Jason Powell, CM Fabian Bedne and CM Jason Potts. Also attending representing the Mayor's Office was Daniel Wainwright. Mike has an office on Nolensville Pike and he says that he is particularly concerned about the impact of the growth of high-interest payday lenders along the corridor. Given that the town hall meeting encouraged questions about "revitalization of Nolensville Pike", Mike had some questions for Rep. Powell in particular:

I asked him how much money he has taken from the payday loan industry and he refused to answer.  He has, of course, taken several contributions from them.

I spoke to him on the phone a couple of months ago and he told me that he has no problem with payday loan stores, and that he knows the people at Advance Financial, and they are "good people".

Nolensville Pike

Mike tells me that everyone he talks to in South Nashville has a problem with the explosion of predatory lenders. It seems to me an entirely fair question to pose to any elected official who has influence over how a community grows and develops: have they accepted funds from owners of those shops? If they have, it should be stated unequivocally so that voters can determine for themselves whether such influence over quality of life suits their interests.

Not everyone who attended the meeting was happy with Mike for raising questions about the influence of the donations of predatory lending companies on conditions along Nolensville Pike. He forwarded me emails that accused him of having a "political agenda." How is it a political agenda to ask a politician to identify the sources of his financial support which might lead him to support certain developments that neighbors have issues with? It seems common sense to me.

I remember that right after CM Erica Gilmore was elected the first time to represent the district where I live, a Germantown leader told me straight up that several people in that neighborhood donated an impressive amount of money to her campaign to leverage their historic overlay, which she eventually took to passage. People understand that this is how the system currently operates. There is no other agenda in learning about who is beholden to whom. It is a natural question we should be asking.

Jason Powell's second quarter campaign finance report shows a $1,000 donation from the Advance Financial PAC. What is the harm in asking Rep. Powell to be publicly accountable to South Nashville constituents for the wealthy special interests that could influence how he supports revitalization along Nolensville Pike?

How not to use social media on behalf of your city's water utility

The City of Detroit has decided to ignore the idea that access to clean water is a human right. They have spent the last few months turning off the water of residents who cannot pay even though rates have been hiked to cover some questionable financial choices the city has made over the years. They only started turning off businesses who have not paid--which make up the lion's share of the cost of delinquency--last week. Golf courses in Detroit owe hundreds of thousands in unpaid bills, yet they get preferential treatment.

Sunday Detroit Water representatives took to social media to accuse people who are trying to get water of "stealing" it from their utility, and they looked like thugs threatening their customers on Twitter:

This is worse than bad PR. It reflects the neglect and disdain that increasingly privatized municipal services, heavily influenced by business sector wealth, have for ordinary people living in difficult times. The double standard is clear: wealthy people have need of golf courses; they have no need of people who can't afford to bankroll brokered water. They have no need of universal human rights.

In Tennessee, innovation and corruption seem to go hand-in-hand

Recent visits from two notable figures, AOL co-founder Steve Case and Salon writer David Sirota, rendered two different takes on how we spend our money in Tennessee. Mr. Sirota cited a study that indicates that the Volunteer State is one of the more politically corrupt due to how it spends most of its revenues: on construction and police protection instead of on education, health, and welfare. The writer also mentioned Nashville's penchant for throwing our tax revenues at private corporations, which don't appear to find our city itself enough of a lure to decline to payola to stay put:

“Cities and counties in states with troubled political cultures demonstrate the greatest willingness to offer business development incentives.” And again, comparing Tennessee’s corruption with its economic development policies seems to confirm this.

According to the watchdog group Good Jobs First, Tennessee is at the top of the list of states offering so-called “megadeal” subsidies to corporations. Likewise, the Nashville City Paper reports that in the name of economic development, the city has been dramatically increasing its subsidies to corporations, including a $65 million outlay for a minor league baseball stadium.

During last December's ballpark debate when suggestions were made that Metro lessen the moral hazard of handing Nashville Sounds owners our revenues by making them more obligated for spending the money responsibly, the Mayor's minions on the Metro Council called it a "poison pill" that would kill the deal. I would add such false provocation to Mr. Sirota's list of indicators of political corruption in Tennessee.

The city's legislative branch expressed shaky ethics in defending Mayor Karl Dean (who has turned private subsidies into an art form) with its outrageous slurs about entirely reasonable requests concerning how public money is spent.

One council member defended the ballpark funding scheme by insinuating that she might retaliate in any future projects in other districts:

Erica Gilmore

If you think about the way I have supported you in the past, your different projects so that your particular districts can thrive and survive. And I think I've been good at doing that. So, I ask that you would support my district tonight, my community, not just for me but for Nashville. We have to make sure things are equal. We have to make sure all communities work, and before I have never stood up on big projects and talked about fiduciary responsibility, taxpayers money. We just trusted it in the past and now we have a question with it.

It is the height of councilmanic privilege to hold future votes over the heads of other CMs in order to push through a ballpark plan despite questions on how public money will be spent. It must have worked, because she did it again last February regarding a different proposal in her district:

Please know that in order for us to work together you have to support me, because if you bring something for your constituents you expect me to support you and you can't support me I can't do it as well.

For his part Mayor Karl Dean acts like it a badge of honor that Metro is making no money off the lucrative ballpark naming deal with First Tennessee Bank and that the only big ticket item Sounds owners are paying for without government assistance is the guitar-shaped scoreboard. No wonder that Hizzoner wanted to push it through with as little public input as possible; Nashville ends up on the short end of the financial stick at almost every point.

Mr. Sirota is on to something in our state. His observations also provide the political backdrop for Steve Case's visit and comments about Nashville's startup businesses. Discussions about startups in Nashville seem to occur in echo chambers at the expense of evidence that the startup industry is contracting. So, Mr. Case's appearance may be an attempt to shore things up.

The Nashville Business Journal reported:

Looking forward, Case said, that entrepreneurial spirit will be needed to continue growing, competing globally and creating jobs.

“If we’re going to create jobs, we have to back our startups,” Case said.

And those startups can’t just be emerging from Silicon Valley, he added. As technology enters its “third wave” and focuses on integrating the Internet into myriad processes – health care, transportation, etc. – other regions of the country with experience in those sectors should emerge as leaders.

For Nashville, Case said, that will mean seizing the opportunity to remain the biggest innovator in the world of health care.

NBJ did not elaborate on what Mr. Case meant by "we have to back our startups". What that has meant in Nashville under Mayor Dean is kicking in corporate welfare for private businesses, even as public services suffer under his budget knife.

I worry about Mr. Case's exhortation to fund disruptive innovation in health care. Tennessee already flirts with corruption in that it spends less public revenue on access to health care than on subsidizing private business. Encouraging technological expansion in health care is not the same as investing public dollars to expand broader access. Dumping money unregulated into the health care industry simply translates to writing executives blank checks to do anything they want. Startup businesses are not beholden to anyone but themselves and the corporations to whom they may or may not eventually sell out to.

Unchecked innovation will only encourage more corruption in Tennessee regardless of how redundantly stylish it has become for techies to claim they "make the world a better place".

Mr. Sirota deftly rebuffed claims that on-the-dole innovation leads to greater economic development:

Do those subsidies result in job-creating technology and innovation hubs? While many locales ramping up their subsidies certainly hope so, the jury is still out — and that’s being generous. Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that subsidies do not create the economic development their boosters promise, and instead they merely cannibalize already-existing economies. Meanwhile, a lot of those subsidies end up being awarded to politically connected firms, calling into question whether they are really designed with any kind of coherent economic development plan in mind.

So, the growth that happens here is not caused by the disruptions prompted by government redistribution. The growth would have happened somewhere. All the corporate subsidies do is favor some industries over others and cement political influence and cronyism.

A paycheck

One more note of irony to close this out: Mr. Case's visit was hosted by Nashville's Entrepreneur Center, which is housed in the refurbished Trolley Barns on Rolling Mill Hill. Those Trolley Barns are publicly owned (by MDHA, which bought the property for $10 from the county in 2006). The barns were built as part of the Works Progress Administration, the largest New Deal program that pulled our country out of the Great Depression, not by privatizing and outsourcing the work, but by the government directly hiring and paying people to build. Whenever governments promote job creation nowadays, they come across as a faint shadow of the bold New Deal. Likewise, Mr. Case's chatter about startups providing jobs is a negligible projection of what the government could actually do free from the networks of crony capitalism that fund so many political campaigns.

The political corruption that we see rampant in Tennessee and in Nashville with the giveaways is neither necessary nor inevitable, but until there is tectonic shift in political culture here, the corruption will continue.

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.

When the testers don't perform

This week it is just plain "outage"

Boy, watching Tennessee's standardized testing regime's derailment this week has confirmed our decision last year to pull our daughter out of Metro public schools. The naked hypocrisy and outright shame of a high-stakes testing regime--which pushes kids into performance anxiety--sputtering and stalling under its own inept weight and low performance are proper payback for the toll the system took on us and many others.

Maybe someone should test the testers.

Forget it. That will never happen. They will just go on bumbling through the future, coercing kids to prove themselves over and over by standards that may or may not have anything to do with teaching kids to think critically or to become functioning citizens in a democracy.

This waiver is good for the Metro public school students who are going to have their grades reflect their actual academic performance in real classrooms for once. That beats being measured by an arbitrary stick imposed upon public education under duress by the special interests of business lobby groups and chambers of commerce and enforced by flawed federal policies.

It won't be long before Tennessee's education apparatus rights itself and this cycle of psychological violence and abuse starts all over again. Our public school children will be reduced again to survivors before long.

In the meantime, payback is a bitch, ain't it?

Erica Gilmore's millennial head fake

In February the Mayor brought his plan for the $16 million Gulch Pedestrian Bridge to council with CM Erica Gilmore walking point. Fortunately, the council deferred, and now we see what is actually motivating the Mayor to earmark so much money to 700 feet of sidewalk when so many other neighborhoods have been waiting on sidewalks for years:

Real estate investor Mark Bloom said he's received inquiries from several luxury brands about a high-profile site he owns, while MarketStreet is thought to be working to bring a luxury Thompson Hotel to property it owns near 11th Avenue South and Pine Street.

Bloom sees SoBro as the convention center and limited-service hotel market, while the Gulch becomes the center for lifestyle luxury hotels.

"There's a heightened influence of the creative class here, and ... it's creating a shift in the urban luxury lodging category. The Gulch is going to be the area where the shift is (most) pronounced," Bloom said ....

[T]he area isn't without its challenges. One need is better connectivity with downtown and Midtown. A pedestrian bridge that would stretch from SoBro near Music City Center to near Pine Street Flats in the Gulch has been cited as a potential remedy, but in February, the Metro Council deferred a plan to buy land for the bridge.

So, it was niche luxury tourism prompting this project. That motivation was not mentioned by CM Gilmore in her defense of the sidewalk last February:

There are 2,000 constituents who live in this area and 2,000 employers on top of that .... That is a very dense area and as we get more progressive we talk about transportation and we talk about bridges more people in this particular community will be using bridges more so than cars. The group of Millennials that are moving into this area do not depend on cars as much as other parts of the region so ... we need to flesh it more if we are not clear about things.

Yes, well, let's be clear. CM Gilmore could have been more clear about the developers' motivations and the Mayor's penchant for pandering to the tourist industry. In this case, CM Gilmore failed to mention that the prospect of luxury hotels and getting tourists from those hotels to Downtown venues--including conventions at Music City Center--are perhaps prime movers of the Gulch Pedestrian Bridge.

Instead, CM Gilmore head faked about Gulch residents (for the record, I do not disagree that Millennials should be heeded). She also discounted other CM's concerns by insinuating that debate about neglected sidewalk projects would eventually degenerate into fights over "north vs. south vs. urban" neighborhoods (along with a not-so-subtle caution that she might withhold support on other bills in retribution).

Each of us have to do what's best for our constituents .... I understand the importance of having sidewalks for your neighborhood .... But know that this is a neighborhood in my district and I don't want us to compare.

I can see now why she did not want to compare. Because then we would have to talk transparently about the luxury hotels planned in "her neighborhood", while Nashville school kids in other neighborhoods have been lacking proper sidewalks they might use for a decade. The Dean administration has constructed or repaired a fraction of the sidewalks that the previous administration did. Pricked by public criticism, the Mayor's Office argued that Karl Dean has "aggressively invested" in sidewalks, despite a recession and the 2010 flood (conveniently failing to account for the probability that today's dollars probably pay for fewer sidewalks than under the previous administration, which likely also spent dramatically more on sidewalks as a percentage of the total capital budget).

We likely would have known the truth about the unstated purpose of the Gulch Pedestrian Bridge too late if the council had voted to approve quickly in a condensed timeline like that of First Tennessee Park. Might the luxury hotel angle have developed quickly since February? Perhaps. But given Mayor Karl Dean's MO of ramming disguised capital projects through with or without debate, I suspect that the prospect of new luxury hotels prompted a luxury pedestrian bridge in turn, regardless of the 2,000 Gulch residents.

We should be thankful that the council at least drew the line somewhere. Too bad--for those of us concerned about the neighborhood impact of the new ballpark--it did not come one project sooner.

The bridges they burn can light their way

So, Erica Gilmore is sponsoring this bill that would authorize a sumptuous new walking bridge (what walking bridge does not offer walkers terraced seating to take a luxurious break from walking?) for the "southern corridor" of her district, and other council members--who said they could not spring simple sidewalks in their neighborhood--slowed her roll this week. Her option to avoid a fight over money: defer the Mayor's gift to south Downtown. Jerry Maynard promised to bring the council foot-draggers along to CM Gilmore's way of seeing things.

During her comments on deferral, CM Gilmore said she did not want to get into "a north-south" lest it be "divisive" and "unproductive". Looking at the million-dollar baby she intends for south Downtown (a.k.a. "The Gulch") versus the existing pedestrian bridge (the only pedestrian bridge?) in North Nashville, I can understand why a comparison wouldn't be productive for her legislation:

The Gulch's proposed $16,000,000 pedestrian bridge

North Nashville's existing pedestrian bridge (near Hadley Park)

That is quite a divide in stylishness. I can understand why some in North Nashville might resent the special favors lavished downtown. So, let's not focus strictly on comparisons, since it would be "divisive".

However, there is also a divide between rational and irrational choices of costs versus benefits.

According to the council's own documents, the requested $16,000,000 would be taken from the capital improvements fund that includes "a general $20 million designation for the maintenance, repair, rehabilitation, and replacement of bridges for fiscal year 2014." So, the conditions of existing bridges in CM Gilmore's district and in other districts are so good that we can spend most of this year's bridge funds on building an opulent new pedestrian bridge for 2,000 Gulch residents (most of whom CM Gilmore described as "carless Millennials")?

Terraced seating for the Millennial Generation!

You can sit on the stairs if you really want to.

In fairness, North Nashville's only pedestrian bridge is not in CM Gilmore's district and my guess is that it was not paid for by Metro (was it?). But the blight is symbolic of the privileges accorded to downtown development that are strictly rationed at points outside of downtown. The imbalance can be worse in districts whose council members have failed to copy the knack for ingratiating themselves to Mayor Karl Dean.

CM Emily Evans responded to CM Gilmore's bill by pointing out that she cannot even get sidewalks funded for school kids who have grown up waiting for them in her district, so she cannot vote for a $16,000,000 sidewalk for a bunch of Millennials who could and do use the Demonbreun viaduct when they want to go downtown. You go, Emily Evans:

Until I see the priorities of sidewalks in this city shifted to things like [installing them where kids need them to walk to schools], I'm never going to vote for something like this. So, you can defer it indefinitely. I appreciate the effort, but I think this is one of the most outrageous proposals I've seen.

For myself, I don't oppose the idea of building a pedestrian bridge in the Gulch. Goodness knows we would not want the Millennials walking an extra block to cross over at Demonbreun. But guzzling millions in bridge funds to air brush the Mayor's capital projects resume when a cheaper Gulch project would allow us to repair and renovate less sexy bridges across Davidson County? Or when it would allow us to move the money to needed sidewalk projects? Well, that's just foolish and wasteful.

By the way, CM Gilmore responded to my complaints about the double standards of capital spending with the reply "northern corridor got Sulphur Dell Ballpark." Never mind that the ballpark favor she handed out primarily serves team owner and real estate developer, Frank Ward. That's not really the point. The point is that Erica Gilmore may resist "a north-south" argument with fellow council members, but she seems to be willing to wade right into one with her constituents.

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.

Small print for ballpark groundbreaking says, "Paid for by Karl Dean for Mayor"

It is not in the advertisement below, but the small print from the email containing the ad for the January 27 ballpark groundbreaking at Sulphur Dell notes the event's campaign nature. Here is the ad:

The email explicitly says that the event is not subsidized by Metro government funds, but the ad conspicuously displays the official seal of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County as if it is a sponsor.

By the way, this is not the first Mayor's Office e-mail blurring the line between Karl Dean's campaign aspirations and his official capacity.

Passing Sulphur Dell: the ends of getting a new ballpark do not justify the means used to steamroll democracy

The Mayor's plan for a new ballpark at old Sulphur Dell will pass tonight. It will pass because most bills pass on third and final reading.

More significantly, it will pass because council considered it without proper public vetting given the timing of the holidays and the abject paucity of community meetings. It will pass because the council only pushed negotiations with the Sounds owner to the slightest degree before potential plan opponents began falling like dominoes.

Despite my past support for the Sounds and their previous plan for a new ballpark, I will not be able to lend my support to passage of this plan because of how a few council members (even my own), enabled by the Mayor, ran roughshod over a proper public process of involving all stakeholders, including those of us who live here, in the decision for building at Sulphur Dell.

We have seen other cases where the local community was ignored in the name of the Mayor's ambitious capital projects that usually suit his cronies more than our communities. We saw it in the West Nashville police precinct, which was catastrophically flooded in 2010, just as neighbors warned him beforehand that it would be. We saw it in the State Fairgrounds unpleasantness, which turned into a populist blow to the Mayor's muscle-flexing and clearly defined his take-no-prisoners style of governing.

There was simply not enough time or energy during the holidays to slow this particular project down in order to give people a chance to respond to it. Likewise, so little has been said about the details, and advise-and-consent is practically impossible.

Finally, I believe that the Sounds owner has said some things publicly during this affair that should make those of us who will be his team's new neighbors concerned about how they will treat us in the future. More on that later.

I am Erica Gilmore's constituent, too

I was not going to go into great detail about my pointed exchange with CM Erica Gilmore before last Saturday morning's hastily called community meeting on her Sulphur Dell proposal. I was going to leave it at mentioning her dissatisfaction with my online criticism of her initiatives. But then--during her comments last night on an amendment to the bill that would have required the Nashville Sounds to pay a fee every year that their promised development did not develop--she went and said this via TV broadcast:

All I can focus on is that some of my constituents have sent me email saying, "Why now are we putting a $750,000 clause on it, and we have not done it in the past with all the different things. Aren't we taxpayers as well? Don't we have a fiduciary responsibility in the past?" And they're concerned that with this particular bill ... it's happening at this time.

The shock of learning that she does do email, particularly some email more than others prompts me to share the rest of the story from last Saturday.

Ms. Gilmore did not respond to the emails I sent her articulating several concerns I have with the constricted timeline for approval of a new ballpark. She had a chance on Saturday to address my concerns face-to-face about flooding, parking, and other potential problems that a new ballpark might create. She did not do so.

Instead, she insisted that she left a voice mail message for me a couple of days after receiving my email. I told her that I had been having problems with my voice mail but my email account still seemed to be working and she could have responded there.

She replied face-to-face that she does not "do email" because of the high volume of email she receives on various issues.

Last night I found out that not only does she do email, but she even publicizes email from constituents who are supporters of the Mayor's timelines when doing so serves her own interests.

So, I basically gather from this that if I want my views acknowledged, let alone represented, by a council member whom I voted for in the last election, I have to agree with her views on these questions.

In the end I agree with her comment above: it appears that all she can focus on are the emails of some of her constituents.

There is some latent hostility in the takeover of the community planning process

“This is a poison pill,” Councilman Jerry Maynard said, using a corporate term typically applied to measures that discourage hostile takeovers.

--The Tennessean covering CM Maynard's attack on stronger regulations

on Sulphur Dell ballpark developers

The politician displayed ballpark cynicism

Since the project I started yesterday (to crowdsource a list of community meetings that Rev. Jerry Maynard claims ballpark supporters held many times over the last few years) seems to be failing miserably, I'm starting to assume that readers are just as unaware of any of these forums as I am. Maybe no neighborhood-oriented meetings were held (beyond the one I attended in 2010 that was designed to drum up support).

As regrettable as CM Maynard's claims about community meetings are, I want to skip today to something else he told council, which came across as cynical to me with a second look at the tape:

We're not doing anything we haven't done in the past .... I got to tell you, I'm troubled because, this is the fir- as council lady Gilmore said, this is the first time we've had major economic investment in North Nashville, and to pull this one when we haven't pulled anything else after all these years. I just think we need to move forward on this.

I never lose faith in CM Maynard's ability to stretch the truth beyond anything I might recognize, but once again, it is not factual that the council has not pulled any other bills on first reading after all these years. I've blogged about several times the council has pulled bills off the consent agenda on first reading. I can remember other times bills have been pulled on first reading for discussion. It is rare, but it happens. I've always assumed it remains in the by-laws because the members see its utility even in its rarity.

So, how many times does CM Maynard have to make stuff up before someone in council or in the news media calls his bluff?

But I digress from my original point: the cynicism of CM Maynard's argument in light of the fact that community meetings really have not happened much if at all. Why do I consider his comments cynical? Because I hear within them an implicit deal of "I won't pull your big capital spending bills if you don't pull my expensive pet projects." Instead of at least going through the motions of holding community meetings and bringing concerns to the council (even if disingenuously brought), CM Maynard seems to be conceding that Metro Council is not so much Nashville's representative body as they are what they have been called by others before: "40 jealous whores" fighting over turf, over influence. "You don't pull/I don't pull" comes across to me an acknowledgement that this council is more focused on whatever plums might fall from the master's table, leaving the crumbs for their constituents (who are otherwise out of sight, out of mind in these deliberations)

Playing the role of CM Maynard's enabler was Ronnie Steine, who did not particularly care for the way the council was tending to "move forward' on the ballpark bill. So, he counseled "backing up" and lectured the council about being on the same team with a united interest that he did not define. I'll have to assume that he meant the same old "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" interest they share. After he got a round of the council's applause, CM Steine launched into bill opponents for doing something he claims he always opposes, pulling bills on first reading. While he backed off his erroneous charge that opponents were breaking rules, he insinuated that they were breaking council tradition. But remember, they're on the same team:

You can call me a hypocrite on this one. I opposed pulling any bill on first reading .... I would argue whether you're for or against it that you honor this council and how we operate.

Whether or not I can call him a hypocrite may be up for debate, but calling him inaccurate is not. During one of those past moments where a fellow did indeed pull a bill off of the consent agenda during first reading, CM Steine had such a conniption that he threatened to pull every other bill off that same agenda for debate. Threatening to pull every bill on first reading to prove a point is still a contradiction of one's commitment never to pull any bill on first reading. Wouldn't the at-Large CM be better served, that is if he honestly is opposed to pulling bills off the consent agenda, by making a motion or introducing a resolution to change the by-laws and charter to prohibit pulling those bills? Even having a "consent agenda" implies that consent is freely given. If not, it's not a consent agenda, and fabricated tradition be damned.

The cynicism was on full display Monday night in the council discussion on a new ballpark for the Nashville Sounds. I guess I was expecting it, but I keep hoping for something more noble, even after all of these years.

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.