Is the Farmers' Market growing more exclusive by jettisoning the flea market?

The Piraeus, home of ancient Greek schlock

In Plato's Republic, Socrates goes from Athens to the Piraeus, a port side passage where the masses thronged. He went down from high society to the places of parades and cheap entertainment. More importantly, it was the place of commoners, outsiders and those considered barbarians. From Plato:

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful.

The Piraeus was a liminal space for a free philosopher of Athens: a threshold out of high society to the mundane world of people of much lower status. If Athens was the one, then the Piraeus was the many.

The Piraeus leaped to mind when I read the news that the North Capitol area Farmers' Market is now terminating its flea market in favor of what sound like bigger ticket vendors more stringently selected:

After spending more than a year visiting and collaborating with other successful markets across the country, the staff has developed a new system of standards that will ensure that shoppers will know the source of all items sold in the market and that the vendors will have been involved in the creation of their products.

“There are other places to go if you want a flea market experience,” says NFM Executive Director Tasha Kennard. "We recognized that in order to be the best market we can be we have to do things differently. The actions of the staff and the board show our commitment to and appreciation of the value of local farmers and products.”

What other flea markets exist within walking distance of North Capitol neighborhoods that allow the experience of the Farmers' Market adjoined by a great public park like Bicentennial Mall? I do not know of any. The article goes on to say that Farmers' Market flea market vendors are to be exiled to the Fairgrounds in south Nashville. Is a gated-community consciousness growing in North Nashville?

I'm not a buyer of kitsch, but I recognize that there is a reason it exists. It is a form of cheap art or expression that those middle-class-and-below can afford without a line of credit. Will those same commoners still be able to enter the Farmers' Market and browse with the idea of buying? It does not sound like it. A member of Urban Planet criticizes the move:

I agree that the produce and flowers should be local, but I disagree with kicking Flea Market vendors out. Growing up in the area - before it was hip and cool - the flea market has always been a part of the Nashville Farmers Market, even when it was on the other end of Bicentennial in open air tents. If the vendors pay their rent and don't sell knock off items, why should they have to move. I love going to the Asian couple tha has the $1 bins of little household items and wudknots. Many of these people make their livelihood at the Flea Market and displacing them because of a "few" that do not like cheaply made items is a shame. That's what a Flea Market is - I would rather have these vendors at a facility where they pay montly rent/taxes, than to have them posted up on the side of a road or in vacant lot selling their items, because that is what's going to happen.

So the Market will be displacing 50+ vendors in the flea market for a handful of "artisan" vendors that will sell $10 handmade soap, $20 soy made candles, and $30 hand-made scarfs. I'm all for supporting local-made products, but not everyone likes those type of things. Being that the market is located in a historically and predominantly black zip code, I would think they would want to cater to all residents - not just the folks in the new apartments, condos, and million dollar shotgun houses.

Their is plenty of space at the facility for everyone to coexist. They have already gone up on their rents three-fold now I guess this the last straw to kick them out [SIC].

I understand why many gentrifiers look down their noses at cheap tacky stuff that has been sold in the same place for decades, but I have no problem with flea markets because there are common goods that are higher than stuffy taste or stiff-necked wealth. Inclusiveness and respect are two such common goods.

What stands out to me is that First Tennessee Park, the Nashville Sounds' new ballpark, is specifically mentioned as a catalyst changes at the Farmers' Market. Some of us have warned that the new ballpark may not have the desired effect of growth in existing Jefferson Street businesses. Instead, it may leverage relocation of larger businesses that drive out the smaller ones. Is that good? It depends on what your expectations are. The Farmers' Market is like canary in a coal mine on that score.

Make no mistake: the Farmers' Market is a Metro owned public space. Make no mistake: if the Farmers' Market discourages buyers who cannot afford handmade artisan crafts, they will not visit the Farmers' Market, which will make it a less diverse place. Make no mistake: a space that no longer welcomes diversity, including class diversity, is no longer legitimately public.

I've been a neighbor of and a regular customer at the Farmers' Market for a decade since moving to Salemtown. I did not patronize the flea market, but I also never saw the need for it to go away. I do not understand why later arrivals (and apparently a neighborhood association) do.

By the way, I would be deliriously pleased if the Farmers' Market could certify that all of its produce comes from local, organic, family farms (like those in Scottsboro/Bells Bend) and not from Tennessee's powerful agribusiness plantations. I'm not deluded enough to believe that the schlock-haters are clamoring for a bridge that far. They seem satisfied enough with elbowing out the riff raff.


Disclaimer and full disclosure: This blog has been a donor to past efforts to preserve and to develop the Farmers' Market.

Metro Council stops the Mayor's Fair Board appointment and a council candidate takes it personally

I, like many, received an email blast last week from Save Our Fairgrounds, one of the few groups that has organized and defeated Mayor Karl Dean soundly on one of his major sell-off plans. The blast warned of Hizzoner's latest bid to appoint Eric Malo to the Fair Board. SOF called our attention back to 2011, when Mr. Malo advocated demolishing the Fairgrounds racetrack, which he pinned as the culprit for the pollution of nearby Browns Creek. He also supported selling off the public property to private interests for construction.

The irresponsible claim that the racetrack is the cause of the pollution of Browns Creek, whose watershed parallels railways, crosses under roads and intersects interstates, is enough for me to wonder whether Mr. Malo can fairly serve on the Fair Board. After 4 years, I am still waiting to see some of the negative energy vented at the Fairgrounds turned into a positive collaborative watershed alliance between Mr. Malo's group and other community groups. Something like the Richland Creek Watershed Alliance is what I have in mind. If I had read somewhere that Mr. Malo had taken part in real watershed preservation since 2011, I would have a launch point for parting with Save Our Fairgrounds on his appointment.

However, there was nothing in the present coverage of the council debate last Tuesday (I watched the debate myself) to make me think that Mr. Malo had made moves beyond Karl Dean's plan to some larger vision. The council defeated the mayor's appointment to the Fair Board, and I have no problem with that. It is actually refreshing that the council debated one of the mayor's board appointments for once. They typically rubber stamp them.

As if on cue, another player from the 2011 unpleasantness, Colby Sledge, insinuated himself into the council decision not to appoint the mayor's man to the Fair Board. Mr. Sledge is now running for the council seat of district 17, and I guess he sees the board appointment as important to his current campaign because he tweeted:

What was the petty political agenda? Seriously? A grassroots group--opposing the mayor's plan to tear down first the Fairgrounds and then the attached racetrack and sell them to private developers--organized once again to oppose one of his appointments to the board charged with oversight on the basis of that person's support for the mayor's plan. They petitioned the council harder than Mr. Malo's supporters did. It is politics, but how is it petty?

It is surely nothing like the pettiness of Mr. Sledge (who again lives in council district 17) in inserting himself four years ago into the district 24 race to try to torpedo Jason Holleman's campaign because CM Holleman opposed tearing down the Fairgrounds. The pettiness was compounded by the already expressed sentiment that no one outside of Mr. Sledge's anti-Fairgrounds group, Neighbors for Progress, should have a say in what happens to the Fairgrounds.

But Neighbors for Progress, who launched a website that no longer exists to promote a tear-down petition that only garnered 500 signatures (after thousands were projected) and turned out 35 speakers at council public hearing as the other side turned out 3,000, appeared to be astroturf.  I have my doubt's that Mr. Sledge's group was ever anything but marginally "grassroots," particularly since under his leadership, the group's agenda seemed to shift with whatever tactical moves the Mayor's Office was making at any particular point of popular resistance, including Karl Dean's advocacy of Sarah Lodge Tally over CM Holleman in 24.

Maybe Colby Sledge could not muster any more popular support for Mr. Malo than he could for demolishing the Fairgrounds and then the attached racetrack. Thus, his "friend" lost a board appointment as a statement about the future of the Fairgrounds. But there was never a need to personalize this as candidate Sledge has. Maybe he should direct his anger at council "progressives" like Ronnie Steine, Megan Barry and Jerry Maynard, who could not line up the votes to appoint.

As for CM Steine, he could not line up votes because he was too busy concocting false analogies: Mr. Malo's past opposition to the racetrack versus council opponents of Music City Center construction who nonetheless support it now. Well, if any of the latter wish to seek an appointment to the convention center authority and CM Steine wants to organize community opposition to them, you won't hear complaints here. Good luck with that, councilman.

The irony here is that the council followed proper procedure, stunt-free, to defeat the mayor's appointment of Mr. Malo to the Fair Board; CM Steine has a track record of pontificating on following council process. He also has a knack for breaking with process when convenient for him to do so.

So, spare us the crocodile tears, Mr. Sledge.

Again, this was not about Mr. Malo. The mayor lost this appointment because he tried to place someone who previously echoed his own will-to-demo and penchant to sell off valuable Metro resources. Loyalty tends to trump rationality in his administration. This was also about Mr. Dean and his preference for running end-arounds on democratic process. The track record is clear: the convention center, a Hickory Hollow flea market, the Fairgrounds, the Sulphur Dell ballpark. Those are just the ones that come off the top of my head. (For what it's worth, there are rumors circulating that the Fairgrounds question was deliberately kept out the Nashville Next planning process to avoid the recurrence of embarrassment in the Mayor's Office; I guess there was not as keen an interest in sparing Mr. Malo disappointment).

Karl Dean's decisions express a disdain for democratic process when it does not line up with his growth agenda. Checking this board appointment is not petty. It represents one of the few instances where grassroots organizing keeps the mayor from overreaching and padding the incomes of wealthy developers.

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.

Dean: "at some point" the neighborhoods most affected by a new ballpark will be brought into ballpark planning

I distinctly recall that in the days when a previous ballpark proposal was under consideration under a previous Mayor, community meetings were held for feedback on location and other considerations well in advance of the legislative debate beginning. Not going to happen under Karl Dean:

crucially, the mayor did say, at least during his time left in office, there would be a new park in Sulphur Dell or there'd be no new park at all, quashing once and for all any hopes of a stadium at the old Thermal Plant site in SoBro or at the foot of the Korean Veterans Bridge on the East Bank. The former was all-but a done deal in 2008 and the latter was briefly considered a frontrunner as late as last year.

Indeed, the Sounds — and even former Nashville Vols who actually played at the original Sulphur Dell — were on the record, in the past, as being unenthused about the prospect of moving to North Nashville.

Sticking with the theme that all of this is very early — the mayor wouldn't commit to any "hard timeline" on the project — Dean said at some point the area's neighborhood associations would be brought into the discussion, though he said "this is a project for the whole city."

I guess under this "strong executive" form of county government, the Mayor unlike other mayors need not be a "neighborhoods mayor". However, the peculiar hypocrisy of saying the interests of proximate neighborhoods should take a backseat to the city is obvious to those of us who watched the theatrics of the Mayor's plan to sell the State Fairgrounds to private developers.

First, I recall a gaggle of residents from South Nashville neighborhoods around the Fairgrounds supporting the Mayor's plan and arguing repeatedly that even though the Fairgrounds is public property, their communities should have more say over demolition and planning than anyone who did not live nearby. Second, when Karl Dean introduced his Fairgrounds sell-off plan, he greased the skids at the first council committee meeting considering his plan by showing a video of neighborhood association president Keith Moorman promoting Fairgrounds demolition/redevelopment to the Chamber of Commerce and the news media. South Nashville Action People, the association representing the Wedgewood Houston neighborhood, got their own exclusive public hearing before the council during which Mr. Moorman pitched the Mayor's Fairgrounds plan. No opponents were allowed to speak at this committee meeting. Instead, they had to wait until council's public hearing. Further, the Mayor's SNAP supporters even insinuated that they were entitled to their own public hearing later in the council process, as if Mr. Moorman had not been given one in the first place.

And one more note. The land on which a new Sulphur Dell would sit belongs to the state. By Hizzoner's own logic, a new Sulphur Dell ought to be "a project for the whole state" with the city brought in "at some point".

Straight from jump this Mayor has consistently shown benign neglect toward North Nashville. He merely perpetuates that neglect by not affording our neighborhoods the same influence over a major capital project (in this case a ballpark) that he grants others. My interpretation of "the point" at which Mayor Dean will bring North Nashville communities into the process is basically when, if ever, it is safe for him to.

The aspirations of Megan Barry: how has being a cautious progressive helped her?

I am a recovering supporter of Megan Barry, so I took some interest in a recent Tennessean editorial on her bid to woo the business class kingmakers over at their reportedly favorite watering hole. First, erstwhile journo Bruce Dobie claims that the suits are fretting about their choices next time for Mayor. Before droning on about Barry, I have to point out that there is a certain irony in Dobie maintaining that these are the people who actually do the choosing of executives to run county government--votes be damned--and yet, their own system has left them without a candidate to run county government.

But I digress:

Second, progressive goo-goo [a.k.a., "good-government"] front-runner Megan Barry makes them nervous.

Barry, a Metro Councilwoman, has been the most public and out-front candidate to date. A resident of the not-so-mean streets of Belmont-Hillsboro, Nashville’s ground zero for left-leaning politics, Barry is known for successfully sponsoring a workplace anti-discrimination measure for the city’s gay and lesbian communities. She also was the force behind the proposal for Metro Government workers to receive a “living wage.”

Such accomplishments have prompted the Jimmy Kelly’s biz crowd to order a second martini and continue the search.

Dobie goes on to compare CM Barry to blast-from-the-past Betty Nixon because both appear to have the same genitalia as well as interest in being Mayor (in the interest of fairness, why didn't Dobie bring up a "youthful" mayoral candidate from the past to compare to Jeremy Kane?).

Without fail, Dobie falls back on that dated label of "goo-goo" to compare the two. Of course, he has in past columns mentioned Ludye Wallace as a favorite of good-government types, a claim that is a laugh riot to some of us "goo-goos" who have actually been Ludye's constituents. Dobie's dependency on a twenty-year-old term, as Ms. Nixon pointed out this week, is practically archaic. It also may show that he is more in touch with the bar at Jimmy Kelly's than he is with politics unfolding on the ground in Nashville.

While I am not cynical enough to label CM Barry's initiatives as symbolically liberal, they do strike this observer as incremental at best. Her living wage plan upset some council conservatives, but it did not help more than a dozen folks who work for Metro government. What about the many who were not as lucky as those few? Likewise, she hammered home demands of nondiscrimination against Metro employees, but she was barely a blip on the radar when the question turned to nondiscrimination for private companies contracting with Metro government.

Any credit she might get from me for taking boldish stands on strictly social-progressive issues is overwhelmed by my memories of her support of the conservative growth policies of Karl Dean. She voted for the new regressive stormwater fee structure that charged property owners who created less stormwater (mostly residential) more than those who generated more stormwater (mostly business). After going through the motions of holding a couple of community meetings on the proposed Music City Convention Center, she supported the largest capital project in Metro history without making any demands on the Mayor or leveraging progressive perimeters for the project. She supported Hizzoner's bid to tear down the State Fairgrounds and to sell all but a sliver off to wealthy private developers, which would have had the double-barreled effect of eradicating a working class entertainment venue and of making some potential campaign donors even more wealth. Megan Barry has mimicked, over and over, Karl Dean's market-driven habits of governance.

And where has it all brought her now that she is facing down the Jimmy Kelly's deciders? They still do not trust her.

Megan Barry has never remotely resembled a populist progressive concerned about class disparities, quality employment, equal opportunities for working people or the alienating effects of unfettered gentrification in urban areas. She has never even taken a stand as a "loyal opponent" of the Dean administration. She stays close to the social issues that are stylish among Nashville top-shelf progressives: the rights of women, equality for gays and lesbians, immigration opportunities. Granted, those kinds of issues do not risk the primary flow of money and power in Nashville; or at least they are not as risky as are unflinching looks at unequal growth, environmental justice, power imbalances in land development and class inequities. In my opinion, any future Nashville mayor worth her salt has to have taken some risks toward the left. I do not see that level of boldness in CM Barry's resume.

I don't know if Megan Barry would have been able to pull together a coalition giving her higher levels of popular votes to offset any donation losses she might have experienced by being even a part-time populist. I do see that being a full-time social progressive in lock-step with Karl Dean is not pulling her any closer to the Mayor's Office she covets. As conservative as she has been, she is still not conservative enough for the suits.

Could not contain my laughter on this one

The Tennessean's local beat reporter, who rarely writes a discouraging word about Mayor Karl Dean, attended yesterday's Lipscomb University panel discussion on neighborhood associations and tweeted the fawning comments of Colby Sledge (one of Cass's former colleagues who has also been a paid partisan flack and lately a public relations pro working with government agencies).

For someone like me, who has followed and documented the short but happy neighborhood attention span of Mayor Dean, Sledge's Lipscomb panel comment is over-the-top. At his very first summit with a lecture-hall full of neighborhood leaders, Hizzoner emphasized economic development as one of the primary means for dealing with neighborhood interests (cops and schools being the only others). The Mayor made no bold moves as his predecessor, Bill Purcell, had on infrastructure, smart development, or quality of life. The Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods rarely made the same splash it did under Purcell. When it did, it was drawing the ire of neighborhood leaders for giving their personal information over to the marketers of spam. Then when the 2007 election cycle hit, Karl Dean was suddenly remaking himself into "the neighborhoods Mayor", even though he had been more focused on helping big business with subsidies, tax breaks, and the largest capital project in Nashville history, which was devoted to the tourism industry.

Colby Sledge replaced Keith Moorman--who was trotted out to the Metro Council in 2010 to lend a neighborhoody rubber stamp to Hizzoner's plan to sell all but 5% of the non-flood-risk fairgrounds holdings to private developers (who have lots of bling to donate to election campaigns)--as leader of South Nashville Action People. Then came "Neighbors for Progress", a group that shot for 2,000 petition signatures to flip the fairgrounds the Mayor's way, but only got 500, and then showed themselves to be funded not primarily by neighborhoods, but influential Democrats and a 527 organization. With Sledge as its spokesperson, NFP flip-flopped on the fairgrounds question from relocating the flea market to razing the racetrack to trying to capture what council mandated as a broad community plan process. Then without skipping a beat, NFP endorsed Sarah Lodge Tally in a council district far away from the fairgrounds in what looked like a bid to give the Mayor a pocket vote 100% of the time.

Such a sliding scale of scruples should give those of us who are concerned about neighborhood issues pause.  The "emphasis on neighborhoods" Colby Sledge stresses suggests to me whatever will win for an up-and-coming red-state Democrat like Karl Dean. Consequently, neighborhoods seem simply a means to the end of greater influence and more donations with a head-fake of populism. We're in for another lean 4 years if the next Mayor treats neighborhoods as cynically and opportunistically as Karl Dean has.

My promotion of commercialism is okay. Yours is not.

Do you catch the irony in this recent neighborhood elist exchange about Fairgrounds Speedway? [Names have been changed to protect the innocent]

John Q.: DON'T FORGET TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO BUY SEASON GRANDSTAND PASSES & SEASON PIT PASSES!!!! They will officially go off sale at 5 pm today!

Jane Q.: I thought this site was not to be used to promote any commercial entity...
[Signed] Jane Q.
T-Mobile. America’s First Nationwide 4G Network.

How many handheld device comments would we have to prohibit if we pushed rules against commercialism too far?

Another year-end tribute from Tennessean reporter Michael Cass for Karl Dean

Cass ended 2010 with an homage to Karl Dean. His 2011 verse same as the first.

Last year he wrote the evocative tribute to the Mayor under the banner declaring Karl Dean "Tennessean of the Year." This year Michael Cass's retrospective on Metro politics is no less ingratiating. It places Mayor Dean at the center of the action, as vanquishing victor over any opponent, as well as the unqualified champion of several policy issues and one strictly personal one (you and me losing weight). Cass even minimizes the hits the Dean budget is set to take because of convention center land acquistion/construction overages that many have warned about.

Perhaps the most pandering and shameless homage to Karl the Conquerer is Cass's cast of the Mayor's Fairgrounds opponents as finally trampled in war despite an impressive series of populist battles won from 2010 to 2011:

[W]hen Dean didn’t lay out a specific plan for the property ... his proposal died at a Metro Council meeting that brought out thousands of people on Jan. 18 ....

While Dean lost that battle, he arguably won the war six months later, when Metro voters overwhelmingly supported his re-election bid on Aug. 4 and gave him another four years in office even as a large majority also voted for a Metro Charter amendment putting further restrictions on changes to the fairgrounds.

Cass's editorializing that Dean "lost the battle, but won the war", seems to assume that the only mission of Dean's Fairgrounds' opponents for the last half of 2010 into January 2011 was to beat Karl Dean in the August 2011 election. By any standard, let alone the journalistic standard, that assumption is a stretch. Many of us who opposed Dean's plan were clear about the victory in January. Few of us were looking for an alternative candidate to run against a wounded Mayor. So, where can Cass possibly get the idea that the Fairgrounds war was won by Dean in 2011?

In my estimation, Cass's reporting has tended to hedge against Dean opponents the longer this Mayor has pressed the Fairgrounds issue. First, he initially underestimated the turn-out of Dean's opponents at the Fairgrounds public hearing before conceding the actual high numbers that were being reported the night of the meeting.

Second after a 71%-29% landslide trouncing of the Mayor's demolition plan in August at the polls, Cass oddly reported that the Fairgrounds question divided Nashvillians while Karl Dean did not. Given the lopsided results, the Fairgrounds question was no more divisive than Karl Dean himself was. So, Cass is flat wrong about Dean winning the Fairgrounds war in August. He beat a handful of no-name candidates, one of whom was homeless (which hardly makes for a big campaign finance base to the obscene degree of Dean's). It is just as plausible to conclude that if the Fairgrounds question is the litmus test, Dean lost the battles of 2010-11 and the August war. And the community planning process that the council voted as the alternative to Dean's demolition is ongoing.

And readers should never let Cass live down that 2010 "Tennessean of the Year" homage. As much as it may have gained him friends inside the Courthouse, it should also be the context for whatever else he publishes on Hizzoner. It tarnishes his image.

The January victory of the Fairgrounds preservation group was almost a year ago. A long time ago. In my opinion, the Mayor's Office and the Dean supporters at the Tennessean are counting on the length of time passing and the shortness of public memory to bury the actual events leading to the defeat of the Mayor's demolition plans.

This history is contestable. Don't let them re-write it.

Occupy Nashville was never really Nashville to me

Both print press outlets, the Tennessean and SouthComm (via the City Paper), are giving generally sympathetic coverage to "Occupy Nashville" this Christmas season, in keeping with the dominant script about Occupy Wall Street.

Over at the City Paper reporter Steven Hale waxed melodramatic:

While Occupy factions around the country have continued to face harsh crackdowns, the Nashville encampment has endured. Having declared multiple victories over the state, their claim on the so-called “People’s Plaza” remains intact. And for the time being, Nashville remains occupied.

The Nashville occupiers have endured without ever taking on the machine of Metro Nashville. So, how can reporter Hale conclude that Nashville itself remains occupied? A state-owned square remains occupied in a national organizing context that may be shifting away from tent cities in municipal parks.

The Tennessean account is at least more realistic about the intentions of the occupiers in Legislative Plaza: ON is not focused on separating corporate influence on Metro at all. Instead, they are holding out for January, when the General Assembly will once again convene. Yet, the question remains, why call it Occupy "Nashville"?

If I may deviate from the media script for a second: before Occupy Nashville appeared on the scene demanding the separation of corporations and government while leveraging no observable separations, 11,000 Nashvillians organized to leverage a referendum to check Mayor Karl Dean's unilateral grab of the community planning process on the question of the Fairgrounds. The Mayor was set to make a lot of influential suitors in various industries richer at the expense of the democratic process. That was until he was turned back convincingly both by petition and by the ballot itself.

Those dissenters did not receive the sympathetic media attention Occupy Nashville has in the waning days of 2011, but they were no less grassroots, no less democratic, and no less significant than ON. I have been waiting for the Occupy movement to have an impact on Nashville remotely as large as the Fairgrounds preservationists did. I'm still waiting.

Nashville Scene reporters: desperately seeking the slew

Ever since Occupy Nashville started taking on Governor Bill Haslam (or maybe it was since one of their reporters was arrested during one of ON's post-curfew occupations), the boys and girls blogging for the Nashville Scene have joined in one undeviating chorus of support for Occupy Nashville. That string continued today with an indulging Jeff Woods post and a post by Steve Haruch on outside coverage of the protest at Legislative Plaza.

What grabs my attention in this media love affair for a local protest that has not done much to protest locally (as in "protesting Metro Nashville itself") is the contrast of it to the circumspection, ambivalence, and snootiness that Scene bloggers expressed during the debate over Fairgrounds redevelopment, which occurred over the past year and a half.

You may recall that the Fairgrounds tensions ratcheted particularly over the question of whether citizens were being excluded from the Mayor's top-down planning process, and they piqued over charges that local proponents of Fairgrounds Speedway demolition did not really come from the grassroots, but were astroturfed by supporters of Karl Dean. You may also remember that opponents put the question of their grassroots credentials to rest at nearly every turn, especially one Metro Council meeting night where literally thousands showed up to speak against the Mayor's plan during public hearing.

Nonetheless, from their Pith in the Wind perch, Scene reporters were unmoved by such popular opposition in 2010-2011, until Occupy Nashville came along. Compare, for example, Haruch's dulcet post today (celebrating ON bringing together people across the political spectrum) to Jim Ridley's irresolute post on the New York Times coverage of the public hearing. Whereas Haruch frames media coverage in terms of ON's purported big tent, Ridley seems to be in full-blown denial of the long-reach populism driving opposition to the Mayor's plan. Ridley claims that the Times brings light to a debate which has been all about heat. The only heat Haruch frames of Occupy Nashville--with the aid of MSNBC.com--is the warm "bridge-building" glow of "southern hospitality." Ridley invokes "carpetbaggers." Rereading these epically vamped accompaniments leaves me searching for Tara and Twelve Oaks in the protests.

A year ago yesterday Ridley and Haruch tag-teamed a post promoting a YouTube video that alleged that Fairgrounds Expo vendors supported the Mayor's redevelopment plan. A week later the Nashville Business Journal reported a poll that found that 98% of the vendors opposed Karl Dean's plan to send them to Hickory Hollow, which was supported by the astroturf redevelopment proponents before they flip-flopped to advocate tearing down the speedway.

One of the astroturfers, Keith Moorman, was hand-picked by the Mayor's Office to speak for Fairground redevelopment in a video intended to persuade the Metro Council (long before the public hearing) that Dean's community support was strong (which the 2011 Fairgrounds referendum proved to be false). But rewind the tape at Pith back to the comments section of a 2007 Haruch post where Ridley (a.k.a. "Mr. Pink") praises Moorman as a populist everyman who has "piqued interest" of his community. I'm convinced the scripted astroturf started at that very moment.

I wish I could recall a post where a Scene writer embraced populism half as vigorously during the Fairgrounds brouhaha as they have during the occupation. But Ridley called voting against the Mayor voting for the status quo. Former editor Stephen George accused the grassroots of being hollow PR and naked cynicism while giving a pass to the Mayor's propaganda squads. Tracy Moore lavished link-love on a pro-Dean neighborhood blog while ignoring many of us on the other side. Betsy Phillips looked forward to a Dean-proposed park surrounded by impervious parking lots.

To a person, they seemed loath to advocate for balancing wholesale privatization and redevelopment with a community-based planning process. But now, forthwith, populism counts. Accountability to the 99% suddenly matters where it did not last winter in the heated halls at 12th and Laurel.

Meanwhile, some of us support both an open and accountable Fairgrounds planning process and the occupation of public spaces to make corporations and government more accountable to the people. It is a more consistent position.


UPDATE:  More on the astroturf of redevelopment proponents who did not attempt to present a balanced picture of where the community stood.

History is written by the winners (with the help of journos)

To which CM might
that "Super Progressive"
label lead?

It wasn't too long ago that SouthComm writers labeled CM at-Large Megan Barry as a "Super Progressive," despite the fact that her only progressive chops were on nondiscrimination (eager support on Metro employees, hesitant support for Metro contractors) and on a "living wage" bill that helped a little more than a dozen Metro employees. At least we can be grateful that in their latest report she is cast not so much as a super progressive, but as one who has uncannily strong ties to local progressives while also keeping her business options open.

With interest I have followed the short but happy political life of Megan Barry for several years now I have yet to see her risk the same stances against the Nashville business junta that she has against the cash-strapped pro-neighborhoods wing in Nashville politics. I have always assumed that any strong leader has to at some point risk their political capital to show their character and the strength of their conviction to voters. Even if observers do not agree with her they may respect her for taking a stand once and a while against the odds. And that stand cannot be strictly symbolic. But I have yet to see Megan Barry lay it on the line. The truest passage of yesterday's City Paper spotlight on Barry had to do with the pure symbolism of the progressive agenda she's worked on:

Both of Barry’s key bills were also symbolic measures. The new living wage applied to only 14 workers who had wages below $10.77 per hour. And there hadn’t been many Metro workers who had actually cited discrimination in the government workplace.

“In a community where you’re starting with a baseline, and you have to make incremental steps, that’s how you bring people along,” Barry said.

At least CM Barry has the honesty to admit that these only amounted to incremental progress, but whether they build consensus is open to debate. Consensus assumes that all things are equal as partners each give up benefits to achieve something higher. However, the Nashville game is always rigged to favor industry, unsmart growth, and development over community and quality of life. So, while she may aim for consensus, in reality, neighborhoods are forced to take whatever they can get unless they stubbornly and tirelessly mobilize their numbers. Even then, they are accused (usually falsely) of being regressive, pro-status-quo, and NIMBY.

(By the way, the fact that Chris Sanders, Chair of the Tennessee Equality Project, is playing up that consensus--given that his organization is steadfastly single-issue and hidebound not to consider other people's priorities--contains no lack of irony).

On questions that are more substantive, and not symbolic, CM Barry has either wavered, flip-flopped, or sided unabashedly with the business presidium, the admirals of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce:

• She voted with Mayor Dean on a regressive stormwater fee structure that charged property owners who created less stormwater (mostly residential) more than those who generated more stormwater (mostly business) and then blamed keeping her promise to Rich Riebeling on the bill's sponsor
• She enlisted neighborhood support in her bid to beat Charlie Tygard's LED sign bill that would have allowed Vegasesque signs in residential neighborhoods, then she disappeared quietly into the LED Task Force and walked-back her opposition. Her campaign manager emerged several months later to attempt to remind neighborhood leaders that she opposed LED signs
• After sponsoring a community meeting or two on the proposed convention center, she supported it without making any demands on the Mayor or setting any perimeters for the project
• She opposed a community-based master plan project for the State Fairgrounds and she supported Mayor Dean's bid to tear everything down, sell off 95% of the non-flood-risk public property and build an expansive office park that would have been a boon to private developers while increasing vehicular traffic further polluting Brown's Creek.

So, again, how has Megan Barry been anything more but superficially progressive or pro-neighborhoods? The latest SouthComm pin-up of the council member still seems like a re-write of history, because it ignores historical facts about her record. Swallowing the story would have been easier had it been strictly a matter watching a reporter weigh in with journalistic objectivity between Barry's critics and supporters. Instead, it becomes a matter of judging whether journo's own interpretation helps a winner frame the history that her constituents remember.

False equivalence at the Tennessean

For the past few months the political beat writers around the city have amplified the organization of supporters of the Mayor's plan to sell off the Fairgrounds, even though there was little or no evidence that they had a popular movement behind them. Even the ultimate test of a landslide referendum win seems to prompt no change in the reportage.

Michael Cass's report on last week's election keeps up the false equivalence as if demolition supporters swarmed the polls to the same degree that advocates of a community-based master plan did:

the century-old fairgrounds ... has divided neighbors and other residents throughout the city. The fight has pitted people who love the fairgrounds' history and affordable activities against those who believe it's mostly dead space and a noisy nuisance when cars are zooming around

Judging by the 71%-29% landslide of the referendum, the Fairgrounds no more divided neighbors than Karl Dean himself did. And yet, Cass never brings up Karl Dean's divisiveness in his report on the Mayor's race. Instead, Cass ponders how the popular Mayor will get the extra 6 council votes the referendum mandates.

Unlike the relatively positive media spin that Fairgrounds opponents like South Nashville Action People and Neighbors for Progress received during the past year, the Mayor's no-name opponents got next to none. There is no telling how media coverage of SNAP/NFP motivated people to vote against the referendum and there is no telling how low the percentage of "against" referendum votes would have been had SNAP/NFP received the same meager coverage that Karl Dean's opponents did.

Fact checking Nashville Public Radio

Even the local public news service has its problems with accuracy.

Last Friday WPLN's local politics reporter, Daniel Potter, completely mistook how the Metro Council dealt with Mayor Karl Dean's plan to sell the Fairgrounds in a story on the referendum results:

Dean had hoped to redevelop the fairgrounds, but the council rejected that plan. Fairgrounds activists then forced the referendum in hopes of protecting the property.

The council did not reject redevelopment of the Fairgrounds. They merely mandated a community-based master plan. I have yet to meet anyone who is opposed to any redevelopment of the Fairgrounds. And this is not the first time Potter has misrepresented opposition to mayoral initiatives.

Another WPLN reporter Rae Ellen Bichell, covering a Vanderbilt study on the influence of yard signs seemed to overstate conclusively that the signs have powerful influence in elections without regard to analyzing the Vandy researchers' methods or the merits of their claims. I read the PR piece from the university's flack magazine and I spotted several potential problems that Bichell does not address:

• the authors themselves seem too conclusive about the study proving their hypothesis. Social scientific research first indicates conclusions; evidence is only "conclusive", as the researchers claim, when the study findings stand up to both time and scrutiny. Same goes for the claim that field experiments "confirmed" their lab findings.
• the authors say they emailed their surveys to parents on a PTO mailing list. Were those parents part of the small percentage of "likely voters" (which is the more dependable survey set in elections)?
• the authors' use of the survey rather than an exit poll seems itself problematic. Did the Vandy researchers factor out subject motives like name-dropping candidates whose signs they saw in order not to appear as ignorant about local politics? A survey may not tell researchers exactly what they want to find: a connection between a yard sign and pulling the lever in a voting booth. Instead, research subjects could be doing what the Vanderbilt magazine is doing: managing their public image.

It may be the case that Bichell does not have social science experience to challenge the Vanderbilt team on these questions, but that does not absolve WPLN from accuracy and balance in political reporting on studies of yard sign impact on voting patterns. Someone in the newsroom should have been asking critical questions rather than strongly repeating a hypothesis that yard signs have "powerful influence" over elections as if the questions are settled.

The most disingenuous quote from Thursday's Metro Nashville ballot

From the AP:

Colby Sledge, a member of Neighbors for Progress, a group of south Nashville residents who have complained about the noise and pollution from the racetrack, said the next steps are to get more input on what residents want at the facility and try to reach an agreement that everyone can be happy with.

"We'll try to see if we can come to a consensus that's been elusive in this whole process," Sledge said.

I've heard preservationists say on several occasions that they have extended offers to Sledge's South Nashville Action People to work on neighborhood quality of life only to have their offers ignored. In the meantime, Sledge moved on supporting the plans to move the fleamarket to Hickory Hollow, to tear down the Fairgrounds and to replace it with a private office park built by wealthy real estate interests while relying on the assistance of Democratic insiders and the money of at least one political action committee.

If anything can be described as elusive in the process it is the authenticity of the SNAP/Neighborhoods for Progress group who talk as if they want a consensus, but walk as if they can only rely on partisan power from beyond the community to get exclusively what they want.

What tonight's election returns say to me

Several results from tonight's returns of this year's election suggest to me that Nashvillians are perfectly fine with how the Metro Council has moved toward holding Mayor Karl Dean in check over the last year or two:

• A light voter turnout both during early voting and then in today's polling suggests to me that people were not mobilized to rally around a single philosophy of growth in Nashville nor were they motivated to come to the Mayor's aid as his agenda faced increasing opposition in the Metro Council.
• Voters overwhelmingly supported the Fairgrounds charter amendment (71% "For" - 29% "Against") that would require the Mayor to get 6 more votes on the Metro Council before he can carry through with demolition plans at the Fairgrounds. That was a huge rebuff that eclipses the Mayor's wide margin of victory over 3 unknown, weak candidates. This result is vindication of the CMs who challenged the Mayor's redevelopment plan and leveraged a community-based planning process. The referendum win also sends a strong message to the newly elected class that they should check with voters before they decide to cave to heavy-handed growth designs of the Mayor's Office. If not, they may find their re-election chances at risk.
• In three districts that the Mayor worked to flip votes against his capital projects to certain votes for them, he did not prove that his endorsements made much of a difference to voters. The biggest loss was Sarah Lodge Tally to CM Jason Holleman (by nearly 20 percentage points), where the challenger trucked in trailers full of outside cash and had former Dean and Bredesen insiders working her campaign. The second casualty was Tanaka Vercher, who was beat handily by conservative CM Duane Dominy. The third Deanie Baby, Page Turner, did not get enough votes to beat conservative CM Robert Duvall who himself did not get enough to avoid a run-off with Turner. Getting those three seats could have mitigated the referendum requirement of 6 votes to demolish. Predictably, Karl Dean is saying he has no Fairgrounds redevelopment plans tonight. He currently does not have enough committed votes because his coattails did not bring pocket votes in, yet.
  
• One of Karl Dean's most loyal supporters, Anna Page, appears to have lost narrowly to her challenger. At least one mainstream reporter characterized her loss as having to do with running in a pro-Fairgrounds district. As of tonight, no incumbent that I am aware of has lost due to his or her opposition to Mayor Dean. The same code of loyalty that reportedly adheres in the Mayor's Office does not appeal to voters. I take that as an indication that they are comfortable with the Mayor being held in check.

Outside of the new class coming in, the defeat of Jim Hodge and a couple of run-offs, the voters stood pat on the current contentious balance between the Metro Council and the Mayor's Office. As long as the council continues to show increasing spine while demanding accountability on Karl Dean's projects, these are results that I can live with. We will need some new CMs to keep the referendum in view and step up to fill the vacuum of independent CMs who did not or could not run this time around.

After this ballot, the new ones have little reason not to.

Neighbors for Progress poses as community-based, but is fed by outside donations

Astroturf. That's what it seemed to me beginning late last year when the same small number of representatives from self-styled "neighborhood" organization, Neighbors for Progress, appeared at council meetings during Fairgrounds discussion. Then, they could only muster 35 supporters during the pivotal council public hearing against 3,000 advocates for racetrack preservation.

While the mainstream news media continued to spin Colby Sledge et al. as a neighborhood group, I continued to insist that NFP looked like an extension of Davidson County Democrats who had a financial interest in selling the Fairgrounds to private developers. While their website promoted a community-based movement committed to installing a park, in a pinch they were getting help from very powerful people including a lawyer last minute to try and derail their opponents before the referendum.

Not even handing out t-shirts could make them grassroots

So, now I'm not surprised at all that the media has finally dug up NFP's financial ties to partisan politicos (nor am I surprised that the embarrassing media reports are coming so late in the game to minimize the damage):

Campaign efforts of the fairgrounds area organization Neighbors for Progress aren’t funded by actual fairgrounds neighbors.

Rather, the group’s modest amount of money has come from former Mayor Karl Dean strategist Will Pinkston, investor John Cooper and a political action committee dubbed Building Nashville Together, financial reports submitted to the Davidson County Election Commission last week reveal.

The organization, which supports Dean’s vision for redeveloping the 117-acre property, has made only one political play during Metro’s election season: issuing a negative campaign mail-piece against District 24 Councilman Jason Holleman, who is trying to fend off challenger Sarah Lodge Tally and her army of pro-Dean supporters. Holleman has questioned the mayor’s handling of the fairgrounds issue.

“I think the disclosure demonstrates that Neighbors for Progress was a political attack operation, not any kind of neighborhood organization,” Holleman said.

Pinkston, a former aide to Gov. Phil Bredesen who briefly worked on Dean’s re-election team, contributed $1,000 to Neighbors for Progress. Cooper donated $700. Building Nashville Together contributed $1,500.

Neighbors for Progress is not very effective at organizing people so they have to rely on organized money given by some very powerful people in the Democratic Party, many of whom have ties to Mayor Karl Dean. Colby Sledge admitted to the City Paper that they cannot muster any influence without the help of these partisan sources. That admission does not allay my perceptions about NFP.

By the way, Building Nashville Together is a 527 organization whose chair is a former campaign manager for Jeff Yarbro, who is closely tied to Karl Dean, too. BNT has been paying people to canvass neighborhoods for Dean-friendly candidates for Metro Council, no doubt to grease the wheels on future projects like the Mayor's Fairgrounds "redevelopment" scheme.

Paid out $10,000 helping Deaniacs like Tanaka Vercher and CM Anna Page

If you can't organize people to help you at the grassroots you can always buy some influence to mobilize the voters you believe you need. And money spent now may just flip future council votes to Karl Dean.

The Metro Charter already set the Fairgrounds specifically apart from other public property

CM Emily Evans responds to constituent questions about the Fairgrounds referendum at her blog:

Some have raised the rather specious argument that the question of the Fairgrounds does not rise to a level of importance necessary for inclusion in the Metro Charter. They are, of course, ignoring the fact that the reason we have a State Fair in the first place is because we are directed to do so by the Metro Charter.

Compare this to a quote that Dean supporter and McNeely Pigott & Fox spinmeister Katy Varney attributed to the son of a Metro Charter architect:

The charter was not set up to address specific issues, but rather it is the overarching instrument that sets forth the process by which decisions are made by our elected officials ....

Regardless of how we feel about the future of the fairgrounds, it is a mistake to change the charter to apply rules to one place that are not in place for any other Metro property.

Given that the Metro Charter as drafted already made specific exceptions for the Fairgrounds that it does not make for other Metro property, how is it inconsistent with the Metro Charter to amend further exceptions for the Fairgrounds into the charter? Distracting us from the merits of the Fairground referendum with a logical fallacy like an argument from authority is not just bad form, but Varney's appeal is also undermined by her own authority's argument, which is itself inaccurate at best, deceptive at worst.

Davidson Co DA declares that Neighbors for Progress lawyer's slur of "illegal conduct" has no merit

What a monumental waste of time it must have been for the District Attorney's office to have to consider a request from the Neighbors for Progress lawyer to investigate unfounded "illegal conduct" allegations about Davidson County citizens who organized to legally leverage a referendum on Fairgrounds demolition.

From the beginning Democratic hack and former journo Colby Sledge and his NFP organization have slung mud at the intentions and the actions of those of us who supported the movement to stop Mayor Karl Dean's take-over of the planning process for the State Fairgrounds. They generated innuendo and gossip about Fairgrounds supporters coming from outside the county and being bankrolled by racers. Once it became obvious that the referendum had enough popular support to be put on the ballot, they trashed Fairgrounds supporters during the Election Commission process, and the latest false charge of "illegal conduct" was just part of the pattern of lies to stop a movement that is determined to stop Karl Dean's bulldozers.

Hence, the DA's refusal is further evidence that Neighbors for Progress's case for stopping Fairgrounds supporters never had merit and their ulterior motive has been to help Karl Dean prevail by any means necessary. But they just keep losing:

District Attorney General Torry Johnson said a review of the petitions determined that no further investigation should be conducted.

"The Election Commission is very stringent in its review of these petitions and they determined that there were more than enough qualified signatures provided that they didn't even need to rely on any of these forms the ‘Neighbors for Progress' group found questionable

Leader of the Fairgrounds referendum effort, CM Jamie Hollin, called Neighbors for Progress's latest efforts nothing but "gutter politics." That's exactly what they are conducting despite their claims to be community-based. It seems more like a party-type campaign of mud-slinging.

Cast my ballot yesterday

Only 2 votes cast.

No real choices for Mayor and Vice Mayor and neither Dean nor Neighbors deserve my vote (I voted for Dean last time around). The at-Large incumbents have behaved like either tools or tanglefoots. The at-Large challengers have not presented any viable alternative. They look to be either cookie-cutter conservatives or selectively progressive Deanie babies. The "good enough" this time was not to waste votes on those who have not represented my interests.

Neighbors for Hypocrisy

Remember how 35 members of Neighbors for Progress stood in a Metro Council public hearing last January and stipulated that their opinions of how redevelopment should occur at the Fairgrounds count for more than those of anyone else who lived farther away?

Well, it takes a lot of nerve for Colby Sledge and his gang to go outside of the Fairgrounds area to try and influence the re-election chances of a West Nashville CM simply because he did not agree with their opinions (or maybe they realize they can't beat the referendum and they're trying to pack the council with Deaniacs like Sarah Lodge Tally):