Moving pictures

The Mayor's self-funded, sketchy, astroturfed

501(c)(4) created to pose a tax increase as grassroots popular (2012):

Hizzoner's failed attempt to dedicate rapid transit to West End hotels & Downtown tourist stops (2013-14):

The extension of the Dean administration by other means (2015):

Ding! Dong! The AMP is [officially] dead!

UMM, NO.

I have been arguing from jump that the east-west connector proposal (involving bus rapid transit) should be dead on arrival because it deliberately excluded sections of Nashville, like North Nashville, that needed it more than the hotels on West End did. The Amp plan was a case of class and ethnic prejudice that once more mustered public revenues and infrastructure in support of wealthier, whiter communities at the expense of others.

Early on I was simply ignored and no bus rapid transit supporters responded to my concerns.

When they started responding to me, it was to make the case that the transit authority had considered all modes of travel (conveniently leaving out that not all corridors had been considered).

When the arguments that the Amp was a case of transit inequity started gaining traction across the city, Ampsters in what now appears to be a peel-off move, insisted that West End was merely the spine of a region-wide transit plan that would also bring BRT to corridors elsewhere beyond the east-west corridor. All of the sudden they began vaguely predicting future northward legs.

Today the Metro Transit Authority officially proclaimed the Amp dead. And MTA's new executive admitted what many of us had known all along, namely that the Amp was never designed to spread beyond east and west Nashville. These are CEO Steve Bland's exact, pertinent words on the Amp today:

Frankly, it would have been difficult to replicate in other corridors.

Nope. We were not the fools some made us out to be.

Suburbanization is a failing development model in Tennessee

Charles Marohn describes how a city like Memphis got itself into a bind by relying on subsidized suburbanization as an answer to the ills of industrialization. Now with "soft defaults" (vs. hard defaults in Detroit) the chickens are coming home to roost:

Relying on the automobile to facilitate growth by horizontally expanding the city, Memphis shifted away from the traditional pattern of neighborhood development and played its part in building the American Dream of large yards, easy driving, and free parking.

Suburbanization, sold as a way to cure blight and promote prosperity, was radically new and untested. It was also irresistible. Driven by federal programs and financial incentives, Memphis – like most American cities – built highways through the middle of the city, annexed property and extended public utilities outward.

In the process, core neighborhoods were destroyed and residents relocated to neighborhoods built in the new, experimental style. Streetcars were abandoned and the economic activity at the old stops shifted to new commercial corridors. Old buildings were torn down to provide parking and millions of tax dollars were spent widening streets to accommodate the automobiles now necessary for daily life.

Eventually, the vitality of the city was inverted from its traditional historic pattern of a strong core surrounded by incrementally growing neighborhoods to one where most economic activity took place on the edge. While this shift left many people behind and devastated the historic neighborhoods of Memphis, the result was seen largely as a social problem, not an economic one. Easy growth on the periphery – where land is cheap, the development community is ready, and all the government incentives are in place – was then, and remains today, the community’s default strategy for economic improvement.

Somewhat unhindered by the levels of industrialization borne by Memphis, Nashville is no less exposed by its overreliance on exurban expansion and what Mayor Karl Dean embraces as "regionwide growth". Nashville recently depends on gimmicky baubles like the new Music City Center, a "We Are Nashville Promenade" and an east-west rapid transit connector ("The Amp") in order to spike short-term economic activity without reference to long-term viability in the city for its inhabitants.

Marohn warns of "new massive gambles" undertaken by sprawling metros to keep heads above water: convention centers and retail complexes driven by municipal debt and tax breaks for already wealthy corporations. Likewise these conditions also apply to Nashville, where it feels like we are mortgaging our future sometimes to fund huge new capital projects that enable the Dean brand more than aid Nashville proper. We are definitely sacrificing urban services, from which the Mayor perennially demands cuts, in order to bankroll the diversions.

In the end, an emphasis on regionwide growth seems like warmed-over, evangelical suburbanism. It constitutes a doubling down on failing economic policies that hurt both Memphis and Nashville in the long run. Once the smoke-and-mirrors floor show of the Dean administration ends, what will be left with?

Nashville said to be possibly taking a giant leap ahead on Tuesday (but likely leaving North Nashville behind)

The Obama Administration is reportedly going to roll out its 2015 budget today, and the Mayor's minions are all abuzz that POTUS may drop $75 million on Karl Dean to run his bus rapid transit line down West End almost to Belle Meade. The excitement and the predictable blowback at Hizzoner's self-imposed blindness catalyzed by power and money has gone national:

For Nashville, the backlash calls to mind a recent battle over the planning of the city's half-billion-dollar convention center, which opened in May, and was a cornerstone of the administration of Dean, the second-term Democrat who has the support of the chamber of commerce and the business community writ large. Some residents and elected officials derided the project as a publicly funded gift for tourists. A similar line of attack has been heard over the particular route planners chose for the Amp.

"This bus gets the tourists from downtown to the nicer restaurant/bar district," as one elected official recently put it. "The concept is: we're not building a transit system for Nashvillians. We're building a fun bus to run tourists out to West End and the cool bars."

If President Obama does award Karl Dean a huge grant to build a new transit line for a corridor that needs it less than any point north or south of downtown, it will merely the latest stanza in the dirge I sing for the support I once held for Barack Obama.

The President's stimulus package, if properly funded, could have been a dramatic turnaround for our nation's cities and our national workforce. It was constricted by a leader who has preached the virtues of bringing the unrepentant, uncivil GOP along.

Obamacare is not much more than Romneycare.

Federal education policy has been directed at privatizing public schools and managing high-stakes testing with an eye to giving big business more control in school districts.

Our foreign policy continues to be marred by Bushian tactics, including the civil-rights-violating detention of prisoners. Mr. Obama's drone-slaughters of civilian targets have far exceeded anything Dubya ever did.

And now, instead of granting rapid transit in working-class communities or in neighborhoods predominated by people of color, President Obama may reward Nashville for serving the entertainment and tourism industries one more time before Karl Dean leaves by subsidizing party buses to run visitors to-and-from their hotels, bars and honky tonks quickly.

A President who has been more comfortable serving up tepid Republican pablum may enable a Democratic Mayor who is himself a nice fit for red-state, neo-liberal Tennessee politics.

If Nashville wins this grant today, then it could complete Karl Dean's tenure of serving Nashville's wealthy and influential while leaving communities like North Nashville behind. The Amp is the perfect compliment to the Music City Center. If funded it will be a subsidized pleasure line on which tourists can depend.

And those who make promises that it is only the first step in BRT extended to underserved communities cannot back up those promises. Despite their empty promises, they are going to stand by this Mayor to the end. It's not illogical. If you want to play, he's the game in town. However, Mayor Dean--being term-limited and having higher political aspirations--will never have to be accountable to deliver on those promises.

If the federal government does come through, I predict that in a few years, when we're told there is no more grant money and the budget is too overextended to serve places like North Nashville, Amp supporters will be eating their promises. The best thing that can happen now to bring everything and everyone in Nashville back down to earth is that Obama finds another neo-liberal Mayor elsewhere to support in 2015.


UPDATE:  The Obama transit dept. is recommending $27 million next year for the Amp. If approved it is a little more than 1/3 of what the Mayor's Office wants. So, which 1/3 of the project will get built and which 2/3's waits to see if federal money shows up in 2016, 2017, 2018? Downtown to West End gets BRT first? Without $75 million in 2015, how much longer does North Nashville have to wait for its promised bus rapid transit lines to materialize?

Also, consider this one: “Evidence suggests expanded rail operations produce higher ridership gains than more bus service.” There is a reason the BRT grant is called "Small Starts". It is not nearly as bold as rail, which would create more ridership. The fact that BRT is cheaper, but limited to the hotel and entertainment corridor suggests that the Mayor's Office not only plays it safe in choosing locations, but does so on the cheap. Rail would have made a bolder, more attractive statement.

Racism and the "stage-managed narrative" in transit and ballpark plans

Last year I gave Metro Councilmember Scott Davis a pass on his view that a new east-west bus rapid transit line would help "low-income residents" in his district even as it won't help the same classes in North Nashville. Based on the opinions of poli sci professor, Sekou Franklin, maybe I should not have been so quick to concede CM Davis's boosterific points for "the Amp".

Dr. Franklin's recent column is a scathing reflection on the transit injustice wrought by MTA and Karl Dean's administration and the minions supporting "the Amp":

...Amp advocates, backed by the mayor’s office and Metro Transit Authority officials, selectively picked winners and losers for the project. They relied on flawed data, steered federal civil rights officers away from studying North Nashville bus routes and backed zoning changes to boost the appearance of higher ridership in the West End corridor, which stands to benefit the most from the Amp.

The pro-Amp group’s East Nashville angle also has been an insincere attempt to inoculate itself from racial and civil rights scrutiny. Pro-Amp advocates claim that Amp terminals east of the river will help working-class blacks, when in reality, they are located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. The project could actually accelerate the displacement of blacks who still remain in the Main Street-Five Points area.

The Amp debate also has exposed how Nashville’s leading officials exploit the politics of race while lacking any real commitment to systemic racial inequities. Similar to the debate about the Sulphur Dell ballpark, Amp supporters have brought attention to distressed communities and African-Americans, but only to bolster a stage-managed narrative of Chamber of Commerce boosterism — a narrative that is not intended to help African-Americans or distressed communities, but meant to convince urban pioneers that Nashville is the premier Southeast destination.

The irony is that the so-called distressed neighborhoods for both projects (Germantown for Sulphur Dell and Main Street-Five Points for the Amp) are places where working-class African-Americans are being pushed out in record numbers.

In both cases (a new ballpark and the east-west connector) development for the business sector has taken priority over residential interests and social justice. Metro Nashville does not seem committed to balanced, smart and sustainable growth, but seems more bound to a malignant growth that devours quality of life and historic communities. The scales are tipped toward money and power. If you don't have much like the predominantly white Courthouse class does, then you are only in the way.

The truly sad part for me personally, is that there does not seem to be a critical mass of people organized at the grassroots who care enough to speak up for equity in development and in mass transit. The opponents who do speak out are ignored, pigeonholed and marginalized, even by North Nashville council members who are supposed to represent them.

1,500+ people attended 5 BRT meetings, but the Metro Transit Authority is only going to meet with individual businesses about the Amp proposal

Those of us in rapid transit deserts can only dream.

This is truly a head-scratcher:

More than 1,500 residents participated and shared valuable input about the project. In the coming weeks and months, MTA will closely review all the public input it received from the meetings, meet with individual businesses along the route and then schedule a second round of meetings in March to share revised design plans.

I asked the anonymous person doing the Amp's promotional social media why MTA was not meeting with neighborhood associations or residents along the route (ignoring completely, of course, those of us outside the east-west corridor), but he or she has yet to reply to me. Anonymity has its privileges.

Assuming they do follow up with more than a select group of token businesses likely to tell officials what they want to hear, how do they possibly have time to meet with all of the businesses along the route from East Nashville to St. Thomas Hospital between now and the mid-March meetings?

The only conclusion that I can draw is that Metro officials are once again drawing up transit policy while privileging the voices of those with more money: business owners. I watched more than just business owners give feedback at the two meetings I attended. Nonetheless, their feedback, their votes count more than those of us who are no less affected by these biased, maddening transit decisions.

"Cleveland's curse" could be North Nashville's curse if Amp is built

For the sake of argument, let's grant without question the major points east-west connector supporters are giving for building the Amp:

1. Since Cleveland, which some ballyhoo as a success, is the model for Nashville's Amp, the odds are good that BRT on West End will succeed.
2. Amp will increase growth along its corridor because all transit stops drive up the value of nearby land.

Even as I grant these arguments, the reality that remains represents the motive of my opposition to the east-west connector: it is not equitable transit. Proponents can call it "the first step" in regional transit if they wish, but repeating it over and over is no guarantee of more than one step. In fact, the logic of development would encourage keeping BRT rare to maximize the riches along a wealthy corridor. And who would blame East Nashvillians for trying to keep their Amp funds away from the risk of future northward BRT expansion? So, believing that Amp is a first step would be the height of gullibility.

And, ironically, Cleveland provides the case for being wary.

There are indications that Northeast Ohio is having problems expanding past the initial progress they have made. As proud as Clevelanders are reported to be of their BRT line (a.k.a., "HealthLine"), there are real questions as to whether they have the will to expand BRT to spread the benefits to others:

With some minor gripes aside, we all get to witness BRT success everyday. But, has the influx of “choice” riders to the HealthLine whet the appetite for another BRT line?

Certainly, at $200 million for 5 miles of infrastructure and hybrid buses, an award-winning BRT system is not cheap. But, this isn’t just infrastructure, it’s transformative, high-value infrastructure. The economic return is an estimated $4.3 billion for infill and redeveloped buildings on Euclid Avenue. It makes the case for a second act. But is there a will among the leadership at Greater Cleveland RTA, a city in its service area, and at the source of funding, NOACA, to build another BRT line in Northeast Ohio?

It took quite a bit of swimming upstream to get the Euclid BRT line funded (80% was federal and 20% a local match. The case was built more than a decade earlier in the Dual Hub Streetcar plan...).

So much has changed in the world since 2008 — much for the better in transit projects. Nearly every city in the U.S. is clamoring for a new streetcar line — and at least half a dozen, including Dallas, Charlotte and Cincinnati are poised to add lines soon to existing streetcars in Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, and Portland.

Before the recent leadership change at NOACA, observers noted, there was no more juice to do a follow up project at transformative scale like the HealthLine ....

RTA's director of planning, Maribeth Feke, told CEOs for Cities where the transit agency could envision another BRT line. But does anyone else besides RTA see BRT as a catalyst for revitalizing old streetcar districts...? Without a concerted effort to the multi-year planning and development, it's unlikely the region will see another Bus-Rapid Transit line soon.

So, ballyhooed Cleveland has their beautiful BRT line, showcased by many, including Nashville's Amp proponents, but the wealth is not going to be spread around any time "soon". BRT is not expanding, even though the HealthLine garners positive national attention and mimicry.

Cleveland's limited progress does not bode well for progress in North Nashville, where I live.

Now explain to me again slowly why I should support, especially with my taxes, a BRT line that bypasses my community and pumps wealth into already wealthy communities with no guarantees of transit equity? Why should I look to Cleveland and be inspired to support Nashville's Karl Dean's Amp? Why should I wish to subsidize West End wealth when the political will to fight the same fight for North Nashville transit would likely be lacking after east-west BRT is built?

Metro's Midtown "Open House" on the Amp threatened to turn into a town hall meeting earlier tonight

".... go to Cleveland. See what a mess it is."

Tonight's Midtown transit "open house" or "workshop" (or whatever officials are deciding to call it at the moment) nearly busted out into a full blown public hearing on the east-west connector after one person in the audience asked an Amp engineer who was finishing up at the podium if he would take questions from the floor.

The citizen expressed his opinion that he did not think that projections could be correct based on his own experience with metro transit. The engineer moved to the fellow and started answering his questions as if they were having a one-on-one, and someone else in the crowd spoke up and asked the engineer to use a microphone so everyone could hear him. The engineer declined to grab the mike and expressed his own wish that all questions be expressed at the tables.

I wondered why he seemed resistant to fielding some crowd questions before turning to the tables. As I saw it he could have answered and parlayed the group to dispersing more diplomatically without seeming so bent on individual conversation. If the reticence to discussing these issues is about controlling the rabble, it really does hit me the wrong way.

In the meantime, a third attendee spoke up and encouraged others present to go to Cleveland and see "the mess" that a similar system is there. Pitchforks were starting to emerge. Meeting organizers seemed on the edge of losing control to the masses.

But there was a lull, then some aside chatting, and before anyone else had a chance to take the floor, engineers regained control and got those in attendance to the tables where different members of their team could manage expectations.

Crisis caused by uppity populism averted.

Crowd backed down the hallway, the foyer, and outside.

In the meantime, people were still trying to get into the main room, but the crowd was stacking up in the hallway and out the front door. I actually left 20 mins into the meeting because I felt guilty about taking up space when I had already attended the East Nashville meeting. I asked one member of the design team whether they were expecting this many people. I learned that they were not either tonight or in East Nashville the night before last. I joked with another official as I was leaving whether the number of people in the building was a fire code violation. The reply: "I plead the 5th". When I got outside to my car, there were yet others walking through the parking lot to the building and I saw several cars circling and stalking potential parking spaces. As soon as I backed out one of them grabbed mine.

Before I left I heard interesting things. First of all, the engineer at the podium said with emphasis, "In no way are these final designs, yet". I do not recall him saying that in East Nashville. If he did it was not with as much verve or I would have remembered it. Whether he felt like he did not need to make the point across the river or whether this was an attempt to be more measured, he left himself wiggle room to refer to this stage as a "visioning" process. Although again, even if a final stage is "only" 30% complete, a good part of the vision seems already achieved. Haggling over the details at specific intersections does not seem like "visioning" to me.

I heard many more concerns expressed at this meeting than in East Nashville, particularly about where bus riders would park around West End, whether 5,000 riders per day with Amp was believable, whether historic preservation would be endangered by infrastructure changes and whether adding extra lanes would create more snarl. I was in earshot of a woman who exclaimed that, given the current parking situation along West End, there was absolutely no way that riders would be able to find parking to catch the bus. I heard one design team member tell one concerned transit rider asking for ridership comparisons to projections that he did not know what the current daily ridership was.

As I left, I noticed a police officer who seemed to be letting people into the room as others like me exited early and I wondered, with this much unexpected popular response to a transit proposal, pro and con, should not the public meeting process have started long ago with honest communication so that we would all not be so caught off-guard now? More specifically, why weren't we permitted to "vision" long before the transit authority reached 30% of the final stage of the project?

UPDATE: Rather than simply reporting the news, the Tennessean is resorting once again to bias by speculating in their report about how many green and red reps attended. Just like in East Nashville, most of those I saw in attendance had no form of pro or con signifiers displayed, so why does Brian Wilson feel emboldened to say that there was "balance" between pro and con? Did he interview every single person? I doubt he will share his method of counting, but it cannot be very scientific. There could have been many different points of view beyond simply polarized opinions, and it really is unfortunate when the news media fabricates "facts" instead of conveying them.

My takeaway from last night's East Nashville Amp meeting: they ask for your input, but then want you to go away

Oh, the contradictions. Last night I attended the East Nashville public meeting on the Mayor's proposed east-west rapid bus transit connector held at East Park community center. I expected a major PR push without cracks or holes for this series of January meetings. The Chamber of Commerce, the beast hauling Karl Dean's transit bid, hired pro flacks and so I expected more than this:

• The meeting was billed December as a "charrette". The Mayor's Office prefers to call it an "open house". It could not seem to settle on either, so it was convoluted and confusing.
• The Amp has been described by engineers as being in the final stages of design. Last night the engineers described this stage as a "visioning process". Since when does visioning follow final design?
• Transit officials introduced the meeting by saying that businesses could talk to engineers about the changes that they wanted to see. Transit officials introduced the meeting by saying that the audience could ask questions and get information about the way the Amp will be designed. The two messages did not seem to me to compliment one another.

So, I sensed a split-mindedness in last night's meeting: Metro wants you to give feedback, but then go away. Or maybe they want you to give the feedback that fits with engineers' final design, which was laid out on four twenty-five foot tables. How can this be a visioning process when the design is staring back at you in the face from humongous blueprints? Unless the only public vision that will count is that which is already laid out?

The old proverb, without vision the people perish, applies to North Nashville in this case. There was no accommodation for someone in the audience like me, who believes that BRT would work in North Nashville, to envision the Amp for us too. All an engineer could have said to me over his huge map of East Nashville was that North Nashville could not be addressed in this mass transit plan. No kidding. Any of us who came to this community meeting thinking that we would could make a difference in transit equity were rendered invisible. The vision of the Mayor's rapid transit minions can only extend so far. They are blind to the rest of us.

But we're not the only ones. Transit representative Holly McCall (who also represented Karl Dean on the Music City Center) told the audience that business owners were invited to speak with engineers about their concerns for the line that would run by them. The meeting seemed more focused on businesses, which is not atypical for this Mayor's Office, although it is clear that Mr. Dean is getting resistance to Amp from the business level. But what about residents? What about residents of Cayce Homes public housing? This line hardly serves their needs. Again, it is an artery laid out to drive up the real estate values of wealthy property owners and to serve Nashville's largest corporations. Is it really a "community" or "public" meeting when invitations to share are made to business leaders present?

If this had been an authentic charrette, all stakeholders present would have participated in a small group process of working through differences and reaching a consensus. But the meeting was too much open house in which the public was invited by the Transit Authority to view the way things actually are. People were encouraged to write their comments on sheets of paper and turn them in. That is no replacement for a charrette, and it is certainly a less accountable means of encouraging public input.

I am under no delusion that the Amp suffers significant opposition in East Nashville. Once the bus line was extended there in order to draw more support, the Mayor effectively divided and conquered organized grassroots opposition to sending rapid transit up West End. It is common sense to assume East Nashville supports rapid transit for themselves. But to claim as the Tennessean has this morning that supporters "largely outnumbered" opponents on the basis of counting green shirts against red ones is misleading. Far outnumbering green and red shirts were shirts that did not announce any position on the AMP.

Nonetheless, I was in earshot of an Amp supporter who complained that the media was interviewing a couple of red shirted opponents in the room, thus, he speculated, creating an impression that opposing turnout was on par with supportive turnout. I stood there thinking, "How can you judge from this crowd of clothes who stands for what? I oppose the Amp, but you cannot tell from what I am wearing." (I had a green pullover on). And what is someone who is neutral or otherwise unsure supposed to wear? How many of those people were there and individually counted by the news media?

As I walked from the meeting to my car I chatted with a woman I don't know. She asked me how I thought the meeting went. She asked me whether I thought our feedback mattered in the plan. I replied that they did give us these comment forms to express our feedback, assuming they would indeed read them and permit input to influence the plan. She told me straight up that she did not think that the feedback mattered because this east-west connector is exactly what Karl Dean wants. We both seemed to agree that in the end Hizzoner is most likely to get what he wants and that these "public" meetings are publicly pointless.



UPDATE: Because of parental responsibilities I could not attend the Downtown public meeting on Tuesday evening, but there are indications in the Tennessean (which did not resort to the same useless t-shirt counting of their previous report) that the same questions I have were expressed by some in attendance:

Several project skeptics angry with the broad contours of the bus line were just as critical of the public meeting’s format, which was largely an informal question-and-answer period during which people could talk one on one with the project’s engineers.

Questions aside, the manner in which developers went about the plan annoyed Nashville resident Michael Rogers.

“They’re going up there and making it seem like a done deal,” Rogers said. “I just feel it doesn’t build trust.”

Because so much of the development remains in flux, whether from the amount of federal and state funding to the planning that still remains, there wasn’t much that could be gained from being there, said undecided downtown resident Julie Lammel.

One of the other regrettable impressions that this project's boosters keep trying to create is that the east-west connector is merely the first step in a long process of regional growth. Those are empty promises at this point with no guarantees, especially with Karl Dean's mayoral tenure coming to a close. Nashville's dustbin is filled with well-intentioned capital projects that never materialized.

If built the Amp is just as likely to be the only leg of beautiful BRT in Nashville, serving the wealthier segments of our county while continuing to neglect others. That prospect would be more consistent with local history.

If you don't follow the Amp Twitter feed, you may not know that the Transit Authority changed the West Nashville meeting location a week before the meeting

Once public meetings to seek input on the Mayor's east-west bus rapid transit proposal were organized and announced in early December, the powers-that-be did a remarkable job of saturating every line of communication possible with news about the meetings. We even received a card by snail mail to go along with all of the news we were getting about the meetings on and off line, inside and outside the news media. The card delivered by the U.S. Postal Service:

West Nashville meeting info is now wrong on this post card!

But last Wednesday, 8 days away from the West Nashville meeting, the pro-AMP coalition announced that the location of the meeting was changing to West End Middle School via Twitter and Facebook. I tweeted questions on what plans were being made for people who did not follow or friend the AMP's social media presence and whether there would be new hard copy post cards sent to Nashvillians to keep people from showing up to MBA instead of to West End Middle. As of this moment, I cannot get a straight answer from the transit tribe.

Still eating their static.

That link they tweeted goes not to a new update but to their December 12, 2013 press release on the meetings. Whoever edited the release made no effort to change the date or flag the statement as "UPDATED" as is the usual practice for these things when people actually care that vital information about changes not slip through the cracks. All they seemed to do was drop down to the West Nashville meeting bullet and change the location.

Shoddy webpage update!

At best, this is a meager attempt to communicate significant changes to an exclusively and largely sympathetic online audience of people on Twitter and Facebook while calling no attention from the largest number of people to the change on the original release. At worst, it reeks of an attempt to depress turn out in West Nashville neighborhoods where opposition to the Amp is relatively strong. Whether this is simply inept communication or more of a confidence game by pro-Amp forces, they should exercise the kind of thorough communication now that they did in December.

Kerr errs on Amp opposition

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the hoop-like excuse that Metro Transit apparatchiks may have held "public hearings" before they settled on "the AMP" (east-west bus rapid transit connector) is no reason to believe that those hearings were effectively conducted for the public. Tennessean Gail Kerr comments this morning, "There were early public hearings on whether we should build a bus route at all, but there were sparse details at that point." This may seem minor to some, but it confirms my view that the process is more rigged to keep the public uninformed and destablized so that stronger trump cards can be laid later. The public hearings were designed to keep us guessing, not to bring us on board to reach a consensual decision in which everyone won a little of something.

The only other interesting point in Ms. Kerr's column is the ironic encouragement of people to attend public hearings now, as if the process is substantively different than it was. She seems to be merely saying of the latest hoops, "It's real this time around." I suspect that what is real is the opposition the Mayor is facing from the neighborhoods down low and from Tennessee Republicans up high. Four late-called community meetings seeking input looks like a mad scramble to lend legitimacy to a limping bus line.

Otherwise, Kerr's column is unadulterated garbage. She calls those of us who advocate a northward leg "snooty" because she alleges we believe that buses should serve mostly "lower-income people". Nope. I advocate a northward leg because it would serve mostly people. Not corporations. Not tourism. Not wealthy campaign donors. Not property owners with maximized property values. Nope. I believe that mostly average folks of various incomes are whom a Charlotte Avenue line would serve. Her preconceived notions about who lives in North Nashville may make her the "snooty" one.

But what ultimately makes Ms. Kerr's hard copy not even worthy of chucking into the compost heap is that she expects opponents of the AMP not to differ in their motivations and in their strategies for expressing dissent to an east-west connector. She bases her assumptions about the resistance on an email thread "obtained" by a couple of reporters. That's right. An email thread. One of the more mercurial, fluid and volatile forms of communication; an email thread. She relies on that to opine that opponents are not unified, to insist that we are "disjointed".

But Ms. Kerr is confusing her snapshot of a lack of consensus on how to respond to the Mayor's next gambit with a lack of purpose or a lack of solidarity. And keep this in mind: Ms. Kerr herself was coached by a PR firm in the past to flip talking points to Tennessean op-ed. By such flack standards, democratic consensus may appear to be "disjointed" and lacking in a common goal. It is not the failing of opponents of the AMP that they have different views on how to get to the shared purpose of defeating an east-west connector. It is Ms. Kerr's own failing to step outside of a world where coordinated selling points are spoon-fed to journalists.

Controlling public meetings amounts to controlling outcomes

As we rapidly approach one of the first announced community meetings on "the Amp" bus rapid transit system connecting East Nashville and Downtown to West End, the Mayor's minions continue to insist (debatably) that the public has been given fair opportunities to address the questions of when and where rapid transit will go. The Mayor himself disqualified North Nashville from the process, saying that we should have read his mind and kissed the ring years in advance if we wanted to be considered worthy of rapid transit.

The Chamber of Commerce (which supports Amp) hired a lawyer-up public relations firm, which suggests to me that these meetings are going to be more bully pulpits for making the sale of AMP than they are open town hall meetings for gathering input from you and me.

Metro has a particularly heavy-handed history of conducting community meetings, whether it be holding meetings at days and hours inconvenient for most people to attend, not plainly specifying in published agendas that certain questions were up for discussion, couching issues in specialized jargon that makes average heads spin or strictly controlling how questions are asked to discourage messy democracy. These tactics become especially nasty given the strong executive form of Metro government, where voters have very little influence after elections on the Mayor's Office.

I've documented over and again here the draconian tactics that are used in the planning and rezoning process by Metro officials, but I went back through my emails people have sent me from community meetings they attended to find more examples.

One that stands out was related to me by Mike Peden. Last winter CM Edith Langster, empowered by a couple of developers and Metro Planning, filed a Midtown rezoning request to allow a number of properties to be exempted from a compromise supported by the community in 2012 to prepare for overlays consistent with the Midtown Community Plan. Community plans are heavily influenced by participatory public meetings periodically held.

Leaders in the community expressed concern by email about Langster's bill. Metro Planning held a community meeting last March and CM Jason Holleman encouraged constituents to attend saying of Langster's proposal that it would not provide "protections for individually National Register Eligible/National Register Listed buildings and design guidelines will not be included for the area around Elliston Place".

Mike attended the meeting and related what he witnessed:

The room was packed. Several people had to stand.

The attorney from the Planning Office that spoke is clearly in favor of ... CM Langster’s proposed rezoning. He spoke as if that bill has already passed.

There were several questions raised about transit and MTA, but he made it clear he was not going to discuss that issue.

Jason Holleman attempted to ask questions but the attorney from Planning would not allow him to speak. He said that is why they requested everyone write questions on the cards so he would not have to get into a one-on-one discussion with anyone

Community plans always involve discussions about transit options, so why should they be prohibited by a lawyer in a community meeting? Less than a month later a Metro Planning spokesperson would tell a Vanderbilt writer of a "cultural shift" prompting zoning changes in Midtown that included the need to "cut down expenditures on gas". If planners can bring up transit as a motivator for their policies, why can't the community raise the question with planners in community meetings?

Also, requiring questions on note cards is just another way of keeping the unwashed masses at arm's length. And shutting down a council member with questions about impact on design and preservation seems extreme.

But these are the kind of tactics you have to watch out for in the upcoming community meetings, which they tell you now are about getting more of your input. Will they listen and incorporate input? Given the track record, I am not a believer.

Double standard: public meetings for east-west solicit community input; public meetings for North Nashville do not

Do I make too much of the unequal expectations between North Nashville and wealthier sections east-west?

I call attention to the primary difference in recent public meeting announcements for the Mayor's proposed bus rapid transit project ("the Amp") and for the Mayor's proposed ballpark project.

The public meetings announcement for the Amp that went out just before Christmas, weeks in advance of mid-January meetings, explicitly invites, practically welcomes "input" across four different meetings for the benefit of affected east-west communities:

In contrast, the announcement for the hastily arranged public meeting for the Sulphur Dell ballpark proposal was issued less than one week beforehand, and it makes no mention of public input, treating those few constituents who showed up during the Thanksgiving break as empty receptacles into which foregone plan and budget explanations would be poured:

Metro's prejudice against participatory democracy and actual community planning in North Nashville is clear to me from these announcements. Minimizing or ignoring it does not make it vanish.

A few thoughts on Sulphur Dell since the Mayor's financing plan is introduced

You cannot look to ballpark supporters for sober cost-benefit analysis on the question of financing a new Sulphur Dell and subsidizing the Nashville Sounds in the process. I have a few observations about the events of the past few days in the spirit of being more rational about that process:

• The Friday late afternoon news dump of this story last week was curious. A couple of hours before today's ballpark meeting was announced GOP State House Speaker Beth Harwell announced to the news media that she would not support dedicating $35 million in state funding for Karl Dean's new bus rapid transit east-west Nashville connector, "The Amp". That can always change, but for the time being it is a blow to the Dean infrastructure priority list. It is a blow to his brick-and-mortarmentum. The Sulphur Dell announcement could have been planned all along or it could have been announced to soften the PR blow on and divert news media attention from a limping Amp plan.
• It is obvious that Karl Dean's modus operandi is to move ahead with these voluptuous capital budget plans with minimal popular input. He pursued the new convention center even though local opinion polls indicated that Nashvillians did not support it. He threatened to demolish a popular working-class entertainment venue, the State Fairgrounds, and sell off most of the land to private developers until there was impressive public backlash threatening to rip Metro Council limb-from-limb. Hizzoner could have eliminated most of the strong, organized popular opposition to the AMP by moving bus rapid transit north to Charlotte, but he dug in his heels and all but dared state Republicans to kill funding. They are able to embrace popular opposition, and the Amp is on the verge of unraveling. Likewise, he is ramming the ballpark plan through the Sports Authority and Metro Council with no regard to public questions or feedback. We will see if he can push this before any organized opposition gains the footing necessary to slow or stop the ballpark.
• In the context of today's meeting announcing the financing plan, the October 24 "community meeting" continues to appear to have nothing to do with the community. None of the questions asked by the community are being considered. Everything is running to script and any of the concerns that many of us have about traffic, parking, flooding, fireworks, etc. are generally being ignored, even by the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods. Buoyed by Metro's offer to build them a garage, the state is fully on board now. If Metro will not listen to community concerns, what chance do we have the state?
• Our council member, Erica Gilmore, is ignoring the questions from the October community meeting. She does not seem to care to represent all of us. During tonight's council proceedings, she was described by one reporter as "celebratory" about the ballpark plan. Not a concern in the world about community impact. She seems to have checked out on some of us.
• Before people start waxing on about how historic and "uniquely Nashville" the Sulphur Dell agreement is, they need to keep this in mind: the Metro Finance Director admits that the plan for Metro subsidizing the Sounds' new digs is based on the practices of other cities. Metro taxpayers are going to cough up $65 million to help pro baseball owners get wealthier because other cities do exactly the same thing. Ironically, being like other cities violates Metro Planning's first guiding principle: Be Nashville.
• Seven years ago I expressed qualified support for the previous administration's plan to increase Metro operating budget spending $250,000 per year in maintenance costs for a new ballpark at the old downtown thermal plant site. It seemed like a fair trade-off, given that Greer Stadium required $5 million to bring it up to ADA compliance (completed in 2009 after the old deal fell through). I was more open previously to tax-increment financing (also a part of Dean's deal). I have had a change of heart about TIF, which I find to be overused and abused by opportunistic politicians nowadays. The Mayor's current proposal to carve out $345,000 from the annual operating budgets may not seem much more than the older plan, but we live in different times: cash flow to Metro services seems more strapped as the years go by. And a ballpark at the thermal site generated fewer questions about the potential negative impact on residential neighborhoods than the Sulphur Dell site does. Any support I express for a new Sulphur Dell has even more qualifications than my previous support.
• The Mayor admits that the Nashville Sounds baseball club will not be contractually obligated to pay the $50 million that he plans on them paying for development. So, why would they need to hire a big-money lobbyist when they are not even required to pay for the development?

After going through the financials, I am still not ready to support a new Sulphur Dell without some assurances that Salemtown's quality of life will be protected. I am also not satisfied with how the concerns of the community, democratically expressed, are being overlooked and ignored by those we elect to represent us.

And this guy claims to be Mayor of all Nashville?

I do not think that the Mayor's Office realizes just how polarizing their justification for not planning rapid transit for North Nashville is. I do not believe that this administration grasps how their cavalier response expresses the idea that Nashville is not one city, but a fractured arena of interests competing for Hizzoner's good graces. Or maybe they get it, but they just don't care. Their cynical replies to a reporter are not even subtle in sovereign tone:

community activists and council members from North Nashville soon took up the chorus, suggesting their part of town was getting screwed yet again on a major public investment. As recently as April, state Rep. Brenda Gilmore floated the mention of a lawsuit if the route was not altered.

All were valid concerns. The problem, to the Dean administration, was that they were coming years too late. By that point, according to the mayor's office and Metro transit officials, foundational decisions about the project had been set in stone.

So, if North Nashvillians wanted bus rapid transit we should have bellied up to the trough with our power and money like the wealthy West End business interests and leveraged the Metro Transit Authority budget decisions in our favor. Never mind that it would have been more ethical for the executive branch to insure that infrastructure was distributed fairly around the city in the real absence of greater influence and wealth.

In truth, many of us who have attended these "public" meetings know that there are 1,000-and-1 ways to use meetings to mask and to misdirect. Procedural tricks are used all the time by those who have mastered rules and bylaws to allow hidden agendas under the guise of transparency with deniability intact (see the excuse, "All of the meetings were public", as if the public can attend all of the meetings along with every other public meeting Metro holds).

Now, claiming that we are too late to the party is part of the confidence game. The Mayor's Office has it both ways. This thing is only set in stone now because meetings and decisions were orchestrated to foster impenetrability. And now we are the chumps who did not see it coming. As if we ever could have.

In my opinion MTA has already pulled a fast one on us by not publicizing the alternatives analysis (and I don't mean modes of transit alternatives under consideration). Had North Nashville leaders been able to see the results for studies outside the east-west corridor, they likely would have been mobilized to fight Karl Dean's exclusive reservation of BRT for West End.

But in this administration's preconceived notion of Nashville as a social Darwinist theater of winner-take-all, such popular mobilization is discouraged.

Bus rapid transit plan being sold as tried and true even though it is a convoluted experiment hemmed in by straw men

Vanderbilt professor Malcolm Getz sent a letter opposing the plan to fund bus rapid transit down West End to Metro Council a little over a week ago. His comments are relevant to my views of the BRT proposal:

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) sent a funding request to the FTA prematurely. The MTA systematically suppresses critical documents and misrepresents the effects of its proposal. We have filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for the original Parson's-Brinkerhoff study, and have not received it. We have received (through FOIA) the Alternatives Analysis and the Preliminary Engineering Report (118 pp. and 333 pp. respectively.) All of these reports were taxpayer funded and none have been made available to the public. The reports published on the MTA website are merely excerpts and summaries, and do not reflect the facts presented in the full reports. The MTA claims public involvement and implies public approval.

The MTA’s letter to the Council today refers to the "Alternatives Analysis" for the corridor begun in 2011, which forms the basis for the MTA Board’s January 2012 recommendation to advance the current plan. The plan removes lanes from traffic to dedicate them to buses. The Metro Council, State officials, and the Federal Transit Administration should insist on seeing the Alternatives Analysis. I have discussed the lack of public access to the full report with Mr. Peter Rogoff, the Federal Transit Administrator.

A pivotal issue is increased traffic congestion. The project removes two lanes of traffic and a turn lane from key sections of the highway between 440 and 5th Avenue. As a consequence, the project will dramatically increase traffic congestion, creating choke points. This effect will begin immediately as construction begins and will remain at a higher level after the project is complete. Although a number of other cities have deployed limited-stop bus rapid transit, only a few have provided lanes just for buses, and among these, none have taken lanes from major arterial roadways in the center of the city where no alternate routes are available for traffic. The AMP proposal is an experiment, but is presented as "tried and true."

The MTA claims that the new bus service will enhance access to the three major hospitals between 440 and 40 but the plan provides no bus stops at any of the three hospitals. Travelers face transfers to other vehicles or long walks to complete their journeys. Indeed, the bus stops are a block or more from major cross streets that provide connection to these major destinations. The quality of bus service to major mid-town destinations will be inferior to that provided today. This information is not included in the Summary Reports.

The primary effect of the project for bus riders is to move people from today’s cost effective service to a less convenient and more expensive service. The MTA claims the project will serve 4,500 weekday riders daily. But its own ridership estimates demonstrate that the vast majority of these riders are already making trips by bus. A very high level of expenditure per added local bus rider means the project is not cost effective.

The MTA proposes to dramatically reduce the frequency of the local bus service, making bus service less convenient for many people who make short bus trips and value being able to enter and exit buses at any blue bus stop sign. A major reduction in local bus service means that access to mid-town hotels and restaurants will degrade. The proposed limited stop bus service will not appeal to convention visitors.

I have spoken to many groups about this project and found that, once people understand the details, even many enthusiastic supporters of better public transportation for Nashville—and I count myself among them—become skeptical of this plan. It serves Nashville poorly. The MTA should make the public documents available for review and reconsider the issues of traffic congestion and bus ridership.

I have made it clear before that my opposition to Nashville's "Amp" as proposed by Mayor Karl Dean is based on the fact that alternatives analysis of routes has not been made public for scrutiny. We cannot thoroughly judge the validity of the claims of Metro Transit deciders (for instance, that West End is the best route for bus rapid transit) until we have access to the data collected from all routes. It would be interesting to know whether there is something to hide about Charlotte Pike and other alternatives that might make the West End corridor less compelling than the Mayor's supporters let on. (One other interesting question raised by CM Josh Stites is whether the HCA jobs projections, now sinking into refilling Lake Palmer, were included in MTA's filed proposal for federal funds).

The failure to be forthcoming is magnified by the fact that Metro Nashville has a tradition of neglecting North Nashville and of concentrating resources and infrastructure west and east. While the new "Amp Coalition" represents a rebranding of the mission to build an east-west connector and an attempt to flip the script to say that West End is merely the first move to provide BRT for everyone, I can see no good reason to have faith that North Nashville is even on the agenda of these hip transit nexters.

For his part the Mayor, rather than simply ordering that all analyses be made public, has taken to tilting at windmills:

The strongest case for The Amp would seem to be that as the mayor says, worse traffic is coming no matter what. West End, a corridor that is already often congested, will only get more and more crowded as the Middle Tennessee region grows (according to the city's oft-cited projection) by a million people between now and 2035. A transit option without a dedicated lane does little to solve this, the mayor and project supporters reasonably argue, because it would be subject to the same worsening congestion.

Unfortunately, the mayor wields this argument against an opponent unrecognizable to anyone who's been following the debate over The Amp. Call it "Dean to Straw Man: Drop Dead."

Sure, people may say, "Let's just leave everything alone, let's change nothing" — but largely they aren't saying that. There are those who strongly support investing in transit but think that we should start on Charlotte Avenue (and include parts of North Nashville, where many people depend on public transit). There are others who say a BRT Lite system — like those in operation on Gallatin Road and Murfreesboro Road — would be a better option on West End.

Why is Hizzoner acting so quixotic on an issue he should be winning? Steven Hale goes on to suggest a possibility: Mr. Dean may be expecting us to buy into Amp not on the basis of its merits, but simply because he himself as Mayor expects us to. If this is mayoral hubris, it is further indication to some of us who have not seen alternative data that West End might not be able to stand on its own merits.

I wish she had put as much energy and enthusiasm into stopping Metro Water's new toxic landfill near Germantown

CM Erica Gilmore predictably is super excited that the Mayor is finally coming out of the closet on Sulphur Dell. So super excited that spell-check eluded her:

Today, Council Lady Erica Gilmore reported the 19th  District constituents are thrilled with the idea of a proposed new Sounds stadium at Sulphur Dell. Sulphur Dell is the original home of professional baseball in Nashville, and minor league and Negro league teams played there dating back to the 1860s.

After many months and years, “I am excited the Mayor is moving forward with this proposal, stated Council Lady Gilmore.” This challenge is a tremendous opportunity for the North Nashville area. This proposal will create more jobs and will be a valuable community asset with the ability to expand economic development.

Council Lady Gilmore stated, “We are grateful that Sulfur Dell is being considered in District 19 and know this will be a Homerun for the North Nashville area.” [sic]

I am glad CM Gilmore broke with her seeming indifference in the past about planning quality and smart growth at the intersection of Jefferson and Rosa Parks (given that she was willing to welcome a predatory lender and bid farewell to the National Museum of African American Music).

On the contrary, she expresses no interest in or insight on transit questions which plague the idea of building a ballpark at Sulphur Dell. Would not bus rapid transit from downtown be a perfect compliment to a new ballpark? But, oh, she has already gone all in on the Mayor's bus rapid transit connector between East and West Nashville; the plan that leaves North Nashville out of the transit equation. What a squander.

AMPlifire: Hizzoner lumps concerned opponents of his westward-friendly BRT line with people who do not care for the environment or mass transit

Now there's going to be people who disagree. There are going to be people who are against change, who aren't interested in the environment, who aren't interested in other people being able to move around. That's fine. But I think most Nashvillians are.

--Mayor Karl Dean to Channel 4 News

Yeah? Well, if Mayor Dean cared about the environment in North Nashville, why would he permit Metro Water to dump toxins and contaminants into a new riverside landfill near Salemtown? If he cared about moving North Nashvillians around, why wouldn't his AMP proposal include us?

AMPartheid

More like: "moving for whom?"

I am grateful for the opportunities to meet some great leaders since moving to North Nashville ten years ago. Because our kids attended the same public school here, I have had more occasions in the past year to enjoy conversations with two such leaders, Sekou and Tene Franklin. I was impressed, but not at all surprised today to find Sekou's thoughtful, timely, and honest response to the Mayor's transit plan. A number of us have expressed frustration that the bus rapid transit project leaves our community behind in favor of subsidizing and further skewing West Nashville growth. But few of us are as adept as Sekou is at drawing out the nexus between a historical context of prejudice and contemporary transit decisions:

Since last year, community leaders have asked the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to extend the Amp route to North Nashville, which has one of the largest concentrations of blacks in the Mid-South region. North Nashville also has a historic tie to unjust transportation policies, most notably the Interstate 40 development that dislocated scores of residents, churches and businesses in the 1960s.

Many North Nashville neighborhoods are under-resourced and need better transportation options. The community also has a high number of hospital workers, renters, senior citizens, disabled residents and college students, all of whom could benefit from an Amp stop. However, MTA officials rejected pleas for an Amp terminal in North Nashville in the initial phase of the project. This snub could lead to a system of transportation apartheid in which some communities receive the bulk of transit investment — in this case, more than a $1 billion for neighborhoods in the Amp corridor — while others such as North Nashville are rendered invisible.

In February 2011, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) sent a civil rights team to Nashville to assess whether the MTA was following federal civil rights law. The two-day visit occurred during the initial phase of the Amp design. In their visit, the FTA officers were shown routes in West, East and Southeast Nashville. Yet, for unexplainable reasons, the MTA did not allow them to visit North Nashville. This was yet another example of how communities such as North Nashville are treated as if they are invisible.

That last paragraph is galling. It is shameful that transit leaders intentionally ignored North Nashville on the question of lawful access to transit. It also casts a pall on the arguments of east-west corridor supporters who say they honestly believe West End is a better choice without any reference to MTA's shoddy treatment of North Nashville on a question of civil rights.

The shameless roll out of an east-west rapid transit corridor is the extension of the historic injustices that do not disappear with new generations leaders. While some local progressives attempt the tortured logic of scolding the Mayor for wanting to govern "the fun parts" while absolving him of responsibility for extending the time-honored, sanctioned neglect of North Nashville, Sekou Franklin reminds us that this BRT transit policy, in doing nothing to break from an infamous tradition, is the natural extension of that tradition. The link is not so easily severed just because Mayor Karl Dean is an odds-on jolly for taking down a Republican in a hypothetical run-for-office.

No degree of public relations can cover up the wounds reopened for some in North Nashville. You can pat your progressive self on the back all you want about supporting transit and helping some boiler room workers exit West Nashville faster at quitting time to access the same slower, lesser infrastructure they know all too well along points north. But liberal preening will not alter the reality that AMP extends Nashville's legacy of unequal development, and it serves disproportionally white, affluent communities before any other.

As such, it is transportation apartheid. Sekou calls it out for exactly what it is.

At least he acknowledged that AMP bus rapid transit is leaving North Nashville behind

North Nashville's working class won't be thrown any BRT bones, while East Nashville workers will enjoy some of the transit crumbs from Amp:

“Yes, people in parts of North Nashville are being left out of it,” [East Nashville CM Scott Davis] told The City Paper the following day. “I’m not arguing that. But we have to remember that it’s also helping low-income residents in my neighborhood that are along the [route]....”

“We forget those low-income people along that route have been left out of the conversation,” he said. “They work over there off of West End. And they don’t have some of the glamorous jobs, you know? A lot of them are in the maintenance part, or they’re working in the boiler room at Vanderbilt.”

If they’re driving to work, Davis said, many of those people struggle to pay the cost of parking. For many who use the current bus system — which must work its way through car traffic that The Amp, with its dedicated lanes, will avoid — getting off the job and making it to a day care, for instance, to pick up a child before extra charges start to kick in is a challenge.

“Not everyone low-income and in trouble hates The Amp, it’s just that they can’t make it to a 3 o’clock meeting or a 4 o’clock meeting to let people know,” Davis said.

I will not dispute the point that there are folks among East Nashville's working poor who will benefit from the exclusively east-west corridor. And I don't blame a CM for voting in what he perceives to be his constituents' interest. If only North Nashville council members had attempted to assert North Nashville's best interest instead of sitting quietly by when the Amp vote came before Metro Council.

What I do find fault with is perpetuating the perception that this corridor maximizes benefits for the masses of Nashville's workers or at least strikes a balance between the transportation needs of the working class and the profit motives of businesses to the west. Amp will subsidize the tourist industry with cheap transit for visitors and it is going to provide some attractive infrastructure improvements for West Nashville neighborhoods that do not need them as much other others.

I also find it curious that none of the low-income residents whom CM Davis claims it would help were interviewed for this news story. Regardless of the anecdotes, I would like to see hard numbers on how many of the working poor are going to benefit from this project vs. how many might be helped if it went farther north. Will more Vanderbilt undergrads take Amp to party Downtown and around East Nashville's Five Points than Vanderbilt workers ride it to work in boiler rooms?

Part of the problem here is that we are constantly promised that the more we spend on the tourism industry, the more will flow down to average Nashvillians in the form of infrastructure. With Amp, infrastructure suited more to the hotels, restaurants and venues that serve tourists seem to be replacing that promised to all our communities.