Pocket vote for Dean, much?

Council District 7's Twitter feed.

Seems like when a sitting council member puts a picture on his Twitter feed of himself with the Mayor instead of with voters, we plainly see where his loyalty lies.

I got into a discussion today on CM Anthony Davis's vote to support the Mayor's plan to allow the Nashville Sounds to take all of the money from the naming deal with First Tennessee. I asked him if he had ever while on council voted against any of Mayor Karl Dean's major initiatives (some of which were publicly controversial). His reply, "Nope, they've all been so good...why would I?"

Breaking: Nashville Sounds owner scrubs the historic title "Sulphur Dell" from the name of the new ballpark

Mayor Karl Dean even gushed:
"Nashville won't make a cent off this!"

Sometimes I really hate having my healthy cynicism about people in power confirmed, but it was this morning. Wealthy real estate developer and owner of the Nashville Sounds Frank Ward just announced the naming rights of the new ballpark at the Sulphur Dell site. The name announced is, "First Tennessee Ballpark, Home of the Nashville Sounds" (named after the bank).

Mr. Ward and First Tennessee seem to have agreed to purge the historical moniker "Sulphur Dell" completely from the official title of the new ballpark. Obviously, the brand won't stoop to bear the historic context of the area adjacent to my neighborhood.

Looks like I was not exaggerating last week (in reporting the demolition of the state fountain commemorating the old sulphur spring that gave birth to a city) when I intimated that developers are willing to wipe away history to squeeze a few more bucks to add to their obscene piles of cash. I keep looking for the ballpark/mixed-use development team to prove me wrong about my concerns with this agreement, but today's announcement is the latest sign that these folks are willing to use our history as a sales pitch to grease the skids of politics, but they are not necessarily serious about embracing it.

We have been told to trust an accelerated process. We have been preached at over and over by Friends of Sulphur Dell, by the Mayor's Office, by opportunistic Metro Council members, by supporters far and wide that building a new ballpark as quickly as possible without proper public process is the best way of honoring the history of our area and the history of baseball at Sulphur Dell. With one morning press conference Metro, the Nashville Sounds and a bank just wiped all of that away.


UPDATE: Couldn't resist broadcasting this little dig at the now extraneous Friends of Sulphur Dell as it appeared on Twitter

UPDATE: Reporter Steven Hale has a rundown of the questions to ask elected officials and team brass that no other reporters are asking in the wake the ballpark naming kerfuffle. Take note that he cites the comments from Jerry Maynard about baseball "going back to Sulphur Dell". That got me thinking about CM Maynard's other comments employed to get the Mayor's plan passed without proper public input:

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

Reverend Maynard's Sulphur Dell sermons strike me now as hallow and conniving. He has every opportunity now to speak out against the Sounds' decision to exclude Sulphur Dell from the ballpark moniker. I doubt he will say a word against it.

The other thing that strikes me about Hale's observations is how the Mayor places the blame for not leveraging any money for Nashville out of the deal with First Tennessee on the council's vote in favor of the deal:

Mayor Karl Dean's spokeswoman, Bonna Johnson, tells Pith that was part of the deal "just like at LP Field and Bridgestone, and it was in the agreements approved by the Council."

This is not much more than a chicken-shit response from the Mayor's Office. They determined the perimeters and terms of the Sounds deal that was sent to council with the point that any change in terms was a "poison pill" that would destroy it. They set the condensed timeline for approval of the ballpark. They held one community meeting even as Metro Planners promised more than one. They whipped the legislation through the council. They ran the PR campaign from start to finish. The onus is only partly on the weakling council that could not muster a challenge on much of anything to save its life. The Mayor conveniently acts like a strong executive (which is the Metro form of government) when he wants to, but when the heat gets turned up he consistently refuses to take it. Hizzoner's style of governing is to take the credit when it suits him, but to pass the buck when the load starts getting heavy.

The council deserves it's share of responsibility in this stupidity, but make no mistake, the Mayor should assume the lion's share of the blame for any money that could have been made from the naming rights but was lost.

Remember when Mayor Bill Purcell responded to the death of the last Sounds deal by demolishing part of their parking lot to expand a local park? I still marvel at the gumption of that. My sense is that, had he still been Mayor, he would have walked away from this deal with more revenues for public coffers (and even assurances about the Sulphur Dell name) than Karl Dean has.

Don't even think about commenting on a new ballpark, peons. You are fresh out of time.

Your ignorance is your bliss. What you don't have time to know about this ballpark deal cannot hurt you (at least until 2014 when it is too late to change anything):

Once they break it, we will have bought it, ready or not.


UPDATE: Alright, there are several significant things I am learning that I believe I should share. Not like any of us has time do anything about them:

• The agreement with the state contains a provision that Metro will pay the parking costs of state workers displaced by a ballpark at LPField, along with the costs of a shuttle service to carry them from and back to their cars.
• The Mayor has crafted a proposal to expand this year's already approved capital budget by $10,000,000 more to accommodate a new ballpark at Sulphur Dell. He will present that at the next council meeting.
• The Sounds are currently losing $1,000,000 per year, which may explain why the Mayor is not contactually binding them to sharing the costs of development, but instead relying on their good nature to volunteer the money.

If those are the some of the new things we are learning in less than one month, how many more are we going to learn after council approves this plan on December 10 at final reading?

I see a bad MOON arising

When former Democratic Party campaign strategist Courtney Wheeler took over the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods earlier this year, I predicted that MOON--which was originally created as a community-oriented advocate connecting people with Metro bureaucrats and municipal services to solve community problems--would become a campaign/marketing mechanism to sell the Mayor's brand to consumers (a.k.a., his constituents). While we have yet to see whether her work will assist future Dean campaigns for higher office, in the wake of what MOON has done so far, I have to say now that sometimes I really hate being right.

Ms. Wheeler cranked up MOON's social media soon after taking the wheel. Her office joined Twitter and created a PR engine sending out Mayor's Office releases to members of NextDoor (a private social networking site marketed to neighborhoods). While not a member of latter, I have been following @moon_nashville since its beginning. Its primary bent has little to do with troubleshooting and problem-solving at a community level. It has not really been focused on connecting people with Metro services.

The MOON Twitter stream devotes at least as much space if not more to the Mayor's appearances around town and his pet projects as it does to neighborhoods. Here is a sampling of tweets having nothing to do with neighborhoods:

 

MOON social media promote Hizzoner's appearances with celebrities like Jack White, Jimmy Fallon, Taylor Swift and Garrison Keillor. They hawk a new riverfront amphitheater and The Amp. They preach us up to lose weight, pick up litter, and then lose more weight.

In the meantime, the nods to neighborhoods are marginal at best. They are just as likely to virtually wink at the Chamber of Commerce. The few and infrequent statements about neighborhoods tend to be vacuous ones about how Mayor's Office officials had a "great time" meeting with neighbors of wherever they appeared next.

The Office of Neighborhoods' social media strategy seems oriented to neighborhoods in name only. Kind of what you would expect when a campaign strategist steers the ship.

(While I did not say much about Hizzoner's use of NextDoor in particular, if you are interested, you can find more on it over here after the jump).

Final estimates on public turnout for the last Fairgrounds public hearing are much larger than first reported

A local news media walk-back of early estimates closer to 1,000:

Fairgrounds charitable event raises almost $500,000 for VUMC, faces an uncertain future with Karl Dean's Fairgrounds plan

Each year for the last 50 the women of Christmas Village raise beaucoup money at the Fairgrounds for Vanderbilt University Medical Center and other charities. This year they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars despite the buzz generated by the Mayor's Office that their facility was being closed and sold off to private developers:

When they met with Hizzoner to discuss their concerns several weeks ago, he acted like a boorish Grinch toward them. Undeterred, they raised an impressive amount of aid regardless.

How much did Karl Dean's lack of support cost them in donations? Given that they have just one more year at the Fairgrounds if the Mayor's latest sell-off plan passes, what will be the impact on future donations?

About my Twitter fight with a SouthComm editor

Same Twitter stream in which the City Paper editor sized me down to a kid with Mentos and Diet Coke after I suggested that journalists accusing bloggers of conspiracy theories is pot-meet-kettle. It's actually club soda or nothing for me, thank you.

Local news editors continue to show that they just do not get it. Down these years I have been blogging, one editor after another has at one time or another taken swipes at certain bloggers who do not merely link their editorializing but who dare to question their balance, who raise the question of bias.

In spite of the fact that blogging has made its own contributions to understanding local politics, over and over it seems a remarkable number of editors cop a tone of arrogance whenever a blogger dares charge bias and self-interest in reporting and "analysis."

Being a blogger who will not blindly promote or otherwise genuflect to the corporate generation of pro journalism, I'm now catching heat from Nashville's newest editor, Stephen George, who hasn't even been here a year but already knew enough about the local convention and tourism industry (as well as risks of encumbering Metro's General Fund to support that industry) to write a shill editorial in support of Music City Center construction months ago.

After I challenged his support of the Davidson County branch of "Government Goldman" (a term that captures the pandering, patronizing relationships that governments develop with finance industry brokers like Goldman Sachs, which is the primary financier for Music City Center), the editor characterized my views as conspiratorial. I did not ask, but I'm sure that branding was meant to lump me in league with those society lampoons with references to black helicopters, UFO probes, and the grassy knoll.

As if criticism of the lop-sided power of the banking and lending industry, which undeniably brought this country well-nigh to its knees, amounts to paranoid speculation or a lunatic fringe.

Frankly, that's rich from a local journalist. The news media here has not given a second thought to performing conspiratorial hatchet jobs on out-spoken opponents of Mayor Karl Dean's policies. Courthouse class savaging of Mike Jameson for speaking out on East Bank Riverfront development and of Emily Evans for questioning broken funding promises on the convention center was abetted by the media echo chamber.

Both were rumored to be over-politicizing opportunists. Both have been generally above reproach. They just were bold enough to dare to block the bandwagon, unlike Nashville's newspapers.

Moreover, it is not conspiratorial for me to challenge self-interested "4th estate" promotion of Music City Center within this constellation of government power and private, special-interest wealth. We live in a world where the journalists we used to read and listen to end up as communications directors in government and information officers in industry or they move to start their own public relations firms with intentions of using connections to garner deals with government and industry. We live in a world where journalists are coached by PR flacks to write columns and where newspapers donate money to the cause of Metro launching its largest capital project ever to serve the smallest number of Nashvillians ever.

It is entirely reasonable and realistic common sense to argue out loud and in print that journalists' motives in promoting Music City Center fail objectivity and neutrality tests given the rewards for so shilling. Mr. George would have acted more honorably by not writing an editorial following the chatter class crowd down the road of growth and development.

Because, you see, the insider access the news media enjoys at the Courthouse also seems to bind them to pass on unchecked, speculative innuendo that damages reputations even when refuted. And their guild gives them a sometimes unearned cloak of balance and fairness. They end with the mantle of official gatekeeper for news even when they behave more like Courthouse information curators.

Hence, editors like Mr. George cannot without self-contradiction charge informed, engaged bloggers of "humping conspiracy" for expressing common sense suspicion toward elite power moves while defending journalism's co-dependent relationship with Courthouse sources.

In the end I do not think the news media should ignore innuendo. But raising the specter of ignorance is missing the point. Journalists should admit that they have "humped" a few conspiracy theories themselves and looked more like PR flacks than seasoned pros who refuse to stand to post at the government house threshold.

An eye opener!

I'm getting a little lesson on just how unmonitored and unsupervised municipal bond issues--like those backing the new convention center--are over at CM Emily Evans twitter stream. Jump over and see what a wild, wild west it is. My Twitter stream is available here in the right-hand column in the black box.

UPDATE: The most salient point in CM Evans' twitter stream concerns the governing body that Congress appointed to regulate and protect municipalities on bond issues, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), whose appointees are a small group of finance industry insiders from banks like JPMorgan:

We have to ask at this point, if it is rigged, was it rigged against Metro Nashville when Mayor Karl Dean went to Wall Street last week and lauded the market for "validating" his convention center plan?