Lurking in tonight's council consent agenda

Even as the NBA is about to start a truncated season, our neighbor to the west, Memphis, has positioned itself to sue its professional basketball team, the Grizzlies and the league for any revenues it loses to this year's work stoppage should the loss require extra taxes to pay expenses. In the past few weeks, the Nashville news media has covered Metro Nashville's plan to fund improvements to LP Field without reference to the real question of how we would pay for these improvements in the case of an NFL/Titans work stoppage.

Here is the council analysis of the bill for stadium improvements on tonight's consent agenda (the latter term means that the bill will be lumped in with other bills on first reading and passed as a bundle rather than debated)

This resolution approves the issuance of taxable public improvement revenue bonds in a principal amount not to exceed $28 million to finance improvements to LP Field. The original bonds to finance the construction of LP Field were issued in 1996. The Titans have identified a number of capital improvements they believe are necessary to keep the facility comparable to other similar facilities ....

The total cost of these new projects will be approximately $25 million. The estimated useful life expectancy for the improvements, averaging 18 years, is as follows:
• Elevators and Fan Hospitality Areas – 30-plus years
• Sound System – approximately 15 years
• Video Boards – approximately 15 years
• LED Ribbon Boards – approximately 15 years
• Control Room – approximately 10 years ....

The new bonds to be issued for the capital improvements will be taxable since they will be paid from the ticket tax revenue .... In order to build a capital fund for future needs, the Titans have requested that the ticket tax be increased to $3 effective for events scheduled on or after August 1, 2013, which is the subject matter of Ordinance No. BL2011-40 on third and final reading. This will allow funds to accumulate at a rate of approximately $900,000 per year for future improvements. The council would need to issue additional bonds if and when the seat replacement project is initiated.

In the event the ticket tax revenues are insufficient to pay the debt service on these revenue bonds, Metro is pledging its non-tax revenues. These revenues include, but are not limited to, permit fees; franchise fees (cable, gas, and telephone); fines; court clerk fees; forfeitures and penalties; charges for services; and revenues from the sale of surplus property. This is the same backstop revenue pledge for the convention center debt. However, the pledge of the non-tax revenues for the convention center bonds is subordinate to the pledge to the sports authority for stadium and arena revenue bonds. Further, this resolution provides that the additional one dollar tax levied by Ordinance No. BL2011-40 effective in 2013 would be used to pay any debt service deficiency before the non-tax revenues are used.

Because the quasi-public capital expenses on the Mayor's agenda continue to expand and because money is often shifted around in a kind of shell game where insider knowledge brings greater influence and fiat, it is important that we keep up with these details.


UPDATE: Council approved as expected. Disappointing to me: council progressives seem to cede all questions of equity in capital spending to conservatives, a couple of whom raised questions regarding future drops in ticket demand and getting greater obligation from the Tennessee Titans to assume an equitable amount of risk to that which the public assumes. If council progressives are not afraid of the wrath of the Mayor's Office what are they afraid of in seeking greater equity?

Convention center costs barreling overbudget, gaining momentum and risks after second courtroom loss

In July, Mayor Karl Dean and his MDHA minions lost a jury trial they hoped would hold the line on the low-ball offer they made to Tower Investments to get land for the new Music City Center. They might have low-balled the figure to hold down costs to make the convention center project sexier to the Metro Council, but they lose they did.

Now they have lost their appeal of their July failure to a judge, who upheld the jury's decision:

The Metro Development and Housing Agency, which was in charge of acquiring land for the Music City Center, hoped Circuit Court Judge Joe Binkley would reduce a critical July jury verdict in the contentious eminent domain case against development firm Tower Investments. Instead, Binkley agreed with the jury’s verdict that MDHA undervalued the land, which the city condemned and took from Tower to construct the new convention center south of Broadway.

Binkley rejected motions filed by MDHA seeking a new trial or to have the $30.4 million jury verdict reduced.

As a result, the convention center’s land acquisition budget remains busted, and the budget for the entire $585 million project will be left with a razor-thin contingency. A spokeswoman for MDHA did not rule out a possible appeal, opening the door for the 2-year-old case to be dragged on even longer.

“I don’t reasonably disagree with what [the jury] did,” Binkley said from the bench, citing state law that allows a judge to grant a new trial if he “reasonably disagrees” with a jury verdict. “And I do not find that the evidence preponderates against the verdict. I approve the verdict.”

Metro Finance Director Rich Riebeling, who is one of Mayor Karl Dean’s top aides, declined to comment as he left the courtroom.

So, was Karl Dean's right-hand man, Mr. Riebeling evacuating quickly to avoid having to answer tough questions about what might have to be cut from the Metro budget to pay for this monument to the tourism industry or was he headed out to figure which groups of constituents might be least angered by cuts to their basic services in exchange for a colossus that looks bigger every time we count the costs?

The Mayor's Office is in a catch-22. The Music City Center Authority swore emphatically that the project would not go over budget. If Metro appeals Tower again and loses, the budget-busting costs grow absurdly astronomical. And what have they salvaged for the other two legal cases they have to fight over land acquisition? They have already redirected tourist taxes that were subsidizing pro hockey to cover this project. How will they keep their promise? How can they if they risk losing another trial with two others in the pipeline? Metro's other budget items have been drastically cut over and over again, so how will we pay for these convention center losses and still benefit from Metro services?

What separates Democrats from Republicans?

The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachman has a few dumb ideas doesn't mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that the belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders.

--Matt Taibbi, Griftopia

I'm still surprised when I hear people whom I consider bright, who call themselves progressive robotically repeat cliches about government getting out of the way of business. The Tea Party is more mainstream than many would care to admit.

Death of urban progressivism

Sometimes it is nice to see an argument I've been making for a while validated by others:

Sure, two or three decades ago, there may have been some truth to the notion that the American city is a union-driven bastion of populist progressive economics. But today, while cities may still largely vote Democratic, they are increasingly embracing the economics of corporatism. The result is that urban areas are a driving force behind the widening intra-party rift between the corporatist, pro-privatization Wall Street Democrats and the traditional labor-progressive “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”

It is not just the question of support for labor that shows a severe case of the emperor's new clothes. Labor unions can be divided and conquered with empty calls of "jobs, jobs, jobs" without reference to how jobs are created or their quality.

The false pretense of urban progressives is also exposed by how funding mechanisms like tax-increment financing are deployed and whose benefits are consequently maximized.

Mayor Karl Dean has not used tax-increment financing to build and maintain infrastructure dedicated to broad public benefit (unless you define a library tacked on to the larger scale Bellevue Mall redevelopment as "broad'). He has used it exclusively for economic development to give millions to private enterprise to finance construction of the hotel connected to the Music City Center, and he has given indications he could use TIF to build a new ballpark to convince the Nashville Sounds to stay. In this city it is wealthy corporations who benefit most from TIF financing with the assumption that some overflow benefits will trickle down to the rest of us.

In other cities, like Chicago, some are warning about the damaging effects of trickle-down TIF on neighborhoods:

A report released by Mayor [Rahm] Emanuel’s appointed TIF Taskforce states that “the existence of TIF districts increases the individual tax burden on property owners both inside and outside of TIF districts.” All city residents have to pay more taxes every year to build this pool of development money.

TIF money is intended to help create economic development in low-income, blighted neighborhoods. But instead, city officials often give TIF dollars to multimillion dollar corporations based in the downtown area — entities that least need the assistance.

For example, documents on the city's TIF website indicate that the City awarded the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) $15 million in October 2009. Chicago's TIF website also shows that United Airlines was awarded a total $31.3 million in TIF money in two different deals in September 2009 and October 2007.

Faced with cuts to libraries, mental-health clinics, and police-station closings, residents do not understand why money can be found for downtown corporations, but not for crucial neighborhood services.

I am at a loss to explain how trickle-down economics--the mantra of Ronald Reagan (called "voodoo economics" by his Vice President George H.W. Bush)--is now embraced by Democrats and progressives. Nashville is thick with supporters of trickle-down TIF. But it is almost like we mimic Chicago as our model of top-down, corporatist development.

Karl Dean telegraphed these commitments at the beginning when he maintained that his campaign troika of economic development, education reform, and public safety would take care of neighborhood issues on the back end. However, community development has been an afterthought to unbalanced, top-heavy growth, and neighborhoods seem worse off than they were when Dean first became Mayor. That is hardly progressive.

And don't even get me started on the sales tax revenues regressively redirected--without Courthouse protest--to the Nashville Predators ownership and away from Metro services to pay for our infrastructure.

A recipe and a North End cultural history of "Kalb Hollow" (Germantown/Salemtown area)

Nashville blogger Thomas Horton relates a family story and a recipe his father produced when forced to come up with a meal to prepare in a pinch. His father called the dish "Kab Holla" based on where he grew up during the Great Depression:

Kab Holla is how Dad pronounces "Kalb Hollow," which is the nearly forgotten name for the neighborhood where he grew up, about half a mile north of the State Capitol in Nashville. Today, it's called "Historic Germantown" and is undergoing urban pioneer regentrification, but when he was a boy during the Great Depression, it was a scrappy, tough neighborhood whose German Catholic backbone was the Church of the Assumption on Seventh Avenue.

My father went to the Assumption School starting in 1937, the sixth of eleven children. His family home was a tiny three-bedroom shotgun house just down the street from the Church, not far from Morgan Park. His own father was a violent ne'er-do-well and gambler who couldn't really hold a job, with some very questionable associations. His mother worked as a switchboard operator at the Hermitage Hotel and was the principal breadwinner for the family. His two sisters, both considerably older, handled the cooking and cleaning. Food was scarce, and my father grew up hungry more often than not ....

Many times ..., there was no lunch, and on such days, he and his equally hungry little friends would commiserate after school in the fields of Morgan Park. One day, his buddies hatched a plan.

Each one of them was to return home briefly and steal something from their family kitchen. They would build a fire and cook the purloined food, and share the bounty together.

What was most most common in these 1930s Nashville kitchens were potatoes, and most of the boys just nabbed a potato or two from the family bin. One boy had a couple of pennies, and bought a stick of butter at the corner market. Another boy only made away with an onion. My father was the hero of his group: he went home, opened the icebox, and miraculously found meat. There was almost two pounds of bologna, and he nicked three thick slices and took them back to the field. Their ringleader had obtained a frying pan, and over an open fire in Morgan Park, eight boys, aged six through nine, cooked these stolen goods, and shared the meal equally between themselves.

While I posted this as a matter of historical interest for our neighborhood, go read the rest of Mr. Horton's fascinating account.

Enclave to donate blog ad revenues to Cumberland River Compact

I have a long-standing practice at Enclave of donating any Google Ad revenue checks I receive to worthwhile local non-profits, particularly those in North Nashville who give so much back to the community. You can click on the "Donations" tag below to cull posts on past donations. You make those donations possible by clicking on ads.

Having recently received a check from Google for my blog ads, I have decided to donate those funds, $100, to the Cumberland River Compact. The Cumberland River forms one of our community boundaries here in the North End. The stormwater that our yards don't retain runs directly into the Cumberland's watershed. The Compact is a non-profit that works with all interested organizations and individuals "to help ensure that our rivers and streams continue to provide us with clean water, bountiful crops, healthy fisheries and abundant recreational opportunities." Since our lives here are connected to the river, CRC expresses worthy goals that deserve our support.

Mud and gravel from construction run-off choking streets
about 7 blocks from the Cumberland River (Salemtown)

And they no doubt can give back to our community. The North End continues to experience a robust clip of construction projects. Some builders need to be reminded of CRC's point that the main pollutant of our Cumberland River is silt and dirt from our properties. We have responsible developers who effectively manage their stormwater run-off, but we have some who do not.

Having an organization so interested in our watershed that they can be partners with us in making sure that the water that flows out of our neighborhoods and into our river is as clean as it can possibly be is an underestimated benefit. Builders can help with inexpensive preventative measures ("smart growth") and neighbors can help by installing simple rain gardens that retain and filter water. The Cumberland River Compact facilitates both. Just last week I started installing a new rain garden in our backyard myself to manage our run-off.

So, I am pleased to supplement my yard work with this donation to this worthwhile non-profit. The check will go in the mail tomorrow. Thanks to Enclave readers who clicked on ads and made this donation possible. I hope that you will consider donating to CRC as you are able. Even if you are not able to donate, they are available to advise you on measures to conserve run-off and preserve our watershed.

Burn notice

A disaster that had been waiting to happen:

Multiple emergency units responded to a large structure fire Thursday evening in East Nashville that sent one person to an area hospital.

The fully-involved fire was reported before 8 p.m. at an abandoned fire hall near the intersection of Gallatin Road and Douglas Avenue.

The building itself has been vacant since 1989, but it had been recently deeded to a non-profit organization called NEON, affiliated with former Metro Councilwoman Pam Murray ....

The district's Metro Councilman, Scott Davis, says Murray is the vice president of NEON, and she had planned to use the building for an art center.

The seeds of destruction of a venerable old building were planted years ago by Metro Council.

News media construction of the North Nashville brand

Following a police scanner or keeping an eye on Nashville crime Twitter feeds tell me that crime occurs in every part of Nashville. It may be an anecdotal observation, but over the Thanksgiving holidays there were regular reports of crime in east, south and even west parts of Nashville and much less in the central and northern parts of the city. Nonetheless, crime often gets disproportionally attributed to our side of town.

As alarming as the recent Jefferson Street area shootings during TSU Homecoming were, they were no more numerous than crime I've heard of in other parts of Nashville. And yet, the news media has a reputation here in our part of town for generally linking North Nashville with crime, including crime that does not happen here.

That reputation is sustained in the 2010 update of the North Nashville Community Plan, which is based on community feedback. According to "Chapter V - Implementation" (p. 261):

North Nashville stakeholders began to think about the specific actions that could be taken to improve the condition of residential neighborhoods. Of the 50 ideas from the implementation discussion, the following ... were determined to be the most important priorities ....

• Improve the perception of North Nashville neighborhoods by working with local news stations on neighborhood geography to accurately report the location of crime incidents. Currently, crime that occurs in other parts of Nashville is reported as being in “North Nashville”, increasing the perception that North Nashville is dangerous.

Old prejudices die hard, but media prejudice against North Nashville needs to die soon.

Fehr School update

I received an email from CM Erica Gilmore this morning that her sponsored legislation to rezone Salemtown's historic Fehr School building to preserve it from demolition or drastic exterior alteration is now in the pipeline and moving toward council consideration. First, it has to go to the Metro Historical Zoning Commission before the last Planning Commission meeting in February. Then it has to be approved by the Planning Commission before going before the council for three votes.

Salemtown Neighbors Neighborhood Association raised about $670 to pay for the planning costs of publicizing the proposal and advertising public hearings. We also have a petition just in case we need one. It has been personally gratifying for me to see the community rally around this project.

Getting this legislation passed all commissions and council will be a real boon to our community's sense of history and our quality of life.

The high price of influence and re-election

The Crane Watchdog on the Mayor's re-election haul:

Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has filed the final reports covering his recent reelection campaign, and our Dean Campaign Finance page has been updated. Dean's top 10 contributors remain unchanged, with Nashville law firm Bass Berry & Sims his top all-time donor (as a contributor itself and as the employer of contributors). Bass Berry & Sims acted as bond counsel for the $624 million public financing of the Music City Center.

Recent significant contributors to Dean include Auto Zone, Nashville real estate company Southeast Venture, and several country music industry figures. Three members of the Music City Convention Center Authority – Marty Dickens, Ken Levitan and Luke Simons – gave money to Karl Dean in the latter stages of the campaign.

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.

At the business end of Guns N' Roses

It doesn't really matter if you like this aging hard rock band or not. Whether you have tickets to see them this weekend at publicly-owned Bridgestone Arena or not, it's all good.

The real question is how much bling do you think the Nashville Predators will make off this non-hockey event that should have been going into Metro Nashville coffers in these tight budget times? How many revenues originally pledged to pay for Metro services like schools, libraries, and parks in order to land an NHL club will be going into hockey club owners' pockets?

Deniable Dean?

Before Thanksgiving I posed the hypothesis that if Karl Dean did not know about the plan to send millions in non-hockey-event sales taxes away from Metro coffers and to the Nashville Predators hockey club then he is either inept of willfully ignorant. According to a late-breaking NewsChannel5 report last week, it looks like more of the latter:

But we've now discovered that they've actually pocketed almost $6 million, and there's another $4 million waiting for them to claim. It's all thanks to a lobbying effort on Tennessee's Capitol Hill.

"I just was a lobbyist, so I put the bill into the legislature," said Nashville attorney James Weaver.

Weaver is the man who went to Capitol Hill to get more of your money.

He's a longtime supporter of Mayor Karl Dean and a former lobbyist for the Nashville Predators.

After the team signed a lucrative new contract with the city in 2008, Weaver now admits he got state lawmakers to send them even more taxpayer money.

"We found out after the legislation had passed," Dean told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

But his longtime ally had a different suggestion.

"It was a public process," Weaver insisted. "Again, the bill was debated in the House, debated in the Senate, passed by both by large margins and signed by the governor."

Does Mayor Dean really expect us to believe--given general claims that mayors possess specialized knowledge of the ins and outs of financial dealings that we are not privy to--that he had no knowledge of a public process of state legislation that redistributed tax dollars to private enterprise? Karl Dean is a lawyer, for crying out loud.

Reporter Phil Williams also found that former Nashville Mayor, former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen inserted language into two different state bills that made the transfer of millions to the Preds possible. Dean worked for Bredesen when the latter was mayor, and a slew of Bredesenistas came to work for the Dean administration--at significant cost to taxpayers--after Bredesen's gubernatorial run ended.

The symbiosis between Dean and Bredesen (both of whom are Davidson Co. Democrats to boot) suggests to me that Dean would have had to have known that the fix was in on these bills. He cannot reasonably claim any deniability unless he simply kept himself willfully ignorant.

The part of this investigation where Dean's ineptness may slouch through is NewsChannel5's finding that MDHA hocked a sweetheart real estate deal to a local business in the convention center footprint that also had personal and influential connections at the Convention Center Authority. If the Mayor's Office prompted special assistance for one business it would be corrupt enough, but the very act of putting MDHA back in charge--after their mishandling of the Music City Center publicity deal with Dean ally, PR firm McNeely, Pigott, and Fox--is stupid and incredible.

Low-wage families require more assistance than just moves to new neighborhoods

A 15-year study of families who moved from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods finds that they did not necessarily enjoy access to greater opportunities:

[The "Moving To Opportunity" study group’s] special mobility assistance didn’t enable families to gain and sustain access to high-opportunity neighborhoods. Although many moved to better housing in safer neighborhoods, few moved to neighborhoods served by high-performing public schools. And few spent more than a year or two in low-poverty neighborhoods. Rising rents, problems with landlords, and difficulty finding the next apartment all pushed families back to less desirable neighborhoods.

In other words, they didn’t really move to opportunity. It turns out that helping low-income families find, afford, and hang on to housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods requires more help than anticipated. Building on the lessons of MTO, mobility assistance programs in Dallas, Chicago, and Baltimore are now offering more hands-on help (with both the first move and subsequent moves) so families they serve can move to and stay in safe neighborhoods with good schools and abundant opportunities for both kids and adults.

It seems to me that helping low-income families move to greater opportunities requires governments to spend more money providing and sustaining supportive infrastructure (parks and libraries) and truly public schools. Also, without some sort of regulations on the apartment market, I don't see how working-class families will survive higher-income neighborhoods, where the atmosphere is more of a free-for-all than fair-value.

The political salience of local protest outside the bounds of elections alone

I've been consistently beating the drum that local protest movements (like "Occupy") need not lead to election results in order to have political merit, despite claims from critics all over the spectrum to the contrary. Out of Oregon comes news that protesters are having a profound affect on municipal policy matters without need of political parties or the ballot box:

Two weeks after Portland mayoral candidate and state Rep. Jefferson Smith publicly challenged Portland to move some of its money to local credit unions, Mayor Sam Adams this morning said he would pursue the cause.

The mayor's comments came during the public testimony portion of Wednesday's regular Portland City Council meeting and follow on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement and related protests against national banks. The city of Seattle this week adopted its own "responsible banking" resolution in response to the same forces.

The city of Portland has tens of millions of dollars in Wells Fargo, one target of protesters' discontent. But it was unclear as of Wednesday what specifically Adams would do differently ....

Todd Olson, the Portlander who introduced the topic during public testimony at City Council, said following through would allow the city to "address the gross inequity that brought 10,000 Oregonians to the streets of Portland six weeks ago."

This is a textbook example of how local protest groups should target city councils and Mayor's Offices to leverage real changes that move capital from powerful Wall Street banks to local institutions with larger local bang. It is not the first time cities have departed from federal policy to leverage positive change at home. 2 decades ago cities conducted an end-around President Ronald Reagan's support for South Africa and its apartheid government. By the end of the 1980s almost 100 US cities had divested from companies doing business with South Africa.

Likewise, cities are setting new headings due to Occupy Wall Street's fight against corporate malfeasance even as the Obama Administration is doing little to regulate the finance industry. That fills an under-utilized niche that politicos and party wonks ignore or hand over to others with conflicts of interest. The American Prospect has more:

"Banking is now a salient political issue," testified Olson before the city council. "Where local governments choose to bank is a political and social act."

It sure is. Now. And it would take a hearty dose of self-delusion to think that Occupy Wall Street hasn't contributed to creating a moment where wonky discussions of credit union collateralization are perfectly normal. That's true even if the folks in Zuccotti Park aren't the ones churning out white papers. That's how change politics works. And if Bloomberg thinks that "things aren't working well," another option would be for him to help figure out sensible responses, instead of chiding Occupy Wall Street protestors for not presenting end-to-end solutions wrapped in a bow, without anyone else's participation. That's a rather sad view of how change happens.

Hopefully, this trend will spill over to protesters here in Tennessee, and we will start to see pressure put on Mayors like Karl Dean to stop Metro Nashville investments in our abusive and malfeasant finance industry (the Dean Administration climbed into bed with unseemly Goldman Sachs to finance the new convention center).

Metro Health Department flip flops on Occupy Nashville citation

First, Metro Nashville cited Occupy Nashville for feeding the homeless and told them to close down their kitchen. Then, according to an ON supporter, Metro Nashville told the local media that their kitchen shouldn't have been cited:

According to [Metro Health] spokesperson Brian Todd, Occupy Nashville can feed anybody they want to, as long as they aren't selling food. He denied that the kitchen had been shut down and compared it all to tailgating for the Titans and said the only issue was whether or not the food was being sold. Since food has never been sold by Occupy Nashville, there should be no problem, right?

Except, Occupy Nashville still has the problem of the official citation, the one with the box checked that reads, "Your permit to operate a food establishment in Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County is suspended effective this date," so today Occupy Nashville representatives tried once again to determine what it all meant and what they could do and not do in order to avoid more citations or even arrests or eviction of the entire occupation. By the end of the day, a curious story would emerge from Metro's Director of Public Food Safety, Todd Crozier.

It seems there should never have been a citation issued in the first place. According to the explanation given to Occupy Nashville today, "somebody, possibly the state of Tennessee," filed a complaint and requested an inspection. The inspector sent was new on the job and wrote the citation based on standing regulations, unaware that Occupy Nashville has been granted an exception to the requirement that they only feed members of their own group.

The blogger goes on to say that she believes the Governor's office is behind the citation, but even if that is true, Metro Nashville officials are still responsible for assigning an inspector and citing the camp. And it looks fishy to me that Metro bureaucrats are responding to these concerns in the news media rather than corresponding with ON directly to fix these problems. Even if Bill Haslam himself filed a complaint, the Metro Department of Health is culpable for following up, including deciding on the front end that the complaint bears no merit and releasing ON instead of leaving them confused, hanging on and holding the citation.

The simplest explanation here is not that Governor Haslam is able to manipulate Metro machinery even to the fine point of sending a noob prone to cite Occupy Nashville. The simplest explanation is that Metro Nashville screwed this inspection up and then launched damage control and spin in the Tennessean. That fits the Dean Administration MO.

However, anyone bent on seeing a conspiracy here should consider the possibility that part of Mayor Karl Dean's aspiration for an-office-higher-than-Mayor may include pinning the rap for his own boner on a Republican administration. Occupy Nashville should avoid the appearance of partisanship by perpetually focusing too exclusively on Bill Haslam when Karl Dean's administration is in play.

Under-the-table state deal allows Predators to sap millions from non-hockey sales taxes on city-owned arena

These are exactly the multi-million-dollar under-the-table deals that you have to worry about when the city and the state grants subsidies to pro sports teams:



That part about Garth Brooks is particularly disturbing. The country music star came to Nashville to help the city by raising funds for flood recovery. The Nashville Predators flipped the huge sales tax windfall (which could have gone to the city to help with flood recovery) into private income. On top of that they justified the gain with a lie: that they had to rearrange their schedule to accommodate Brooks after Brooks had worked around to help them. That they would exercise guile about a charity event is particularly loathsome in my book.

But who paved the way in state government? Based on a Twitter exchange I had yesterday with Phil Williams and Scene reporter J.R. Lind, I gather that Tennessee Democrats (Gary Odom?) had some legislative oversight of the bill that hustled these provisions in on Metro's contract with the Preds. But it looks like former Governor Phil Bredesen's revenue department also had a hand in this, although the revenuers seem to deny to Mr. Williams that they have relevant records (much like the Predators' front office denied having the paper trail that CVB had).

And the Dean Administration? If it comes to keeping up with how their home team conducts its NHL business with influential state Democrats they look inept or willfully ignorant. They may not be at fault for the funneling of vast sums of government revenue to sports enterprise, but they also seem to have done nothing to safeguard tax revenues by calling public attention to questions of where sales taxes from events might come and go through the CVB. Then again, Karl Dean has never struck me as the kind of Mayor who wants to count on public attention or support beyond that which he receives at election time.


UPDATE:  NewsChannel5 announced today (Wednesday, Nov 23) that reporter Phil Williams will divulge the identity of the individual(s) who leveraged millions in non-hockey sales tax revenues for the hockey club on their 6 pm broadcast.

Karl Dean's bad form: Mayor's Office robbed Peter to pay Paul to pay Judas

The fact that Nashville is doing what none of its sister "hockey towns" is doing--subsidizing arenas for their pro clubs--is lousy enough. I agree with those of you who may be irritated by propping up athletics aristocrats in lean budget years.

But a tidbit buried deeper in this news is far worse than the fact that we bend over backwards to cater to corporate welfare. The Preds have been made accomplices in Karl Dean's mission to transfer Metro wealth in the form of tax revenues from the services devoted to streets, parks, libraries, neighborhoods and public safety to construction of the Music City Center.

Essentially, the Mayor's Office is raiding the General Fund (which pays for the services we demand of our local government in exchange for our taxes) to cover losses in subsidies to the Nashville Predators that were being paid by tourist taxes now redirected to construction of the Music City Center:

city leaders say it’s time for a change [in paying the Preds $7,800,000 out of the General Fund], especially considering the stress on the Metro budget. Amid whispers of a possible property tax increase, Metro Councilman Lonnell Matthews said it would be difficult to justify continued subsidies for a professional hockey team out of the operating budget.

Until last year, the subsidy was funded by tourism taxes and fees, but that revenue now goes to pay the debt for the new convention center.

Many of us warned over and over again that regular Nashvillians would be the truly disadvantaged of the convention center construction project, because our services would eventually be cut to obligate General Fund revenues to pay the huge cost. Rich Riebeling connived quite a shell game to cover the Music City Center drain on our resources without appearing to pay for construction with the General Fund. But that is exactly what has been happening.

It is time to shelter the General Fund services we enjoy from being bled out by Music City Center pipe dreams. The Mayor must end the subsidies to the Nashville Predators. If he does subsidize hockey the money should come from tourism taxes.

Knee-jerk corporate response in Nashville to proposed relief for overextended principals and teachers

After the state agreed to ease up on overworked educators and streamline the unrealistic teacher evaluation process, the Music City mogul class flushed apoplectic:

Keel Hunt, a public relations executive on the steering committee of Nashville’s Agenda, said education reform has emerged time and again as a focus for the group and Nashville. He is one of 29 people who put their names to the letter — others were Metro Nashville Director of Schools Jesse Register and Orrin Ingram, president and CEO of Ingram Industries.

Their letter contends that changing the evaluations could jeopardize the Race to the Top grant.

“I hope (the letter) helps underscore the importance that these people feel this issue has,” Hunt said. “It’s very important to stay the course. ... This is very important work, and there is broader interest in school success that goes beyond what one or two people feel.”

Nashville's Agenda has proved itself in times past to be a tool of wealthy special interests here while branding itself a product of democratic process. It was not too long ago that neighborhood-based leaders were at odds with Nashville's Agenda over the latter's "top down process that began with A-List financial, business and community leaders". I am not surprised at all that the organization wants to "stay the course" in the public school pressure-cooker that produces more opportunities for privatizing than it does for educating.

Apparently, Boss Register is willing to follow this course no matter how low teacher morale drops. He has cast his lot with the pecunious elites.

Education reformers attempt to soft-pedal embarrassments by revising history

On its Facebook page, Stand for Children - Tennessee promoted its organization's assimilation of the Education Equality Project (popularly associated with celebrity John Legend) and in the process exercised a revision of its own history:

Unlike some reform groups that frequently challenge teachers unions, Stand For Children, founded in 1996 in Oregon, has prided itself on generating local support and collaborating with unions as it promotes legislative change. That reputation was challenged this summer after the group was revealed to have lobbied aggressively against Illinois teacher unions to get a reform bill passed.

Jonah Edelman, Stand For Children’s founder and CEO, said today that the new partnership with EEP would help the groups extend their influence in more states, particularly southern states where the influence of reform groups has been less strong.

“Together, we’re positioned to shape the national debate on public education while building powerful statewide organizations across the country that will make a profound impact for students, from the state capitol to the classroom,” Edelman said in a statement.

That is an interesting gloss on what happened in Illinois and a complete omission of what happened in Oregon. Mr. Edelman is obviously using the occasion as another form of damage control to the embarrassing mess he and SFC left of their track record.

Observers acknowledge the common values that bind Stand for Children to the more conservative and dominant elements of Democratic Party culture, which share affinities with Republican politics:

The most engaged in this neoliberal education campaign are organizations focused on school choice: Democrats for Education Reform (and their 501(c)(4), Education Reform Now Advocacy), Education Sector, and the Progressive Policy Institute; as well as service-oriented groups like New Leaders for New Schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Green Dot charter networks, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, Stand for Children, the New Schools Venture Fund, and even the leadership of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

These groups, it should be stressed, are very careful to avoid being characterized as politically on the Right or affiliated with Republican political efforts. Their collaborators, however, do not show any such reluctance. Right-wing, free-market think tanks have joined with neoliberal education groups in pushing for choice and privatization policies. These right-wing think tanks and similar organizations are active in every state, and many more are pursuing a national agenda. Together, these groups have launched a potent attack on the progressive foundations of American schooling, and they are framing this attack as a “civil rights struggle.”

After years of hammering home the theme of “failing public schools,” the campaign is now increasingly focused on teachers’ unions and the existing system of teacher education, preparation, and certification.

Stand for Children - Tennessee plays up school choice without leaping in with both feet to the constellation of other conservative values, but they do not forswear any challenge to teachers. They have fallen silent on recently publicized ambivalence toward teacher evaluations. Whether SFC cares to concede it or not, they have built strong ties to anti-union groups, and they leave open the option of going after teachers as they have elsewhere.

In Los Angeles, as the teachers' union joined Occupy Wall Street, Stand for Children joined the opposite side, a coalition of otherwise disparate non-profits (like the United Way and the Urban League) committed to education reform. The reformers, backed by corporate donations in contrast to the grassroots empowerment of occupiers, encouraged an ad campaign addressed to the union a couple of weeks ago: "Don't Hold Us Back".

The campaign drew the appropriate retort from a local teacher:

Of all the factors that have contributed to the struggles of our students, we the teachers, THE TEACHERS, are the ones “holding students back?” Not the economy. Not the crime. Not the violence. Not the hunger. Not the fragmentation of the nuclear family. Not the lack of medical care and fresh food in the South Central community in which I work, but me, the teacher.

They really spent thousands of dollars to buy this ad, buy a webpage? Couldn’t the money used for this ad have helped the students that are hungry and homeless stay in their apartment for one more month, get that tooth taken care of?

Who are the experts in what is best for students? Educators or billionaires? Teachers or journalists? Unions or astrotorf orgs? I may be a parent, but when the doctor tells me how to take care of my daughter, I yield to the expert. When her 5th grade teacher shared his expertise on how to approach her math work, I listened and implemented. Parents play a huge role in the success of their children but we each have our own job to do; and it differs.

SFC LA is not an isolated case. Seattle's SFC has endorsed school board candidates who are financed by union-busting venture philanthropists in the Great Northwest.

In all of these cases, Stand for Children may not appear to be in full-blown assault of teachers unions, but they are aiding and abetting forces aligned against public school teachers. I also worry that one day they may find it more convenient to mobilize against Tennessee teachers than stay noncommittal toward them.