Wheeling and Back-Room Dealing

Jan. 17 was a strange day to be one of John Summers’ constituents. If you happened to be a supporter of a conservation overlay, a restrictive zoning ordinance fiercely contested within two neighborhoods in Summers’ West Nashville district, you were certain Summers would push forward with the measure. Polls seemed to indicate a majority in both neighborhoods—Sylvan Park and Whitland—favored the overlay. If you were an opponent of the overlay, and thus an opponent of John Summers, you were certain the 53-year-old, silver-haired council member would push forward with the measure because the aforementioned polls seemed to indicate you were on the losing side. If that weren’t enough, you were clued in when you approached Summers more or less hat in hand, seeking to compromise any way possible in the minutes leading up to the vote, only to find Summers as smug and cocksure as ever, telling you, in almost as many words, that you could kiss his ass. The overlay looked like a done deal. Then something odd happened. Vice Mayor Howard Gentry read the ordinance as he does before debate on nearly every bill. But Summers wasn’t in the chambers to propose what to do with it once Gentry finished—pass it, table it, amend it, whatever. Several seconds of awkward silence ensued, followed by a motion from council member Rip Ryman to defer the overlays until late June. Summers’ absence was the first sign something was amiss. Returning suddenly and speaking out of turn, Summers asked Ryman to retract his motion because Summers himself wanted to make the motion to delay. That was the second indication something was out of whack. Why would he defer a measure neighbors on competing sides thought was certain to pass? In a rambling, almost nonsensical monologue, Summers said he arrived at the decision by taking the “interest of his constituents” to heart. He said that he had tried to maintain a fair process to canvass the neighborhoods to see how residents felt about the overlay, but “people”—by which he meant overlay opponents—had worked hard (“which was their right to do,” he noted), and had “confused” the issue and “discredited” Summers and the council. Even if all of this were true, the most reasonable next step for Summers would have been to call for a vote, if only so that Summers and the council might begin to regain their sullied reputations. Instead, he asked the council to delay the overlays indefinitely while yet another poll of the neighborhoods was taken, which meant more bickering and acrimony among neighbors. (To flash-forward a moment, in mid-February, a poll conducted by the city showed Sylvan Park and Whitland overwhelmingly opposed the overlays, which flew in the face of previous assurances from Summers that majorities in both neighborhoods supported them.) In the days and weeks after Jan. 17, overlay opponents began to piece together why Summers may have abruptly changed course. They speculate—with a good deal of circumstantial evidence on their side—that Summers struck a deal with Buck Dozier, a socially conservative, at-large council member with aspirations to be the next Metro mayor. They think Summers agreed to vote for a Dozier-backed ordinance permitting video billboards if Dozier voted for the two overlay ordinances. But here’s the rub: Summers was absent when the council voted on the video billboard measure. About 20 minutes before the overlay ordinance was introduced, depending upon whose memory you trust, Summers was either assuring overlay supporters or belittling opponents in a back room of the council chambers. The video sign ordinance, it should be noted, failed by exactly one vote. And, according to minutes of the Jan. 17 meeting, Summers did not vote on the measure. Summers didn’t return calls for this story. Dozier, however, says there was no quid pro quo to vote for the overlays. “I wasn’t voting for [the overlay ordinance] anyway. The allegation is totally fictional. I will always tell the truth. This is one of those urban legends that come around. It’s pretty bizarre. I really don’t deal much with John Summers. And I don’t cut deals.” Eight council members interviewed by the Scene, including several sympathetic to overlay opponents, say they can’t verify whether Dozier and Summers had a deal. One council member, who asked not to be identified, says he wouldn’t put it past either council member to swap votes, and another says Summers routinely trades votes “for sport.” Says council member Charlie Tygard, speculating about why John Summers asked for another poll rather than put the overlay to a vote: “He probably decided to go a different route when he stood up and took a glance around the room and saw he didn’t have a firm commitment from enough council members.” Tygard says he’s unaware of such a vote swap but adds, “stranger things have occurred.” Todd McKee, who is director of legal affairs at Meharry Medical College, first made the vote-swapping allegation public two weeks ago when he asked the Davidson County delegation to consider changing the method by which overlay ordinances are adopted. McKee, a Whitland resident, says one Metro Council member confirmed the Dozier-Summers deal, but he declines to name that member. “It was a done deal before we knew what was happening,” says Kate McKee, Todd’s wife, who pleaded with Summers for a compromise, she says, minutes before the overlay vote came to the chamber floor. “We just got lucky because it blew up in John Summers’ face.” Of course, it should be noted that there’s nothing patently illegal about vote swapping. And a case could be made that there’s nothing ethically wrong with the practice, given that congressional and statehouse members employ the practice to their benefit. But if Dozier and Summers agreed to exchange votes, when did it happen? State law is clear that two members of the same governing body cannot deliberate outside of public view. Technically, even the whispers that Summers and other council members sneak back and forth during council meetings should be amplified for the public to hear, though few council observers would push the issue to such absurd, impractical lengths. This isn’t the first time Summers has been accused of circumventing the state open meetings law. In August 2001, according to a Tennessean article about open meeting abuses, he orchestrated a private meeting of at least five council members, in conjunction with the head of the planning department and a union official, at which they discussed plans to redraw district lines. Most recently, a Summers’ email will be Exhibit A in a pending lawsuit involving a Belmont-Hillsboro neighborhood overlay. Because Summers is considered the guru of conservation overlays—he engineered passage of Nashville’s first conservation overlay when he was an East Nashville council member in the 1980s—Belmont-Hillsboro council member Ginger Hausser asked him to help her pass the zoning ordinance in her district. In the run-up to the vote on the Belmont-Hillsboro overlay last year, a number of council members exchanged emails, some of which read like position papers and some of which bordered on goofy. Jason Alexander, whose blue-collar district stretches south and west of the airport, wrote, tongue in cheek, that he would vote for the Belmont overlay if council members agreed to one in Antioch. Alexander wanted to preserve the “integrity” of historical places such as a hamburger stand and an out-of-the-way wilderness area. “I want these places preserved so my son can one day eat a Fat Moe’s burger and have a place to skip school in the Mill Creek Cave as I did in my high school days,” Alexander wrote. (Alexander tells the Scene he wrote the email in part because he was frustrated with the volume of overlay emails he had received.) Summers emailed Hausser that she should ask the head of the Belmont Hillsboro Neighborhood Association, two historic zoning staff members and a Metro attorney to congregate in a “back conference room during the council meeting” so they could answer questions for council members undecided about the overlay. “You should take council members back to the room, one at a time, and ask them where they are on the Belmont-Hillsboro overlay, what their concerns are,” Summers wrote. “If they don’t give you a firm commitment, try to answer their questions right then and there. This gives you a chance to give them the numbers, answer these ridiculous questions and answer their questions one on one. It’s something you haven’t been able to do.” Probably, that is, because it’s illegal. Just how damaging that email, and others like it, is will be decided in Chancery Court, at the moment the only venue for taxpayers to overturn backroom Metro Council deals. But even before they’d made it to court, the emails had become an issue. Metro Legal staff attorney Brook Fox sent Summers an email in June 2005 “respectfully reminding” him that it wasn’t legal for council members to discuss council issues via email. Summers’ reply? By email, he asked another council member, Randy Foster, how punitive the law was, almost as if he were weighing the risk of circumventing it. “Am I correct that the penalty for violating this is that our actions may be void? So how would they enforce that, do you think? And who would enforce it, do you think?” This session, the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government asked the legislature to change the state code so that if council members like Summers were ruled in violation of the open meetings law, they might be fined, and citizen groups, like the one that filed the Belmont-Hillsboro suit, might receive attorney fees if they win their case. But the legislature balked, saying it would be difficult to find candidates to run for an office susceptible to ticky-tack fouls. On the other hand, by embracing the status quo, Tennessee will continue to field candidates like John Summers, whose heartfelt interest in constituents seems to end at the back room of the council chambers.