Developers Gone Wild

It was one of the slickest marketing themes of Mayor Karl Dean’s election campaign: He promised not to play the “old-style politics” of Nashville’s past—a not-too-subtle dissing of his stale, vapid opponent, Bob Clement. Yet now, scarcely eight months into his first term, comes the news that Dean’s top aide—Deputy Mayor Greg Hinote—may have interceded on behalf of politically connected developers who are pressuring the Metro Planning Department to fire its strongest advocate for neighborhoods.

At the center of the quarrel is the Swiss Ridge apartment/townhouse complex—a little taste of the Alps in gritty Antioch, which was built by the developer husband of Vice Mayor Diane Neighbors and is half-owned by the Planning Commission chairman.

As you might expect, nobody’s admitting anything. But if it’s all true—and there’s certainly plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing that way—the mayor’s critics see all sorts of unsavory possibilities: a return to cronyism and political back-scratching at the courthouse, a new heyday for developers in Nashville and the end of an eight-year rise of neighborhood-friendly policies that Dean’s predecessor, Bill Purcell, started.

Metro Council member Mike Jameson, to the obvious annoyance of some of his more development-oriented colleagues, tore the lid off this political potboiler last week during public hearings on the Planning Department budget. As Jameson questioned the department’s executive director, Rick Bernhardt, about the whole dispute, the budget committee chair, Erik Cole, objected.

“This is a budget hearing,” he scolded Jameson. “It is not a deposition.”

At which point Jameson launched into an attack on the Dean administration and a defense of David Kleinfelter, the tough-minded Planning Department manager who looks to be losing his job because some developers don’t like his style.

“I’ve read some recent statements in the press that this administration is trying to restore balance in the never-ending divide between neighborhoods and developers,” Jameson said during the hearing, “as if neighborhoods somehow have the upper hand, as if driving home tonight any of us aren’t going to see just seas of asphalt and pavement. To suggest that the neighborhoods are somehow winning these wars, and to take from us one of the few advocates we have on the planning staff to help us win reasonable negotiated compromises is a real, real setback.”

Kleinfelter, who by his own admission is known among developers as an “arrogant asshole” for his rigid insistence that they follow often-complex zoning plans and rules, is drawing fire in this case over a sidewalk.

In its plan for the Swiss Ridge complex, the Planning Commission required a sidewalk on each side of the street in front of the development. That was 2003. The developers—Planning Commission chairman Jim McLean and Affordable Housing Resources, whose construction division at the time was run by the vice mayor’s husband, Steve Neighbors—have haggled over it ever since, and still there’s no sidewalk.

(How a developer manages to become chairman of the Planning Commission is a very good question, but that’s for another story.)

On May 1, Deputy Mayor Hinote met with Bernhardt, the department’s director, and Eddie Latimer, CEO of Affordable Housing Resources. Latimer, who asked for the meeting, says he complained about Kleinfelter and demanded that Bernhardt change the Planning Commission’s plan for the development to require a sidewalk on only one side of the street. He insisted that only that much sidewalk had actually been required in the beginning but that the commission’s minutes were inaccurately recorded back in 2003.

As Latimer recalls, “Rick [Bernhardt] said, ‘Oh, I can get you on the agenda’ to change the plan, and I said, ‘Thank you.’ ”

So suddenly, after five years of squabbling, all was well after the meeting in the mayor’s office. “Rick got us on the agenda in two weeks,” Latimer boasts.

Bernhardt rewrote the 2003 minutes, the commission rubber-stamped it as a mere technical correction, and the development plan was changed. It now requires a sidewalk, strangely enough, only on the opposite side of the street from the complex, where for logistical reasons, it’s presumably less expensive to build. To reach it, assuming it’s ever built, residents will have to cross the street and walk through traffic coming down a steep hill.

What’s more, only days after the meeting in the mayor’s office and after a breakfast meeting with commission chair McLean, Bernhardt told Kleinfelter that, after seven years on the job, his $88,000-a-year employment contract wouldn’t be renewed when it expires at the end of the year.

By one account, Bernhardt told Kleinfelter, “ ‘I just can’t defend you anymore.’ ” According to Bernhardt, he relayed a message from McLean. Bernhardt says, “I told Kleinfelter that McLean said that the commission would not approve a renewal of his contract.”