If you can’t say something nice, don’t run for Metro Council. With next week’s citywide races rapidly approaching, rival campaigns are spitting up nasty, if factually correct, gossip on their opponents that suggests we’re about to send a gaggle of slayers, tax cheats, rage-aholics and paranoids to the city’s legislative body.

The candidates running for District 30, which covers parts of Antioch, don’t exactly have the kinds of personal bios you’d expect from someone answering the call for public service. In fact, two of them have recently killed people. Mark Woodside, a bail bondsman who received the Scene’s endorsement last week, shot a man dead in an abandoned boat dock along the Cumberland River, in an apparent act of self-defense. The fallen, charged with rape and sexual battery, had skipped his court date and was planning to leave the country. Woodside and another bondsman say they ordered him to the ground and were hoping to apprehend him peacefully when the man started firing and accidentally shot himself. Woodside had someone call for an ambulance, but as the ring of the sirens grew louder, the fugitive reached for his gun and pointed it at the bail bondsman. Woodside says that he had no choice but to shoot him first.

“I’m not proud of it,” he says. “It was a bad situation that I was forced into, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.”

Still, Woodside also has an arrest record, featuring a criminal contempt and an assault charge. He says both stemmed from a messy divorce and charges were later dropped.

Meanwhile, the other shooter in the race, candidate B.J. Brown, told the Scene with no sign of remorse that he shot and killed a carjacker on Haywood Lane last year. Brown also says that Nashville needs more police protection, a statement, that, when coming from him, is not exactly cliché.

All of which leaves incumbent Michael Kerstetter with a catchy campaign slogan: “There are two people running against me who have killed people,” he tells the Scene. The personal dirt on Kerstetter is barely dusty. Last year, he agreed to pay a judgment of nearly $7,000 after his two attorneys, who had represented him on a domestic matter, sued him for unpaid fees.

In District 19, an inner-city area that covers sections of North and South Nashville, disaster and tragedy have struck challenger Janice Davis in her race against incumbent Ludye Wallace.

Davis says that, among other things, “We have experienced some frontal attacks when my house was broken into, our car was vandalized, and we were being followed.” Davis will not say where these attacks have been coming from, although she clearly believes they are part of the volatility of the campaign. She adds that Metro police dispatched an officer to provide protection at her home.

“I’m just saying it happened, and people can assume what they want to assume,” Davis says cryptically.

As if all this weren’t enough, Davis says the stress of these and other incidents wore so negatively on her mother that she suffered a stroke last month and later died.

Of her adversity-laden campaign, Davis says she has been “unable to focus on some things.” But she vows to keep moving forward and wants to get the word out that she is still actively in the race. “I want to win. I want to serve.”

Earlier in the race, Davis had unsuccessfully challenged Wallace’s residency in the district. Election officials opined that, in fact, he lived in the district, even though the residence in which he claimed he lived had no active water service. Around that time, Davis says her own landlord began efforts to evict her from her apartment, which she believes was in retaliation for her claims against Wallace.

Wallace didn’t return a phone call asking for comment.

Louie Johnston, who lives in the Old Hickory area, is not a candidate for council, but he’s doing everything he can to make sure that District 11 incumbent Feller Brown goes down hard next Thursday. A legal guardian for three orphans, Johnston wanted to build an addition to his home to give the kids their own rooms. “They were sleeping on sleeper sofas,” he says. But Johnston’s neighbor didn’t approve of the plan and got Feller Brown to sic codes officials on him. “My neighbor and Feller Brown are politically tight,” Johnston says, explaining the incumbent’s motivation.

Seeking retribution, Johnston employed his three orphans, along with a trio of graduates from a drug and alcohol program, to distribute anti-Feller Brown literature on the doorsteps of area homes. Asked if he felt it was a good idea having former drug addicts and alcoholics walking through people’s yards, he replied, “They were looking for work and looking to reenter society.”

Fair enough. Anyhow, Johnston says the local postmaster warned him about putting unsolicited pamphlets in people’s mailboxes. That came as a shock to him, he says, because he says his help were placing the anti-Brown packets on doorsteps, not in mailboxes. So Johnston theorizes that “Brown’s people got them off doors and put them in people’s mailboxes” to fix the case against him. Brown didn’t return a call for comment.

In his race against incumbent John Summers, District 24 challenger Joel Sullivan has cited his business background—he’s founded several small companies—ad nauseum as one of the qualities voters should consider. As a result, he won the endorsement of the Nashville Business Coalition. Then The Tennessean published a story about his not having a business license for one of those companies, Sullivan Concepts. Sullivan says that it was a minor transgression, given that his company only eclipsed $3,000 in revenues once in the last four years, the threshold for needing a business license. But there’s more to the story. Sullivan also managed a security company that is delinquent in paying its business taxes. Sullivan says that since he doesn’t own the firm, “I don’t have control on the bills they pay; my job was to come in and help them out.”

Sullivan also founded a security software firm, Granite Technologies, that doesn’t have a business license. Sullivan says that he’s just a shareholder in the company and that it’s now operated out of New York. He says he doesn’t know what his share is in Granite Technologies nor what the company’s revenues are. So much for that business background.

Finally, an agitated at-large Metro Council member Adam Dread needlessly sparred with Tennessean city hall reporter Brad Schrade over a story on campaign signs this week. Schrade happened to find one of Dread’s campaign signs on a sidewalk, the most trivial of political sins made somewhat noteworthy in light of Dread’s own past efforts to discourage such displays on public right-of-ways. Even still, the story would have been quickly forgotten if Dread had simply explained the situation and then hung up the phone. Instead, he lost his cool with Schrade, who exploited the outburst for every inch he could. Dread accused the paper of being on a witch-hunt, used vulgarities and then asked the comments be kept off the record, all of which Schrade mercilessly reported.

Dread admits he shouldn’t have lost his temper with Schrade, but he still accuses the reporter of having a “personal vendetta” against him. “And I have it on good authority,” Dread jokes, “that he’s working on another hit piece with an anonymous source who swore I once illegally removed a mattress tag.”