A former Metro attorney has drafted an ordinance that would essentially make it easier for an obscure, out-of-town company to be the gatekeeper of the city’s newspapers and booklets. And the company likely to assume that responsibility, the Florida-based City Solutions, has a president who has openly mocked local publishers, while oddly claiming that his firm will “return the city [of Nashville] to the people.”
“They have rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” says Council member Phil Ponder. “Their approach is not exactly Southern-polished.”
Rack clutter, rack blight, rack sprawl, whatever you want to call it, the Metro Council apparently thinks that it needs to keep tabs on the proliferation of newsstands on city streets. Up for debate are two competing proposals: one, up for consideration this week, recognizes a voluntary plan pursued by local publishers; the other, a binding ordinance, would essentially encourage City Solutions to set up shop in Nashville.
City Solutions has retained former Metro attorney Leslie Shechter, now with the firm Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, and she drafted the bill that she touts as a compromise. The legislation gives publishers a choice between maintaining their own news racks by paying a $50 annual permit fee per rack—or placing their publications for free in large modular news racks, presumably maintained by City Solutions. The ordinance would include all news racks in Davidson County. The Bicycling, Pedestrian, & Traffic Calming Advisory Committee plans to examine the ordinance early next month.
“The compromise aspect of this is that there is no specific provider, anybody can put up modular news racks,” Shechter says. Adds Tom Trento, president of City Solutions, “This ordinance is a compromise that settles the whole problem.”
But the publishers, big and small, don’t see that plan as a compromise, and they say that it forces them to choose between paying a fee or cooperating with a third-party vendor. “I’m not willing to support it, not without some major changes,” says Jeff Scharfeld, general manager of USA Today for the Nashville market. “The permit fee is an astronomical amount for a small publication,” says the Apartment Blue Book’s Bobbie Turner. “It’s going to drive a lot of people out of business.”
Trento, who makes his money by selling advertising on the back of his news racks, initially tried to lobby local publishers to participate voluntarily in his program. Nearly all of the newspaper publishers—who, of course, always have maintained capitalistic control over their racks—did not want to be bothered. So when the advisory committee initially voted in favor of giving a private company such as City Solutions the responsibility of distributing local papers and booklets, the publishers decided to outflank him.
Rather than participate in Trento’s program, the publishers formed a 20-plus member co-op and retained the public relations giant McNeely Pigott & Fox. Then they cleaned up many street corners with 11 or more news racks by installing their own modular units, and their new PR friends trumpeted their efforts.
That shrewd tactical move threatened to kick Trento out of the Nashville market, which might be a key battleground for the 5-year-old company. Indianapolis remains the only major city where City Solutions has a sweeping presence. Some think it needs to win Nashville to see any kind of domino effect. “If City Solutions can’t win this one here, they have a problem,” Ponder says.
Replies Trento, “Nashville is a desired city for us. We love this town, but it’s not necessary to the success of City Solutions. We’re necessary to the success of the news rack plan.”
Nevertheless, ever since local publishers formed the co-op, Trento has gone on the offensive. At the Nashville Urban Design Forum recently, he testily debated Scene publisher Bruce Dobie, an avid proponent of the publishers’ voluntary plan. And in a letter to Dobie, he claimed that the Scene publisher’s participation with The Tennessean undermines the weekly’s long-standing practice of critiquing the local daily.
Trento also accurately noted that the voluntary plan is, by its nature, non-binding and may be subject to the whims of The Tennessean. After all, unlike Gannett, City Solutions has a natural incentive to care about the distribution of all publications. In other words, trying to play to the potential fears of the little guys, Trento argued that the voluntary plan ultimately could dump the city’s smaller papers on the street.
Those were some of Trento’s coherent arguments. There were others that weren’t so cogent. In a rather surreal July press release, Trento also referred to The Tennessean as “the Wizard” and Nashville as “Oz.” As for City Solutions? Well, the company would be “following in the paw steps of TOTO (sic)” by revealing “the fearful Wizard” and returning the city to the people.
Also in that press release, Trento compared local regulation of news racks with that of the “governmental regulation of the food industry.” And in perhaps the strangest passage of all, he pleaded for local publishers to spurn the co-op and “marry me, someone who will commit his life to keep you alive.”
If his propaganda is, well, out there, so perhaps is his background. In the late 1980s, Trento was a committed pro-life activist. In fact, in an anti-abortion speech covered by the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Trento noted that “doctors who perform abortions have lost their high calling and...ought not to be referred to as doctors.” The San Francisco newspaper, SF Weekly, reported that Trento served as the editor of the 304-page Prolife Resource Manual, which, according to the paper, contained gory photos of aborted fetuses.
Trento’s past activism might cause concern, especially if publishers are worried about what kinds of ads his modular units might display. And while Trento has said that his company is bound by a restrictive ad policy, publishers might prefer someone with a more milquetoast background to distribute their newspapers.
As a businessman, however, Trento has his admirers. “He does a pretty good job,” says Richard Bauer, a code enforcement administrator for the city of Delray Beach, a small south Florida town and the first city to push for modular news racks as a solution to rack blight. “Everything I’ve asked him to do he has done.”
But even in Delray Beach, Trento ran into problems with the local publishing community. When the program was first established, there apparently was some confusion about whether or not City Solutions was going to charge rent to the papers it housed. According to a story in the Delray Times, a coalition of 18 publishers “drew a line in the sand,” telling both company and city officials that it would not pay rent to secure news rack space. Trento says that the publishers knew full well what they were getting into.
But today in Delray, most major papers, including USA Today and the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, still distribute from their own racks. And unfortunately for Trento, the city of Delray has prohibited advertising on his news racks or the charging of permit fees that exceed maintenance costs.
In Indianapolis, which Trento has compared to Nashville, his business is more established. But even there, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune have foregone a downtown presence (except in local coffee shops, for example) rather than participate in Trento’s program.
In nearly all instances, newspaper publishers have balked at any legislation mandating they relinquish distribution of their product to a third party. Nashville is no different. Local publishers also worry about what would happen if they lost the right to distribute their papers where they feel they can reach the most readers. And while City Solutions could have tried to allay those concerns, its tactics might have done just the opposite.
“I feel like they are going to place their boxes where drive-by traffic is the highest,” Turner says of City Solutions. “That doesn’t translate to foot traffic. I just don’t think they have our best interests at heart.”
