For those who haven’t been paying attention to the patrolling habits of the Belle Meade police force, the recent terrorist attacks are not the motivation for its compulsive and stringent tactics. It’s just more of the same.
Late last month, a city police officer stopped Ray Wagner, a Green Hills resident who committed the grave offense of riding a bike with an attached baby trailer down Belle Meade Boulevard. The officer reprimanded Wagner, wrote him a ticket for $20, then escorted him and his two young children out of the city.
“It made me feel great,” Wagner jokes. “People were coming out of houses asking if everything was alright.”
Earlier this year, Belle Meade’s bumbling trio of city commissioners, who three years ago provoked criticism when they secretly approved the use of public funds to pay for a couple of bronze horse statues, banned outright the use of baby carriages and strollers on Belle Meade Boulevard. At first, the city’s finest merely warned offenders. Now, however, they are under orders from the commissioners to ticket first and ask questions later.
“We have signs posted,” says City Manager Beth Reardon on the warnings to the baby pushers. “We’re not hiding anything.”
That’s of little consolation to Wagner, who for whatever reason wasn’t told simply to stay off the street but was paraded past city limits by the officer, who, perhaps in an attempt to humiliate him, kept her blue lights flashing the entire time.
“It was a beautiful day. I just thought I’d get a little exercise, and my kids love riding in the baby carriage,” Wagner says. “It’s just a silly law.”
And there are others. Last week, police ticketed a woman for violating the city ordinance forbidding pedestrians from—you guessed it—walking more than 18 inches outside the median on Belle Meade Boulevard. Police Chief Jimmy Binkley said that his officers give eight to 10 such tickets a month.
“It’s to prevent people from getting killed,” he says bluntly.
In the tony city of Belle Meade, where the prevailing concerns include razing cozy abodes in favor of constructing enormous Italianate homes and fretting over stock portfolios, the issue of how to govern the town’s signature street has reached epic proportions. The crux of the problem is that the street’s proximity to Percy Warner Park has made it a popular thoroughfare for a motley crew of walkers, runners, and cyclists. Throw in an inordinate number of Land Rovers rumbling alongside the exercisers, and you have a veritable crisis on your hands—at least among the easily spooked Belle Meade citizenry.
“We have had people call and say they were driving down Belle Meade Boulevard and came up behind a parent or someone pushing a child in a baby carriage or stroller, and they said it was very frightening,” Reardon says.
In a raucous public meeting last January on the topic of safety, more than a few residents suggested discouraging “outsiders” from using the popular boulevard. One said that the city shouldn’t spend a “bloody dime” making the street more attractive to those who reside outside city limits. The crowd applauded loudly.
Architect and Belle Meade resident Boyd Bogle later echoed those sentiments when he told the Scene that cyclists particularly should have to pay a fee to use the street. “And it should be very expensive,” he said at the time. “Except for the residents of Belle Meade.”
Asked if he worried about the rather exclusionary tone of his remarks, he replied simply, “I could care less.”
Currently, the landscape architecture firm of Hodgson & Douglas is trying to devise a plan to segregate the cars from the pedestrians. The firm is considering options that range from creating a trail or walkway down the grassy median to closing down a lane of traffic and reserving it for cyclists, pedestrians, and runners. This fall, the city’s commissioners plan to evaluate the proposal and figure out what, if anything, they should do.
“There is nothing on the table yet, and there is no consensus in the city,” Reardon says. “Everybody has a lot of different opinions on what they would like for Belle Meade Boulevard.”
Believe it or not, the government of Belle Meade, which doesn’t seem to have the same managerial acumen of many of its residents, has been debating how to regulate the 3-mile long boulevard for more than three years. It’s a good thing Old Hickory Boulevard doesn’t fall under its jurisdiction.
