Davis Briley is sworn in as Nashville's mayor on March 6Photo: Daniel Meigs
Vice Mayor David Briley’s phone was blowing up.
He parked at the council offices and did a routine check-in with council attorney Mike Jameson. After that, the five-block walk to Briley’s law office at Bone McAllester Norton on this late-January morning was interrupted by texts and calls. In short succession, the vice mayor heard from an assortment of friends, lawyers and journalists, all asking him to confirm what they had heard: Mayor Megan Barry had an affair with a member of her security detail, who had retired abruptly.
When Briley got upstairs, his law partner Charles Robert Bone stepped into his office and closed the door. “What do you know?” Bone said. “What do you know?” Briley responded. Bone had found out the night before. Ironically, the man who would become mayor was one of the last to learn about Barry’s infidelity: Rumors over the weekend had begun spreading through Nashville’s power circles, setting off a feeding frenzy among reporters who scrambled to confirm them. Barry began informing her inner circle on Tuesday. By Wednesday, with a formal announcement imminent, Barry weighed whether or not to resign.
As the two men traded information, one fact became glaringly obvious: The well-worn jacket and slacks that Briley had on were just not going to do if he was going to be sworn in as mayor. There was a bigger problem, however — Briley had dropped off every last one of his suits at the dry cleaners the day before.
He drove over to Levy’s in Green Hills at lunch and picked out something sensible. While the store hustled to finish alterations, Briley dropped by his mom’s house nearby and waited. New suit, new shirt, new tie, the vice mayor headed back to the office to wait and see what his job would be later that day: mayor, or attorney and part-time vice mayor.
Barry called Briley’s cell at around 2 p.m. She apologized to him for her actions but said she’d decided to continue in office. David Briley would have to wait another month to begin his accidental tenure as mayor.
Mayor David Briley addresses reporters after his swearing-in on March 5Photo: Daniel Meigs
Writers love political dynasties. Kennedys. Bushes. Roosevelts. They love the romance of them and the built-in storylines. They love the air of royalty that generations of elected officials give off. On the surface, Nashville’s newest mayor would seem to fit the bill. Clifton David Briley was born at Baptist Hospital on Jan. 8, 1964, nine months after the consolidation of Nashville and Davidson County into one Metro government and the inauguration of his grandfather Beverly Briley as mayor. He’s not just a child of Nashville — he’s the first mayor to be born in Metro Nashville.
Beverly Briley had been the county judge, basically the chief administrator of Davidson County, since 1950, and he was a passionate advocate for Metro government. Postwar Nashville was an increasingly fractured city to govern, as the population moved out of the core and into booming suburban areas like Madison, Donelson and Green Hills. The case for Metro was straightforward: The city’s tax base was eroding, and the county didn’t have the means to keep up with the demand for services. A single entity could eliminate duplication and expand services like waste management, fire and police throughout the county. In 1958, a referendum sought to unify the county under one government, but despite the support of both city and county leaders, it failed. A second attempt in 1962 was successful, and Beverly Briley rode that wave into the courthouse as the first Metro mayor. He was seen as a progressive on some issues — he supported civil rights and the desegregation of schools and lunch counters before he became mayor — but he also had a conservative streak. He supported Richard Nixon for president in 1972 and Bill Brock for U.S. Senate over Jim Sasser, a move that would get him kicked out of the county Democratic Party.
He was elected three times before term limits forced him to give way to Richard Fulton in 1975. By the time Beverly Briley retired, he had led some or all of Davidson County for a quarter-century.
But David Briley never really had any deep philosophical or political conversations with his grandfather. He never went door to door handing out campaign materials or planted “Briley for Mayor” yard signs, as Beverly’s last campaign finished in 1971. He was just 12 when the elder Briley retired, and he was 16 in 1980 when his grandfather died of cancer. He was closer to his grandmother, who passed away six months before her husband. The generation between the two men — David Briley’s father Cliff, uncle William and aunt Diane Easterling — never sought to grasp the levers of Metro government. Ask Briley if he’s part of a dynasty or some powerhouse political family and his look is more amused than anything. He’s been asked some version of this question his entire political life. Nashvillians today are more likely to know the family name from Briley Parkway rather than recalling a mayor who left office four decades ago. The number of citizens who voted for both David and Beverly grows smaller each day.
David graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy and later Georgetown University. Then he headed to Latin America with just $600. He taught English in Ecuador and became fluent in Spanish during his time abroad, a useful skill for reaching a 10 percent — and growing — slice of Nashville. In his post-inaugural press conference on March 5, he answered a question from a Latino radio station in Spanish.
Upon returning to the U.S. after his time in Ecuador, Briley decamped for San Francisco, where he would attend Golden Gate University’s law school and, perhaps more importantly, meet Jodie Bell, his future wife. The couple were happy on the West Coast, enjoying the city in the early 1990s before the cost of living became completely prohibitive.
Briley gravitated toward the plaintiff’s bar, eventually working on class-action cases involving silicon breast implants. In some ways, it’s more useful to look at influential attorneys like LeRoy Hersh (Briley’s mentor in San Francisco), Charles W. Bone (the scion of Bone McAllester) or Clark Tidwell for their influence on Briley’s life than his grandfather.
For David Briley and Bell, the decision to come back to Tennessee came down to family — they wanted to start one and decided that Nashville was a better option, so the couple moved to the Inglewood neighborhood. The change also let David live close to his younger brother Rob, whose successful 1998 campaign for state legislature he worked on. It was that race, more than anything to do with his grandfather, that whet David’s appetite for politics. He had always been interested in public policy, but David found that he liked being in the middle of things, so he skipped the district level and ran for a countywide at-large seat on the Metro Council in 1999. After a tight general election, Briley topped all the runoff candidates and earned a spot.
On the council, Briley staked out an aggressively progressive agenda on issues like the environment, schools and, in particular, discrimination. His support of a bill to protect gay and lesbian city workers from discrimination drew fire from political opponents like Roy Dale, who used it in a 2003 council at-large race advertisement against Briley: “If you want Nashville to be more like California, say, ‘Hello San Fran Nashville’ and vote for David Briley.” Briley finished first in the runoff. Dale finished last.
Vice Mayor David Briley presides as Mayor Megan Barry addresses the council on Oct. 2Photo: Metro Nashville Government
Over the past quarter-century, Nashville has had, broadly speaking, two different types of leaders: “neighborhood” mayors, who focused on issues like sidewalks, roads and schools; and “business” mayors, who focused on economic development and larger projects. Phil Bredesen and Karl Dean fell squarely into the latter camp, between them building an NFL stadium, an arena, a baseball park and a convention center that have transformed downtown Nashville. Bill Purcell was the former, adding hundreds of miles of sidewalks and bikeways, expanding neighborhood watch groups and establishing a Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods. Megan Barry ran as a hybrid, a neighborhoods advocate who would continue the work of the Dean administration — working on affordable housing as well as championing a soccer stadium.
These are two broad categories, and the work of a city means that each of Metro’s past four mayors has been responsible for things outside his or her general label. But they are useful in understanding how mayors have operated and, importantly, how candidates have pitched themselves to voters.
In 2007, David Briley leaned toward the neighborhood category, launching a mayoral campaign based on adding parks, putting police manpower toward quality-of-life issues and promising to be Nashville’s “green mayor.” At 43, he was the youngest candidate in the field to succeed Bill Purcell, and two terms in the council had given him visibility — but also a reputation for being opposed to Chamber of Commerce initiatives like the proposed Music City Center and a downtown baseball stadium. Some critics called Briley “anti-business.” In a race that included Bob Clement, Howard Gentry and Buck Dozier, Briley counted on holding down the left side of the electorate in a crowded field to make the runoff. It would have been a viable strategy if not for one factor: Karl Dean.
Dean announced his run in late December 2006, getting in the race six months after most of the field had started. As the city’s former public defender, he had a natural base of progressives, and he augmented that with four years as Metro law director, which gave him a ringside seat for the policy discussions in the Purcell administration. Perhaps most importantly, Dean was able to self-finance a million-dollar campaign — with the help of his coal-heiress wife — that was first onto the airwaves and helped overcome his name-recognition deficit.
Dean’s late entry angered Briley — in Briley’s mind, the two candidates were pulling from the same base. Dean started swamping the race with his money, and some observers noted that Briley did not have a strong campaign finance team in place. A summit was convened at the firm of longtime civil rights attorney George Barrett. There were a dozen people there who could go out and raise money for Briley, including former Scene editor Bruce Dobie, who had sold the paper and for the first time could support a candidate.
“As I was looking at those people, it was painfully obvious Briley did not have big hitters or big raisers,” Dobie says. “Barrett turned to me and said, ‘How in the hell are we gonna get this campaign going with these people sitting around the table?’ ”
By the time July rolled around, Dean had put in $950,000, while Briley, against the advice of some advisors, had taken a second mortgage on his house just to keep his ads on the air. The difference showed. Dean finished first in the August election just ahead of Bob Clement, who had raised a race-leading $1.3 million. Briley was a distant fifth.
If the stress of a mayoral race wasn’t enough, Briley’s brother Rob had begun melting down during the campaign. Unlike David, who rarely drinks more than a beer or two, Rob was an addict, like their father. He began drinking in high school, got sober at 22, but fell off the wagon in 2003 and had struggled since then. The legislature, with a permissive culture fueled by lobbyists, can be hazardous for people with vices. Just days before Dean faced Clement in the Sept. 11 runoff, Rob found himself in Watertown at the end of a drugs-and-booze bender and high-speed chase, pulled over by local cops and immortalized on a dashcam video that was bizarre enough to make the late-night talk shows. The brothers’ relationship, both personal and professional, was badly damaged. David dissolved the pair’s law firm and moved his office to Bone McAllester Norton. Rob would relapse again before finding sobriety.
It turns out losing a mayor’s race has its upsides. Briley poured himself into legal work — finding areas where he could make a difference, like fighting the English-only initiative brought by former council colleague Eric Crafton — and causes like Habitat for Humanity, Hands on Nashville and Nashville Cares. He sued the state on behalf of Occupy Nashville when troopers arrested protesters on Legislative Plaza in 2011. When his wife’s retinitis pigmentosa worsened, Briley became the primary driver for son Sam’s trips to school and extracurricular activities like rock climbing. He wasn’t doing politics, coming home late in the evening. He wasn’t rushing out the door in the mornings, thinking about who he’d made mad the day before.
But the itch to serve was still there. In 2015, with another great scrum of mayoral candidates gathering — this time to replace Dean — Briley opted to pursue the vice mayor job. As a council veteran, he thought he could provide some leadership for a body that would be short on experienced legislators. And as vice mayor, he couldn’t file legislation or vote, keeping him above the fray. Blissfully, it was a part-time job and wouldn’t require raising millions of dollars. He beat former Councilmember Tim Garrett by six points, and now he was in charge of the Metro Council — the body his grandfather infamously referred to as “40 jealous whores” decades earlier.
The part-time nature was a blessing when Briley suffered a heart attack late in 2015, requiring quadruple bypass surgery. He ended up changing some key parts of his life — like deciding to go vegan — to become healthier.
At the council, members say he rarely put his thumb on the scale, picking only a few issues to intervene on, such as the issue of broadband access with Google Fiber. While the council’s decision to pass “one-touch, make-ready” legislation ultimately got tied up in the court, it spurred AT&T and Comcast to roll out their own fiber offerings faster. He also intervened to add funding to Metro General Hospital. And he has largely buried the hatchet with the chamber crowd. Observers say it’s been less a specific action than finding areas where his interests and those of the business community overlap, and being intentional about communicating them. The image of Briley as someone who couldn’t find support beyond Bongo Java, as the Scene once wrote, was largely gone.
When Barry’s administration was in stasis for 34 days after the news of her affair broke, two questions swirled through the city: When would she resign? And what kind of mayor would Briley be?
For this story, the Scene reached out to more than a dozen colleagues, friends, observers and city stakeholders on background to find out their perceptions of Briley. The strong consensus was that he is low-key, thoughtful and more ready to be mayor now than he was a decade ago. Two sources worried that he would make the office too political. He is less likely to be seen at events around town like Barry, but shares many of her priorities — notably transit. His presence as the transit plan’s frontman is likely to give the referendum a boost. One city observer put it bluntly: “The mayor has to be the person leading the way on transit, and Barry was never going to be able to do it after the scandal.”
At a meeting a few hours before being sworn in, Briley told the mayoral staff not to expect any great upheaval in the new administration. With a tough budget season upcoming and a May 1 election that includes the transit referendum and a number of other initiatives involving the city (including an Amazon headquarters proposal), the word “continuity” is being used a lot both inside and outside the courthouse. It’s not surprising that the Nashville Business Coalition, the same group that feared Briley a decade ago, called for the field to be cleared for the special election in August so he could serve out Barry’s term and the city could avoid having three mayors in the span of a few months.
As for his priorities, Briley is an admirer of the programmatic way Purcell approached education, adding funding for K-4 classes. He also spoke on the campaign trail in 2015 about criminal justice reform issues, like a bipartisan national initiative pitched by Newt Gingrich and Van Jones that would help cut the jail population by addressing mental health and substance abuse issues in nonviolent offenders.
Those issues and any other issues Briley might want to pursue might have to wait for a term of his own, if he wins one. But in Briley, Nashville inherits a native son with a deep familiarity of the workings of the city.
How he arrived in this position, much like his famous last name, is just happenstance.
