East Nashville residents love to say the area, full of beloved local businesses, offbeat community events and wide neighborhood streets, is the best place to live in the city. For folks outside of East Nashville’s District 6, however, there’s an obvious headline for this council race: This district, currently home to the Tennessee Titans’ Nissan Stadium, will soon likely see billions of dollars in investment and development related to the new Titans stadium and East Bank buildouts. (The stadium is not included in the redrawn D6, but will still have a huge impact on the area.)Â
The two leading candidates, public defender Clay Capp and urban planner Daniel McDonell, are proud East Nashville dads who express similar priorities about managing development, improving transit options, increasing teacher pay and providing affordable housing. Both say they’re frustrated with the state legislature’s attacks on the rights of their LGBTQ neighbors. Neither feels that advocates for the $2.1 billion Titans stadium redevelopment adequately made the case for such a massive investment, and both wish the Metro Council had spent more time investigating the plan’s costs and benefits before it was put to a vote in May.
Indeed, there’s a lot of similarity between the two, and it’s easy to imagine them voting similarly on the council. They pitch two different visions of what the job means: Is local government a project to be managed or a battle to be fought?
Capp, a public defender who grew up in Nashville and formerly served as legal director for the Tennessee Justice Center, says his top campaign priority is protecting and funding Nashville’s public schools. But he sees a necessary fight on the horizon as the Tennessee General Assembly attacks reproductive health care access, LGBTQ rights and Nashville’s ability to self-govern. Capp says he’s prepared for that fight because he advocates for clients every day in the courtroom.
“To me, the purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people, to guard the people and their fundamental rights,” Capp says. “The only dignified thing to do when they are threatened or taken away is to stand up, every lawful way that we can.”
Memphis native McDonell has held a variety of transit-focused roles since moving to Nashville in 2012 and currently manages the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Multimodal Planning Office. He says he likes to “nerd out” over how to make intersections safer, develop new solutions for commuting and secure the best funding for infrastructure projects around the city and state.
That experience, he says, makes him a perfect fit to head up the project of making East Nashville the best place it can be.
“The good end results we see on the ground as residents here are not inevitable,” McDonell says. “It takes someone pulling the funding buckets together, making the projects priorities.”
Family attorney Brandes Holcomb says he’s seen East Nashville transform through the two decades he’s lived there. He lags significantly behind in funding and name recognition and does not have a campaign website, but says his top priority is making it easier for residents to understand what’s behind the decisions that shape their neighborhood.
All 40 Metro Council seats are up for election, and early voting begins in one month
