John Cooper
John Cooper’s name has been in the newspaper since he was a little boy.
He was just 21 months old when Tennessean scribe Garry Fullerton observed him, his brothers Jim and William, and their mother Hortense following his father Prentice Cooper’s 1958 campaign for U.S. Senate.
Prentice, who served three terms as governor years before John was born, left a political legacy that Jim, a current member of Congress, and later John would follow. But it is perhaps Hortense’s contribution to the family that more directly shaped John Cooper’s life. As a descendant of the McGavock and Hayes families, Hortense — and thus the three Cooper brothers — inherited a chunk of former plantation land in what is now Williamson County.
That’s where John Cooper has spent a large part of his working life, as a real estate developer partly responsible for The Heritage at Brentwood retirement community and Maryland Farms office and retail centers. (The McGavocks also produced at least two antebellum Nashville mayors, giving Cooper perhaps an even stronger dynastic claim than Mayor David Briley, his opponent in the Sept. 12 runoff and the grandson of Mayor Beverly Briley.)
Though Cooper frequently appeared in news stories about his work in Williamson County, among his first forays into Nashville politics was a 2005 debate over Tony Giarratana’s planned Harding Town Center. The Tennessean described Cooper then as a local resident “leery of” additional traffic on his street, which he expected to be produced by the mixed-use development.
It was a natural place for Cooper, who is now on the precipice of a mayoral runoff election that could see him elevated to the city’s top job, to begin his foray in local politics. Since then, his extreme skepticism of Nashville development projects has served as the unifying force of his political career. But it’s stood in contrast to the fruits of his day job.
Two years after Cooper’s public complaints about development-related traffic in his West Nashville neighborhood, residents across the county line in Brentwood were making similar complaints about one of his proposed developments. Though a traffic study found that Cooper’s proposed rezoning at the corner of Virginia Way and Granny White Pike — a site that would ultimately be home to the Tractor Supply corporate headquarters — would not significantly change traffic in the area, neighbors and a couple of Brentwood City Commissioners disagreed.
The fact that Cooper was planning to give the city a portion of the land and pay to turn it into a public park was not enough to sway the anti-development neighbors.
“Mr. Cooper isn’t offering us a park; he’s offering us a park on land he would have had to use as a buffer anyway,” one neighbor said at the time, according to the Williamson Herald. “I think Mr. Cooper is using this park to distract us from the reality. This is not good for Brentwood.”
Another neighbor accused the city, Tractor Supply and Cooper of “backroom manipulations” that “went down way too quick and greasy,” according to The Tennessean, though the city’s attorney stressed that “it was not a backroom deal.”
The sort of criticisms of Cooper’s Williamson County work were remarkably similar to Cooper’s own critiques of projects in Nashville, including later proposals from Giarratana.
Several years earlier, in 1999, Cooper was the second of two developers trying to build a first-of-its-kind retirement community in Brentwood. The city wanted only one, and Cooper’s plan proved successful over the first group — a nonprofit entity backed by a local church — in part because Cooper offered up some of his land to Brentwood. The offer found Cooper in a newspaper story under the headline “Quid pro quo common in development decisions.”
“In Brentwood, it is private developer John Cooper asking to scratch the public’s back by putting up a chunk of flood plain for parks and public facilities in exchange for approval of his planned retirement community across from the Brentwood Library,” the author wrote.
Today, Cooper would more likely end up in a story like that as a critic than as a subject. When Giarratana was discussing trading millions of dollars and land for a downtown park last year, Cooper was among the most forceful opponents.
“We’ll have to step back and really examine this,” Cooper told The Tennessean at the time. “Is this part of the same pattern of developer-friendly arrangements that are needlessly complicated?”
Another of Cooper’s raisons d’être is his dislike of financial incentives for big businesses, particularly those seeking to move to Nashville. During his mayoral campaign, he’s compared the practice to “trickle-down economics” and promised a “strategic redirection” for the city, if elected. (He’s also voted in favor of the latest deals involving Amazon and Wall Street firm AllianceBernstein.)
But to get Tractor Supply to set up its headquarters at Cooper’s development, Brentwood had to offer the company, already based in the city, unprecedented financial incentives. The city gave Tractor Supply a $375,000 tax break over the course of a decade (Williamson County chipped in too), the first — and to date, only — time Brentwood has offered up such a tax abatement, according to Brentwood City Manager Kirk Bednar. Cooper himself was not asking for the incentives, but it’s the type of kowtowing he can often be found railing against in Nashville. Regina Smithson, then and now a Brentwood city commissioner, accused Tractor Supply of holding the city hostage by teasing the prospect of moving to Franklin, Nashville or Rutherford County.
But much of the response to Cooper’s developments has been positive, even years later. Tom McCoy, a former longtime Brentwood planning commissioner, recalled the high density of Cooper’s retirement community project as being inconsistent enough with Brentwood’s history to leave city authorities “very uncomfortable.” McCoy still praises Cooper, though.
“I recall that Cooper was unusually creative and flexible in working with the various authorities to develop a version of the concept that could be successfully inserted into Brentwood’s physical and legal landscape,” McCoy says. “I would say that the success of The Heritage to date confirms Cooper’s foresight and his skill in implementing his vision.”
Cooper has always positioned his day job as helpful for his work for Nashville.
“My background as a developer is going to be useful to Nashville,” Cooper said at a recent campaign forum.
“It’s a very exciting moment to go negotiate better deals for the city, and negotiate deals with people first in mind,” he said after he entered the race in April, adopting the “I alone can fix it” parlance of another real estate developer chief executive. “I am uniquely qualified with my background for Nashville right now. That’s real estate, financial background, project management background, and spending enough time in Metro government to have a sense of Metro government.”
It’s difficult to determine how significant Cooper’s business holdings are. Financial disclosure reports required of local officials only ask him to list sources of income without monetary values. But his brother Jim is a passive investor in many of John’s business endeavors, and financial disclosures required of congressmen are more thorough. Based on those disclosures and other available information, congressional newspaper Roll Call estimated Jim Cooper’s net worth at north of $12 million. Together, the brothers own property around the state, including an apartment complex near Hillsboro Village and an office park near the Nashville Zoo. (The property taxes on those two sites alone would have jumped nearly $30,000 under the tax adjustment plan opposed by both Cooper and Briley.)
“We’ve never worked together,” says Jim Cooper of his brother. “John did that all on his own. It’s amazing. It’s great. He went to Vanderbilt business school on his own, figured out real estate development on his own.”
Though John Cooper worked on some of his brother’s past campaigns, their political careers have rarely overlapped since.
“All John did was give voters another choice,” says Jim Cooper. “No one was forced to vote for him. It’s entirely their own free will, as it should be. I’m not against David Briley. But John’s my brother. I’ve known him his entire life. I know him well. I trust him. I think he’d do a great job, but I’m not putting anybody down. Just, John’s my brother.”
But Briley isn’t buying the argument that Cooper’s business experience could be good for the city.
“When it comes to neighborhoods, he’s built a Publix in the neighborhood, we know that,” Briley said at a recent fundraiser. “He’s built a shopping mall in the neighborhood, we know that.”
Briley went on: “There’s been somewhere like $600 million worth of capital spending that’s been proposed in the last couple of years, and he’s voted against all of that, even though it was being spent in our neighborhoods. Doesn’t sound like a neighborhood guy to me.”
