Nashville has a new planning director, and his name is Rick Bernhardt. The Planning Commission, including Mayor Purcell, voted for him unanimously this week. The fact that Hizzoner was the first mayor in living memory to personally take his seat for a commission meeting indicates the degree of importance Purcell places in the appointment, and the confidence he has in Bernhardt.
”What decisions the Planning Commission makes, on the advice of its staff, become literally part of the fabric of the city forever,“ the mayor said at the meeting.
Bernhardt says he’ll be ready for business on Rutledge Hill June 8. In the meantime, he and his wife Linda are house-hunting. Putting their money where their urban values are, the couple are searching the older neighborhoods of East Nashville.
Bernhardt will relocate to Nashville from Orlando, where he has most recently served as director of town planning for EDAW, an international planning and design firm. From 1982-99 he was director of planning and development for the city of Orlando. The Nashville native received his master’s degree in planning from Ohio State University in 1974. For the two subsequent years, Bernhardt was a senior planner with Metro.
”I left,“ he explains, ”because of some of the issues that still remain in Nashville today, having to do with the culture of the organization. The historic role of ‘good government’ movements [such as developed Nashville’s Metro Charter] is to separate planning from politics. That sounds good, but the result was a focus on creating plans rather than communities. I wanted to make communities.“
Bernhardt was the unanimous choice of a search committee composed of Planning Commissioners Jim Lawson, Doug Small, and Council member Phil Ponder, as well as Patrick Willard from the Mayor’s Office, John Stern of the Neighborhood Alliance, and Seab Tuck of the Urban Design Forum. The committee worked with the Metro Personnel Department and private consultants with the HR Group to field an initial list of 39 serious candidates, which was cut to 12, and then four. Two finalists were brought to town for interviews with the search committee and the Planning Commission, and then there was one.
”I’ve never before been involved in a hiring situation that was so intense in terms of the depth and breadth of questions,“ says Council member Ponder. ”Rick Bernhardt stood out because of the depth and breadth of his answers, based on his experience, and his grasp of the issues that face Nashville.“
Comments from the Orlando grapevine also wowed the searchers. ”I spoke with Orlando planning commissioners who were on the selection committee when Rick was hired, as well as some current commissioners, and all gave him an outstanding recommendation without reservation,“ says Doug Small. ”That’s most impressive for 17 years of leadership, because city planning isn’t short-term, it’s a long-term vision implemented over time.“
The Bernhardt hire sends a clear signal that Nashville is ready to raise the level of its planning game. The new planning chief made a national name for himself in Orlando—and compiled a long list of awards—by instituting policies that emphasized sustainable development, the importance of historic preservation, and the use of traditional neighborhood design in the planning of new communities. Such policies are sorely needed in Nashville, which has been struggling for years with urban revitalization and suburban sprawl.
In the early ’80s, Orlando focused its downtown renewal effort on entertainment, as did Nashville a decade later. ”The big tourist draws of Disney and Universal came downtown because they had no evening entertainment for adults,“ explains Bernhardt. Opryland had a similar motive in developing the river taxis and the Wildhorse Saloon. Today in both Orlando and Nashville, there is a greater focus on bringing the natives back in town, with more residential and offices.
Bernhardt notes, however, that Nashville hasn’t been careful to preserve its historic downtown buildings. And while ”Metro has put the big boxes—the office towers and the arena and Country Music Hall of Fame—on the right sites, they don’t come together to make a sense of place, build a real public realm,“ he says. A passive planning department and an active Metro Development and Housing Agency have meant that Nashville redeveloped without planning for it.
A healthy downtown is dependent on the necklace of neighborhoods that surround and support the central core, and Bernhardt is credited with a major role in reversing the decline of Orlando’s. In 1985, he persuaded city officials to readopt aspects of the 1927 zoning code within the traditional city boundaries—easing suburban-style parking requirements, orienting buildings toward the street, and removing the prohibition on such amenities as sidewalk cafes. When private investment finally arrived, therefore, it came in a form that would support rather than erode the neighborhoods.
Bernhardt also insisted on active codes enforcement to ensure that existing buildings were well-maintained.
In contrast, Nashville’s planners have only recently begun an effort to make our zoning code more urban-friendly within the old city limits. And our codes enforcement, as any resident of an old neighborhood will tell you, is still frequently half-hearted.
Phil Rampy, an Orlando developer whose Olde Town Brokers has been a main force in the urban neighborhoods, says, ”Rick doesn’t just give you ideas, he pushes things forward. He’s very pro-development, but development controlled by the principles of New Urbanism, of which he’s been a pioneer—mixed-use, anti-sprawl.“ Today, Rampy says, housing within walking distance of downtown Orlando sells for $150-200 a square foot, the highest values in the region.
Bernhardt points out that boosting Nashville’s urban neighborhoods will be more difficult because many were ”urban renewed,“ losing valuable architectural fabric and gaining suburban-style commercial infill in the process.
Two master plans Bernhardt fostered for new development in Orlando were on a scale much larger than any available site in Nashville would allow. But he says that the principles used ”are applicable“ in areas as distinct as ”SoBro and Bellevue, where there are great opportunities to be proactive.“
For the Southeast Orlando Sector Plan, Bernhardt brought together property owners, developers, Realtors, government agencies, utility providers, and public interest groups to establish urban design guidelines for a 19,300-acre greenfield site. A more recent master plan for a 1,200-acre brownfield that was once the Orlando Naval Training Center also involved intensive citizen input.
Both plans provide for a fine-grained mix of housing types and prices within the neighborhoods, incorporate schools and parks as neighborhood focal points, promote a balanced transportation system that encourages bikers and pedestrians, and integrate wetlands and wildlife corridors into the built environment. Nothing like them has been seen in Nashville, where former planning director Jeff Browning tunneled his vision to platting subdivisions.
Bernhardt’s résumé may make him sound like he walks on water. In Orlando, what he walked into was a bureaucracy that integrated all planning functions under his leadership, including transportation, housing, zoning, and codes enforcement. ”The theory was that Public Works does a good job of building, but not necessarily designing what to build,“ he explains.
Bernhardt is well-aware that planning in Nashville is fragmented among various Metro departments, and that ”getting everyone to row in the same direction“ could be his biggest challenge. ”In Nashville all the departments are good at what they do—MDHA, for example, is great at developing—but not necessarily at planning and design,“ he says.
Bernhardt will undoubtedly have an impact on getting some new oars in Nashville’s waters. Randall Dunn is on loan from MDHA as acting head of Public Works. And zoning administrator Sonny West will retire later this year.
If Nashville hasn’t exactly embraced New Urbanism, or even old urbanism, Bernhardt points out several advantages our city enjoys over Orlando: a Metro form of government eliminating squabbling between city and county, and its access, as a capital, to state government on regional issues.
”Nashville also has a historic economic base which is grounded in the community, as well as Vanderbilt University, which provide money and leadership potential that can be tapped as a design force,“ he explains.
Bernhardt cites personal as well as professional reasons for coming home after all these years. ”Linda and I are both from Nashville, and we still have family here,“ he says. ”And I’ve realized, after a year-and-a-half in the private sector, that I want to get back into the public sector. The problem with private work is that you only get to do a portion of the project: the plan. And I think one of my skills is the ability to follow through politically, make it happen.“
The primary reason Bernhardt wants to be Metro’s planning director, however, is a perceived change in the ”culture of the organization“ that caused him to leave in the first place. ”I think that for the first time in as long as I’ve known Nashville,“ he says, ”there’s a mayor and a Council who want to do something different, who are interested in building community by planning from the ground up.“
