Steve Glover
With 15 candidates seeking the five at-large seats on the Metro Council in the August election, it may be challenging for aspirants to stand out in the crowded field.
We spoke with most of them and are publishing edited, condensed transcripts of those conversations. (See our previously published interviews with Burkley Allen, Fabian Bedne and Adam Dread.)
Next up is Steve Glover, who like Allen and Bedne is finishing up his second term as a district council member. The financial planner and former broadcasting executive represents District 12, which includes parts of Donelson, Hermitage and Old Hickory.
How do you stand out when there are so many candidates?
The way I stand out is that I take the actual core issues of what we need and what we have to do in order to keep our city healthy, and I try to tackle those. We have to make sure we understand what the priorities are in Nashville. We can't talk just niceties every single time we want to talk. And we can't sit down and say we need to raise taxes because we're not paying enough taxes, all of us. We have to find a balance of how all of this fits. Because I have a great deal of knowledge, not only of the Metro government, but Metro government as a whole, because I've served on the school board, I've now served on the council for eight years. There's not a learning curve when I step into this. I understand where the challenges lie and I want to be a leader in the council to help us be an independent body where we're not a rubber stamp machine for the mayor's office.
As an outspoken conservative, how do you expand your electoral support from your district to a mostly liberal county?
Let's not kid ourselves: We've got about 40 to 45 percent of the county that grasps what I'm talking about. It may be sparsely populated in various districts, but they're out there, and I hear from them every day. They want their voice heard, so that's one reason that I decided to go ahead and do this. We don't have a couple people that are worried about money. It's not just Republicans. There are conservative Democrats. There are conservative independents. Obviously there's conservative Republicans. But this is not about just "being a Republican." This is about people who want Nashville to be financially healthy and for us to look at how do we actually grow as we go forward and not devastate the people of Nashville in the process.
Sounds like you'd be opposed to the Bob Mendes property tax increase, so what other ways can you get the city's finances in better shape?
By aligning our priorities. When you sit down and you look, you say, over the last five years we have an additional $440 million in revenue that wasn't there five years ago. We have squandered it. We have wasted it. We have not spent it the way we should have because we haven't taken care of the basics and so, first of all, we have to look in that arena first. Then, if in fact we warrant raising taxes, I think we have to go out and talk to the people of Nashville and we have to explain why we need to raise taxes. And if in fact we're going to try to raise taxes, then we have to have legislation that says, of the new money that comes in, it will only be spent on public safety, education and paying down the debt.
No more frivolous stuff until we get the financial house in order here in Nashville.
You say that new revenue has been squandered but you've been on the council for the past eight years. How do you convince people that four more years will be different?
I'm a little smarter than I was eight years ago, as far as how to go about this. I'm building a coalition of several council members and people that are running that I hope will get elected that understand we have got to get our finances in line. I'm building a coalition of people to where we don't rubberstamp everything the executive branch hands us, because we can't keep doing what we've been doing. It's not working.
What would you like to see in the relationship between the mayor and the council in the next four years?
What I'd like to see is the council be an independent thinker, that we realize that we're elected by the people versus the mayor. We're not elected by the mayor. No matter who the mayor is. I'm not throwing stones at anybody that sits down on the first floor. But we should not worry about what is the mayor going to think about this, is the mayor gonna like it, is the mayor not gonna like it. I don't care. What I care about are the people who elect me. Each one of the 35 council districts, I want us to try and focus on the fact that those districts elect us. The mayor votes for one district council person. Therefore I want the executive branch to do their job. I want the legislative branch to do our job. And I want us to be strong in order to weigh it all out, hopefully balance it and make sure that we're representing the overall welfare of the city.
What are some of the "frivolous" things the city has spent money on?
I'm going to use MTA as an example. Last year I pointed out that we had between $10 and 15 million in new monies we were throwing that direction that I felt like we could cut out and it would not damage anything. Lo and behold, nobody wanted to cut it last year, but now this year when MTA has a budget shortfall, they're cutting the things I recommended last year. So where are there frivolous things? It's anything that is not public safety, first responders, education and paying down the debt.
After we take care of those basics, then we look at what else we can afford to do, but not until we pay the basics.
I take it you wouldn't be in favor of another transit referendum until some of those issues are addressed.
We need to absolutely go to work on transit. But we need to look at it from a regional standpoint and we need to have a much better understanding as to what the surrounding counties' role will be versus the people of Nashville having to pick up a $9 billion tab. That would have been disastrous for us. We need to look at how do we combine and take a regional approach, and everybody pitch in their fair share. When I say everybody, I'm talking about the surrounding counties as well.
I think we've got opportunities, but we need to sit down and be smart about it. We just can't step out there with some half-baked plan and pretend like we did our homework and pretend like we actually had the input from the entire community. The community obviously said no you didn't because it voted it down.
How do you get other counties to buy into it?
Every county around us is facing some of the same things we're facing. They're looking at having to raise their property taxes, everything else. Their growth is literally explosive, because they're trying to figure out how to build fire departments, how to build schools, how to do all these other things. They understand that we've had a population shift. Davidson County needs to understand that we need to be accommodating for people to live here. But if you do live outside the county, and you're going to work in the downtown area, and you're going to contribute to the overall congestion and traffic, then your county where you live where you pay your property taxes, you need to be a part of the solution on fixing the transit issue.
You just go out and tell it the way it is. You don't mince your words. You explain that if you're not going to do this, then we're going to have to deal with it in a different manner, which you may not like. I don't know what that manner is because I believe that there's no local government that doesn't want to try and manage the growth. We have to collectively, on the transit issue, we have no choice, we have to work as a team on this.
How do you think the city has handled incentivizing companies to move here?
Everybody knows I voted for those [Amazon and AllianceBernstein]. I've never run away from the fact that I did vote for them. It is a balancing act. The part that bothers me the most is a lot of times people think it's corporate welfare or it's this or that. I don't know that I agree wholeheartedly with every deal that has been done. On the ones that I felt economically could make sense for us, I supported it.
One of the reasons I supported the Bridgestone deal was because all of this stuff is like dominoes. If we would have lost at the time the 1,100 jobs with Bridgestone. It wouldn't have been the 1,100 jobs. It would have multiplied to two-to-three-to-maybe-five times that because of the unintended consequences of losing that type of corporate structure in the city.
Do I think it's fair all of the time? Probably not. Do I think it's necessary? Yeah, because other cities offer it and you kind of have to to play along. What I think is the biggest problem is that the council doesn't have a say until it's too late. That is the area that I think we need to have a committee where we sign a nondisclosure, we can't talk about it. It's highly competitive. We have to try to figure out a way to balance it. We need to be a lot more informed than we have been in the past.
Has the city handled the rise in tourism well?
We aren't hitting home runs; we're hitting grand slams all the time. Have we handled it well? No. It's creating a problem for our residents here. I don't think anybody wants it going away. I think we need to sit down and find a happy median somewhere. It created a financial burden on the average taxpayer in Nashville because the money was not being distributed properly. We're going to have to sit down and have a really hard conversation to say that when this money comes in, we've got to find an equitable solution for how it's dispersed, versus it just going to Music City Center or the convention bureau. It's got to be dispersed properly.
The people of Nashville are OK with the tourism piece as long as they can still live their life. That's going to be the challenging piece, finding where is that balance.
As a former school board member, do you think MNPS is on the right track?
The council, all we do on education is we just approve the dollars we give them. We have no other say on that.
Do you think the funding has been adequate?
I don't know that it's been adequate. It scares me drastically and the hairs on my neck go up when the executive branch talks about an MOU being signed with the school board to where the executive branch, for the first time in our history, is going to become more involved. I'm not sure that's constitutional. If that's the case, do we need the school board?
Because I am a conservative, I get very concerned when I feel like we're probably stepping outside what the constitution allows. I don't like for any branch of government to pretend like we can do whatever we want to do.
I know there's a lot of people who don't agree with me, and I'm OK with that. But there's a lot of people I don't agree with either, and I've got a lot of supporters who don't agree with them. So I think we need to try to have a balance.
