With Mayor-Elect Freddie O’Connell fresh off Thursday night’s resounding runoff victory, he and his team are hitting the ground running in preparation for taking office in the coming weeks.
But in fact that preparation started even before he beat Alice Rolli by nearly 30 percentage points.
“We’ve been working pretty consistently preparing for the transition,” says outgoing Mayor John Cooper, who already has a vacation on the books later this month.
Cooper, who opted not to run for a second term, says he congratulated O’Connell in the green room of the victor’s election night party but adds that he has avoided talking too much about the transition until now. He says he declined to publicly weigh in on the race because “it’s not about me.”
“You don’t want to talk about it too much prior to actually being elected lest you invoke some karma,” Cooper says. “But people have been working on it. All next week is hopefully a whole lot of pretty intense work.”
Marjorie Pomeroy-Wallace, O’Connell’s campaign manager, was at Cooper’s office Friday morning meeting with Cooper’s chief of staff, Jennifer Rasmussen-Sagan.
Metro Nashville has an unusually short transition period, necessitating the quick turnaround. O’Connell will promptly begin interviewing and hiring key staff members. He got a jump on that process Friday by announcing that his transition team will be co-chaired by surgeon and former Metro COVID response leader Alex Jahangir, author and business adviser Christy Pruitt-Haynes and attorney David Esquivel.
Mayor John Cooper signs final pieces of legislation last month.
Cooper, who won election as an at-large Metro councilmember and then mayor in his first two tries for elected office, says not much on Thursday surprised him.
“Jeff [Syracuse] and Russ [Pulley] did a great job,” Cooper says of the two district councilmembers who lost bids for at-large seats. “Politics is very hard. Chris Cheng should be congratulated for going from not-that-well-known to a very strong performance. All the people that won are dedicated to creating a great Nashville. The growth of women’s participation, now being a majority of the council and all five at-large seats is a noteworthy, significant event. That’s quite a change from 60 years ago.”
Cooper is not quite ready to announce what’s next for him, though his vacation at the end of the month includes a painting course, as he hopes to revive a much-loved old hobby. Asked about his advice for O’Connell, with whom he served on the Metro Council, Cooper says, “I have a lot of advice.”
“This is a very administrative job,” the outgoing mayor says. “You don’t often think of it this way, but your job is the morale of the fire department, too. Your job is teacher vacancies. There are lots of complex government systems that are collected under Metro. You are responsible for those systems being successful. Some of it is how this office connects to making that happen and being effective in doing that.”
This article was first published via our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
