Freddie O'Connell Prepares Mayoral Bid

Freddie O’Connell lives in Salemtown. He's currently serving his second term as a councilmember representing District 19, which covers the urban core as well as parts of North Nashville, including Germantown. He announced his candidacy for mayor on Thursday, a day after Mayor John Cooper delivered the State of Metro address. The Scene spoke with the councilmember about why he decided to run, his plans for the office and more. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

After your time in Metro and representing District 19 for two terms, seeing constituents’ problems and fielding those problems as their councilmember, what made you to say, “I can continue my work in the mayor’s office”?

I have a sense that picking up people’s trash and recycling is a solvable problem — I’ve literally done it myself at this point. There is blocking and tracking, the fundamentals of governing, that I’m hearing very clearly and have been for months, that we need to be better at. On quality-of-life issues, the noise comes to us as councilmembers but the signals emanate from the mayor’s office. If there’s not an operational focus on quality-of-life issues, it’s much easier for those to not get as much priority in the Metro departments charged with those issues. There's executive authority that we need, leadership out of the mayor’s office, that delivers on real-world concerns for our constituents.

During the State of Metro Wednesday, John Cooper returned to the fundamentals-of-governing talking points that he ran on: neighborhoods, affordable housing, education. What made you hear that and want to start a campaign focused on the same things?

I’m still hearing this week from constituents who are concerned about trash. There's almost a cognitive dissonance from the themes of that speech and life on the ground in Nashville right now. I come back to when we couldn’t pick up recycling — I rented a truck and went out and did it myself. These are solvable problems, but first you have to care about the problems and be aware of the problems, then have the resolve to go deal with them. The other is the things that weren’t there. We had one of the deadliest years on record for people unhoused in Nashville. The mayor’s maybe going to break ground next month on a permanent supportive housing project that was supposed to have been completed this winter. We’re two-and-a-half years delayed on a critical project because the mayor didn’t like the windows. When we talk about addressing homelessness, meanwhile, we’ve had a dozen resignations out of the Metro Homeless Impact Division to the point where we can barely even operate our homeless management information system while he’s talking about staffing on that. Coming back to cognitive dissonance, it’s a real thing. 

Are there big projects you want to pursue as mayor? Big transit projects, big infrastructure projects that would be North Stars of your administration?

Given the priority that we've seen on this topic for such a long time, it's very strange to me to have a mayor who specifically doesn't want to build a transit system. Sure, we can talk about a transportation plan and that we're back to marginal growth above pre-COVID ridership levels, but we're not talking about the fact that we're one of the only top 25 cities in the country that has neither dedicated funding nor a system that is serving its people with just basic traditional bus service, with investment levels and ridership levels comparable to our existing population or growth population. It’s conspicuously absent from our priorities, especially if they're going to talk about climate and greenhouse gas. That's where transit and related infrastructure are such an important piece of that puzzle. To deemphasize that is really striking.

What are some things over the past decade, or your whole life in Nashville, or even the past 48 hours that pushed you to decide to run for mayor? 

The animating reason for me to get into council was the link between affordable housing and transit. I own my house because I was able to exist in Nashville without relying on a car for a few years. It is how I saved up for a down payment now. That goal has gotten further out of reach for too many people, in part because we have an affordability crisis on its own, but also because people can't reduce their overall household costs. Transportation costs are on par with the raw cost of housing, and we're not putting downward pressure on either one of those things. This is a place where we could invest considerably more.

Two, the work I've done on the problem of what we discovered in the Brookings Institute report about 37208. I had started some of that work, and we leaned into it with Councilmember [Brandon] Taylor [of District 21] chairing a special committee. There are still a lot of reforms that you can make there that are good for both the underlying economy and for people that have ever had an encounter with their criminal legal system. There are things that are fundamentally good for public safety. Work on reducing people's overall cost of living and you have a positive impact on when and why people may start to be in a position where they are considering committing a property crime.

The drift of the city in the last 10 years, five years, or even two years, has been really concentrated on your district and on downtown and the urban core. What is future of downtown growth? As mayor, how would you handle growth countywide versus the urban core, all balanced with tourism?

I don't think everything is mutually exclusive. I think Nashville as a whole is a better city if we continue to see growth in our urban core. It's very consistent with what we saw in NashvilleNext, where people said they wanted future growth to be concentrated downtown. That's why it was also so striking not to see any discussion of the East Bank — and what are the opportunities for creating housing there, or what the feel of the neighborhood would be — in the State of Metro.

It's good for the city because we continue to have such a strong economy in District 19. It pushes revenue out into all 34 other corners of the county. Having a vibrant District 19 ultimately builds sidewalks in neighborhoods in Antioch.

A strong downtown also is good for so many other things. It's good to have a concentrated “live, work, play” environment. That helps with the cause of transit and climate and sustainability issues — there are a lot of reasons why not everybody living in that context is going to want or have access to a car on a regular basis.

On the tourism front, I think it's fundamentally really good for Nashville to be in a position where we can attract world-class events. I think that tension sometimes comes from: Are we going to shut down major corridors to let people do P90X in the middle of the street? In some cases we need to be more selective about that issue of disruption.

There's that logistics piece, but I think also there's the argument about opportunity costs — if we're going to lay down water, electricity, all that infrastructure on the East Bank for however many millions of dollars, what is the next best use of that money? Is it a sidewalk in Antioch?

This is where you look at the total return on investment. If that investment produces returns in property taxes that are appreciable enough to generate a sidewalk in Antioch, you might conclude that it is. That’s why that deal for the East Bank matters so much. It might turn out to be a good deal. It might turn out to be that it captures too much revenue. We're still waiting. We don't know what the proposal is yet.

What does it look like for you over the next year-and-a-half? Do you have an idea of a team that you want?

I grew up in Nashville, I've set foot in every part of the county, but over the past six years in particular, my focus has been on District 19. Now a lot of this is going to be the tough tension of continuing to represent District 19 and also be more available to listen to concerns and listen to aspirations in all parts of the county. There's going to be a lot more movement and presence than I've been participating in over the past six years. You will see pieces of a full campaign start to emerge probably as soon as July.