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Metro Arts and its embattled director have finally parted ways.
The Metro Arts Commission voted on Friday to pay Metro Arts director Daniel Singh $200,000 in return for his resignation.
The agreement is the product of negotiations between Metro Legal and Singh’s lawyer, Jamie Hollin, over the past week and was finalized Thursday night. The Metro Council must still approve the agreement at its June 4 meeting, but it would seem that the dust is beginning to settle around the chaos that resulted from a botched FY24 grant cycle and has consumed most of the Metro Arts Commission’s bandwidth for months. With what interim executive director Paulette Coleman called a “clean slate,” it is now up to the commission and its staff to forge a path out of the cloud of controversies that have shrouded the department for years.
Singh went on FMLA leave on Feb. 23 and was concurrently put on paid administrative leave while the commission worked out how to proceed. Commissioners signaled they would bring a vote to fire Singh on Friday, with multiple members referencing reports of a fraught relationship between Singh and staff as reason for the move.
But Metro legal director Wally Dietz announced a settlement before the commission took any action.
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“This is a walk-away settlement on both sides,” said Dietz, explaining that Hollin approached him over the previous weekend to make a second attempt at avoiding Singh’s termination. The commission voted unanimously to approve the settlement. The body then voted unanimously to keep Singh on paid administrative leave until June 6, when Singh will resign if the Metro Council approves the deal.
With Singh’s departure, the commission will begin the nationwide search for a permanent replacement. Metro Human Resources director Sharon Hall told the commission that such a search typically takes three to four months. In the meantime, Coleman will remain interim director.
While commission members might want to leave the past 18 months behind them, the grant distribution process isn’t quite in the rearview mirror.
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The Metro Arts Commission voted in July to approve a grant distribution formula that was considered the most equitable of the options, providing independent artists and small arts organizations with historic funding levels. A Metro Human Relations Commission report — conducted as a result of the past year’s events — found that since 1987, the commission has awarded approximately $61,572,329 to arts organizations in Nashville, and 71 percent of it has gone to organizations with an annual budget of $1 million or more.
But a month later, in August, following a Metro Legal opinion that the July vote could open the commission up to litigation due to its reliance on race as a data point, the commission revoted on new formulas, this time approving a formula that looked closer to what MHRC executive director Davie Tucker would later call the “status quo.” The change caused an uproar among Nashville artists who lost the funding they had been promised in July.
Fast-forward to earlier this year: With half of the funding for the August formula still not sent to arts organizations, MHRC complaints were filed against the commission over the removal of grants from independent artists. Due to Singh’s leave, Metro Arts did not have leadership as it was simultaneously navigating closing out the FY24 grant cycle and getting started on the FY25 cycle.
In March, Metro Legal and Metro Finance announced that $3 million would be directed to Metro Arts to pay anyone promised funding at a level greater than they were pledged between the July and August vote. During the Metro Arts Commission’s budget hearing before the Metro Council Budget and Finance committee on Thursday night, Metro Finance assistant director Amanda Deaton-Moyer gave an update on artist payments.
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“Not everyone has responded, but 62 have and have been processed for payment ... out of 91,” said Deaton-Moyer. “And more every day.”
However, once those payments are sent out and FY24 is all squared away, the issue of how to move forward remains. On top of $2 million in surplus funding allocated to the Arts Commission for grant funding last year, the agency also received the additional $3 million allocation. With a flat budget this year, it’s unlikely Metro Arts will receive much money outside of its typical budget of around $5.5 million.
With all eyes on Metro Arts, commissioners will have to find a way to distribute meager grant funding resources equitably.
“I do not want to build another grant cycle on guidelines that we know need revision and reexamination,” said Coleman. In a typical year, the FY25 grant cycle would already be underway. Still, due to the changes in funding, discussions in the commission have seemed to err toward delaying the cycle until the fall to work out the formula.
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A meeting of the commission's Grants and Funding Committee is scheduled for Thursday; Coleman expects more substantive discussions of how to move forward.
As the commission navigates these issues, it still has only 11 of its 15 members. Mayor Freddie O’Connell will need to fill the four empty seats. The mayor’s office confirmed earlier this month that while they are working through vetting candidates, they have not yet sent nominees to the council. They expected to do so soon and tell the Banner the administration had received more than two dozen applications.
Not only will O’Connell’s choices on who to appoint be widely scrutinized, but he will also need to make them soon. Quorum has been an ongoing issue for the commission following multiple resignations.
Additionally, a piece of legislation brought before the Metro Council by District 32 Councilmember Joy Styles aims to make changes to Metro Arts’ grant formula approval process and add a councilmember seat to the commission. Styles deferred the legislation one meeting during the council’s May 21 meeting.
