As of this writing, 13 candidates have qualified to run for at-large seats on the Metro Council, with 11 more having pulled petitions ahead of this week’s ballot deadline.
The campaign for at-large is unique. Because the top five vote-getters win, candidates typically remain positive, and surprising candidates can sneak into the winners’ circle.
Early voting for Metro Council and mayoral elections starts July 14, with Election Day following Aug. 3. A runoff, if needed, would come in September.
Our latest Q&A with an at-large candidate is with Burkley Allen, who served two terms as a district councilmember for the Belmont-Hillsboro area before being elected countywide in 2019. Earlier this week, we published an interview with candidate Russ Pulley. This interview has been edited for length.
One of the big things you've been involved with during your time in office was Airbnb regulations. Looking back, do you think that effort was successful? Could it still be improved upon?
Yes to both of those. When we started in 2012 or 2013, there were 200 short-term rentals. We looked at what was available around the country and made a stab at what made sense for Nashville. It definitely was a starting point, maybe not necessarily the best starting point, but at least we got rules in place, required permits and registration and to pay taxes. I would definitely say it was not perfect at the get-go. We do a good job now of knowing who's out there so that almost everyone operating in that realm is registered.
We still have some issues with enforcement. I don't hear about them nearly as much as I used to, but I'm sure there are still issues with noise and impact on neighbors. If these exist in neighborhoods, they need to fit in and not be impactful.
Ultimately, now that there are 5,000 instead of 200, we said that's enough in the neighborhoods, so we put an end to that. We've now put an end in the multifamily, because we began to see it have an impact on people being able to find places to live. That was an appropriate move to make. If we can get the regulation and the enforcement right, there's a place for this in providing additional income for homeowners and providing more options for hospitality. We have a lot more hotel rooms than we did when we started.
Has the city done enough to prioritize affordable housing? What else should the council do?
If we'd done enough, we would have solved the problem, so no, we're not finished. I served on the mayor's affordable housing task force. That group did a great job of coming up with some very specific recommendations, and one of those was to create the housing division that's now in the planning department. That's in place now, and that is powerful.
Also to consistently provide $30 million to the Barnes affordable housing fund. We used some American Rescue Plan money last year. This year it's actually part of our budget. That program is now producing on the order of 1,000 to 2,000 units per year. When it first started it was doing a couple of dozen a year. It's grown significantly, and that's huge.
I was the sponsor of a tax abatement program called the mixed-income PILOT. That creates a tax abatement for properties that set aside a small percentage of their units, anywhere from 12 to 20, for tenants that earn around the area median income.
We set that up as an incentive for regular for-profit developers to be able to help with this issue, and that got jumped on immediately and 468 units are currently in the pipeline. There's another round of that coming up, so hopefully that will also move the needle.
Was that effort borne out of frustrations with that state preempting inclusionary zoning?
We worked very hard on the inclusionary zoning bill, and worked with the business community and the construction community and the development community, and were really disappointed when what we worked out together was then preempted before we could even implement it.
That process did help put a lot of good ideas out on the table. We drew from some of the mechanisms of that for this mixed-income PILOT.
In your hypothetical second term, what would be the next push on housing?
The housing task force has the list of 10 things. I think we're halfway through it. Continuing to march through that list of things, whatever has a legislative component, I'm definitely going to be pushing on.
Are there other fees we can waive that can help people to be able to afford to build affordably? I would love to try to get the right people in the room to create the equity fund. Companies are all beginning to realize that it hurts them if their employees can't live in this county. I'm hopeful I can get enough people interested in this to invest in a pot of money that would be available to the people who know how to build housing that can be affordably priced and not have to turn around to an investor and say, “I promise I'm going to get you 25 percent return on your money.”
Are you planning to support anyone in the mayor's race?
I will probably remain neutral. I will happily give good advice to anyone who asks me.
What do you want to see from the winner?
A continued emphasis on housing. I think we've made really great progress on that. I think we need to get some focus back on improving transit. Garbage is boring, but dealing with our solid waste is going to become an issue.
When we spoke ahead of the 2019 election, the transit referendum defeat was relatively recent, and you said something about how we should take incremental bites at the apple and support enhancements, which is somewhat the tack that the mayor took. Has that been successful? Are we far enough along now to move on to another referendum?
We have to do a better job of community engagement. I believe the improvements with bus services — more frequency on key routes and running later into the night and more crosstown buses — a lot of the things people were asking for are beginning to fall into place. COVID sort of knocked things off but our ridership is bumping back up. I'm encouraged that our bus system has done a number of good things and will continue to do those.
Ultimately, we can't really do transit until we have a dedicated source of funding, and we can't get that until we've got public buy-in. The process leading up to the plan before the referendum, there was a real huge effort to engage as many people as possible. We have to pick those efforts back up again.
What did you learn from your cycle as budget chair? What might you do better with another opportunity?
One goal was to continue the good community engagement that the prior budget chairs had started with a lot of opportunities for people to come learn about how the budget works. COVID made that a little tricky. We also created the first-ever early public input session on the budget, and that continues this year. What the charter lays out is a public input process the first Tuesday in June, and then we have one meeting left to make changes to the budget. It doesn't feel to citizens like that's really much of an opportunity for their input to be considered.
Last year, we went through the wish list process once we got the mayor's proposed budget, and the first thing I had to do was fix the hole in the school funding caused by the state shortfall, which didn't leave us much room for all the other things that our citizens are asking for. We actually managed to find quite a few things and got additional raises for school staff as well as some other positions.
We always hear people wishing we were spending more on education and sidewalks and fixing our traffic problems. There's more money in this budget for sidewalks but it's still not the $30 million that we had in there in my first term, which I fought hard for and thought would be permanent. You can't assume anything's going to stay if you don't stick around to keep an eye on it, which is what I'm trying to do.
During the Titans stadium debate, you supported diverting some ticket fees to a special fund rather than the general fund. Why?
Ultimately I supported putting it back in the general fund. One thing that appeals to me about the Nashville Needs Fund is that the current process for allocating Metro money to nonprofits changes with each administration. To me, the Nashville Needs Fund for the first time created a way where we would have a known quantity of money and we could put in place a thoughtful objective process that everyone would know how it works.
What people were advocating for most strongly were schools and sidewalks and things that make our neighborhoods better. That's stuff that the general fund does. When the option came up to do that, if that got more support, that to me seemed like a reasonable option.
How do you respond to a voter who thinks the council could have been spending its time and energy on other priorities besides the Titans stadium?
For most of us, it was just additional time and energy. It's not zero-sum; it's just less sleep. We definitely put a lot of time into it, but I see it as additional time.
What was your reasoning for supporting the stadium deal?
My starting point was that the existing lease was made at a time when we were in a position of weakness and promised whatever it took to get a team to look at Nashville. The obligation to do maintenance and the fact that we were behind on what we should already have paid, and the obligation to keep it in “first-class” condition, which was an unknown, but it started in the hundreds of millions and went up from there. All of that was coming out of the general fund, where money for schools and sidewalks is, so the opportunity to get some of those things waived and to [get the team to] take on the maintenance and cost overruns, and to shift things from the general fund to taxes that are essentially tourist and sports-fan-oriented, just seemed like a fairer deal.
You were also named to a tax incentive review committee. It seems that would be relevant to discussion about development of the East Bank campus.
Possibly. Officially it's a tax abatement study and formulating committee. There are a number of issues where, in the past, we've used tax abatements. Originally it was all about job creation. Then in the Purcell administration we used them in a small amount for affordable housing and that has now become the new focus.
The point of that committee is to at least have some comprehensive thought put into what all do we give tax abatements for and do we want to think about how much revenue we should be willing to forego relative to our overall budget for things we think are important.
Where that might fit into the East Bank is if we chose to do tax-increment financing.
Do you foresee that happening? Do you want that to happen on the East Bank?
I think we have to strike a balance. We made a promise to people that that is going to be a neighborhood-centered development that will reflect all the input that went into the East Bank vision process. It also at the same time has to fit in with the economic plan that says this new stadium is going to pay for itself out of these taxes. We need to ensure there's enough development over there paying property taxes and generating sales taxes that those projections hold up. If you do the infrastructure right, the developers are going to come and make the rest of the investments.
What will you be looking to make sure is included as the East Bank process unfolds?
Absolutely affordable housing. That was a topic that came up from the very beginning. Child care would also be beneficial, because we don't have enough of it, and if you're trying to create new places for people to live and work, having that opportunity nearby is also huge.
If we lose TPAC in its current location, does it make sense to put something over there? Possibly so, but it's got to fit in with the revenue projections that we've talked about. We've got a great blank slate opportunity there.
As a former district representative, how would you pitch that development as a benefit to your constituents who don't live there?
We've now set things in motion for people who are passionate about this to take it and run with it. I'm going back to the things that I care about, which is traffic calming and reducing traffic deaths and trying to get affordable housing in places where we can't get it.
What did you learn from the license plate reader debate? Are you going to be following up on the results of the pilot?
Absolutely. That was a complicated vote because there are dueling interests of people who live in neighborhoods with crime that would like to have that reduced, as well as the very real concerns of the immigrant community, of “could this be a tool that could be used against us?” That's a really fine line to go down. I felt like it was revised an awful lot of times in response to all those concerns, and I think that's the way good legislation works. I think it was definitely better by the time we finally passed it, and the pilot process and the data gathering that we're doing now is important. I know there will be many of us who will sit down in the public safety committee and work through what our measure of success is, and did we deal with the concerns that people brought up in an effective way, or do we need to do further tweaking before we go full scale, or does this tell us that we don't want to go full scale. Every councilmember is taking the pilot seriously as an evaluation tool and not just as a rubber stamp on the way to the next step.
Has the city's push to clear homeless encampments and get people into housing been effective? How would you like to see it change?
We're learning a lot from the process. We're using a whole lot of American Rescue Plan money to do several things. One is to provide temporary gap housing that we know is not the permanent solution. You can't say to someone “get out of this encampment” if there's no place to go to. A number of those people, they just need to be stabilized so they can get back to earning an income again. And then there's some folks that there are mental health issues and that might not be their ultimate path but with the right social support services they can possibly access Social Security that they just haven't been able to do the paperwork on.
Helping people experiencing homelessness overcome the obstacles that put them there is the only way we're going to clear them out. We're not through yet, but we're systematically working our way in a comprehensive fashion, one location to the next. There will be some recidivism but I think we've figured out much better how to do it so that number's a whole lot lower. We've got to continue that process.
