The Calvert Street Group came under fire this week when Murfreesboro Mayor Shane McFarland accused the prominent Nashville public relations firm of impersonating Murfreesboro residents at a town hall. Calvert was hired by waste management company Republic Services to advance a proposed expansion of Murfreesboro’s Middle Point Landfill, the latest chapter of Rutherford County’s ongoing trash drama.
Rutherford County officials are currently weighing Republic’s proposal to expand the site, an unpopular garbage patch just across the Rutherford County line from Smyrna that takes on an estimated 3,700 tons of trash daily, per its website. The landfill is expected to hit capacity by 2029, a pending potential crisis for Nashville, which relies on the site for its own waste disposal.
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In a video posted on Facebook, McFarland alleges that two Calvert Street Group employees impersonated Rutherford County residents to aid the firm’s campaign for landfill expansion. A full-length streamed video of the town hall does indeed appear to feature two Calvert employees.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” McFarland says in a video statement. “They get up and talk about how we need a landfill, and they work for the group that’s promoting this. We don’t believe in paying people from outside our community to deceive our residents. I really think that these groups think that we’re naive, we’re gullible, that we’re uneducated. That’s not us.”
Darden Copeland founded the firm in 2009, scoring a high-profile public relations victory as part of the team that organized the “Save My Fairgrounds” effort in 2011. Neither Copeland nor Calvert Street immediately responded to the Scene’s requests for comment.
The firm recently added longtime Metro insider Tom Jurkovich as a senior director. The group has represented Speedway Motorsports Inc. in its push for a contract with Metro to expand the current fairgrounds raceway.
