@startleseasily is a fervent observer of the Metro government's comings and goings. In this column, "On First Reading," she'll recap the bimonthly Metro Council meetings and provide her opinions and analysis. You can find her in the pew in the corner by the mic, ready to give public comment on whichever items stir her passions. Follow her on Bluesky here.
An unknown number of people were detained in traffic stops and surrendered to federal immigration authorities, then bused out of state
Over the weekend, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents collaborated with the Tennessee Highway Patrol to detain nearly 100 Nashvillians. Under the guise of a “public safety operation,” they targeted areas of the city home to many Hispanic Nashvillians and terrorized South Nashville.
I cannot begin to imagine the fear, the anguish, the heartache our immigrant neighbors are experiencing. Indiscriminate immigration enforcement doesn’t make our communities safer, but then again, safety was never the point. The cruelty is the point.
At a special-called meeting of the Metro Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee meeting Wednesday, Nashvillians packed the gallery, calling for action from our city leadership. One Metro public school teacher described her students’ palpable fear in the wake of the detentions: They were “shaking, physically quaking in their seats.”
“We were a community of neighbors,” she said, “and in a way, Nashvillians are an extended family. But all that was shattered on Sunday.”
Federal agent requested police patrols for 'field operation' two days before mass immigrant arrests
Just before the meeting, Metro legal director Wally Dietz sent an abbreviated timeline of the weekend’s events, from Metro’s perspective, to the council and the media. The timeline revealed a critical detail: A dispatcher in the Department of Emergency Communications was informed about the plans for an immigration enforcement operation on Thursday, May 1. According to Dietz and DEC Director Stephen Martini, the dispatcher treated the call as a routine request for extra police patrols and did not inform anyone else in Metro. Her actions were in apparent contravention of an executive order from Mayor Freddie O’Connell instructing all departments to promptly inform the Mayor’s Office of New Americans of all communications with federal immigration authorities.
It was a mistake, Martini said. But that mistake cost Nashvillians their freedom. Metro leadership has work to do if they want to regain some semblance of trust from community members. The clock is ticking.
Planning a Coup
Councilmember Ginny Welsch is on a collision course with the Planning Department.
Last month, the Planning Commission recommended disapproval of a 620-acre rezoning that accounts for roughly 17 percent of the acreage in Welsch’s district. Welsch is seeking to dramatically upzone the area, allowing for additional entitlements for future development. She has paired the proposal with an urban design overlay, which would impose certain restrictions that seek to encourage the type of “middle housing” — duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and other small-scale multifamily housing — that Nashville is lacking.
With little meaningful deliberation, and not a single question for Welsch, the commission roundly rejected her plan. Their main concerns revolved around process. Rather than digging into the details of the plan, the commission bemoaned Welsch’s unusual approach, which mostly sidestepped the Planning Department in favor of her own direct engagement with constituents. They barely touched on the substitute proposed by Planning staff — a 216-acre rezoning that staff said would comply with the land use policy in the affected area. Instead, the commission opted to say no to both proposals.
Planning commissioners argued that Planning staff should be the ones initiating and leading the process of large rezonings like the one Welsch has proposed. But state and local law are clear: The local legislative body — in our case, the Metro Council — retains sole control over land use and zoning decisions. The Planning Commission exists to make recommendations to the council, not to impose their ideas of proper process. Welsch followed the rules; the commission seemingly didn’t like how she followed them, so they punished her.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, huge swaths of the county were downzoned. Neighborhoods throughout Nashville that previously allowed for two-family development became single-family-only. That has remained the status quo for much of the past 25 years, with very few councilmembers taking on the type of large-scale upzonings Welsch is attempting here.
Housing diversity is seen as key to alleviating catastrophic home prices
Welsch moved for an indefinite deferral of her proposal at Tuesday’s council meeting, using her speaking time to deliver a scathing indictment of Nashville’s planning apparatus. “Planning continuously asked me to slow down,” she said, to allow time for the department to release a long-anticipated report on housing and infrastructure in Nashville. “But I was very clear with Planning that I would not wait to start this process until June, because Planning has a history of not meeting timelines and slow-walking real reform.”
Welsch decried the Planning Commission’s consideration of her proposal, calling the outcome “preordained” and their deliberation “rehearsed.” Welsch vowed to bring back her proposal “with or without Planning.”
The Status Quo Has Got to Go
Council meetings are too damn long. Councilmembers love to hear themselves speak, but that’s not the only thing dragging out the agendas. On the first Tuesday of each month, the council holds statutorily required public hearings on rezoning proposals. One agenda can include dozens of rezonings, slowing down the progression of the meeting to a snail’s pace.
Outside of the council meetings, rezonings tend to eat up a significant portion of councilmembers’ time. Councilmembers I spoke to say this time-suck varies, depending on the number of pending rezonings in their district. On the high end, some estimated as much as 75 percent of their time could be dedicated to reviewing and shepherding rezoning proposals through the onerous process to approval.
Doing one-off, parcel-by-parcel rezonings is an incredibly inefficient use of the city’s resources. Large-scale rezonings free up time on the councilmember’s schedule to pursue other priorities for their district, and they eliminate the need for an endless series of public hearings. From a sheer efficiency perspective, large-scale rezonings could transform the way we do land-use planning in Nashville. They would also free up staff time, allowing Planning to focus on broad policy work on behalf of the council.
If business as usual has gotten us into the housing crisis we now face, then perhaps it’s time for a shakeup.
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s ... a Military Helicopter?
For the past few years, the U.S. military has performed annual training exercises in the vacant building that once housed the Bordeaux long-term care facility. Because it’s a Metro-owned building, the council has to approve its use for this purpose.
When the matter came before the council last year, district Councilmember Joy Smith Kimbrough raised concerns about lack of notice to nearby residents. She worried that the simulated ammunition firing and helicopter flights would frighten her constituents. To address this, Kimbrough successfully negotiated an amendment to the agreement requiring Metro to provide notice to the surrounding neighborhoods.
According to Kimbrough, that notice never happened. So when it came time for the council to consider whether to allow the military to use the building in her district this year, Kimbrough threw a flag on the play.
Also: Housing proposals targeting South and East Nashville neighborhoods advance
In a heated Government Operations Committee meeting, Kimbrough urged her colleagues to support her request for a one-meeting deferral of the resolution. The delay, she said, would give her time to ensure that all her constituents are informed of and prepared for the mock invasion. The training was scheduled to take place before the next council meeting, though, so a deferral would essentially kill the resolution.
Kimbrough’s request for a deferral on the council floor triggered a rarely invoked council rule that allows a district councilmember to unilaterally defer for one meeting a piece of legislation that targets only that member’s district. When Vice Mayor Angie Henderson informed the council of this, Councilmember John Rutherford, a veteran, got pissed. “I’d like a further explanation on this, and why the council body as a whole does not get a say in whether or not this is deferred," he said. "We should have a say in that!”
But the council did get a say — when they voted to adopt their rules of procedure at the beginning of the term. If Rutherford had an issue with the rule, he could’ve raised it then.
Councilmember Tonya Hancock joined in calling for Henderson to rethink her ruling. She made a convoluted, too-cute-by-half argument that, since this was an agreement with the United States, it would actually affect “everyone that is served by those individuals,” so it shouldn’t be subject to the rule about district-specific legislation.
Council director Margaret Darby appeared slightly bewildered as she attempted to clarify the vice mayor’s ruling. “The agreement is related solely to activities taking place at 1414 County Hospital Road, which is located in District 1,” Darby explained. “All of the activities are happening at that location. They’re not happening elsewhere in the county.”
But wait! There’s more. Rutherford proceeded to contend that, because the activity would involve helicopters that might fly over other districts, the resolution is actually “related to the entire city.”
That one didn’t fly either.
Fuming, Rutherford moved to challenge the vice mayor’s ruling. He argued that the deferral was disrespectful to the service members, and that it would be a “black eye” for Nashville. Rutherford lost badly, as the overwhelming majority of his colleagues voted to uphold Henderson’s ruling.
The federal government is already beating the shit out of us. What’s one more black eye?
