Where other mayoral candidates want the pedal down on Nashville's success, David Fox throws a caution flag

Editor's note: The coming mayoral election in August promises to be one of the most decisive in Metro Nashville's history, in determining the future health and managed growth of a city at a crossroads. In this seven-part series, we profile the people competing to maintain Music City's newfound success, to represent those in danger of being shoved aside, and to steer the city past the shoals of bubble and bust. Read the rest of our profiles: Megan Barry, Charles Robert Bone, Bill Freeman, Howard Gentry, Jeremy Kane and Linda Rebrovick.

Name: David Fox

Birthdate: Aug. 1, 1961

Birthplace: Virginia

High School: Montgomery Bell Academy

College: University of Virginia

Jobs: Nashville Post Co., Metro School Board, Titan Advisors

Memberships: Board Member at The Foundation for Athletics in Nashville Schools Inc.

Family: Carrington (wife), Oscar (11), Julius (10) and Simon (8)

Pets: LuLu (dog), Tiger (Salamander) and Six Backyard Chickens

Website: FoxForNashville.com

It won't fit neatly on a bumper sticker, but here is one thing you need to know about David Fox: Of the six candidates running for mayor, he may be the only one who doesn't think the recent boom years have Nashville pointed in the right direction.

If he thought the race was about who could take the wheel from Karl Dean and keep the city moving straight ahead, he wouldn't be in it. He has more steering in mind.

This comes through at candidate forums, where his flat delivery accentuates the fact that he thinks the emperor is missing some clothes. In a recent interview with the Scene, he matter-of-factly works through a number of issues he finds troubling.

He is concerned, to put it lightly, about the billions of dollars in debt and unfunded liabilities the city is carrying into the future. He thinks the 30-year experiment with an elected school board, of which he was once the chairman, has been a failure, and he's calling for a discussion about a wide expansion of charter schools. He envisions a "complete redo" on public transportation. And while it's not pleasant, he thinks a lot about the city's sewage.

"If everything were on autopilot in Nashville, then there'd be no chance of me running for mayor," he says. "Zero."

But he is running for mayor, after quitting a lucrative job at the New York-based hedge fund management firm, Titan Advisors, where he's worked for the past nine years.

"Business has been great," he adds, bluntly. "If I did that for another four or five years I'd be kind of set. So the only reason to do this is to think there's something to accomplish or to avoid a problem."

All of this might make the decision whether or not to vote for him fairly easy. And he likes that. It fits squarely into his businesslike approach to the race — like the fact that Team Fox officially calls its manager "the campaign CEO."

"I like the fact that it's a binary situation," Fox says. "There won't be any question at the end of this business's existence if it was successful or not. I like that. The metrics are very clear. You win or you lose."

So where has David Fox been the past six months? After making his candidacy official by appointing a treasurer in July, his campaign seemed nowhere to be found. Even after he unveiled a campaign staff and website in November, he kept a noticeably low profile, even as Megan Barry, Charles Robert Bone and Jeremy Kane were publicly making the rounds and Bill Freeman was making his own calculated splash. (Fox's visibility was greater only than that of Linda Rebrovick, whose campaign seemed hypothetical until a recent bit of activity.)

Even for a profile like this, for which candidates might want to be observed on the trail, Fox meets with a Scene reporter in his current campaign headquarters: a corner office in the West End-area home where he lives with his wife Carrington — who, full disclosure, is a longtime Scene food writer — and their three sons. On the floor are stacks of paper, reports and studies he's been devouring in preparation for the campaign, from one labeled "How to Make a Great City" to a copy of the FY2015 Metro budget.

Fox attributes his low-profile start to the fact that, although his family lineage of Nashville business leaders dates back to the late 1800s, he was "starting at zero" when it came to building a political campaign. On top of that, it took him a while to find he says, "someone who could work with a candidate like me in a city like Nashville." A former business journalist and co-founder of the Scene's sister SouthComm publication Nashville Post who became a longtime businessman, Fox is a fiscal conservative with "a free-market bent." He's also Jewish, and that heritage, he says, colors his social views.

"We have that long heritage, learned through difficult dark moments in the Jewish history, that the world is a lot better if it's welcoming and respectful of all kinds of people," Fox says.

There's also that bit about how good business was going. He left it behind to run for mayor, and plans to put $1.3 million ("an important part of our net worth," he says) into his campaign — a personal contribution similar to the one Dean made in 2007, and one that will be rivaled in this race only by Freeman. He says he wasn't going to go forward unless he was certain he could win. That eventually meant going out of state to hire Chris Turner, of the Texas-based Republican firm Stampede Consulting.

Since then, he says, he's been spending a lot of time in places like Madison, meeting with ministers and community activists who exist in a different Nashville.

"It's great to live down in the Gulch, but once you get out in the outside [part] of the county, you see well, huh, 'It City' doesn't seem to apply to everybody," he says.

Fox's concern for people on whom the It City has cast a shadow instead of a glow is hard to question. For a man whose personality is as businesslike as his résumé, he leans forward and becomes as close to animated as he gets when he talks about the families, and particularly the children, at risk of being left behind as Nashville accelerates. From them, he says, has come "the awareness that there are tens of thousands of young people in Nashville who didn't ask to be born into poverty, who didn't ask to be born into families that were not intact or have difficulty supporting their educational needs."

"We didn't get a bad hand of kids, we have perfectly good kids," he says. "We've been dealt a bad hand of adults, in the leadership.

"The urgency that I feel for what my kids need has been grotesquely lacking in the urgency that our civic leaders have applied to other people's children. And these are children whose lives depend on this. Not just the quality of life, but their actual lives depend on adults getting their act together and doing the right thing."

With the education debate in Nashville as hot as it's ever been, Fox's definition of "the right thing" promises to be one of the more polarizing pieces of his platform. But he's no stranger to that.

Fox served as chairman of the Metro school board from 2006 to 2010, a term that was marked with controversy. In 2008, Fox called for the dissolution of the elected board, urging then-Gov. Phil Bredesen to empower Dean to take over the schools and support legislation allowing the mayor to appoint all members of the school board.

The next year, Fox was named in a federal lawsuit stemming from Metro's 2008 rezoning plan. The suit alleged that the plan was an attempt to re-segregate Nashville's schools. A federal judge would later rule that, although the plan "caused a segregative effect," there was no evidence it was racially motivated. The case was dismissed in 2012, and Fox called it a "ridiculous lawsuit" and "an unfortunate waste of money."

Fox also presided over the outsourcing of custodial and janitorial services in Metro schools. It was a move predicated on saving money — and one he recalls now as the kind of tough decision Metro's leaders have to be willing to make to avoid bigger financial problems later.

At the time, he called for an end to school board elections, reasoning that while candidates are typically well-meaning and nobly motivated, they often lack the experience and background a mayor would seek in appointed education officials. He still thinks doing away with the elected school board would "give us a far better chance to be successful," though he doesn't expect that will happen.

"We've had it for 30 years, and until the last few years we've had continually diminishing results and poor function," he says. "I don't think that's coincidental." He returns to a point he likes to make about who's failing the system and whom the system is failing.

"We have not been dealt a bad hand of kids," he reiterates. "We have perfectly good kids. We've had adults in leadership positions who have failed the kids, who haven't been worthy of the kids that they're trying to serve."

The solution, from Fox's perspective, involves a lot more charter schools, the publicly funded, privately run model that has expanded in Nashville in recent years and embroiled the city in near-constant debate along the way. Fox references New Orleans, which recently created an all-charter school system, and hails it as a turnaround story. He's not alone in his view of the move as a bold embrace of innovative solutions to a system that's long failed many children.

But it's also far from the consensus. Many in both Nashville and in New Orleans see charters as an offensively market-driven approach to public education, turned over to outside actors who are unaccountable to voters and have dual motives at best.

"I'm not saying that's what we have to do, but anybody who's going to engage in the conversation about how can we make our schools better needs to do it with as much urgency as you do for your own kids and with an awareness of what has been working," Fox says.

"I would like to participate in a conversation that various board members have called for about how do we financially accommodate more charter schools."

The notion of public-private partnerships shows up elsewhere in Fox's vision. In transit, for instance, he says Nashville (and surrounding areas) should pursue a European model: a private company builds a regional transit system, and municipalities lease it, charging a user fee that — if the math is done right — can cover the city's cost.

"We don't do any of that here," he says, sitting near a 19th century Nashville transit map that he says shows how little the city has progressed in some areas. "We should be doing it here. Because how are we gonna pay for this stuff? Nobody is going to pay the taxes it would require to fund all this stuff, but we need it."

And if it means adding to the city's piling debt, he's not on board. The danger of debt is probably the issue he's most passionate about: He gives the sense that the city's unfunded liabilities and debt really do keep him up at night.

"What do you think is gonna happen when our national economy, as it will do cyclically — when our national economy goes sideways for several years?" Fox asks. "We're going to see a lot of municipal bankruptcies. Because unfunded liabilities are too big, the balance sheets are way out of whack, you have way too much debt at the municipal level, and a lot of cities are going to go bankrupt. That's not gonna be an accounting adventure, that's gonna have a real bad effect on people who live in these cities."

It's a fate Nashville can avoid, he says, if the next few mayors do some heavy lifting. It's a big reason why he's running for mayor, although there are other reasons — issues with similarly dire stakes that, if it's possible, get even less attention that municipal debt. Former Davidson County General Sessions Court Judge Dan Eisenstein, who presided over a mental health court, is a friend, and Fox says the two have been discussing that issue a lot recently.

"In my view, in 2015 I don't understand why perfectly good people are winding up going to jail and having to be triaged through the penal system," Fox says. "I think we are a better and wealthier community than that."

At its root, Fox's campaign is premised on the idea that Nashville shouldn't — and can't — continue speeding down the path it's on. Juxtaposed with his opponents, who are largely pledging to keep up the momentum, he stands out for splashing cold water. His pitch offers big, likely divisive ideas about some of the biggest, most divisive issues the city currently faces. It might turn voters off, or it might not. But he likes those options.

"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be useful, is how I see it," Fox says. "If voters agree, I might be the right candidate for people or I might not be. We'll find out. I'm pretty comfortable with that proposition."

Email editor@nashvillescene.com