Last night was a series of victories, one after another, for public oversight and the democratic process in Nashville Metro Council.
The “Surveillance MOU” had much of its surveillance stripped out and was deferred until Jan 20 — teeing up the possibility for a completely new MOU written by the Council instead of the Mayor’s Office, a body that has far more leverage than the administration to get a good deal with NDP.
A resolution “calling for the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Emergency Communications to enact various reforms relative to departmental leadership and workplace culture” that has been championed by Joy Styles (and was co-sponsored by Erin Evans and Ginny Welsch) was passed. DEC has long been the source of harrowing workplace harassment issues, concerns that seemed to only gather attention when whistleblowers started making public complaints.
And a resolution from CM Welsch asking The Office of Homeless Services to provide a plan for how it is going to use its recently acquired $4M of Metro funds to help prevent homelessness in the wake of the largest cuts to HUD funding in modern history also passed, this one unanimously.
The “most progressive Metro Council ever” is beginning to earn its title. What is strange is that all three of these victories for not just progressive causes, but simple plain democratic oversight and accountability, were all chalked up as losses for one party — the man who ran under the banner of “the only truly progressive candidate for Mayor.”
Each one of these efforts, which hardly qualify as “progressive” and, in two cases, were just non-binding efforts to ensure humane processes and good governance is being enacted, were aggressively fought against, in public and private, by the Nashville Mayor’s Office. What connected them was not their political agendas. In fact, the political spectrum of the supporters of each of these ran the gamut of ideology.
There was something simple that put each of them in the crosshairs of the O’Connell administration: they did not let the Mayor act as an autocrat. They put checks and balances, even if in just “non-binding” ways, over the administration’s ability to steamroll their way through public hearing requirements, HR complaint rules, and transparency on public funds.
I have been asking Council to pay attention to these patterns since quitting the O’Connell administration. Here is my first public comment as a civilian a few months after resigning from O’Connell’s Office of Community Safety. You’ll note I was not yet rocking a mustache.
Last night was a bruising night for all involved, all three of these battles had their own universe of herculean efforts to get there. My own efforts, working with the Nashville Community Safety Network, have been documented here. It has been exhausting. The group chats alone are enough to drive one to (to quote a surveillance nihilist) throw your phone in the river.
I’m sure we can all agree we’re in need of a holiday break, and no more think pieces from me for a while.
But I, of course, do have to leave the Metro Council with one last exhortation.
You have much more power this morning than you did yesterday morning. You have publicly claimed the oversight over the District Management Corporation, the entity that puts 100% of the special assessment funds into the Nashville Downtown Partnership.
The Nashville Downtown Partnership is an extremely powerful organization. But you are more powerful. You control their budget. And that means you now have the responsibility to fill the role that the Mayor’s Office had usurped from you, and you must negotiate with the DMC and NDP on how these $15M of funds will be spent.
Council Member Sepulveda spoke it aloud last night: that if these funds are ill spent between now and the next council meeting on Jan 20, she will make it, she said on the Council floor, her mission that NDP does not ever do business with Metro again. This is how one exercises the power explicitly given to them by democratic institutions.
There are different types of political power. There is implicit power, such as what a Mayor’s Office often leverages: making vague promises and veiled threats about what they would like to see happen. And then there is explicit power: power intentionally enshrined in laws, such as our Metro Code and Charter. The Council, by design, has explicit power over the DMC for precisely this reason.
The Mayor’s Office said time and again that the point of this MOU was to limit what surveillance technology NDP wanted to buy. But what the plain text, council testimony, and a public records release I’m now publishing for the first time shows is that it was MNPD in concert with the Mayor’s Office that put the most problematic surveillance technology in the MOU to begin with.
What we see in these work documents is not a Mayor’s Office pushing back against an agency trying to get lots of surveillance tech, but the Mayor’s Office being sure that they have a monopoly on surveillance. The point of the MOU was not to tell NDP it could not spend their money on surveillance.
What it said was essentially:
If the MOU was meant to tell NDP what they were not supposed to do with the grant, it would be written as prohibitions, not as authorizations. It would say “NDP shall NOT purchase surveillance technology without Council approval,” not “here is a list of surveillance technology for NDP to purchase on Metro’s behalf.”
There appears to be some truth that NDP didn’t get everything they were asking for. They didn’t get extra funds for Off Duty cops and license plate readers and something vaguely defined as a “tech center.”
But here’s what MNPD wrote in for what it wanted:
Armored Rescue Vehicle
Mobile Command Post Tactical Support Post
CSC Video Wall
Safety Cameras
LeoSight
Five Cast
And all that made the cut.
Having learned far more than I would have liked about these last two software items, they pale in comparison to LPRs, the very tech that first brought the surveillance ordinance into Metro code. It’s almost as if MNPD and the Mayor’s Office saw NDP’s wishlist and said: “Hold my beer. You think that stuff’s problematic? Let me show you some problematic surveillance tech.”
What we learned from public records requests
(1) Kristin Wilson led this from the Mayor’s Office
The documents show that it was Kristin Wilson, Chief of Operations and Performance for O’Connell (and John Cooper before him), who led the charge on this project from the Mayor’s Office. They likely feel like they deserve credit for not giving NDP everything they wanted.
The Mayor’s Office does not deserve a cookie for pushing back on LPRs in a private meeting between Tom Turner and Kristin Wilson. Are we supposed to give her credit for not giving Tom Turner a few line items while she inserted things far worse, all done covertly without so much as a conversation with the CM whose district this is in?
That’s like a security guard stopping someone from shoplifting a candy bar, then stealing the cash register themselves—and expecting an award for preventing theft.
To say the quiet part out loud (that many in elected office and government positions have said to me in private), Ms. Wilson’s background is thoroughly corporate. And the top-down, dictatorial structure of corporate governance seems to be more her speed — and, if sources are to be believed, she is highly responsible for redesigning Nashville government to operate like a business. But as someone pointed out to me recently when we were discussing this very topic, most businesses fail. And the primary cause of their failures? Poor leadership.
(2) They knew this MOU would be retroactive, making the December deadline argument highly dubious
The public records show some other things. They show why the resolution was written in the “past tense”, something the Mayor’s Office pleaded ignorance on time and time again. We were told over and over that this MOU had to be signed before December or else, something... But the Mayor’s Office knew clearly that this was always going to be retroactive.
Giving Council a month to consider this and draft a quality MOU that the community would actually be interested in does not appear to be a real problem — except if you’re trying to rush in some tech with minimal to no oversight. What waiting a month does is it cuts the Mayor’s Office out of the deal, and it increasingly seems like this was the what they were trying to avoid the whole time. They wanted to be the body that negotiated with NDP, not Council, even though Council has a far stronger hand to play.
The Coalition Is Forming, Opposing Autocracy on a Local Level, Regardless if it’s Red or Blue
The important takeaway from Council last night is that the Mayor’s Office no longer has the ball. Their implicit power to bring NDP to the bargaining table is now gone.
Word spread throughout the Council floor and in the gallery that “NDP is going to walk away from the deal entirely if there is a deferral.”
The Nashville Downtown Partnership, we have it on good authority, was not the source of that if-this-then-that rumor.
The party that is actually losing bargaining power is the Mayor’s Office. They had the most to lose last night, but like all implicit power, it was never theirs to begin with.
The oversight authority, that was hidden from Council 21 years ago, has been discovered, like a secret scroll revealing the true heir to the throne. In a surprise twist, the king left the kingdom to… the people?
The Mayor’s Office will likely not accept that this was a night of losses of their own making. They likely won’t ask the question that all those in power need to ask themselves on a daily basis, especially those who wave the flag of being truly progressive:
They will likely blame their loss on those meddling kids. They will blame disgruntled employees out to burn it all down. They will search our LinkedIn for our managers to complain to and spread rumors about our character. They will blame the people who were on the other side of all three of the resolutions they fought tooth and nail against last night: regular Nashvillians.
That is what you must resort to when you have only implicit power. When your power is built as a house of cards made of threats and hollow promises, eventually it all starts to wobble. And we are getting close to it all collapsing. I won't say we're there yet, but a gentle breeze and…
When you have real power, you can, as CM Sepulveda did last night, actually just say what you want.
There’s a problem with making enemies out of everyone you’re supposed to be serving. When you make enemies of union workers, anti-surveillance advocates, and supporters for public oversight on public funds to help the housing insecure it turns us into a critical mass that can accomplish the impossible. The radicals were shocked by the liberals who sat next to them last night. The Liberals have never felt more part of the #resistance. The conservatives voted for oversight like it was Reagan 2.0.
And all this solidarity is against… the Mayor’s Office, the administration that was “only truly progressive” on the ballot last time. That is not a slogan that will test well next time.
Council Must Step Into Its Power
The Council has explicit power over the District Management Corporation’s budget. Not because of backroom deals or backscratching or backstabbing, but because back in the day someone actually wrote a law that made sense. No one should get to use the power of the government to collect what is technically called “coercive revenue” and spend it unaccountably. If they did, they might inflate their salaries to nearly half a million dollars, hire a shadow police force that wears fake police badges, and somehow explode public property that is made entirely out of concrete.
Nashville’s most progressive Council ever: you are starting to earn your title. But you must now step into your power and own it. You need to stop cowering behind “well as I’ve been told” or “how it was explained to me.” You need to understand that you are in the big leagues. You don’t need to play the game as zero sum, and you shouldn’t, but you need to understand that that is how they are playing it.
You must play the game of power—that is what it actually means to take your oath, as CM Huffman referenced it last night. He told you to remember your oath of office and to vote against the deferral because it conveyed, as he was suddenly passionate about, “transparency.” But abiding by your oath of office does not mean that you take the word of people who are explicitly trying to diminish your power at every turn.
Your oath is to the people of Nashville, not to the convenience of the executive branch. Your oath is to the Charter and Code that gives you explicit power — so not cede that to the implicit threats that try to make you forget that.
The work ahead is clear
Schedule a work session with the DMC. You have explicit power over their budget. Use this time to write an MOU that actually serves the public interest, not one that funnels $15 million into surveillance technology that makes us less safe (even if Larry Ellison erroneously thinks it makes him more safe or if the NFL insists on it if we want the Super Bowl).
Get that public hearing. The public still wants to be heard. Democracy shouldn’t happen in backrooms or through texts on the Council floor — and I say that as someone who texted many of you last night. If they’re going to be spending this much tax money in our streets, the Tennessee tax payers deserve to speak on it, and this process should be open and far, far less confusing.
Use the leverage you have until January 20th. The DMC needs your approval, and that means the NDP needs your approval. They do not get to spend CBID money without your democratic oversight—that is what the law says, and that is what your oath demands you enforce. This is leverage. They will make you feel icky for using it. But that is just their attempt to make you cower and defer to their authority. Stand up! You’ve been given the power over them by law, and that is the greatest defense there is to doing things people may not like. “Sorry, I wish I could let you spend money without any oversight, but unfortunately it’s against the law."
The “most progressive Metro Council ever” isn’t a title earned through slogans or demographics. It’s earned by doing the hard work of accountability when it would be easier to defer to authority.
Last night, you started to earn our respect. Even if you’re exhausted and can’t wait for your term to finish, make each move count. Make it one that increases the collective power of the people who fill your seat when you’re gone. Because 1 Public Square is not the house of autocrats, elected or otherwise. It’s the people’s house. And so long as you’re representing us, we need you to perform like you did last night. Brave, questioning of authority, willing to change with new information, and willing to step into your power.
Politics is for power. Welcome to the game. Now let’s change the rules.