Don’t look up

Spring is a time of renewal in the Tennessee General Assembly: renewal of infatuated devotion to the widest possible access to firearms, renewal of rampant hostility aimed at those with the audacity to be something other than a white cisgender heterosexual Christian, renewal of fervent disdain for the notion that access to health care is something one expands rather than contracts, renewal of burning desire that fewer rather than more people exercise the right to vote, and of course last week’s renewal of rank intolerance for dissent, especially when it comes from young Black lawmakers.

It’s hard to fathom how a legislature so diligently and brazenly consumed with the arts of bigotry, misogyny, violence, and tyranny can find the time to piss on Nashville with its stream of bills sousing the city’s ability to self-govern. And yet they have found more than enough time, tying up the city in legal and political knots for no good reason beyond GOP vanity and vengeance, and disenfranchising tens of thousands of Nashville voters as a bonus.

How to pay for a football team

Against this backdrop of spiteful malevolence and political malpractice spewing from the statehouse, Nashville’s own political class finds itself in the late stages of deciding whether to get in bed with the state for a notably harebrained enterprise: a publicly financed two-billion-dollar domed stadium that, truth be told, nobody needs, few seem to want, and only true believers think is a good idea.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you heard a convincing argument that in Nashville’s present state the thing that most needs doing is building the largest public project in the city’s history so the billionaires who will benefit most don’t have to do it themselves?

Yet with clouds of tragedy and farce (alas not much comedy) overwhelming news cycles in recent weeks, the stadium bêtise flies onward seemingly under the radar. One imagines its backers like it this way — everyone distracted and few looking up while this clunker descends on a crash course with the city’s future.

Earth to Nashville’s Metro Council: it’s time to look up. 

Last Tuesday’s council meeting took up the stadium deal on second reading, and if you saw it you caught quite the instructive display of the debate we aren’t having. But odds are you didn’t catch it — which is part of the problem — because it happened around midnight, more than five hours into a marathon meeting. So (with props and due deference to the nonpareil Metro Council recapper @startleseasily) let me recap a few highlights.

A council bill’s second reading is when amendments are offered, and several were teed up for consideration. One in particular was aimed at the heart of the psychotic paradox of the stadium deal: the state wants to throw in half a billion dollars toward this Nashville project, but at the same time wants to dismember Nashville politically and administratively. Councilmember Bob Mendes’s amendment said, quite simply, that if the state rejiggers the city’s Sports Authority (a bill that would do so is percolating on Capitol Hill), then the city won’t launch the stadium project unless Council gives a separate and subsequent go-ahead. 

Mendes’s argument was eminently reasonable. “Why are we building a two-billion-dollar asset if we can’t promise ourselves that we are going to be in control of it?” he asked his council colleagues, adding that “taking away the power to appoint our boards fundamentally undermines the economic architecture for all our biggest projects.”

A reply came from Councilmember Robert Nash, who declared that “we know there is going to be some change in the way this board is set up,” which translates roughly as “the state legislature is holding a pillow on our face and pressing hard so we might as well enjoy it.” Nash then added with a straight face, in what has to be one of the great political laugh lines so far this century: “We’ve got a situation where in actuality the state is a partner.”

Breaking news for CM Nash (which perhaps my editor will let me put in italics for emphasis): The state is not our partner. The state is our assailant. 

During the discussion councilmember Angie Henderson interjected with a tempting idea: what say we put this pickle back in the jar for a bit and have us a public hearing? A motion to that effect failed by a single vote, with thirteen councilmembers siding with the principle that on a massive publicly funded project of dubious wisdom, less public input is better than more. One of them, Thom Druffel, opined that more input is unnecessary because there were a handful of open public comment meetings on the matter last fall.

Druffel conveniently ignores all that has transpired since, with the legislature gathering to inflict the act of ongoing political violence on Nashville they playfully refer to as the 113th General Assembly. 

A dozen councilmembers shared Druffel’s willful distaste for public input and disregard for political reality, enough to bury the public hearing idea.  And then, to no one’s surprise, the Mendes amendment failed by a wide margin. Soon after, the council opted to call it a (very late) night and resume second reading on the stadium bill next week, with a third and final vote possible by the end of the month. 

The anemic discussion and result last Tuesday on Bob Mendes’s sensible one-sentence amendment felt like a test vote on the project as a whole, suggesting we’re looking at a Metro Council poised and ready to be steamrolled by the power of a terrible idea. And we’re looking at a community and an electorate too bruised by rampage – both physical and political – to be paying sufficient attention. 

The stadium deal is a loser on the merits, as I’ve argued elsewhere. My argument here is that even those who think they like the deal should think again. Whatever its merits, Tennessee’s GOP-controlled state government has flatly disqualified itself — many times over — as a morally acceptable partner we can trust in a large project of this sort.

Many who are for the stadium deal are, I suspect, experimenting with classic forms of moral disengagement — minimizing and compartmentalizing — telling themselves that the state’s political decimation of Nashville, while a bit of a bummer, is unrelated to a project like the stadium. For others, like so many in Nashville’s pathetically unengaged business community, no compartments are needed as they stand mute (interrupting the silence only to make a campaign contribution or two) while the state politically dismantles their city and disenfranchises its citizens.

When Metro Council members gather next week to resume birthing this monstrosity, they need to slap themselves silly and wake up to the reality that Nashville is under existential assault, and that this is no time to be getting into bed with your attacker. You may like the Titans, you may like the idea of a new stadium, and you may even like the cockamamie deal our witless mayor and his team have conjured up. But if you value Nashville and its integrity as a self-governing community whose destiny belongs to its citizens, you will vote this thing down, or at a minimum put it on hold for a couple of years. 

Nashville in 2023 finds itself confronting a grim and formidable challenge to its political dignity and its civic future. All hands on deck. A shiny new football stadium can wait.