Singh-ing All The Way To The Bank

During last night’s Metro Council meeting, members passed their budget proposal on its second reading and, as expected, a crowd the size of a small rally showed up for the bill’s public hearing. Over the course of three hours, nearly 100 people approached the podium to advocate for a slice of the pie. This afternoon, the Budget and Finance Committee will host a work session to consider any further changes the council would like to make to the budget based on last night’s input, and on June 11th, there will be a special meeting to finalize the Capital Improvements Budget and its amendments.

While the budget proceedings took up the better part of last night’s meeting, the drama unfolded as the clock struck twelve when the council voted to approve a settlement with suspended Metro Arts Director Daniel Singh. Last month, Metro Legal and Singh’s lawyer, JR Hollin, landed on the figure of $200,000 in exchange for his resignation.

The settlement would also ensure a quiet departure by securing Singh’s agreement to drop all lawsuits against the city. Prior to negotiations, the spurned director alleged racial discrimination and threatened to file discrimination, Family Medical Leave Act, and retaliation claims against Metro and to sue the Commission and Metro over his termination. 

Final approval of the settlement fell on the council, but Councilmember Joy Styles made sure she had the last word. Before the Antioch representative took the floor to denounce the proceedings as “a distraction from the true issue at hand, which is overreach of Metro Legal and Metro Finance,” Finance Director Kevin Crumbo described the precarious state of the Arts Commission’s finances to the body. “We have been headed to a loss for Metro Arts for months,” he said. “The original computation earlier in the year was about $100,000 to $200,000 or so, the year is not over yet. We still have a ways to go, I'm still expecting them to incur a loss.” 

Crumbo went on to explain that the losses are due to the fact that both the commission’s general operating costs and the millions of dollars in payouts issued by Director Singh exceeded the approved budget. “There is some chance that we will mitigate that by having cut back on contracts and things,” he said. As far as auditing the ledger goes, Metro Finance will release the numbers, just as they do every year. “That is part of our normal accounting,” said Crumbo. “It'll be part of our audit at the end of the year, and that'll be visible to everybody as it always is.”

Styles’ distaste for Crumbo’s version of events was evident when it was her turn on the mic. “...Our legal department seems to believe it's easier to pay Daniel Singh to walk away, after Metro Finance has been slandering his name for months on allegations of fiscal mismanagement, than face accountability,” she said. On two separate occasions, fellow colleagues yielded their time to the councilwoman so she could continue her lengthy harangue. After Styles said her piece, Vice Mayor Angie Henderson turned the floor back to Crumbo, who promptly characterized Styles’ comments as foolish: a retort that earned him a rap on the knuckles from Henderson.

At the end of the day, a Maryland transplant was allowed to drain the city’s coffers: the resolution passed and Singh will be dismissed with a $200,000 payday. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

🎭 Much Ado About Nothing Three months ago, Nashville Scene reporter Eli Motycka was arrested while trying to enter Vanderbilt’s Kirkland Hall, where students were staging a sit-in to demand the University divest from firms linked to Israel. In the days following, twenty Metro Council members took to their micro-pulpits and co-signed a letter to Vanderbilt’s chancellor condemning the arrest, centering their concern on Motycka’s job as a reporter. It seemed like one of those moments ready-made to launch the city’s neglected alt-weekly back into the limelight—one could imagine a marketing campaign emphasizing police brutality and the suppression of speech. And yet, as the days wore on, the incident was soon forgotten.

Aside from an uncharacteristic donation-request email, nothing happened. Motycka stopped reporting on the campus protests. Many of the students involved were either suspended or expelled, and aside from the murmurs of journalists who fetishize persecution for doing their work, no one cared. Meanwhile, Vanderbilt hired Nashville attorney Aubrey Harwell of Neal & Harwell to head up a third-party investigation of the proceedings and determine who went wrong where.

Yesterday, the findings of that investigation were released. They stated that there were a number of procedural errors in the handling of Motycka’s arrest, and that the university should post its media policy more explicitly. But most importantly, it drew the conclusion that Vanderbilt didn’t violate the First Amendment, noting "he may well have been treated the same way” if he wasn’t a reporter;  the report notes that staffers from the Tennessean, Vanderbilt Hustler, WKRN, and WSMV were also present on campus that day without issue to lend credence to this claim. Guess that explains why we didn’t hear about this as much as you’d expect. DAVIS HUNT

🧟‍♂️ The Men Behind the Curtain Last night, The Tennessee Star obtained an FBI memo addressed to Police Chief John Drake. Dated May 11, 2023, it advised against making “public tokens”—that is, the artifacts a mass shooter often leaves behind to “claim credit for the attack and/or articulate the motivation behind it”—available to the general population. Coming a month and a half after the Covenant tragedy, the memo does not specifically address Audrey Hale or the school; however, the FBI delivered the memo just two days after the Star filed a federal lawsuit against the FBI to release the documents (or manifesto) to the public, and one day after a similar suit against Metro. Following the tragedy, I took a similar position, arguing that school shootings were viral in the sense that the crimes usually build on and draw influence from one another.

Here’s what I wrote at the time. 

Releasing the manifesto publicly just encourages mimesis. In the interest of preventing the spread of what is, to some degree, a social contagion, we should limit the flow of information that permits its reproduction. Nearly every mass murderer has studied the actions of previous mass murderers. Everything from the way an assailant dresses to the weapons he or she uses can be interpreted as nods to previous killers.

And expanding on the point: 

Publicizing the grievances of someone who shot six innocent people in a school could very well invite people to sympathize with him or her, and go some way to justify the crimes to those sufficiently aggrieved themselves. General grievances and distress are not new phenomena. What is new is the channeling of such resentment into explosions of mass violence against innocent people.

The article is worth a read if you want to understand the full argument. I’m not a federal agent. Promise. DAVIS HUNT

DEVELOPMENT

• Sylvan Park lands Latin American restaurant that started as farmers market pop-up (NBJ)
• Oracle jumpstarts effort to create East Bank greenway trail (Post)
• Downtown-area ex-adult club building sells (Post)
• Fall start set for Germantown project (Post)

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide and yearly festival guide.

TONIGHT

🎸 Randy Travis @ Ryman Auditorium, 7:30p, $39.50+, Info

🎸 Dennis Parker & Friends: James Taylor Tribute Show @ Station Inn, 8p, $20, Info

🎸 Strawberry Guy @ The Blue Room, 8p, $34.61, Info
+ Welsh indie pop

🎸 Maxxwellhouse @ The Basement, 9p, $12.85, Info
+ groovy trio of instrumental music

🪕 Bluegrass Night @ The American Legion Post 82, 7p, Free, Info