The Best Day of the Year
💰 You know what time it is · Stormwater settlement · ESL on the rise · Repeat offender of the day · This week in streaming · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone.
Well, it’s Tax Day—the best day of the year. Shovel over a slice of that hard-earned cash for ole Uncle Sam so you can have nice things like roads with potholes. Unfortunately for us, the IRS dropped some news yesterday that took the sweetness out of the day. Individuals and businesses that pay taxes in Tennessee now have until Monday, November 3rd to file.
The postponement is due to the severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes, and flooding that began on April 2, 2025, across the entire state—more info from the IRS website here.
Today, we’ve got a small preview of tonight’s council meeting, a look at the expansion of ESL programs in the city, our repeat offender of the day (occurring more frequently than expected, so we’ve changed the title), and a list of some movies to catch on streaming services should you be scared of the sun.
Onward, Davis.
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🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
🌊 Will Council Settle Up Over Stormwater? Tonight, the council will weigh in on whether it will grant more than $1.45 million in a settlement over the city’s stormwater capacity fee. In December, the Beacon Center of Tennessee brought forward a class action lawsuit claiming that the fee charged to those seeking development permits was unconstitutional. “After investigation, the Metropolitan Department of Law believes that the settlement listed…is fair and reasonable and in the best interest of the Metropolitan Government,” reads the resolution.
Back in January, Mayor O’Connell was asked about the suit. He replied with an anecdote as to why the city continues to propose these types of development fees. “We've seen several lawsuits across 2024 that really do kind of focus on that tension where development has costs and impact,” explained O’Connell during a media roundtable. “And there are a handful of counties across Tennessee, for instance, that are able to use impact fees to have a standardized approach to the cost of growth from an infrastructure basis. We don't have that in Nashville, and so between our Planning Department, Department of Transportation, and Water and primary entities, we've tried a few different policy approaches, and we're going to wait to see what happens in those lawsuits.”
O’Connell also said that he wants to encourage conversations with state leaders and solutions at the local level. “We talk about the cost of housing in Nashville,” he continued. “The cost of infrastructure associated with new housing is one of the top concerns, and so as we look at early previews of our Unified Housing Strategy, this is one of those things that's a consideration there as well.”
🗣️ Growing Demand For ESL Classes The council will also consider approving a $450,000 grant application for the Nashville Public Library system to implement more English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. According to the resolution, there is a growing waitlist of Nashville residents seeking to learn English.
The funding for the “Libraries as Pillars of Education and Democracy grant” is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. If implemented in Nashville, the library would operate its additional ESL programs through the GOAL (Growing Opportunities for Adult Learners) Collective, the Branch of Nashville, and the Nashville International Center for Empowerment.
💸 Nonprofit Defraudation Yesterday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced that his office filed a lawsuit to dissolve the National Foundation for Transplants, alleging it misled donors and patients. After NFT shut down in April 2024, many patients could no longer access their donations. The suit seeks court oversight to properly distribute its remaining assets.
“Our investigation revealed troubling discrepancies between how NFT represented its services to vulnerable transplant patients and how it actually managed donations,” said Skrmetti in a press release. “When a nonprofit organization solicits charitable contributions by telling donors their money will benefit specific transplant patients, those representations must be truthful and accurate. We are all grateful for the many Tennessee non-profits who serve our communities with selflessness and integrity, but organizations that betray the public trust will be held accountable.”
DEVELOPMENT
- ⚡️ LG Electronics plans $100M expansion in Clarksville (Post)
- Late-night Mediterranean planned for McKissack Park (Post)
- Midtown Embassy Suites property sells for $57.5M (Post)
✹ REPEAT OFFENDER OF THE DAY
Cookeville’s nightlife took a violent turn Friday when, 34-year-old Ashton Bohannon died from gunshot wounds in a parking light shared by Wal-Mart and Get Axed, a recently opened ax-throwing-themed bar. The incident occurred when Bohannon approached a 22-year-old male in the lot and proceeded to rob him at gunpoint. Unfortunately for Bohannon, his intended victim was carrying and promptly fired several shots at the assailant. Bohannon was rushed to the hospital and died from his wounds on Saturday morning. No charges have been filed against the robbery victim.
Though Bohannon had no record in Tennessee at the time of his death, the Michigan native finished a sentence in September 2023 for a felony weapons charge and assault with intent to cause bodily harm. Despite that, Bohannon got axed while committing yet another violent crime, Fox 17 and WKRN had no issue portraying him as a victim in their coverage over the weekend. Not to be outdone, The National Gun Violence Memorial has already enshrined the convicted felon with an entry on its database. Meanwhile, the hero who ensured that this would be Bohannon’s first and last appearance on our page has yet to be identified, much less lauded for responding accordingly when one tries that in a smalltown.
✹ THIS WEEK IN STREAMING (April 15th)
Y2K (Max) Comedian Kyle Mooney’s off-the-wall alternative apocalypse movie about a teen whose plans to get with his crush on New Year’s Eve 1999 get rudely interrupted by sentient murderous electronics died at the box office last December. But, as we said then, “it’s a genre film that attempts to diagnose its generation’s implosion while offering a damning critique of the victimization that defines peak millennialism.” What it loses co-starring Rachel Zegler, it more than makes up with an Oscar-worthy cameo from Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst.
Your Friends & Neighbors (AppleTV+) Jon Hamm pulls a full 180 from Don Draper as a disgraced hedge fund manager who keeps up appearances by stealing from his HOA-obsessed neighbors in this perfect blend of satire and character study.
The Abyss (Disney+) James Cameron was the King of the World as early as 1989 when he released this underseen thriller about a petroleum engineer (Ed Harris) aiding the military in retrieving a nuclear sub from a seafloor awash in mysterious creatures. See the action great’s last sci-fi hurrah before he went off the blue people deep end.
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.
TONIGHT
🪕 Green River Revue @ Station Inn, 8p, $20, Info
🎸 Bib @ DRKMTTR, 8p, $12, Info
+ hardcore punk
🎻 Music of Queen with the Nashville Symphony @ The Pinnacle, 7:30p, $91+, Info
🎸 Honky Tonk Tuesday @ Eastside Bowl, 8p, $10, Info
+ two-step lessons @ 7p, The Cowpokes @ 8p
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
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Today's newsletter is brought to you by Megan Podsiedlik (Nashville), Jerod Hollyfield (Crowd Corner), Camelia Brennan (Local Noise), and Davis Hunt (everything else).