The Fate of Nashville
📑 Changing the rules · Transit in the courts · Deportation flights · Week in streaming · Much more!
Good afternoon, everyone.
Nashville is a place we are all fortunate to call home, a city that embodies both the promise and the contradictions of modern America. As the world hurdles forward, grappling with rapid and complex challenges, one truth remains clear: it is the resilience, commitment, and character of our local community that shapes the quality of our daily lives.
The future of Nashville is dependent on the quality of its leadership. Fresh off an election that ushered in a seismic shift in our local politics, it's worth understanding what kind of damage unaccountable activists, NGOs, and politicians can do if left unchecked full-fledged robust civic engagement from ordinary citizens.
Oakland, California, a city that suffered extreme levels of dysfunction in the wake of a full-fledged activist takeover, serves as a valuable case study. And our guest Thursday night, Seneca Scott, a former labor organizer turned community advocate/political strategist, spent nearly a decade in the trenches there battling against these very organizations and their harmful ideas, building a diverse coalition of concerned and caring Neighbors who led a highly successful populist insurgency against Bay Area dysfunction.
Just last year, Scott successfully led the historic recall of Oakland mayor Sheng Tao, now facing 95 years in prison on federal corruption charges, and the extremist District Attorney Pamela Price.
Join us Thursday evening to learn about how he did it and what lessons Nashville residents can learn from his success in building a grassroots coalition to fight entrenched corruption and mismanagement, how to hold elected officials accountable and, very importantly, make local politics exciting. RSVP here to get the location.
Onward.
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🖋️ Edited by Megan Podsiedlik.
📜 Changing the Rules Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) stated that special session may take anywhere from days to weeks, but the set of rules passed by the House promises a fairly short session. The most impactful change requires amendments to be filed at least twenty-four hours before a bill is heard on the floor. Some questioned whether the revision would afford them enough time to add their input on special session bills. Concern hinged on the fact that any changes to bill language made during committee hearings—mere hours before a floor session—could affect whether a timely filed amendment based on older language would still be viable. Despite the hang-ups, the House overwhelmingly passed the modified rules for special session.
🚏 Transit Still Tied Up In Court The Committee to Stop an Unfair Tax has appealed the ruling in favor of Mayor O’Connell and Metro in their lawsuit against the recently approved transit referendum. In November, the group took legal action against “Choose How You Move,” claiming the plan misuses IMPROVE Act funding and that the ballot language and the mayor’s information campaign were misleading. Though the dedicated funding source for the plan, which comes in the form of a sales tax, could go into effect as early as February 1, the Court of Appeals will hear the case on March 6.
After January’s initial ruling by Chancellor Anne Martin, Mayor O’Connell stated that he was “excited for all of us to be able to move past legal distractions and get to doing the work that people expect of us and asked us to do.” Emily Evans, former council member and head of the Committee to Stop an Unfair Tax, was unsurprised by the outcome, and has since told the Tennessean that she anticipates that “the appeals court will undertake a complete review of the city's actions and non-actions."
🛬 Refugee Airlines: Cancelled Last week, President Trump signed an executive order halting refugee resettlement nationwide, which canceled the flights of over 80 refugees headed to Nashville. Though the new administration may reconsider the approved resettlement of refugees affected by the decree, WPLN reported that Trump issued an additional memo on Friday “ordering agencies to stop offering services supported by State Department money,” which predominantly funds America’s refugee programs.
“We’re in this state of limbo,” Max Rykov, Communications Director of Nashville International Center for Empowerment, told the media outlet. The local refugee resettlement nonprofit expected to welcome 78 refugees in February and 4 in March.
On Friday, WPLN also published an article that gives a snapshot of the immigrant population in Nashville. According to State Department data collected in 2019, Nashville had 11,208 refugee residents from places like Myanmar, Somalia and Iraq. “Davidson County has around 110,000 immigrants. That’s 15.5% of the population, twice as much as any other county in Tennessee.”
DEVELOPMENT
- Midtown bar building sells for $6M (Post)
- Modernist Midtown building to be razed (Post)
- SoBro surface parking lot offered for sale (Post)
- Former Crying Wolf space to host pet grooming business (Post)
- Metro approval sought for downtown Moxy, apartments (Post)
✹ THIS WEEK IN STREAMING (January 28th)
Goodrich (Max) Michael Keaton stars as the owner of a flailing Los Angeles art gallery whose life is upended when his much younger wife checks herself into rehab and leaves him to parent his two young kids. With his life crumbling, he reaches out to his now-pregnant firstborn (Mila Kunis) to figure out what went wrong. The latest from Hallie Meyers-Shyer (daughter of rom-com legend Nancy) sidesteps the “blame dad” pitfalls on the way to cultivating an ode to the American family that also serves as an effective dissection of L.A.’s diminished state.
Mr. Mom (Prime) We didn’t mean to offer up a Michael Keation double feature, but this pre-Batman 1983 crowd-pleaser is the best portrait of life in Jimmy Carter’s America, one that pairs quite well with Goodrich’s urban Biden Era anxiety. Keaton is pitch perfect as an unceremoniously laid-off meat-and-potatoes middle manager who loses his identity when his wife (Terri Garr) becomes the breadwinner. As adept at emotional resonance as slapstick, it offers the type of serious political substance long extinct in a Hollywood landscape content with insular bromides.
Twin Peaks (Paramount+) Yes, we are mourning David Lynch too, but we don’t think he’d appreciate all this hipster sentimentality. The next time someone tells you a TV show is groundbreaking, remember Lynch got away with this for two years on network TV.
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
🪕 The French Family Band @ Station Inn, 8p, $20, Info
🎸 Honky Tonk Tuesday @ Eastside Bowl, 8p, $10, Info
+ two-step lessons @ 7p, The Cowpokes @ 8p
🎸 Cole Ritter and the Night Owls @ The Underdog, 11:30p, Free, Info
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
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