These Old Bones
👻 Hospital bones, grocery treats, & budgetary ghosts · Governor’s race roundup: it's getting personal · 24 charged in cartel-linked drug ring in Middle TN · Much more!
Voting & TN U.S. Congressional District lookup Early voting has ended. Use your address to find your new congressional district here, find voting information and a sample ballot here, and take a look at the Constitutional amendments here.
Early Voting Tracker Early voting ended Thursday. See the final counts on our tracker. (Take a look)
Like what we do? Forward us to a friend
The Mayor's media roundtable: Nashville General’s looking for new bones, a grocery tax treat, and a budgetary ghost story.
From Megan Podsiedlik
Nashville's 136-year-old hospital looks for a new body During today’s media roundtable, Mayor Freddie O’Connell announced a vision committee to study Nashville General Hospital’s future, including whether it needs a new building or a new location. He wants recommendations in six to eight months and says he has “no predetermined outcome.”
Since 1998, the hospital has leased Meharry’s former Hubbard Hospital building, an aging facility on the college’s campus. O’Connell said the committee will weigh patient needs, possible healthcare deserts, and Metro-owned land when putting together a plan forward. Nashville General was originally established in 1890 as "City Hospital" and operated with 60 beds, one physician, six nurses, and cost $30,000 to build.
Trick or treat: grocery tax break starts the day after Halloween Mayor O’Connell’s grocery tax cut starts Sunday, November 1. “Over the course of the year, that savings will add up for most families to what amounts to basically an extra free trip to the grocery store,” said O’Connell during today’s media roundtable. If you stocked up on Halloween treats before the cut, you didn’t miss a thing: the reduction doesn’t apply to candy, alcohol, tobacco, dietary supplements, or prepared food.
The ghost of budgets' future The grocery tax cut represents between $8 and $9 million in direct economic relief for Nashvillians. O’Connell says the reduction in revenue resulting from the cut “was a challenging amount because it does amount to a reduction in our ability to capture revenue with a very limited set of tools to put revenue into public services and public resources.”
While the mayor intends to make the cut permanent, he’s unsure whether Metro can sustain or increase it without some help from the state. “There have been a couple different approaches to how the state has considered grocery taxes, and going back just a few years, the state did do a statewide reduction in the grocery tax,” said O’Connell. “I'd love for them to continue doing that, to maybe even zero it out.”
“We are still projecting, for FY ‘28, pretty flat revenues given what we know about macroeconomic conditions,” continued O’Connell. “FY ‘28 will feel maybe as tight as any budget we've had this term.” Not exactly a treat heading into next year’s budget season.
HEADLINES
- 🗳️ Governor’s Race Roundup: During a recent MTSU candidate forum, Democratic nominee Jerri Green said she was Cyntoia Brown Long’s “first lawyer.” Brown Long was 16 and being trafficked in 2004 when she shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville man who had paid to have sex with her. She said she feared for her life. She was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison. Then-Governor Bill Haslam granted her clemency in 2019. Brown Long responded to Green’s claim by calling her a “liar,” saying she never met Green and had one attorney, former public defender Kathy Sinback. Green says she worked the case as Sinback’s second chair about 20 years ago under a different last name. Sinback declined to comment, and the juvenile case file isn’t public. (Post)
Separately, the Tennessee Star obtained a 2020 Washington County 911 call from a woman who identified herself as the wife of independent candidate David Hatley. She told the dispatcher Hatley had called to say he’d taken a bunch of pills and told her to check her email, where she found a suicide letter he’d written to her and others. Hatley didn’t deny being the subject of the call and blamed Senator Marsha Blackburn for the audio surfacing. (TN Star) - 💊 24 charged in alleged Sinaloa Cartel-linked drug ring across Middle Tennessee
Federal prosecutors filed a 33-count indictment against 24 people accusing them of moving hundreds of kilos of illegal drugs through Middle Tennessee and laundering millions back to suppliers in Mexico to a group known as “the Office.” Investigators seized more than 500 kilos of meth, 20 kilos of fentanyl, 60 kilos of cocaine, more than $375,000 in cash, multiple guns, and five vehicles. Two alleged leaders, Humberto Morales and Jose Martin Perez, are accused of running the operation from inside TDOC prisons, mostly over Signal. Sixteen defendants are already in state custody, and prosecutors want all 24 held until trial. (WSMV) - 🚒 Three Nashville firefighters resign after on-duty drinking allegations
Just after midnight October 27, a manager at Dierks Bentley’s Whiskey Row called police after three men in NFD T-shirts carrying yellow radios were seen at the bar. The firefighters, Athams Davis, Griffin Hunter, and Daniel Wrenn, told officers they were on duty and denied drinking. The bartender said she served them two vodka-Red Bulls and a water, paid for on Wrenn’s card. A fire captain put them on administrative duty that night, and resigned by October 28. (Tennessean) - ⚖️ Governor Lee expects Christa Pike’s death sentence to stand after failed execution
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer and survived two doses of the lethal injection drug in September. When asked Wednesday whether the state would try again or commute her sentence, Governor Bill Lee said he suspects it will stay the same “unless determined otherwise by the courts.” Pike is back in prison and can now walk and speak in full sentences. Lee has paused executions through the end of the year, and he expects to name a replacement within days for TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada, who resigned after the botched execution. (WSMV)
✹ EARLY VOTING TRACKER
🗳️ Who's Voting Where Thursday was the last day of early voting. Final unofficial totals after all 14 days: 1,280,642 early votes statewide, 148,556 in Davidson County. Our early voting tracker has the final counts for all 95 counties, compared with the 2022 and 2018 midterms. Pick your county or look at the whole state to see where turnout landed (See the tracker)
✹ GHOSTS
The seventeenth installment in Tales from the Westside
From Rachel Gladstone
When you move into an old house, you expect to hear creaks and pops and things that go bump in the night. It takes a while to acclimate to these sounds, which, if you’ve watched any of the Poltergeist movies, ever, sends your imagination to places you wish it wouldn’t go. Eventually time does its job, and these sounds weave themselves into the fabric of your life, giving your imagination the rest it deserves. But then, on a random Friday night, there’s a shift in the space-time continuum, and you come face-to-face with a fully formed apparition who’s chillin’ on the sofa in your sitting room, and it totally freaks you out!
To be clear, this wasn’t the first time I felt this spirit hanging around. As a matter of fact, he’s been here for as long as I can remember. I’d heard stories of him materializing in front of other people, but he’d never appeared to me, which made me feel a little left out. But that feeling was outweighed by gratitude because I scare easily and ghosts are not my favorite thing.
In order to give you the full story, I think we need to travel back to 2001 when my then-husband and I bought the 1913 Central-Hall Bungalow I still call home. I quickly became friends with the woman and her two young daughters who lived next door in a house identical to mine. One evening, while sipping wine on my porch, she told me about the ghost that lived in her house and regularly appeared to her eldest daughter who saw dead people, like the kid in The Sixth Sense, only this was not a movie.
DEVELOPMENT
- In-N-Out opened its nearly 300-job Eastern U.S. corporate office in Franklin, a $126M project on, naturally, Double Double Drive. (NBJ)
- Philips Plaza’s owners, TC Investment Holdings and Scott Borchetta, plan to turn the 21-story downtown tower into a 360-room hotel opening spring 2028, ahead of the Super Bowl. (NBJ)
- Eight developers, including Giarratana, Lincoln Property and LAZ Parking, filed notices of intent on 10 acres of state-owned downtown parking lots, including the Polk Building/TPAC site; Edgemoor has since said it won’t respond. Full responses are due Nov. 23. (Post)
✹ PAMPHLETEER TOOLS
Pamphleteer Tools Council Watch tells you who funds your councilmember and how they vote. The Property Tax Calculator tells you what that cost you.
THINGS TO DO
View our calendar for the week 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
🎃 A Charlie Brown Halloween @ Rudy's Jazz Room, 6p, $20, Info
🎸 Neko Case & Friends @ Ryman Auditorium, 7p, $87, Info
🎻 Musical Landscapes from Bohemia to America @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, $43, Info
🎸 Riley Green @ The Pinnacle, 8:30p, $122, Info
🎸 Zach Top @ Bridgestone Arena, 8p, $59.50, Info
🎸 Country Club Day ft. The Cowpokes @ Acme Feed & Seed, 12:30p, Free, Info
🎸 Kelley's Heroes @ Robert's Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
SATURDAY
🎸 Beck @ The Truth, 8p, $69, Info
🎸 Thundercat @ Marathon Music Works, 8p, $55.29, Info
🎸 Lauren Mascitti Halloween Show @ Station Inn, 9p, $25, Info
🎸 Kelley's Heroes @ Robert's Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info
SUNDAY
🎻 Musical Landscapes from Bohemia to America @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 2p, $43, Info
🪕 Bluegrass Jam @ Station Inn, 7p, Free, Info
+ a night for musicians and singers from all over the world to gather and enjoy making music together
🪕 Sundays Between with Easy Green @ Tennessee Brew Works, 1p, Info
+ a fusion of two beloved musical genres – Bluegrass and the iconic sounds of the Grateful Dead!
📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
The Pamphleteer
Today's newsletter is brought to you by Davis Hunt, Megan Podsiedlik, and Camelia Brennan.