Because people do not live, work, or recreate in North Nashville

Last night East Nashville CM Peter Westerholm toasted to possibly bringing sexy new bus rapid transit infrastructure home to his constituents:

“[West to East Nashville] is an area that does have lots of housing, a lot of residents do reside in this area who use transit. You already have active transit users in this area, you have places of work, you have places of recreation, of entertainment — all the metrics that experts use to determine where transit projects should take place.”

And what transit toys did the North Nashville's council members bring home to us?


UPDATE: Via Mike Peden, below are the numbers that the Mayor intends to spend on bus rapid transit, east-west.

I.D. Number: 13MT0007
BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) - EAST WEST CONNECTOR - FINAL DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION AND STREETSCAPE
2013-14 $49,000,000

I.D. Number: 13MT0006
BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) BUSES - EAST WEST CONNECTOR - 10
2013-14 $10,000,000

I.D. Number: 13PW0016
EAST-WEST CONNECTOR BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) - STREETSCAPE PHASE 1
2013-14 $38,400,000

And in North Nashville:

I.D. Number: 13MT0011
BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) - CLARKSVILLE HIGHWAY AND D.B.TODD BOULEVARD
2013-14 $4,840,000

Notice that the cost for streetscape designs alone--that is design stuff like planters, landscaping, lights (likely with expensive underground power lines), attractive seating, art, etc--starts out at $38.4 million for phase 1 and continues up in the final design. There is no "design" component mentioned with the measly $4.8 million he sets aside for North Nashville BRT altogether. The cost of the east-west buses alone more than doubles what the Mayor says he intends to spend on North Nashville BRT.

It does not appear that the North Nashville council members brought much home at all from last night's budget "fight" (a term I use loosely, given the general lack of backbone in the Metro Council).

Oh, yes. The Mayor's Office finally tips its hand on North Nashville's new landfill

Karl Dean has an annoying habit of taking credit for the positives and foisting the negatives on his agencies while pulling away from the blowback. However, the Mayor is essentially the CEO of Metro Government. Anything proposed by Metro agencies is properly vetted so as not to cause surprise or egg-on-the-face. That's the fact, Jack. His staffers need to hear that posing as if beholden to water services on that which the Mayor has already signed off insults the intelligence. The Mayor supports landfilling heavy metals and petroleum in North Nashville because environmental agencies allow his administration to get away with standards below what they plan in other parts of Nashville in order to save money.

The Nashville Scene contacted the Mayor's Office, which predictably insisted that everything is fine because Metro Water tells them everything is fine:

The mayor's office tells the Scene it has "been assured" by Water Services "that they are following all necessary protocols set forth by the environmental protection agencies."

That may strike Germantown neighbors as cold comfort, though, since the city keeps citing as a positive that the incinerator-burial plan has been approved by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation — an agency whose questionable regulation has come under fire from all corners of the state .... Most recently, in April, Davidson County Chancery Court Judge Carol McCoy ruled that TDEC Commissioner Robert Martineau approved permits for a landfill near a residential neighborhood in Camden, Tenn., without sufficient evidence local authorities had followed laws requiring public notice and local approval. To North Nashvillians, that might sound discomfortingly familiar.

Greeniness: Hizzoner poses with a solar panel.

Or not. It may not strike Germantown neighbors as cold comfort because, according to the Tennessean's clipped coverage of this metastizing problem, Germantown does not care what is going below its water table, otherwise they would naturally mobilize against it.

On Twitter, reporter Steven Hale clarified his Germantown observation when I brought up the Tennessean's blanket statements about the neighborhood. His point was that Germantown neighbors probably would not be satisfied by TDEC approval when they find out about TDEC's actual record. I have to admit, I get more appalled myself the more I hear about TDEC's track record on permitting unhealthy burials elsewhere. So, how can we have the same faith that Metro Water bureaucrats place in TDEC?

But TDEC's actual record? That is something else Tennessean reporter Bobby Allyn conveniently omitted in his kowtowed newspaper article on Metro's landfill plan.


Postscript: going back over my old notes, I rediscovered that this is not the first time I've questioned reporter Allyn's objectivity and fairness.

Music City?

Boot-$cootin' Yee-Ha!

We are in the middle of the huge wealth machine for the local business community: the CMA Music Festival. The amount of money this event brings in is so big that even the most catastrophic flood in the history of the city was not allowed to delay its 2010 opening less than a month later. And in fact that year's event and the revenues it generated were promoted in many ways as resources the city used to recover.

In spite of the wealth that CMA has produced since the flood, other music venues seem to be on life support. But can we be known as "Music City" rather than just "[Country] Music City" with these recent mishaps?

• Bank of America foreclosed on the widely acclaimed Schermerhorn Symphony Center, striking many as beat down of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, which has not received adequate financial support (for a city of this size) in recent years. Nashville's upper crust lusts over the old Downtown thermal site for a publicly-funded amphitheater locale for outdoor symphony performances. But the embarrassing realities at hand have gone national even as the Mayor submits his latest capital budget. Symphonic music in Nashville is on the ropes, but does Music City care? 
• The business community and Mayor's Office responded anemically to the international scope of the National Folk Festival, which arranges 3 year stints in host cities. September 2011 was the event's first year in Music City; it became the last year of the festival. What a wasted opportunity to have been able to host the 75th anniversary folk festival this year. Instead, Nashville will be known as "The City Where the Folk Festival Died".
• The long-delayed building of the National Museum of African American Music has set adrift from its logical home on Jefferson Street, the nerve center of African American musical history in Nashville, to the prospect of a nebulous co-existence in the old Nashville Convention Center with the House of Blues. Will a narrow, commercialized focus on African American music in a Downtown oriented towards the country industry bring any more money or audiences in? Or will it just be backwatered and forgotten if it does ever materialize?

A different kind of treasure.

Museums, special events, and symphony halls are often more trusts supported by the community without regard to whether they shake the money maker or not. They provide living milestones for remembering where we have come from and touchstones for expressing values (sometimes more profoundly than money). I fear that Metro politics is so entwined with the power of money that our leaders let cultural icons die or rust away when the latter do not maximize the dollars. There is a place in cities for large-scale events that draw obscene amounts of bling (like CMA). But there is wealth to go around and to certify that less popular, but no less important musical traditions have mediums in a place that lays claim to the title, "Music City".

Update on Metro Water's petroleum pile and chemical dump

Thanks to those of you sending me emails offering to share costs of an injunction against Metro Water for risking our watershed with chemical debris and petroleum-imbued soil. While the resources look like they could be there via donors-to-the-cause, I am not willing to take time away from my family to mount an injunction as the only named plaintiff without a lawyer. Many of you know that my wife is about to start chemotherapy to treat breast cancer. Our 4th grader is going to need me, too, through this difficult time. Taking on a Metro agency in the courts by myself would not be realistic or prudent.

Organizations need to get involved in this, and frankly I'm surprised that they have turned a blind eye to the potential fouling of a major middle Tennessee water source.

I'm not expecting much from Germantown's association since they came right out in the paper and said they do not care what MWS is putting in its new landfill. Salemtown Neighbors has been curiously mum on the question. I understand that the mission of Cumberland River Compact is to focus on education and helping individuals do things on their own (rain gardens and stream clean-up) to enhance the watershed, but I cannot fathom why they might not at least express support for those of us who oppose a landfill 300 yards from the Cumberland. The North Nashville Political Forum has not issued any responses. The locally influential Interdenominational Ministers Fellowship has not given this problem any of its attention. The NAACP has also been silent. And as much as she makes a point of issuing public statements in response to various Metro actions, Sharon Hurt, Director of Jefferson Street United Merchants Partnership (JUMP) has not said a word about this. This problem has not even come up for discussion on the Nashville Neighborhoods elist, which is predictably consumed with bus rapid transit (North Nashville problems rarely get any attention there, despite recurring expectations that I blog about West Nashville problems). Associations representing developers, realtors and business owners are practically invisible.

And yet, any change, whether prompted by the Metro Council or by the courts, is going to require the help and resources of organizations, not just individuals. These organizations will rue their current decision to sit on the sidelines in the future when studies start unfolding of higher incidences of cancer in the area around the landfill or when someone accidentally digs up something toxic that Metro Water buried decades earlier like they still do around Love Canal. Speaking of Love Canal, it was the homeowners association president there who ignored criticism that she was overreacting to clay-capped chemicals that were not believed to be a problem. In the end, her opposition made the federal government's tighter restrictions on dumping a reality. I just cannot believe that Metro Water Services and the Mayor's Office can get away with burying any carcinogenic debris or soil so close to neighborhoods and Nashville's major river 35 years after Love Canal.

Likewise, I just cannot believe that so many in this growing community choose to stick their heads firmly in the sand as the chemicals are being dumped and buried with faulty oversight.

In the meantime, I am getting no responses to my emails to Metro government for action on the new landfill. Metro Water is not responding to my last email asking them to clarify where the drain right next to the petroleum pile leads. After an initial response of opposition to the landfill, CM Erica Gilmore is not corresponding with me about any work she might be doing on this matter. Add that to her failure to get back to me 3 years ago about dark residue around the area's greenway at MWS.

After two weeks of this story gaining traction, responses and outcry seem to be dying down. That is good for the bureaucrats at Metro Water who want to sneak this problem through. It is bad for those of us in the community who will have to suffer the consequences of their irresponsibility.

Irony across the street from the new MWS landfill.

An entirely reasonable conclusion: AMP would drain resources from North Nashville transit

I have been watching with interest the debate on the Nashville neighborhoods elist about the proposed bus rapid transit line down West End. At one point neighborhood leader Jennifer Pennington tries to pin down Metro Transit Authority executive Jim McAteer on the question of ridership, which transit leaders and boosters of the Mayor's "AMP" plan seem to dance around every time I'm paying attention to what they say:

Futuristic visions, no matter how grand, must not ignore the needs and wants of the current tax payers, period.

The highest ridership and need for public transportation is North Nashville. Federal funding is supposed to look at need, and in West Nashville, those who "ought to" use BRT/AMP don't want it and don't need it. Those who need improved transportation will likely get worse than what they have now, as funding from MTA gets funneled to BRT/AMP.

One of the lessons some of us learn about municipal politics (and particularly about Metro politics in the last few years) is that allocation of resources is a zero-sum game. What is spent in one place has to be taken from some other place when the annual budget is seeing increasingly smaller returns. So, I tend to agree with Jennifer. The casualties with the building of BRT/AMP will be riders who stand to gain from it were it not in West Nashville or at least not so far into West Nashville in order to run rapid transit northbound. Funding to support North Nashville ridership will be at risk with the new project because there are only so many resources to go around. "AMP" will be the new baby; other lines, the tired, old stepchildren.

Metro seems to be hurtling toward dropping $7.5 million on BRT/AMP in order to leverage $75 million from the federal government. Prospects are just as good that--if the federal dollars do come through (a big if)--that future administrations could just continue to divert more money into transit upgrades to the east-west line as a nod to the symbolics of mass transit without substance for North Nashville and its shrinking benefits. Running bus rapid transit down Charlotte Pike makes more sense due to service to greater potential ridership, but Charlotte is not nearly as sexy or as marketable as is the West End-Vandy "brand".

Finally, notice that Mayor Karl Dean refuses to make any promises to North Nashville about transit upgrades on the horizon. I'll wager he does not because he will not want to be accused of breaking those promises in any future run for higher office. AMP could be his signature transit project with which to campaign (with an assist from Washington DC). He has doubled down on West Nashville by ignoring the need for and refusing commitments to similar transit upgrades in North Nashville.

While I generally support quality mass transit, I cannot support BRT/AMP as it stands with no firm commitment to points north. There is little in this plan for us.

You are so Nashville if you give Midtown's new residents a $3,000,000 fitness center and Salemtown's new residents a cheap landfill

While we here in the North End are forced to abide a new clay-capped carcinogenic landfill via Metro Water, look what more affluent Midtown gets to enjoy: an expensive new fitness center at the Sportsplex.

The fitness center project comes on the heels of several proposed projects that will bring hundreds of new residents to Midtown. Southern Land Co. is building the six-story Elliston23 apartment and retail project at 2300 Elliston Place. Developer Tony Giarratana and an equity partner recently acquired two parcels at Elliston Place and 21st Avenue with plans to build apartments.

“When the sportsplex was completed, a fitness center was an afterthought,” said Tim Netsch, planning superintendent with Metro Parks.

 “It’s always been very popular, but small. Midtown is going to continue to grow with higher density and more residential. We thought it should be a priority to provide a new facility.”

West Nashville stands to get both bus rapid transit (with not a single guarantee for the future of lines along Charlotte Pike or in North Nashville) and a new fitness center to stay healthy, as if those people cannot already afford their own transportation and physical trainers. As if this were more than throwing money at sexy signature projects that Nashville does not need.

What do we get? Something else Nashville does not need: Metro Water's waste products buried along our watershed.

I'm sure Karl Dean's apologists will insist that Metro should pay for amenities for the bold and beautiful class along West End first, so that the wealth can fan out from there and trickle down to the third-class citizenry in North Nashville. Likewise, I can hear them insist that heavy metals and fuel contaminates have to be stored somewhere, and it sure won't be next to brand new brick-and-mortar projects along our city's western border.

Where has the stormwater runoff from Metro Water's toxic petroleum pile flowed in the last 10 years?

News that Metro Water Services has allowed fuel-contaminated soil to sit on a parking lot near my home for the last decade (and has now started to bury that soil underground nearby) got me to wondering where all the run-off from that soil went over the years. I have strolled the Downtown Connector Greenway that runs through the plant for as long as it has been open and I remember seeing a ravine and a drain near the parking lot where the pile is kept.

Look at the photos I recently took below that move progressively closer to the drain. The pile of petroleum soil sits but a few yards uphill from the drain at the bottom of the ravine. Where does the drain carry the stormwater from the parking lot? If it is a storm drain, it goes straight to the river. How much petroleum has been washed out of the pile and into the Cumberland River (assuming it is a storm drain) in the last 10 years?

Petroleum pile on the left in the photo; ravine on the right.

Ravine below the treeline; petroleum pile behind treeline.

Ravine with drain, downhill from petroleum pile.

If this is a stormwater drain, it goes to the river.

Again, I do not know for fact whether the drain that captures the pile's stormwater run-off carries the water straight to the Cumberland, or whether the water is contained below ground and remediated before it is sent to the Cumberland. If it is untreated stormwater, Metro Water has likely been polluting the Cumberland for 10 years by allowing the soil to stay heaped on the parking lot beside the ravine.

The situation would be better if the drain leads to some form of containment tank that keeps the untreated water from flowing to the Cumberland. Except that it would not have been better in May 2010. The photo below show that the ravine was inundated with floodwaters that come right up to the foot of the petroleum pile. If the drain leads to containment, that containment was overwhelmed by rising floodwaters and whatever was in it likely came out.

May 3, 2010 aerial photo of flooded ravine, inundated drain.

Metro Water has so many storm drains in the area, and I'm betting that the ravine was designed to send stormwater straight to the river. If that is the case, I hope that MWS has been monitoring the levels of uncontained petroleum that likely would have also spilled from the contaminated soil it allowed to remain for so long exposed during rainy periods.