Metro Council At

Staff Reporter

Metro Councilmember Russ Pulley

As of this writing, 13 candidates have qualified to run for at-large seats on the Metro Council, with 11 more having pulled petitions ahead of this week's ballot deadline.

The campaign for at-large is unique. Because the top five vote-getters win, candidates typically remain positive, and surprising candidates can sneak into the winners’ circle.

Early voting for Metro Council and mayoral elections starts July 14, with Election Day following on Aug. 3. A runoff, if needed, would come in September.

Our first Q&A with an at-large candidate is with Russ Pulley, who has spent two terms representing District 25 in Green Hills. The interview has been edited for length.

I'm not really getting in that race. It's important to let them battle it out. If you ask me today who I'm going to vote for, I don't know that I could honestly give you an answer to that question. I'm listening to what they have to say.

Things that stand out to me are, we have a terribly fractured relationship with the state. That's one thing that would be great, is if we had a mayor that led the charge to try and rebuild that. We don't need somebody that's going to acquiesce to the state. That's certainly not what I want to see happen at all. If a mayor had [personal relationships] with the governor, and with the leaders in the House and the Senate, it's a little harder to come and do some of the things they do to us. Maybe I'm naive, but I think that's important and that can help us with that relationship with the state.

I also think it's been almost six years since we've had our transit referendum, and I think that's too long. I love the fact that we're a growing city, and we are continuing to grow. In the area of growing responsibly, one of the areas we're sorely lacking is infrastructure and transit.

We don't have a transit system that's used like other comparable cities do. We need to address that in a pretty major way. The IMPROVE Act gives us ways to leverage state and federal funding to do so, and I just think it's high time we get a mayor in there to lead the charge to get that rolling and get a good solid transit plan on the books.

No. We're adding 1 percent [hotel tax] for the stadium and we can add more. Under the IMPROVE Act, as I recall, we leverage rental car tax and other taxes that we have yet to tap into. The hotel-motel tax and sales tax were two of the revenue funding streams for the new stadium. My position on the stadium came down to a pretty simple formula. Shiny new stadium has not got anything to do with my position on that. My position came down to what was best for our taxpayers.

When you look at the nuts and bolts of the current deal we have, it's a really bad deal that has the potential to seriously impact our taxpayers for years to come. Getting out of that deal was a priority for me. All that falls on the shoulders of the Davidson County taxpayers. For me, it came down to revenue bonds for a new stadium with potential for revenue streams that don't come with the old one, versus general obligation bonds and there's no telling how much money that could cost us.

I got lots of opinions. There was the mayor's office. The team, they provide us their information, I know it's one-sided. The administration will provide us additional information. We got information from the lawyers who are representing Metro. I looked at reports from VSG. If you look at the renovation costs, the high-end estimate was $1.9 billion, and the low-end estimates, from people who were really against the stadium, were around $300 million. My perspective is I did my best to look at the numbers in the framework of what is best for our taxpayer, and I really felt that if we hung on to this deal we're in now, we would be in a lot worse shape financially, and our taxpayers were going to carry the burden of that obligation.

If I were to be part of the next body I would certainly push to see the affordability component exercised there. What you're going to have here is a really nice tract of land we need to make sure is developed in the best interest of the city, which will be done by private developers. There's been some talk of [tax-increment financing] money. I think we need to manage that well, so that we can make sure to get our best bang for the buck. There's been a lot of talk about infrastructure costs associated with that particular development. If we're going to incentivize developers, that incentive needs to come with them absorbing a significant amount of those infrastructure costs.

I spent 34 years in law enforcement. Naturally, I come to the council with a perspective that puts me on that side of the badge. I also know what the culture was like then, and I know what our culture has shifted to now, and I know the changes, from the perspective of someone who has done that, some of the changes that need to be made. I don't come at this from the perspective of police are always perfect, not at all.

What I keep hearing from my constituents [in Green Hills] over and over and over is they want police to increase patrols. I firmly believe we need a fully funded police department, just like we do fully funded schools.

Things that people were arguing about where police have shortcomings, the examples I was given are in police departments elsewhere. I know we had the Hambrick and the Clemmons shootings. Some of those things [in other cities] made me cringe. When I saw the Tyre Nichols video, that right there made me think those guys were gangsters.

Although they tend to be, in my estimation, sometimes isolated, I think at the time, in the 2020 cycle, [Steve] Anderson was still our chief, and we had some culture issues within the framework of the police department that needed to be fixed. I was a little skeptical that [John] Drake would be the guy to fix them, because Drake comes from the police department and he was part of that culture. But I've been quite frankly impressed with the changes he's made.

The things people are saying, defund the police and put the money toward other things like mental health, I couldn't bridge the gap. We've got a serious problem here. Youth gang violence was really on the rise, and we experienced some of that here in Green Hills. All the homicides we experience here in Nashville throughout the city, I just couldn't become convinced that moving money away from the police department, putting it to these other areas, were going to help solve that problem.

I don't know if this is politically the right thing to say to you, but no, I don't. As a district councilmember, my focus was the 17,500 people who are in my district. For going on eight years now, that's been my focus. That left me little time for countywide policy matters, although I did engage in a few.

To say to you that I know the city of Nashville, I know what the needs are throughout the city, I can't honestly tell you I do. What I want to do as an at-large councilmember is what I'm doing now. I'm going to other parts of the city and I'm meeting with people, I'm going to community meetings. I want to educate people who don't know me on who I am. I need to learn what's important to people.

Bill Barnes was a friend of mine. We served in a neighborhood association together. I spent hours in Bill Barnes' living room talking with Bill, having him teach me about this issue. I learned so much from those conversations about inclusionary zoning, deconcentration of poverty and affordability and all of the work Bill Barnes did. I really felt like I was under-educated on those issues. There was an inclusionary zoning bill right after Bill died, and ultimately it got preempted by the state, but I was a strong supporter of that bill. The concepts behind Envision Sudekum-Napier and Envision Cayce are very similar to what Bill Barnes espoused in the area of inclusionary zoning.

These projects with respect to inclusionary zoning, like the Envision Cayce and Envision Sudekum-Napier, are critical, and I'm glad to see us directly involved in those. I also think we've done a pretty good job of investing in the Barnes Fund. We're upping the amount of money we give there, and that enables us to increase the affordable housing stock that we're able to create annually. We're not going to get where the estimates say we need to be, but we're putting 4,000 units a year on the ground, and that's going to help us get there. The more money we can inject in this, we should.

We've got a ton of protections in this bill, more so than I'd imagine anyone else in the country. We can't hold on to the data very long at all. The police department, they're very restricted in how much access and for how long they have this data. It's a helpful tool for the police, in terms of their effectiveness in solving many crimes. I asked the other side to provide me data where these things are legitimate concerns. I just didn't get compelling arguments that showed me these things we're going on.

Some people were saying it would hurt marginalized communities, and people in those communities would come to me and say, "Yeah we want this." The incredible restrictions we ended up putting on this bill, along with the impacts, and the fact that we're really on the hook for a six-month pilot, made it really easy to support this bill.

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