A Few Questions With

A Few Questions with at-large Councilmember Bob Mendes

BY JUDITH TACKETT

Bob Mendes is one of the most powerful at-large councilmembers who leads the new East Bank Stadium Committee. He has 11 months left in his second term and says he is not running for any office in 2023.

The Contributor talked with Mendes as part of a series called A Few Questions With where we interview councilmembers about their district’s most pressing issues.

As an at-large councilmember you represent the entirety of Davidson County. What are the top issues you hear about from Nashvillians?

Nashville is such a big place with 700,000 people, so you hear different things from different people in different places of the county. People everywhere want a safe place to live for themselves and their family, a fair chance for a good education, and a decent job. In Nashville, we’ve had trouble with the garbage pickup. People want to get their garbage picked up on time, and they don’t want to be in traffic for too long. For all the fancy things we have in Nashville, people want for government to provide and protect these basic services, so they can have confidence that they and their kids can enjoy a good quality of life.

You chair the Metro Council’s East Bank Stadium Committee. What’s the purpose of this committee and where do discussions stand?

The Vice Mayor set up the committee in June and asked me to be the chair anticipating that the Mayor and the Tennessee Titans would soon be wrapping up their private negotiation and let the rest of us know what the deal is that they’re proposing.

The Mayor and the team took longer than anticipated. On Oct. 20, they finally delivered a 27-page, unsigned, non-binding term sheet for consideration by the Metro Council. The non-binding term sheet is basically an outline for a proposed deal to build a new $2.1 billion enclosed football stadium, to capture hundreds of millions of dollars of additional tax revenue to pay for future stadium improvements, and to have 100 acres of high-rise development around the football stadium to help pay for it all.

Through the summer, the goal of the committee was to gather enough information for the public and the Council to make an informed decision about whether to support a deal or not when it comes before us. Now that we have the non-binding term sheet in front of us, the committee has scheduled 12 meetings through mid-December for us all to learn more about the proposal.

In your blog, you say that the stadium development cannot be seen apart from the overall East Bank development. Can you highlight some of the main opportunities and concerns you see for this development?

First of all, the stadium and the East Bank development are completely interlocked together.

As far as the concerns, pro-football attendance is typically an upper-middle-class hobby. It costs more than $500 per game for a family of four to attend. Not everybody can do that, and there is a question about whether this is a worthwhile spending of public tax dollars. We’re told it will be much more than $1 billion of state and local tax dollars committed to a stadium that will be the biggest ever in the history of the United States. That's not including an additional hundreds of millions of tax dollars being captured for future stadium improvements. So, it’s a big deal. And then, anybody who’s been in Nashville since at least the 2010 flood knows that we have to be worried about flooding on the East Bank.

As far as opportunities, the team and the Mayor’s Office are quick to point out that the city is already committed and obligated to pay a certain amount for the existing football stadium. With a new deal, we’re talking about the potential to move our current commitment where we use mostly property tax dollars to pay for the stadium and switch it over to using mostly sales tax dollars to pay for a new stadium. The argument will be there is a better opportunity to switch how we pay for it.

The Mayor talks about building Nashville’s next great neighborhood and some view that as an opportunity. Some people wonder what our commitment is versus [existing] neighborhoods and whether we should build a new neighborhood or not.

And the Mayor’s Office has been clear that they think there are opportunities to help with the transit network because the East Bank is a blank slate because it’s mostly been floodplain and parking lots before now. So, they think there is a traffic or transit opportunity.

Now that we are about a week or so into seeing the proposed non-binding terms, we can start to get a better sense of what the opportunities and concerns are.

You are in your last year of the Metro Council; do you have a major goal you would like to see through this year?

It’s on my mind, I’m down to 11 months. Clearly the stadium and East Bank conversation. It’s the biggest deal that Metro has ever worked on. I have a lot of energy and focus as an at-large member on that.

I am also keenly aware that while term limits have a benefit of getting fresh thoughts and fresh ideas, there is also a substantial downside to term limits. Especially in this particular era. In my seven years in office, I’ve seen three mayors, three vice mayors, three legal directors, three finance directors, three Council directors, and due to that turnover, I’ve got as much experience and knowledge at the top levels of Metro as anybody there is, and I’m walking out the door in 11 months. So, it’s on my mind to try to do what I can to encourage first-term councilmembers to take the lead on things. I try to be a resource for them and pass along as much knowledge as possible. We all want Nashville to be a set of interconnected neighborhoods where people can live and learn, work and play, and live their lives. Yet with turnover in government it’s easy for progress to go in fits and starts.

And finally, what are some potential solutions to homelessness you would like the city to implement?

It’s hard to know where to start. I get concerned that homelessness over the years has been more a political football and talking point than an actual top priority to address. Over a generation and a half, the city has accomplished whatever its top priority was. Whether it was building Downtown or a convention center or shifting to tourism, now shifting to the East Bank. The city has a demonstrated success rate of accomplishing of whatever its number one objective is.

That begs a lot of questions about whether homelessness has ever been a top priority any time recently. I think the advocate community understands what needs to happen. My understanding is that the informed Housing First approach that involves a genuine access to a full range of services depending on the needs of the person works. It’s labor intensive, it’s time intensive, it’s money intensive. But that’s what organizations that have success do. And I don’t know that as much energy has ever been put into that as into a new building. You know, everything is important, but we have to have a number one priority somewhere. So, to me, I feel like the solutions are out there, but I am just not sure the priority has ever been made to make it happen.