There are eight candidates recognized as viable in the city’s race for mayor this year. Some are well-known to the public, with records of achievement in governmental and other public spheres. Others, not so well-known, have money to pour into their races to rectify that problem.
The field ranges across metrics of gender, race, and political party. Individually and collectively, the candidates exude a sense of optimism about the city and its future, though their evident pride at its impressive recent successes is balanced by a concern about maintaining various kinds of equilibrium, including fiscal, going forward.
These candidates are nothing if not transparent. Most of them have been appearing regularly at a series of televised and in-person events, and …
At this point it may have become obvious to sentient readers that the city whose mayoral race we are describing is not Memphis. It is Nashville, the sister city and state capital a three-hour drive from here up I-40.
Pride? Optimism? Transparency? Not so much in the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race, where the modest number of public forums has been spottily attended, both by candidates and by audiences, and focused on the doldrums of public life — poverty, economic stagnation, educational failure, inequities and fallings-short of various kinds, and crime, crime, crime.
Nashville has its problems, also, including aspects of those just mentioned, which rage in the Bluff City like out-of-control dumpster fires. But, with their August 3rd city election looming, the essential problem that Nashville’s mayoral candidates are vexed by can be summed up in such conundrum as: “What else can we afford to pay for out of our tourist bounty?”
Dig it: The Nashville City Council has already agreed to spring for the city’s share of a fancy new enclosed $2.1 billion football stadium to house the NFL’s Titans. Now, the city is also meditating on developing an in-city state-of-the-art driving track suitable for prime events on the NASCAR circuit.
To be sure, there are Nashvillians (and mayoral candidates) who wonder if the city is overextending itself. An ad hoc group called CARE (Citizens Against Racetrack Expansion) says via a public petition — “We respectfully ask: How does spending millions of dollars to bring in bigger, louder NASCAR races solve the most pressing concerns of Nashville? Doubling down on turning Nashville into a Las Vegas-style destination for tourists ignores the desires and needs of a vast majority of our city residents.”
CARE goes so far as to say that “pressing issues like increasing affordable housing, fixing decaying infrastructure and public transit, and approaching the problems of homelessness and crime need our attention and funding urgently.”
Now we’re talking. So, in some ways Nashville, for all its plethora of building cranes and new skyscrapers and ongoing city projects and point-of-origin TV spectaculars, may still have some major issues in common with the struggling city to the west on the banks of the Mississippi?
We know that it does. Both cities inhabit home-rule counties and, as such, have another concern in common: that of maintaining local options in education, health, social policy, what-have-you in the face of an ever-encroaching state government. More on this anon.
Greg Cravens