Personnel Boundaries
A confusing protrusion added to District 5 appears to be a gerrymandering attempt by term-limited Council Member Nancy VanReece.
Because of the nature of this week’s post, Nicole (@startleseasily) recused herself from editorial duties: “I’m fucking terrible with maps and I don’t understand geography.” We apologize for any resulting decrease in quality.
Metro’s Planning Department has worked through three maps over the past month as it redistricts Nashville. These maps would restructure Metro council districts, establishing new boundaries for the 2023 Council races. You can find write-ups about the process more broadly here and here. See all the maps and proposals here. I want to focus on two weird things happening in District 5 (represented by Sean Parker). D5 has been hit hard by gentrification thanks to a rash of development under the previous CM and state laws that put individual property rights over community needs. It’s full of new builds and housing instability. It’s home to historically black neighborhoods, a critical transportation corridor, and River North, Oracle’s planned corporate campus.
Metro Planning uses new census data to adjust districts based on population changes in the city to maintain fair representation. For example, South Nashville is growing and will likely pick up District 8 from Madison, currently represented by Nancy VanReece, where population has grown comparatively less. In its redraws, Metro Planning balances these population shifts with common-sense constraints like historic boundaries, natural markers like arterial roads/highways/bodies of water, neighborhood contiguity, and feedback from residents. Metro elections are technically non-partisan and, unlike redistricting at the state and federal levels, we task the Planning Department (not elected officials) with redrawing the map.. Theoretically it is a procedure free from party considerations and based on objective criteria. In practice, boundaries of neighborhoods are subjective. People can be sliced, padded, or subtracted in different places without much justification other than “population balancing.” It’s impossible to know for sure the complete reasons for decisions made, but when electeds get involved, they leave clues. Such is the case with VanReece and D5.
District 5 is a neat polygon that includes all of McFerrin and Cleveland Park and East Bank/River North and runs up past Trinity Lane, represented by first-term CM Sean Parker. Neighboring CM Nancy VanReece, who will lose her district in the redraw, has become involved in D5’s new borders to ensure that they include a tiny slice of Madison where her friend and potential political successor Lisa Smith lives.
VanReece represents District 8, which comprises East Nashville, Inglewood, Madison. She is term-limited and can’t run for this district again in 2023. Nonetheless, she intervened in Planning’s process to ensure the new D5 included a tiny neighborhood in Madison across Briley Parkway. There was, at the time, not a clear reason why this neighborhood mattered more than any other, but a few more contextual clues point to one potential explanation. Lisa Smith, now a resident in VanReece’s district who was appointed to Metro’s Solid Waste Board in 2019 with the support of VanReece, lives in this tiny slice of Madison according to Smith’s publicly listed board contact information. Serving on a board, a common entrée before running for council, is one way electeds can set up their successors.
Planning’s first redraw, which wasn’t shared with the public, stretched D5 way north. It split up or cut out contiguous East Nashville neighborhoods like McFerrin Park and Maxwell Heights. But it included Smith’s address in Madison. At the time, VanReece indicated that she was okay with this redraw of Parker’s district because it included someone she would support against Parker, according to a source.
Planning’s first official release, Map A, cut Smith out. VanReece intervened directly with Planning and asked for an extension to include Smith’s neighborhood. She even tweeted about it. Map B added Smith back to D5. When asked specifically about this area, VanReece explained her reasoning this way: “I asked to push it to Due West to ensure the Skyline Ridge projects and Dickerson Pike corridor stayed consistent.”
Again, it’s hard to know why some people think some neighborhoods are important for consistency and others aren’t. Or why some boundaries are natural and others can be breached. Why not display the same concern about McFerrin Park in the first plan? Or scrutinize Map A’s treatment of the Gallatin corridor? Or question the effects of district boundaries in Inglewood, which includes VanReece’s current constituency? VanReece’s hyper-specific concerns about her potential protege’s neighborhood make it hard not to see some element of political calculus at play.
Either way, District 5 will almost certainly lose its biggest corporate power center in River North. As Oracle’s corporate campus spawns slowly over the next few years, the entire East Bank is poised to be under the purview of D19 and its sole councilperson. Consolidating the East Bank with downtown aligns with the emerging vision for the urban core. Decisions out of the Mayor’s Office and Metro, like these East Bank design principles and the $20m mystery spine road, are the next steps in developing the area towards more commercial, residential, and entertainment uses. Carl Icahn’s massive scrapyard site is the plot hole here and, according to the Nashville Business Journal, Icahn has started working with Brookfield Properties (whose previous work includes Fifth + Broadway) while talks with Cooper stall.
Taking the East Bank out of Parker’s district would also take the East out of the Bank. The area would be controlled from across the Cumberland rather than by surrounding neighborhoods. Without any population to account for, the decision should, theoretically, defer to natural boundaries…. Like a river.
“There’s little to no population in the East Bank,” said Parker in a text. “I’m hoping that Planning will weigh historical contiguity, communities of interest, and overwhelming public comment in favor of keeping the East Bank in East districts.”
Instead, lines around the East Bank will determine who gets oversight over a critical piece in the emerging plan for Nashville to concentrate public investment in the urban core. In the past two years, stakeholders like John Cooper, Oracle, and the Titans have advanced this vision publicly and privately. Whatever backroom conversations did or didn’t happen, cutting the East Bank out of D5 serves the same vision.
These two incidents happen at the opposite end of a district but they are deeply connected. One cuts neighbors out of decision-making and the other draws a politician into a race. Both concern Parker. Both would be troubling results of a process insulated from politics or specific interests.