Vice Mayor Jim Shulman has served in the Nashville legislative chamber for many years. He represented District 22 from 1999-2007 and served as an at-large councilmember from 2015 until his election to Vice Mayor in 2018.
The Contributor talked with Shulman as part of a series called A Few Questions With where we interview councilmembers about their district’s most pressing issues.
Could you briefly explain the role of the Vice Mayor?
The Vice Mayor holds an elected citywide position. The main function is to run the city’s Metropolitan Council meetings, which are on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. The responsibilities of the job include naming the chairs of each committee, which is typically done every year. The Vice Mayor also names the different councilmembers to each committee.
Since you do not usually sponsor bills or even vote on bills (unless to break a tie), what influence does the vice mayor have on legislation?
That may vary by vice mayor. I try not to influence anybody on how to vote. I believe it’s the responsibility of each councilmember to understand what the issues are on particular legislation. Predominantly, the legislation that’s coming through is pretty basic with uncontested zoning matters, contracts and grants that need to be approved. But there are obviously some items that are going to require some research, some understanding, and that’s up to the individual councilmembers to work through that and work out how they feel about a particular issue. The role of the vice mayor is to make sure that we try to get the ordinance or resolution in the proper form, so that people understand what we are voting on. Then it’s up to them to vote.
An example would be the (Titans) stadium issue that’s coming up. I believe there are close to 30 amendments. So, the role of the Vice Mayor in that case is to make sure the councilmembers understand exactly what’s before them, to make sure they understand what they’re voting on, so that there is no confusion at the end where people think they voted on something else.
You have called several special committees to look further into issues. How do you decide when to call a special committee?
I called a number of special committees early on in this term. That came from talking to people around the county about their concerns and also from talking to councilmembers. We had a review on priorities of sidewalks; we had a question about Codes we wanted to look into; and we had a special committee on zip code 37208, which had seriously high incarceration rates, at one point the highest in the country.
Sometimes these issues are not brought up in a specific ordinance or resolution, and so the idea was why don’t we focus on some issues that we need to. It gave new councilmembers a chance to chair a committee.
We’ve had a couple of special committees since then, one was on civility in the [Metro Council], whether we needed a Code of Conduct and a civility statement. [Another was the East Bank Stadium Committee]. We [also] will have a series of meetings in the Public Health and Safety Committee chaired by Councilmember [Jeff] Syracuse to look specifically at school safety.
What main concerns do you hear from Nashvillians?
Overall, affordable housing is on everybody’s mind. Affordability of the city. I hear a lot about overdevelopment. Gentrification of neighborhoods is a concern. I just left a meeting about trying to make the city more age-friendly, specifically for seniors. Homelessness; we’ve been talking about that for a number of years. The homelessness issue needs a lot more study.
And then you get into some of the basic stuff and that is public safety, the increase in crime, overall education, making sure we properly fund education, and then the safety of our children in schools. We’ve all been watching, since Columbine, these school shootings, and then it happened here. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed, but the number one issue on everybody’s mind at this point is school safety — how do we keep our children safe.
You are running for a second term. If elected, what are your main goals for the next four years?
I think the idea of special committees on the first term was good. I could see [continuing] on special committees with an emphasis on specific issues. We have to keep talking about school safety. Because of state law we’re not allowed to pass laws regarding guns or gun control. But we can certainly have discussions about ideas we can send up to the state legislature. We cannot afford to stop these discussions. We have got to keep talking and try to come up with solutions.
The other thing I would say, we should always be accountable for our actions. There are lots of contracts, lots of grant funds, and we have an almost $3-billion city budget. One of the things we started talking about in the Audit Committee is accountability for the things that we’re funding. If you look at a typical Council meeting agenda, there are a number of contracts — whether it’s for transportation, public safety, etc. We pass them in Council, and then we never typically see them again. One of the things we’re talking about is to make sure that when we pass those things, we know the money is going where it’s supposed to, gets spent appropriately, and it does what it’s supposed to do.
I give you an example, we just authorized that $50 million in federal money for programs and services regarding individuals and families experiencing homelessness. So, we asked Thom Druffel, who is the chair of our Human Services Committee, to pull together a group — basically his committee — to actually make sure that those funds are accounted for, that they go to where they’re supposed to, and that they get spent properly and also expeditiously. We want somebody to stay on top of it to make sure those funds are properly authorized and spent.
That’s the type of thing that we will focus on again if I come back in a second term. Even if I don’t, I think the Council should do it, and that is, focus on the issues that are most important to the people of Nashville, and do it with more accountability, making sure things are done and the funds are spent the way they are supposed to.
How do you think the relationship between Metro and the state is going to continue to play out as you run and serve?
For the last several months, we have been in direct conflict with the state over a number of issues. Everything from decreasing the size of the Metro Council to the state’s attempt to take over the Airport Authority and the Sports Authority. Those are things we do not need to spend time on. I would say on behalf of the Metropolitan Council, we’ve been functioning just fine for 60 years, and we seem to be very efficient.
We need to get back to [focusing] on those issues that are of severe importance to the city and the state. This idea that we’re going to spend time talking about boards and commission and how large the City Council should be, to me those are things we really don’t need to be talking about. We need to be focused on the protection of our citizens, the protection of our school children, and things that really are important in dealing with people who are struggling.
Relationships are not all that good right now, but for the benefit of the citizens both of Nashville-Davidson County and Tennessee, we need to figure out ways to communicate better, so we can come up with solutions.
You are a new board member for The Contributor, and you have always cared deeply about homelessness. What would you like the city to do to help address homelessness?
Homelessness is an issue that we need to deal with. And with a lot of people’s help, and a lot of agencies around the community, there has been a significant increase in focus on trying to address the issue. There are some very strong groups in town that obviously have some different opinions on this, but the idea was to try to bring everybody together. The city needs to address this concern in some way. And it involves finding more and more affordable housing and shelter space if necessary and wraparound services.
We need to find ways to assist people. Obviously, people experience homelessness for a variety of reasons, we cannot put everybody into one group and say this is going to solve the problem. People have different issues that need to be addressed. The idea is that we may have to do this one at a time.
I think one of the most important things the government can help with is [assisting] its citizens. I’m glad that Nashville is much more focused on it, I think we need to keep focused on it, and we need to keep working through it.
Anything else?
As of today, Nashville has been through quite a lot. Not only over the last several years, but over the last several weeks. What I would have said a week and a half ago is that I think the city was going through a depression and grieving. And it still is.
The situation at the Capitol with Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson led to people coming together, particularly in Nashville behind Rep. Jones with the Council acting very, very quickly to put him back into his house seat. I think people felt good about something. Now what we need to do is to continue the ability to focus on democracy, the ability to have civil discourse, the ability to talk through issues and use that to address issues that seriously need to be addressed.
I’m not sure the city has had enough time to grieve thoroughly over what happened at the Covenant School. With everything else going on, I think it’s going to take a while to recover from that. It’s a very, very sad time in the city’s history, and we’re going to be dealing with that for a long time. But the city is resilient, and we will keep working on trying to address those issues that need to be addressed.