Bob Mendes served Nashville as an at-large member of Metro Council from 2015-2023, followed by a two-year stint as the Chief Development Officer in the Mayor’s Office. In October 2025, he stepped away from the Mayor’s Office and returned to private practice.
As an attorney, Mendes concentrated his law practice on the areas of commercial litigation, business bankruptcy, and business planning. He took a pause when he accepted the position under Mayor Freddie O’Connell and helped lay the foundation for Nashville’s East Bank redevelopment and other large development deals, including among them the Rivergate Mall, the Global Mall and a new fire facility at Dolly Parton’s downtown hotel.
Looking at your history working for the city of Nashville, you could be considered a poster child for public service. How would you define public service?
Public service comes in a lot of different forms. When people volunteer at their church or at any nonprofit, that’s a form of public service. In elected office and the Mayor’s Office, there’s more visibility to it. But fundamentally, whether people’s public service comes in the form of tutoring at the school or volunteering at church or being involved in politics, it all comes down to us working together to make our community better for all of us.
In the current political climate we live in, is public service still alive
It’s challenging, for sure. In the political spectrum, it’s hard to be effective if you don’t take positions on difficult topics. And if you take positions on difficult topics, you’re going to run the risk of antagonizing [and] polarizing some group of people. It’s very acute and difficult at this time.
But if you read through American history and history of other parts of the world, I don’t know if there’s been a time where active political effort has been easy necessarily, but it definitely seems like there’s a lot of challenges these days. I think there is a significant risk from talking to friends and my own experience. You’ve got to take care of yourself and your family if you’re going to be involved in the rough and tumble of politics these days. Otherwise, people run the risk of getting burnt out.
In the current divisive political climate — from the federal, state, and local perspectives — what would you like to see local politicians do better to counteract some of that penetrating divisiveness that we see?
In Nashville, we’re trying to operate a successful city that happens to be predominantly Democratic voting [in] a supermajority Republican state and majority [red] federal government.
For local politicians, it is extremely challenging because you only really get to fundamentally choose one of three paths: You can appease the supermajority and run the risk of antagonizing the local population. You can be all in for all progressive all the time and incur the wrath of the supermajority. Or you can try to walk the middle and low-grade: annoy everybody all the time. That’s a little bit reductionist, but those are the three fundamental paths available to people trying to run a blue city in a supermajority red state right now.
My wish would be that people would be transparent about which path they were on, because I think it’s a value judgment. If you want to choose to appease the supermajority because peace and harmony for the city is maximized and that’s good for us. And so I’m going to appease the supermajority, let me say so.
Or alternatively, if your position is, “Hey, I’m principled, like I’m going to stick hard to principled progressive values and if the wrath is incurred, that’s their choice, not our choice,” say so.
And if you’re trying to walk the middle and be a little bit annoying to everybody, say so.
I think we’d be better off if political positions came with sort of an explanation of where people are trying to be on that spectrum.
If you answer that question for yourself, which path would you be on?
Well, I’m retired from government. You know, from the time that I was in the [Metro] Council, I became a believer that it’s really hard to have an opinion about what you would do if you don’t have to actually do it.
I know that as a council member, I was typically on the standing up for the values that I think the majority of the people in the city believe in. That was the position I took as a Council member. I think in the executive branch, in the Mayor’s Office, it’s more difficult to do that.
I think all the mayors through the course of the supermajority over the last decade have perhaps been more circumspect in the Mayor’s Office than they were while they were in the Council. I think we’ve seen that straight across the board. Some people could criticize that as, “Hey, you’re not the same person you were when you were on the Council.” But by the same token, you went from having one out of 40 votes to being the Mayor. And you’re fundamentally responsible whether you’re going to incur the wrath of the state or not. And it’s a different job.
So it’s hard for me, not holding a position in government, to say what I would do because I’m not in that position anymore.
What were some things that surprised you when you shifted from the legislative branch of local government to the executive branch?
I don’t know if there were surprises. If anything, it’s like people have an idea of what parenthood is going to be, but then you live it, and even though you knew it was coming, it just feels different.
The biggest difference is that [Metro] Council is a policymaking body. We could talk about something for a year and a half before a law gets passed. And in the Mayor’s Office you can get more stuff done in the real world in one week than you might be able to do in six months in the Council. Because you’ve got the entire executive branch, the entire government, reporting up to the Mayor’s Office, things move at a quicker pace there.
Again, not to say that one’s better, they’re just different beasts. The executive branch is a lot more about doing all day, every day and council is a lot more about policy over time.
What are some of the proudest moments and accomplishments in your 10-year service to the city?
I feel like I had a role in changing how traffic stop policies worked, and I think that was for the better. I’m proud of that. I feel the reforms we’ve made in tax and refinancing were valuable. I’m proud of that. Beyond that, some of the things that I’m proud of from when I was on the Council are ideas I had [where] I put other people in a position to accomplish. You know, with other council members who say they learned a lot from me, or I’ve managed to put other Council members in a position of succeeding. Those are all the “teamy” aspects where it’s more important to accomplish the goal than to have your name associated with it. Those quiet moments mean a lot.
The last thing I would say are the times when individual people would approach me out in the community thanking me for standing up for LGBTQ rights or for any marginalized community. Having somebody you don’t know stop you and personally thank you for having been a voice for them, for their community, those are private moments that have been most emotional and stick with me the most.
Why did you leave Metro in October and is there anything you would have liked to have more time on?
I believe in the model of citizen volunteers being involved in government. And I’ve absolutely intended to leave government after my eight years in the [Metro] Council. Freddie (O’Connell) asked me a handful or more times to take the position before I said yes. We agreed at that point that we were going to take it year by year.
He knew that my interest was in trying to help the new administration get some of these big projects like the football stadium out of the ground and the development agreement around the stadium — things that would have been distracting to the transit referendum efforts. I was interested in trying to get those things going.
All the large projects that he inherited are in some version of ongoing at this point. My interest was in getting the framework set up, not in sort of project managing those things. So, once we got the East Bank Development Authority fully stood up and in the budget in June, I let the Mayor know the next month that it was time for me to go back to private practice.
I feel like the extra couple of years, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to help get those inherited projects to have some forward momentum and glad to have had the chance to do that.
You are currently working in your own law practice. What else may be next for you?
After 10-11 years of the intense merry-go-round of Metro, these last couple of months I really haven’t done a lot. I’m getting back into my professional life this year, and we’ll see. I don’t have anything in particular in mind.
Right now, it’s obvious federal funding cuts to food, homelessness, and other service programs are impacting the ways folks are able to operate locally. How are we doing as a city when it comes to taking care of vulnerable populations, and where do you see opportunities at the local level, despite what might be happening on a national scale?
It’s such a hard problem right now with the uncertainty from the federal government. It feels like forever, but we’re just one year into this administration. They never really pulled the trigger on cuts to education or changing the way education is funded from the federal government. I believe that that’s the biggest vulnerability that the city has from activities in Washington, D.C.
And so, one of the real challenges, I think, is the city’s revenue is fixed based on the budget. We should anticipate that more funding cuts will happen from the federal government. How do you plan for that? Do you address today’s problems? Do you keep powder dry for what’s going to happen in year two, three, and four of the [federal] administration? These are the impossible things that nonprofits, churches, and governments all over the country are trying to do with the uncertainty that’s been generated out of DC. I’ve got a lot of empathy for the challenge of anybody running a local government in America of really not knowing what the future is going to hold and therefore making it very hard to plan for it.
I think the approach that the Mayor’s had so far [is about] trying to make sure that we’re empowering and engaging resources outside government, so it can be addressed with government and outside government — I think that’s a good approach. But the reality is that obviously, if you go around the homeless community in Nashville and go out on the streets, it’s easier to find problems than solutions right now. And that’s a challenge that I’m afraid is bigger than local government can solve on its own.