Q&A With Freddie O’Connell

The 10th Mayor of Nashville Talks Homelessness, His 15 Fixes

During his campaign for mayor, Freddie O’Connell developed a list of 15 Fixes on Day One, meaning those were the issues he would immediately start working on if elected mayor of Nashville. O’Connell, a former councilmember representing District 19, was sworn in as the 10th Mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County on Sept. 25, 2023.

The 15 fixes are posted online at https://www.readyforfreddie.com/15-fixes. Here is a quick overview:

• Frequent Transit Network — bringing transit closer to communities, extending hours and frequencies, and introducing more technology.
• Office of Housing — a standalone department that connects with other departments and oversees the production and implementation of housing projects and policies. This department will work closely with data from the new Office of Homeless Services.
• Working Families, Successful Students — focusing on budget and logistical choices as well as pursuing partnerships that improve student performance and reduce household stress.
• Community Safety Plan — bringing together the community, law enforcement, the district attorney, the public defender, and the judiciary to build a roadmap to making Nashville as safe as possible.
• Neighborhoods and New Nashvillians — strengthening the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods and the Office of New Americans and ensuring community leaders have regular access to Metro leadership.
• Customer Service — establishing new standards within Metro for notifications, response, and conduct to make local government the premier customer service organization in the city.
• Taking Plans to Reality — implementing projects rather than constantly producing plans that sit on shelves.
• Transparency — residents will know how to communicate with Metro, participate in public hearings, and know what city plans and policies mean for their daily lives.
• Liquid Water, Solid Waste — creating a separate, standalone department to manage Nashville’s solid waste.
• One Time Money for Special Projects — preparing Metro for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act as well as sustaining post-COVID policies that were initially supported by one-time federal funds.
• Implementing Nashville Next — undertaking a 10-year review and update NashvilleNext (which was adopted in 2015), so that Nashville can respond to its growth and strategically prepare for the future.
• Ditch Red Tape — investing in a technological and policy overhaul to remove obstacles to permitting processes and infrastructure demands.
• 100% Solar — having the capability of powering all Metro buildings by solar within three years.
• A Tech-Savvy Government — adopting a data policy for Metro that supplies the Open Data Portal and making sure Nashville government is keeping pace with the 21st century.
• Second Responders — building capacity to create and distribute resources for communities who are suffering. Once a crisis response is over, Nashville needs smooth transitions to experts on mental health, grief and trauma.

“This is our moment to open doors of opportunity, to keep our homes affordable, and to invest in our neighborhoods, so Nashville is a place where you want to stay — and can stay,” O’Connell outlines on the Mayor’s Office website.

During his tenure as a councilmember, O’Connell’s downtown district has put him at the center of many issues surrounding homelessness, affordable housing and growth. O’Connell has attended the city’s Homeless Memorial at the riverfront each year, and plans to again as mayor, he says. O’Connell talked with The Contributor about his 15 fixes and how he’ll utilize both an analytical and community-focused approach to the office.

You have created three transition committees and tasked them to study How Nashville Moves, How Nashville Grows and How Nashville Works. Can you explain briefly what main areas fall under each of these topics and how they align with your 15 fixes?

The 15 fixes were really what anchored us around How Nashville Works. The top one, Frequent Transit Network, is really connected to How Nashville Moves, most of the other fixes fall under the How Nashville Works category.

The How Nashville Grows category is something that came [out of] the conversation with all the [mayoral] candidates and the entire city thinking together about its future. Now that we are obligated to create a new stadium for the Titans, the footprint around that stadium is really a benchmark for success in two different ways. One, if we are given a blank slate, can we build a reference standard small urban city effectively and reactivate our riverfront and do so in a way that leverages the best of workforce development, affordable housing and sustainability? [And two], can we make sure we get access and mobility to the site correct, so that locals have the opportunity to live there and have the desire to come spend time there? While we do that, we also have to apply the same lessons citywide. That to me is the fundamental question of How Nashville Grows.

How Nashville Moves is something that I’ve not only been talking about but also working on for really the better part of 20 years. It is certainly about improving Nashville’s core transit service, but it is also about making our infrastructure safer. It is making the simplicity of both walking down the street and crossing the street safer. It is allowing for people choosing to commute from East Nashville to Vanderbilt as cyclists have a safe corridor to do so. It is relieving pressure from scenarios like the new soccer stadium where Nashville SC just played their last regular match in the season. And still we’re not connecting that stadium as effectively as we could and should to the surrounding residential communities, including access to the very diverse Nolensville Road corridor with Casa Azafran just around the corner and up the hill.

Those are really the three pillars. We have a series of transition committees focused on all three of them. One of them, [How Nashville Works], I would say is looking at most of the 15 fixes with the Moves and Grows committees focused on the other ideas.

Every administration would say they are transparent. But what would you like to implement to increase Metro’s transparency?

When I started talking about this, it was really modeled on something amazing I saw several years ago when I took a trip to Salt Lake City. Then Mayor [Ralph] Becker in Salt Lake City went on to become the president of the National League of Cities toward the end of his tenure in office. He really built this amazing transparency initiative that set an expectation both for city departments and agencies as well as the general public on, ‘Hey, what does it mean when we publicly notice a meeting? Or what does it mean when we’re seeking public input and public participation in our process, and we have a consistent format for how we’re going to tell you about the meetings that are available and solicit input?’

We’ve already had a conversation with ITS (Information Technology Services) about some standardizations along those lines. We will continue to talk to multiple Metro departments. But I think too about processes that have unfolded that have been more successful than most including the original two-year process that underpinned Nashville Next. They actually tracked and benchmarked public participation. If they noticed a particular geographic area wasn’t participating as much, they would increase the amount of outreach that was done. If they noticed that a particular demographic area — whether age, race, ethnicity, gender — was not participating as much, they would look at that as a factor, too. I think those kinds of concepts being baked into how this is an authentic public process of running the city is something we want to be intentionally invested in.

And then the last part of it is, we’ve already made a couple of changes where I’ve been trying to do weekly media availabilities in the Mayor’s Office media room on Fridays. We have started up a new segment in partnership with WPLN as part of their This Is Nashville program where we are going to do a monthly series of Ask the Mayor. I think all of that is really rolled up into the process of transparency.

Mayors face the risk of being shielded and live in a mayoral bubble so to speak. Outside of your family and friends, what measures do you put in place to hold yourself accountable to the people?

For me this is really a similar thing. We tried to make a very serious effort during the campaign, which is for me to be present in as much of the county as I can as often as I can. And already in the first 30 days in office, I have logged more than 3,000 miles of visits to various sites. In fact, just this weekend, I went from an event celebrating Friends of Warner Parks out to Long Hunter State Park in one of the longest drives you can do in the county from far West Nashville to basically one of the furthest points east to celebrate with NAIA for the 42nd annual Pow Wow that they were doing out there. And so, [I’ve been able to] not only participate in community processes that need and deserve our attention as a local government but also be physically present as we do so.

I think that’s one of the best ways to get out of the bubble is not be constrained to either the four walls of the Mayor’s Office or a relatively tight radius around City Hall but rather to be as deep into the community as possible, as often as possible.

People in the homelessness sector are excited because you are intimately familiar with the Continuum of Care, Homelessness Planning Council, the Homeless Management Information System, Coordinated Entry and you have created the Office of Homeless Services. What are your expectations for the next four years A) from Metro, B) from the nonprofit sector, and C) from potential funders outside of government?

I think a few things. One, we are about to deliver, though it’s been delayed, our first fully publicly supported permanent supportive housing. It’s going to be an important moment for the city when we cut the ribbon. Making sure that that project is a success is going to be key for Metro.

We had a strategic community plan and one of the reasons we focused so much on data there was to try to drive performance to make Nashville and Metro more competitive for HUD federal funding. [Editor’s note: The mayor is referring to the 2019 plan.] So, I think there is an expectation that we maintain the successes and extend the successes of the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) going forward.

And there is a process underway right now that would likely transition the Collaborative Applicant from MDHA to Metro in the same way that we transitioned the HMIS Lead from MDHA to Metro a few years ago. In an ideal world, this gives again a potential for not only greater alignment but also greater performance as we continue to work for facilitation of not only federal funds but strengthening backbone opportunities for the nonprofit sectors.

From Metro, from the nonprofit sector, and from potential funders outside of government, [expectations are that] there are some ways in which they’re all coordinated because we want our local providers to be a part of the performance evaluation committee’s successes. We want to increase Nashville’s share of HUD federal funding. We want to improve the use of HUD TA (technical assistance) to inform best practices. And for potential funders outside of government, I think we really do have an opportunity to get some backbone philanthropic support if we can demonstrate the alignment.

And so, again, if you’re talking about expectations, my expectation for the next four years is that if we take the recently approved refresh of the Strategic Community Plan, that we align all of our funding flows against that and deliver meaningful outcomes for people, which includes typically building more housing that is attainable to and accessible to people who are coming directly out of contexts where they’re experiencing homelessness.

We just talked about long-term expectations to address homelessness. Do you have any new short-term goals in mind that you want the Office of Homeless Services to tackle?

Yes. I think it is important that if I’m reflecting on the successes of the original strategic community plan we developed a few years ago — now that it has been refreshed, I think it is important for the Office of Homeless Services to socialize that more effectively, so that the Mayor’s Office uses that for policy development, that the Vice Mayor and Metro Council use that as they’re working through their own affordable housing and service delivery conversations for legislative policy and responses on the ground and in people’s Council districts. That Metro departments that have adjacencies as we come through this intergovernmental response to homelessness understand that this plan is now available and approved. We need to be leaning on it. It shouldn’t be a hidden secret document. It should be a document that really does inform both current approaches and either informs future approaches or is able to adapt to accept guidance from resources like HUD Technical Assistance.

Anything else?

We had a transition briefing with the Office of Homeless Services. I guess one thing that I throw in there that isn’t conclusive yet is, we’re trying to make sure we’re leaving no stone unturned for resources that are available to mitigate this issue. So, for instance we continue to explore use of the Pods that were acquired for temporary housing. We’re still looking to increase the number of participants and [the] quality of data coming into HMIS. We’re still just making sure that [we focus on] increasing access to housing, increasing access to services, making sure we take this mitigation of homelessness seriously, and we’re treating anyone in the city who is a resident here whether or not they have stable housing with dignity. These are all priorities of this administration.