'Agenda' draft showcases ideas for city's future

An advance look at results of big-picture planning process that 'Nashville's Agenda' will submit for discussion tomorrow by 'steering committee' of Nashville powerbrokers

Email | Print By Ken Whitehouse and E. Thomas Wood

06-11-2007 11:45 AM —

Although the results of this year's community-wide "Nashville's Agenda" civic envisioning project have not yet been released, NashvillePost.com has been able to dig up a copy of the draft report just for you.

Founded by the late E. Bronson Ingram in 1993, Nashville's Agenda consists of business, civic, and community leaders plotting toward goals for the city and ideas for the future.

As is inevitably the case with such efforts, some of the ideas being put forward — like "offer safe places for kids to play" — sound nice but do not necessarily break the mold. Other notions on offer may generate more discussion, however. For example:

• Require community service work for youth as part of the school curriculum.
• Increase mentoring programs for all kids — not just those who are troubled. Senior citizens could be mentors for at-risk students, helping them avoid being placed in alternative schools.
• Create a leadership academy which partners immigrant leaders with native Nashvillians to expand partnerships and create stronger leaders.
• Encourage local corporations to “adopt” at-risk or immigrant neighborhoods for civic training and job placement.
• Develop a thoroughfare connecting North Nashville to West End.
• Convert the city’s waste removal to a pay-as-you-throw garbage plan.
• Create a river taxi from northwest Nashville to downtown.
  

The report is not final, and Agenda organizers are said to be at still working on plans to get the implementation of its ideas underway after its final version is made public. To see a full copy of the draft, click here.

Nashville's Agenda aims to bring together input from the broadest possible spectrum of Nashvillians, though elite players and dominant interests in town are guaranteed a say in its final outcome. Organizers sent this draft report last Thursday to a "steering committee" whose members are neither listed among the credits in the draft itself nor included on the Nashville's Agenda website. That committee is to meet tomorrow to hear a presentation by attorney Tom Sherrard of Sherrard and Roe, chairman of a "planning committee" whose membership has been made public. The 24-member planning group overlaps partially with the larger steering group — absent some of the biggest names on the steering committee.

Names on the latter list include Governor Phil Bredesen, Mayor Bill Purcell and other public officials, along with corporate leaders such as Martha, Orrin and John Ingram of Ingram Industries, Jack Bovender of HCA, Monroe Carell of Central Parking, Mac Crawford of Caremark, Marty Dickens of BellSouth/AT&T and David Perdue of Dollar General. Also listed are Nashville Chamber of Commerce CEO Ralph Schulz and current chair Darrell Freeman, music industry leaders Mike Curb and Randy Goodman, and university heads Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt, Bob Fisher of Belmont and Randy Lowry of Lipscomb. About 80 names in total were on the distribution list as the draft report went out to the steering committee.

The organizers facilitated community meetings and telephone surveys to come up with a document that has 58 "ideas for action" spread across seven categories like "Education," "Immigration," and "Economic and Community Development." The community was also invited to respond to an online survey that asked questions like: "If you could pick one thing for the city's government, business, and other leadership to work on, to make Nashville the best it can be, what would it be?" The report states that 306 telephone surveys were conducted and that almost nine times as many people submitted web responses.

The first Nashville's Agenda initiative resulted in a 1994 report entitled "21 Goals for the 21st Century." It called for more sidewalks and greenways, more police bike patrols downtown, attracting professional sports to Nashville, and the construction of a center for the visual arts. How many of these ideas were already on the table before the group claimed them as its own is debatable, but at least that much of the initial Agenda became reality.

Some of the goals outlined 13 years ago reappear in similar form in the new report, but one telling omission is the advocacy in 1994 of "a comprehensive, accessible and affordable quality healthcare system emphasizing wellness and disease prevention for all Nashvillians." The Clinton healthcare plan was before Congress at the time that report was being drafted, and the Agenda-setters apparently thought it possible to influence healthcare policy at a local level. The 2007 report makes no mention at all of healthcare.