(bright music) - [Becky] Sometimes life gives you an opportunity to reflect on what you would do with a clean slate.

Our guest on this episode is John Cooper, mayor of Nashville, businessman, historian, and native Tennessean.

♪ But I've thrown away my compass done with the chart ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ Looking for direction, northern star ♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ I'll just step out ♪ ♪ Throw my doubt into the sea ♪ ♪ For what's meant to be will be ♪ In 2019, John Cooper became Nashville's ninth mayor.

Since taking office, he has achieved historic results for residents by making Nashville's neighborhoods the centerpiece of his agenda.

- So, Nashville's future is bright.

If we responsibly manage our finances, and invest in what works, and innovate to meet the challenges of tomorrow, we can be the best city in the United States.

Now, serving Nashville as mayor, working for the people of Nashville, has been the honor of my life.

(soft music) - [Becky] Mayor Cooper has had a remarkable tenure in a short amount of time, even in one of the most disruptive and tragic periods of our city's history, including in 2020, a devastating tornado, global pandemic, racial unrest.

(crowd chanting) A downtown bombing.

- [Mayor Cooper] It's been quite a year, so adding explosion to the list, I guess, somehow seems so 2020.

- [Becky] And most recently, a mass shooting.

Even with all of that Mayor Cooper helped engineer a financial turnaround that enabled record investments, and focused on economic development, schools, parks, transportation and affordable housing.

Coming from a strong political family including his brother Jim who served as a U.S.

Congressman representing Nashville for over 30 years, and his father Prentice Cooper, who was the 39th governor of Tennessee during World War II, John and his wife Laura reside in Nashville with their three teenage sons.

Mayor Cooper, while dedicated to the planned growth of this city, is not seeking re-election.

We visited with him in his office.

Mayor Cooper, thank you so much for taking the time.

I am really excited about this opportunity because I admire the work you've done here in Nashville.

And just really want to start with, why did you decide to be mayor?

- Oh, oh, wow, okay.

Well, it's a bit of a story, because I tell people I tried hard not to be.

As a little bit of a lark, I got elected council at large back in 2015, and I had a background in real estate and finance, and so I really studied metro.

And you got to 2019, and we were clearly on the wrong path.

And I tried hard not to run for mayor, but I felt that we would stay on the wrong path until somebody really intervened.

And so ran for mayor, I think I was at 2% in the polls that may cause some optimism, but many, many people are running for mayor now.

And I wrote a 47-page booklet that said the 50 things that I would do as mayor.

And really, we have done all 50 things.

Now, there's a lot of other stuff too, COVIDs and tornadoes, and bombings that happened along the way.

The first part of it was the financial health of the city.

And unless you are healthy financially, I mean, we had a big boom back then.

And we were insolvent, gonna be administered by the state for not being able to balance our budget.

So, in that time of prosperity, how has that happened?

And it was a lot of management problems.

So, I used to say, I may not be the right person to be mayor all the time in Nashville.

There are only a few times when kind of an older guy with glasses who knows a lot about finance is the right person to be mayor.

But I was in 2019.

And that election, I think the city really came together and really helped us do some of the hard work that we have been doing, doing the 50 things that I laid out in the booklet.

But we're now in the best financial shape the city of Nashville has ever been since it's been in Metro.

And that's an incredible thing.

And because of that, we can increase per student funding by like 50% a student.

That is the most anywhere anybody can find in the country.

I'm gonna be swearing in I hope my five-hundredth new police officer.

We are gonna be rehousing fifty unsheltered people a month going forward with our big housing first plan.

But then there's a whole lot of other stuff that being a good mayor, you've got new problems that you have to deal with.

So, you have a Department of Housing, we never had a Department of Transportation.

How did Nashville not have a Department of Transportation before?

How did you not have a transportation plan, which we have several billion dollars invested in that, an office of nightlife management?

Well, the old Nashville did not need that.

But yes, we do right now.

13, 14 million people downtown.

You've got to have a special strategy for making our streets habitable for the rest of us.

There is a lot going on in Nashville.

We are the envy of like all the other cities in the country.

I was just at a U.S conference of Mayors, I can tell you, we are the envy, but we need to be an envy to ourselves too.

- There's so much to to just really unwrap here, but let me just kinda take you back to, you were born in Nashville raised in Shelbyville.

- Born in Nashville raised in Shelbyville.

- So, and you went to school- - Shelbyville - At Shelbyville.

You went to school at Harvard and Vanderbilt?

- I did Vanderbilt for my MBA, which is just a great program.

- So, you've really... what is it in, and I know you come from a big political family as well, what is it about you personally and your upbringing, that really brought you to this moment?

What is it about this moment?

- Well, to this moment in 2019, people in Nashville talk about being unicorns, that they were born here.

Well, everybody in my family has always been from Tennessee all the way back to getting off, the boat with John Donaldson back in 1780.

And so, I've always felt an unusual responsibility.

I grew up with all the stories of people that made Tennessee and Nashville and Middle Tennessee.

And I'm a direct descendant of a couple of Nashville's earliest mayors and my father was governor, and my grandfather was speaker of the legislature.

But it turned out in me that I felt like I had a special responsibility to all these people who worked so hard for this to be a great city and state.

The digital economy is really favoring Nashville, and we have the opportunity in the digital economy to be the most successful city for all of us who are here.

And that also means the best live, work, play balance.

But you have to have the investments you have to pick the city you have to stay competitive financially, so we need to stay the lowest tax city in the lowest tax state.

We you know we you got to just do those fundamentals while still delivering in investments particularly in education, and public safety and in housing.

You made a big difference in a living wage.

- Yeah.

- How did you do that?

- Well, you do it by understanding what you have to do to be successful, right?

And what you have to do to be successful is you have to hire great people and pay them enough to keep them.

And you have to have to raise all boats with the prosperity of Nashville, and that includes setting an example in things like a living wage, which hopefully with the council passing it in a couple of weeks will be $18.50 an hour.

It sounds like a lot, but you also have to live in Nashville, too.

And you've got to respect the people who are working for you.

And we had a lot of sort of catastrophes going on.

Bus driver pay was so low, we couldn't keep bus drivers, cafeteria workers, paraprofessionals.

Our school system had just nothing but vacancies.

Now, on the way, you have to make your teachers the best paid in the state, too, which we have done that.

You have to make your police officers well-paid, and they have almost a 40% pay increase since I've been in office.

You have to have your starting police salary be higher than the state highway patrol salary, or otherwise, you're going to lose them to other public safety outfits.

And so, we've got a starting wage of $65,000 for our new police officers, But we're able to recruit.

Now, a lot of that is due to just a great chief.

By the way, you know that Tolstoy's thing about happy and unhappy families?

Happy cities are all the same, they have great chiefs.

Happy cities are all the same, they have a school superintendent that teachers love working for.

So those must-have deliverables if you're creating a successful city.

So, I think the stage is set for us to be a very successful city.

And again, the first step was fixing the finances, but it required somebody who is confident in that space to do it and had a work history where you know you're able to do the right thing because you know you have to do the right thing, and then along the way, you have things like the East Bank.

The East Bank is gonna give Nashville the most successful next set of chapters of any city in the country.

Deeply admired the fact that it's getting a lot of load after off of the taxpayers back here.

And putting it onto the team, putting it onto tourists, and then we're going to make extra money from the tax base that's gonna be created there.

But then also create a live-work-play balance and a transportation spine that I'll be able to take a BRT out to the airport relatively easily and come back.

This is a generational change in transportation capacity.

So, taking 40,000 cars off the interstates and then letting neighborhood traffic get around Nashville easily without having to get on the interstate.

It's incredible.

It's an incredible opportunity for Nashville and I'm super grateful to the council to passing it, and then we're on our way.

- I love this.

I love the whole future thought of Nashville.

So, the obvious question is, why aren't you running again?

You did all this in probably the most tumultuous time.

- Oh, yeah.

- I mean, you think about everything that- - I mean, this office was burned in civil unrest, and you had a bombing and a mass shooting, and a tornado.

Well, there's probably no time that anybody says it's necessarily easy to do it, but I thank people for noticing that this was particularly hard and with COVID.

We had 100 press conferences in one year.

It was kind of just end and then the potential devastation to the economy, and yet we've had the strongest recovery of any city in the country.

So, I think we did just a super job in COVID.

Well, I love being able to prove people's cynicism about public service and politics wrong.

That it is not about me, it is about the city.

You go do a job, do the right thing, and then there is a moment to pass it on to people, and the East Bank will take probably a dozen years to be completed.

So, it would be far beyond the next term.

But the trick is continuing these huge investments in things like education and public safety, which we can now do because the city fundamentally has been turned around, has been fixed from where we had let it drift.

We let it drift in a way that imagine selling the William Edmondson home site for no money or developing Fort Negley for a trivial amount of money.

These are the things you have to preserve and incorporate in our bright cultural appreciation of Nashville being special.

But that also comes from being sort of an old Nashville person as I take these things personally.

Second Avenue and Fort Negley, I'm taking that personally because these are heritage assets for our community going forward.

- That makes me think about, it's a challenge I think to blend old Nashville with new Nashville but you seem to be able to do that.

- Well, it's the challenge of work in progress.

(laughs) - Well, what do you think would be the real key for our community to try to lean into that?

On both sides, old and new Nashville.

- Well, you mean to preserve the best of our past and have the best of our future?

Well, a lot of that is in the built environment, and is respecting the built environment, preserving what we have.

It is a tragedy how much we've lost.

We didn't lose it in the last three years.

We lost it over the last few generations.

Imagine tearing down President Polk's home or General Sherman's headquarters in the Civil War, both of which we lost in the 50s, we were not that respectful of our past.

But I think as we appreciate it, then the trick is to... A lot of cities are growing, expanding, it lets us....

I have an innovation, an architect for the city of Nashville is to incorporate really human designs in what's built going forward and in a community, focused layout.

So, that the new stuff is not only complementary to the authentic past, but it's really an exciting place to live, to build new stuff that was as livable and as great as the best of our old stuff, and to take advantage of the moment.

Now, it's a super challenge.

And this is kind of an arcane term.

There's organic growth, which is kind of funded by your local bank savings, the community savings.

And then there's kind of inorganic growth.

And all successful super-regional cities, of which we're one, are in a little bit of a phase of inorganic growth, meaning that it's not your own banking community savings that's funding your building and development, it's a national or international syndicates of money, which wanna come to Nashville, and that's why you've got $5 billion worth of permits year after year being issued in Nashville.

As people want to come and invest in the city.

But you've got to manage that with a much stronger planning process, right?

And with some design guidelines and most of all with a plan before it happens.

And then post COVID, you see the digital economies effect.

You're not everybody coming downtown to work and back twice a day.

We're living in our neighborhoods.

We're living in these nodes of excellence.

They need parks.

They need greenways, connectivity.

They need great schools that their kids can walk to, that is community focused.

You also need a coffee shop, you need grocery stores, you need enough retail.

But retail is going to be deeply challenged, too, the same way that office is.

But we're not going to lose the need for human connection.

So, in a way, Nashville, in bulk, is a human connection capital, as millions of people come to go to concerts and connect with each other and to have a good time.

As my children say, Nashville is to them the happiest place on earth.

So, in bulk, we're doing that.

But specifically for our residents, we need to do that.

It's just had a really great neighborhood, and people will say in the future, I grew up in Shelbyville, we would say, I'm from Nashville.

But now, people from Nashville are gonna say, I'm from Madison.

- Yeah, you do have that- - I'm from Madison.

Of course, you are.

I'm from Donaldson.

Of course, you are.

Because that's the super, super rocket neighborhood that you're living in.

- You do have that neighborhood focus, which I love.

Now, you know, the premise of this show is what would you do with a clean slate either personally or professionally or for our community?

But you're about to get a clean slate from being the mayor.

What are you gonna do?

- Well, first, I guess I would challenge the theory (laughs) a little bit that it is not a clean slate.

The trick in life is you learn from every phase, and then you incorporate what you learned from the last phase into the next phase.

I wouldn't have been a very good mayor if I hadn't had a finance, and a real estate background before that.

And I had a little bit of a political background before.

So, the trick going forward is how are you going to incorporate this great experience in the other stuff that you're going to do.

And a lot of that is you hope that you grow in wisdom, and that your intelligence changes into wisdom, and then finding ways of deploying the wisdom part of it back in any community effort.

So, it's super privileged to be mayor, but I'm not saying it's a clean slate.

It's a rich and resourced slate that you need to use these other fabulous bits of knowledge that you've accumulated back into the generation of wisdom for the community.

- I guess another question I have for you is if you could change one thing right now just personally that would have the most impact, what do you think that would be?

Well, I mean there are different lengths of measure.

I mean one thing I would change is a different Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore where Al Gore was elected president.

That would be a good thing to change.

And then there are perspective changes.

If we could figure out how to deal with social media, so that it helped communities rather than disrupted communities.

You know, the printing press was invented, it was very disruptive, it took a long time to figure out things like the newspaper to kind of be constructive with information for the community.

You kind of feel that this new thing of social media, we've not figured out how to make it a real social benefit.

Yes, and if we could fast forward that.

I mean as mayor, the thing you miss the most is local media.

I miss Chris Clark and Demetri Kalidemos and the Tennessean.

I miss the banner where people were connected with the same set of facts all the time.

And it really helps in educating the community, and forming the community because now you don't know who knows what, and is it all based on somebody's misinformed Twitter feed, and that's all they know.

It is much harder to manage a city, or a government successfully in that environment.

Now you try and people do try but I'd love to get beyond that into better information, more reliable information to more people, more of the time, and get them to help you make really good decisions.

- I love that and I love being with Nashville Public Television.

I believe we have a space to play there.

- Yeah, very important.

- Thank you.

Do you feel that our community... are there conversations that we could engage in together to try to solve that?

Yeah, I mean, part of it, and I respect both public television and public radio's role, is you have a little bit in America of blowback from national stories that people are recasting as local stories.

So, the question is, what is the local story?

Now, it takes more resources.

There's a lot of homeless analysis that's basically based on California data.

Well, okay, whatever's going on in California, I'm sure that's a problem.

But what is the state of our housing market?

How many units are we building?

What's our local story?

I ended up... Tucker Carlson had a whole show during COVID demanding my impeachment, based on an incorrect local story.

So, the story was withdrawn locally.

People just didn't look at the tape of the press conference.

But it already went national, there's a national story.

But Tucker Carlson had a bigger audience back in national than any of the local affiliates did.

And they never corrected the show.

So, it's the local...

There's a saying now that all politics are not local, all politics are national.

And you worry about cities or city policy being ground underneath that all politics is national way of looking at things.

Whereas cities are different, again just coming from the U.S conference of Mayors, we are uniquely successful compared to most cities.

We have a growing tax base, most cities don't have that.

Most cities are losing population.

We are not losing population.

Most cities, particularly in the West Coast, are desperate for investment in their downtowns.

We are still nothing but cranes.

So, you manage a city, I think, differently based on the circumstances that you're in.

And don't throw us in some national mix.

Let's govern for what we need.

Now, what we needed back in 2019 is fixing our finances, so that we're able to deal with the problems of the future.

And I think we're able to do that.

We need to understand that our competitive advantage, there are low tax rate and our great school system, our public safety, and our community spiritedness.

Now to do that, again, requires management.

And again, as I was saying, I may not have always been the right mayor for the whole history of Nashville.

I'm sure there are other more glamorous figures.

But in getting this fixed and straight, I think I sure have been.

- Oh, I think you've done a tremendous job.

And we're down to about a minute which I can't believe it's just gone like this, but- - Come on back.

- I know, I will come back.

I hope you will just share one more thing about what do you hope for the next mayor?

What do you want to continue from your legacy?

- Well, putting the East Bank to use, I mean some things is just continuation.

We need to continue to build our homeless services effort, so we can go from 50 a month to 60 or 70.

We are in a space now that you can actually look, and say everybody will be rehoused within a year or two.

Not very many cities can say that.

Now, this has happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

So, I'm not just creating an unrealistic situation.

But if you follow through on Housing First, affordable housing units, we're going to have 5,000 in the next fiscal year.

That's incredible.

But now, I've grown housing to being our fourth largest department.

Doesn't have the most people but it's financially, that's incredible for slow-moving city governments to grow a department from zero to the fourth largest when you've got parks and fire and you've got big historic departments that have gone on for a long period of time.

But the East Bank Bank because it gives you the transportation spine that we can connect to and finally begin to have a systemic transportation improvement in Nashville.

And then you're given parkland and greenways connectivity on both sides of the river reaching out into Nashville.

And then you're being given a new cultural heart.

Sort of ignored but I think your viewers will find it very interesting is the state's move with us on a new TPAC facility.

So, you're going to a half-a-billion dollar TPAC, you're going to a global quality performing arts center that needs to be on a park with the dome on one side, and TPAC on another side and then I got all the land back for the city, so the 100 acres that we've gone back is out to an RFQ with a national developer who's gonna build an incredibly exciting part of our city, but you know, we're gonna own it, and we're gonna make money off of it.

And then that funding base with the new tax base on the East Bank is gonna be able to fund many, many, many incredible improvements in Nashville.

So, protecting that, completing the transportation vision, getting TPAC and the RFQ done, the dome done.

Now, I think it's well in hand and well under the way.

And then the use of that extra money out into the neighborhoods.

Nashville, I think has about a dozen sites out in neighborhoods going from old schools to old pieces of property to revision them with the community to be the center of these communities in these new fabulous nodes.

That the new Nashville is going to be comprised of Donaldson and Madison and Joelton and Bordeaux.

Each node being excellent with community investment and probably built around an amazing thing.

Maybe it's a community center.

In some cases, maybe it's some kind of hub.

And so the next mayor's job is gonna be to complete the East Bank and then bring these nodes of excellence online in partnership with the community.

And that's super exciting.

(Becky chuckles) That's super exciting.

And they will have a great time doing it.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And we'll all benefit.

So, thank you for that.

Thank you for this time.

And I wish you the very best.

- Thank you.

(soft music) ♪ But I've thrown away my compass done with the chart.

♪ ♪ I'm tired of spinning around ♪ ♪ In one direction.

♪ - Will it give you an opportunity to explore something new?

- Oh, yeah, and stuff that I've not been able to do.

I mean, I was always a little bit of an outdoors person when I've sailed across the Atlantic in a small sailboat with just a couple of people.

I've climbed Mount McKinley.

I've bicycled through Tibet.

These are not things you're able to do as mayor.

So, having the ability to go do that is super exciting.

And then I've got a lot of business and communications interests as well.

I've always wanted to be a writer, so this is an opportunity and most people who know me go, "I bet you're gonna go teach history."

I would love the opportunity to do that too.

- Oh, boy, your phone's going to be ringing.

I have a feeling.

- We'll see.

(soft music)