Photo: Daniel Meigs

Few (if any) Nashville mayors could relate to the year David Briley just had. Starting on Jan. 31,2018, when then-Mayor Megan Barry admitted she’d had an affair with her head bodyguard, Briley was on board for a series of unpredictable events. As vice mayor, he was thrust into the mayor’s office in March after Barry’s resignation. In May, he won a snap election to serve out the rest of her term. In the time since, he’s faced controversy and criticism over various issues, from policing to budget constraints.

Now he’s running for a full four-year term as mayor. In mid-December, Briley spoke to the Scene at his office — with the year coming to a close, and the mayoral campaign approaching.

What do you want to do with a full term as mayor?

I think it’s sort of split in half. Part of the job is maintaining the momentum we have as a community, because I think it’s good for all Nashvillians if we continue to grow, it’s good if we have more revenue to spend on the things that are important to us. So part of it is looking at opportunities that the city might have and making sure that we’re being deliberate and frugal in terms of making investments along those lines.

But the other part, which is sort of more my sweet spot, what I’ve had more experience in, is trying to assure that prosperity gets more widely distributed in our community. So as mayor, over the next four years, I hope to do both of those things. And especially on this prosperity side, I think we’ve already demonstrated in the first nine-months-plus that I’ve been here that we’re committed to it. With the Nashville GRAD program, we’re finding a way to get more people successfully through community college and increase their wages by a third over their working life. We’ll pass the disparity study changes that are recommended. We have 30-something sponsors for the legislation that’ll be on second reading. And then we’ve gotta do more at [Metro Nashville Public Schools]. I think, fundamentally, if we’re going to be successful as a community and offer prosperity to more people, we’re going to have to make more of our young people successful at MNPS. That’s obviously longer-term and more complicated, but there are lots of successes there every year already, and what we have to do is figure out some ways to expand upon those successes every single year.

I think it’s important for us to invest in the entire community as well. So when we did a capital-spending plan back in September, we funded the first phases of two regional parks: Mill Ridge and Ravenwood. So we’re not just investing in downtown, we’re investing in the entire community. We’re starting the process of the design work for a new police precinct in Antioch, on Murfreesboro Road, because we know it’s an underserved part of our community that we’ve got to do more on from the policing perspective, to make sure everybody is safe in our city.

Now, May 1 was a pretty clear moment in terms of one of the other priorities of the community that I intend to work on in the next four years. Transportation and transit are critical to our long-term success. Right now we have bad traffic some places, some times. If we don’t invest diligently, and are not persistent about addressing the issue, in 20 years we’ll have bad traffic everywhere, all the time. So we’re working with TDOT to try to use the existing roadway network in a more efficient way, because we know that 90-something percent of our residents use their car to get around. But at the same time, I think we’ve got to get some transit on the ground so that people can see how it works, and we can build out some more transit-friendly parts of our community.

We need to make sure that we’re open-minded about technological advancements. For example, that first-mile, last-mile [problem], in autonomous vehicles may be a good opportunity for our community. And then we need to invest in the existing transit network and make sure that those routes that are being used are available longer hours and more frequently so that they’re more successful over time. Getting the $9 million dollars from the federal government this year for new buses is a good start, but we’re going to need to get some additional assistance, hopefully from the feds, in the long run to help us on that, as well as more assistance from the state. They know they can’t build their way out of the problem — they’re going to have to help us here locally on that issue.

So Nashville’s at a unique moment. We’re going to have continued prosperity, I think that is pretty clear. We are uniquely positioned as a city in [this] country to take that moment of prosperity and find some ways to make sure that it is more equally distributed in our community. I think that is the real challenge of Nashville. Nashville is unique because we have the challenge, we have the resources on the horizon, and we have a unique commitment in our city, I think, to make sure things like that do happen here. Whether it’s Envision Cayce and making that community more mixed-income, or the city’s continued investment in affordable housing at $35 million a year, or finding ways to change our procurement code to make it more equitable, or making sure more young people make it through Nashville State. Those are the kinds of things we’re going to be doing all day, everyday to make sure that it balances out with the economic opportunities that are coming to our town.

You mentioned transit and policing. You were on the losing end of two referendums here in less than a year: the transit plan, which didn’t pass, and then the Community Oversight Board, which did pass. Was that a concern to you? Did you feel like that indicated a gap between you as the mayor and a significant amount of the public?

I don’t look at it, I guess, exactly like that. The safe bet, on both of those to a certain extent, would’ve been for me to sit on my hands and say “I don’t control that” — because neither one was something I was running — and just let the cards fall where they may. I felt it was important for me to express my opinion about it, and it’s what I did, and it’s what I’ll always do. If there’s something of importance to the community, I’ll express my opinion about it.

On the community oversight, I’ve always said I support community oversight. I just had concerns about this particular referendum. ...

If you look back at the history of endorsements from this office by any mayor, they’re not frequently seen as resulting in a whole lot of influence over the outcome.

Over the course of the community oversight effort, there’s been a lot of talk about the leadership of the police department. Chief Anderson’s been there some time, and there were a lot of people saying he needed to step down or that you needed to tell him to step down. If you’re elected to a new term, do you think the police department needs new leadership?

The chief and I met [in December] and talked about the Community Oversight Board and about the next steps that needed to take place. The chief was very clear that he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that it was a success. That’s the kind of commitment I think we need from the chief. I don’t think that just changing leadership at the very top is what the department needs right now. I think there is a lot of stress on the department for a lot of reasons right now, and having the chief stay there while we resolve some of these stressors, I think, is important to the city in terms of maintaining stability and at the same time moving forward on a lot of issues.

Recently, after the Amazon announcement, you decided to release the details of the headquarters offer — which your administration specifically didn’t submit — but it was not the typical policy to release that sort of thing. Is that something you think you’ll do more in the future, releasing those kind of details even from incentives deals that don’t end up coming to fruition?

We haven’t really reached a conclusion about what we’ll do prospectively. The concern about releasing them that is expressed is that if we make an offer to Company A and they decline it and it becomes public, well, Company B is not going to start with what we offered to Company A, they’re going to start with [two times] what we offered to Company A. So it puts the city at a competitive disadvantage if it’s widely known what the city of Nashville offers for particular jobs. Having said that, I’m not planning, number one, on making a bunch of offers, and number two, we’ll just have to look at it the next time it comes up and make a more prospective decision about it. Amazon — I think the vast majority of the cities in the country that had made an offer, their offer was already out there, so it didn’t seem like such a leap to ultimately release that.

The annual homeless memorial was held recently. Homelessness is a persistent issue here. What role do you think there is for you to play in that, or for Metro in general to play?

So we’ll build the 100 units of permanent supportive housing. I think that [requests for proposals] will go out [soon]. We’ll be going ahead and building that back here at Second and Gay [Street]. It’s a significant, I think, change in how the city looks at homelessness. We’ve had a lot of transitional housing, but very little permanent supportive housing in our community. So this is a truly significant change in terms of how the city looks at the issue and our obligation to try and confront it.

Since 2014, we’ve had a doubling of the number of people who live on the street. [That means] live outside every night. Not just homeless in the sense of living in a car sometimes or going from couch to couch, but truly living outside. That is something we should do more to address. So we intend to do that. There are some novel things that we need to consider in terms of homelessness that I’ve been thinking about. In terms of working more closely with the safety net providers in the region to find a way to help them redirect their expenditures on health care to try to keep people out of the hospital. That’s something that I’m thinking about, but I think there are opportunities there for us to work through that and find some novel approaches to confronting homelessness.

I noticed in your office you’ve got a photo from the Occupy Nashville days. You did legal work there. I know every mayor gets criticism and will have people upset about things they do. It seems like some of the groups that you’ve ended up at odds with, or groups that have at least been frustrated, are folks you probably were very much aligned with in the past. Does that seem true to you? How do you see that?

I would say that my role as councilman, an advocate and even vice mayor allowed me to be much more of an advocate on particular issues. Once you’re required to be responsible for the entire city, and making decisions for everyone, your ability to advocate without hesitation or qualification is a little bit more limited, I guess, than it would be in the other roles.

Is that frustrating to you?

It’s just part of the job. And I guess I would say — I mean, I’ve said this to a lot of people when they’ve met with me here, I’ve met with virtually everybody who’s upset with me here at one point or another — I’d say, look, not enough people care. So when somebody comes in and they’re upset because they care about something deeply and we’re not moving fast enough, I’m never going to criticize them. I’m never going to be upset with them. I like that. I think it’s important for me to hear those voices and to be pushed by people who are upset about the pace of things. Only two or three things have been said that I consider to be out of line, and I’m not going to tell you what they were. But generally I encourage people to get involved and to push and to advocate and to want better things for this community. I think it moves us in the right direction. So even though I’ve sort of changed my roles a little bit, I don’t have any sense of animosity or frustration with the groups that are pushing. I don’t.