Joey Garrison

jgarrison@tennessean.com

Edwin Gray has found a clever way to make money during election seasons.

His residential garbage pick-up business, Gray's Disposal Co., has numerous trucks that crisscross Davidson County. Recognizing that political candidates are constantly looking to outmatch their opponents in visibility, he agrees to place large campaign signs of Nashville office-seekers on his company's garbage trucks — it comes with a price-tag, of course.

He's overseen this side venture for six years now. Clients include recently elected Democratic state Sen. Jeff Yarbro, Davidson County District Attorney Glen Funk, Metro school board candidates and several Davidson County judges.

"After two or three weeks driving around, you're going to be a household name," Gray said. "Let me put it to you like that. It's very good advertising."

So when mayoral candidate Charles Robert Bone, a Nashville attorney, signed a contract with Gray in October to pay the company $10,000 for use of the trucks through the election in September 2015, he thought he had a nice get.

But the Bone campaign later learned that the team working for real estate mogul Bill Freeman — who hadn't formally entered the race at the time — had told Gray they would pay more and cover possible legal costs with scratching that agreement. How much more is disputed, though Freeman's commitment appears to be more than three times Bone's $10,000 payment.

And so now, Freeman's campaign signs will be displayed on Gray's trucks for the next nine months. And the Bone camp is irked.

"Our campaign was excited about our contract with Mr. Gray to advertise on his trucks," Bone's campaign manager Kim Sasser Hayden said. "We were disappointed when another potential candidate offered Mr. Gray more than three times the value of our contract and encouraged him to break his contract with us. That is not the kind of campaign we intend to run and is not reflective of the manner in which our candidate will govern if elected."

Freeman's entry into the mayor's race on Friday was a game changer. And the squabble over garbage trucks could be the beginning of a bitter, drag-out fight for Metro's top job.

For months, the crop of mayoral contenders had speculated — fretted, really — about the possibility of a Freeman candidacy. Freeman, who has amassed a real estate empire at Freeman Webb Co. and was a top bundler for President Barack Obama in his 2012 re-election, is positioned to pump as much money as he needs into his candidacy. That matters less with campaign yard signs or signs on trucks and more on what can really lose or win a campaign — buying television time via advertisements.

Other candidates running for Nashville mayor in 2015 are At-large Councilwoman Megan Barry, charter school founder Jeremy Kane, former Metro school board chairman David Fox and business executive Linda Rebrovick.

Gray declined to comment to The Tennessean on his contract with Freeman and previous agreement with Bone for his coveted services.

Freeman called the Gray Disposal trucks a "terrific campaign tool" that he will use after the first of the year, when he's planning a formal campaign launch: "I'm happy to have been the successful bidder and obtained that advertising medium."

He rejected the Bone campaign's suggestion that he acted wrongly. Freeman said that he paid Gray with a personal check and he would disclose the expenditure on campaign finance disclosures at the appropriate time.

Chip Forrester, the former chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party and a spokesman for Freeman (who happened to beat Bone in the party's chairman race in 2009), painted a different picture than the one advanced by Bone's team.

"In my meeting with Edwin Gray, he assured me that there was no contract in effect," Forrester said. He added that Gray indicated to him that his company had received only half of what Bone ultimately had planned to pay — and that Freeman had committed to paying only "50 percent more" than Bone's lease agreement.

The Tennessean, however, obtained a contract signed by Sasser Hayden and Gray on Oct. 13 that confirmed Bone's second payment of $5,000, for a total of $10,000. In exchange, it says, Gray would place Bone for Mayor signs on all his company's trucks through September 2015.

On Dec. 11, Gray used a cashier's check to return that money, which is now back in Bone's campaign war chest. And so it appears he'll need to find some other trucks for his campaign signs.

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.