Issues

Education

There is nothing that we as a society can do to provide all citizens with meaningful, satisfying lives than establish good schools as the widely available standard. I think that is an absolutely achievable goal. In education, I intend to work over the long term to help Governor Bredesen, Mayor Dean and the many other citizens who are working to make Nashville's schools broadly effective. Under No Child Left Behind, the state's role in our schools is dramatically increasing.

As a State Representative, I will therefore have much more input into the Metro system than before. There are many in town who talk about the school system as a failing institution. I am more optimistic. While we have schools that are not up to standard, we have many outstanding schools, such as Glendale and Lockeland Design Center, which are already providing quality education and attracting many families who 10 years ago would not have considered Metro Public Schools. I intend to protect these existing programs and ensure that radical changes are directed at truly failing schools, rather than imposed system-wide.

I believe Nashville has the right mix of political will, wealth and committed families to move the entire system to a new level in the next 10 years. In my family's neighborhood, we have seen that the demand for good public schools is enormous. That gives me hope that school improvements will rapidly give rise to a broad consensus in favor of increased funding.

Public Safety

Neighborhoods cannot thrive when people do not feel safe. While crime is down overall, one threat to public safety that has not been brought under control is that of juvenile gun crimes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled violent crime among juveniles to be a true epidemic, albeit one that nationally has been on the decline since 1993. Research suggests that strict laws holding adults accountable for trafficking guns to juveniles may well reduce serious violent crimes among that group. At the same time, cities have had some success subjecting juveniles who commit one gun crime - often a minor possession offense - to aggressive social intervention aimed at addressing root problems that may be contributing to criminal behavior. Other cities, including Memphis, have reduced gun crimes with advertising campaigns designed to underscore the severe penalties imposed for such activities. The point is that while there is no single pat solution, there are multiple approaches that, while not falling neatly into any ideological category, are proving effective. None of these approaches involves reducing citizens' civil rights.

The key, as the CDC has suggested, is to view gun crimes by juveniles as comparable to a curable disease that can be alleviated through focused effort over time. Despite having had someone shot to death in front of my home, seemingly at random, I simply reject the notion that living in an urban area necessarily involves accepting high levels of violence generally or, specifically, the presence of children and teenagers carrying military-style handguns. With thoughtful experimentation, adequate funding and a willingness to focus on results rather than political platitudes, we can, I suspect, achieve further dramatic reductions in violent criminal behavior in our neighborhoods and state.

The Environment and Sustainable Living

I am committed to moving our city, state and nation toward a more sustainable, low impact standard of living. To that end, I will promote credits for green industry, increased expenditures for public transportation, tax benefits for use of clean power and similar traditional environmentally friendly initiatives. I will adamantly oppose mountaintop removal mining and similar short sighted activities that destroy priceless natural resources (while providing no long-term economic benefits for our state and in fact make communities poorer economically over the long haul).

But real sustainability is not a matter of mere credits or incentives - it is a matter of promoting communities that make it easy for people to function with less consumption of energy and other resources. More than anything else, that means creating workable urban communities with the schools and infrastructure that families need. A person living in Lockeland Springs and working downtown will invariably use fewer resources than a person who lives in a newly-constructed "green" house in Spring Hill and drives a Prius to work in Cool Springs. It is by promoting wide scale urban living that we will likely have the greatest positive long term effect on our greenhouse gas emissions and use of resources. We can do this not only by creating safe neighborhoods with great schools but also by using transportation and infrastructure dollars to enhance our urban environment. In "The Plan of Nashville," prepared by Nashville's Civic Design Center, we already have a plan in place for enhancing our already healthy in-town neighborhoods. We need to use look to that model as we spend our transportation dollars.

We also need to explore transportation alternatives. Much of East Nashville, for example, was built around streetcars, not the automobile. In cities like Portland, the revival of streetcar lines has proven to be a huge boon to economic development, generating billions of dollars in investment in new condominiums, offices and retail outlets. The greatest challenge for streetcars and light rail is not creating the routes but inspiring the sort of dense neighborhoods that make using such transportation easy and convenient. Blessed with a city with neighborhoods already planned around such transportation, we need to carefully study its economic viability.