On Wednesday morning, our friends over at Axios Nashville posted the city’s political Story of the Week. It was not even the lead item that morning, but it stirred some new chatter among the city’s political class about the next Mayor’s election, coming in just seven months.
The takeaway: the financial wizard Kevin Crumbo, who was Mayor John Cooper’s Director of Finance through his first two years in office, has now joined the upstart mayoral campaign of Matt Wiltshire, who wants Cooper’s job.
In a mayor’s administration (or a governor’s for that matter) the finance chief is not just another staffer. He (or currently she) is the top cabinet officer and usually the official closest to the mayor on the biggest money decisions about revenue and administration. Old-timers still speak respectfully of Beverly Briley’s finance director Joe Torrence, Dick Fulton’s Charlie Cardwell, Phil Bredesen’s Joe Huddleston, Bill Purcell’s David Manning, and of Rich Riebeling who was in that role for Mayor Karl Dean.
In each of those close working relationships, there was always a presumption of loyalty that attached to the Finance Director: he was four-square the Mayor’s Man. Thus Crumbo’s choice of Wiltshire now has lots of implications for the mayor’s race in early August – and also for the prospects of a candid public discussion of Cooper’s performance and public record.
Cooper is still in his first term, and his first three years have been characterized by big budget issues and hard choices: The costly future of Nissan Stadium, some notable ECD deals, but also the persistent rancor from state officials (and the Cooper administration’s difficulty containing it), and as ever the daily drumbeat over policy choices from affordable housing, traffic congestion, school improvement, and the management of basic services such as garbage collection.
Through most of that time and turmoil, Kevin Crumbo was in the room where it happened. One imagines he could tell quite a story about Cooper’s decision-making process. If the mayor’s race this year becomes sufficiently over-heated by the summer, perhaps he or Wiltshire will tell that story in full.
Axios quoted Cooper ally Robert Davidson on what might have been an attempted brush-back pitch. Davidson said Mayor Cooper "doesn’t hire yes men and always prioritizes expertise over political support. I’m surprised to see Kevin backing one of the bureaucrats responsible for the mess Cooper’s had to clean up over the past three years."
Most of the few local reporters who try to cover Nashville’s City Hall have been dutiful so far to repeat Cooper’s line that he hasn’t even decided he wants to be re-elected. Time will tell.
Crumbo’s first official act on Wiltshire’s behalf: He and his wife Katie will co-host a fundraiser in four weeks at the West End home of Shirley Zeitlin. The invitations have been mailed, and they also name as hosts other prominent Nashvillians too.
I caught up with Crumbo about all this on Thursday. He was clear about why he feels Wiltshire would be Nashville’s best mayor in the next term.
“Matt and I came to know each other shortly after I was appointed finance director,” Crumbo told me. “He has a very sharp financial mind and his ideas for cost reductions were instrumental to the early phases of the financial recovery.
“Matt has experience in the public and private sectors, and specific to his prior accomplishments for the city, he has been a major contributor to important milestones on affordable housing and economic and community development in the past. His leadership would be invaluable to overcoming the city’s growing shortcomings on those topics now.”
Back to that Davidson comment. Were Cooper’s handlers hopeful that Davidson’s shot might help position anything critical that Crumbo – or Wiltshire himself – might say of the incumbent in the campaign months ahead?
Crumbo minced no words there either when I asked him about it: “Today’s city leaders stand on the shoulders of those who came before them,” he told me. “They should be grateful for the overwhelming success of most investments in the city that have shaped the Nashville we know today. They should have clear eyes that investments in the city then and now have risks and growing pains to be managed over the long term.
“Davidson’s remarks,” Crumbo told me, “sound like the bluster of politics, not the wisdom of great investing.”
This is why Field Notes is required reading.
Thanks again Keel.
Kevin Crumbo & his family are friends of mine. I’m happy & proud for him & his accomplishments-past & future!