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Biography

Karl Dean is the sixth mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. He was elected on Sept. 11, 2007 and was re-elected on Aug. 4, 2011 to serve a second term. During his time in office, Dean has led Nashville through two big challenges – a deep national recession and a 1,000-year flood – and has still made progress on his priorities of education, public safety and economic development. He also works diligently on efforts to sustain and improve Nashville’s high quality of life.

Education

During his first term in office, Dean has acted as a strong advocate for education reform in Metro Nashville Public Schools. Every year he has fully funded the budget for Metro schools despite cuts in most other departments. He also has allocated additional funds from Metro’s general operating budget for education-related programs, including the Attendance Center and the Nashville After Zone Alliance.

The mayor created the Metro Student Attendance Center to provide early intervention for students chronically truant from school through a partnership between Juvenile Court, Metro Schools and Metro Police. Since the creation of the center, and with strong support from the school administration’s new aggressive approach to attendance, Metro has experienced a 17.2 percent drop in truancy in its high schools. The Nashville After Zone Alliance was formed to provide a system of structured afterschool programs for middle school students in Nashville schools. When Dean took office, only 10 percent of Nashville’s middle school students were participating in afterschool programs. NAZA more than doubled the number of middle school students who participated in structured afterschool programs in its first “zone” and the program continues to expand.

Dean also formed the Education First Fund at the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee to draw private support for education reform initiatives. Contributors to date include individuals, foundations, and faith-based organizations. These private funds helped bring two national teacher recruitment organizations – Teach for America and The New Teacher Project – to Nashville. And they’ve helped launch The Center for Charter School Excellence in Tennessee, which is training top-notch education professionals to run high-quality public charter schools to serve Nashville’s most at-risk students.

Public Safety

Nashville is in its sixth consecutive year of overall crime reduction, and is on track to achieve a seventh. To help the Metro Nashville Police Department continue its progress, Dean has worked to see more police officers protecting our streets. During his administration, MNPD has recruited and trained over 350 new sworn police officers, including 50 newly-created positions funded by a federal COPS grant, which Dean encouraged the department to seek. The department now has the largest number of sworn officers ever.

Dean also included in the 2010-11 capital spending plan funds to begin construction on two additional police precincts, which will improve police protection throughout Davidson County by reducing the coverage area of the other precincts.

Economic Development

The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Community Development works every day in partnership with the Nashville Chamber and the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to recruit new and expanding businesses to Nashville. Since the mayor took office, these efforts have led to over 1,500 new jobs being created in Davidson County, representing private investments totaling almost $80 million.

The first economic development initiative Dean undertook as mayor was to help women- and minority-owned businesses receive a fair share of Metro Government contracts. Dean formed the Mayor’s Minority Business Advisory Council and began work on legislation to address the findings in two disparity studies conducted by Metro over the past 10 years. An ordinance creating the Procurement Non-Discrimination Program was passed in April 2008. The program is administered out of a new Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance in the Department of Finance, which has worked to significantly increase the number of companies approved for Metro’s small business program and the number of minority-owned business registered with Metro.

Dean also advocated for the development of Music City Center, a new downtown convention center in Nashville, which will attract hundreds of thousands of new visitors and generate millions of dollars in local and state tax revenue. With strong support from the Metro Council, work began on Music City Center in early 2010. Omni Hotels & Resorts has been selected to construct the new convention center’s headquarters hotel. Both are scheduled to open in 2013.

Dean has also recognized the important role mass transit will play in future economic development in Nashville and Middle Tennessee. He has set the course for the development of a true regional mass transit system with the creation of the Middle Tennessee Mayor’s Caucus and the private sector Transit Alliance. The mayor was also a strong advocate for legislation passed by the Tennessee General Assembly to enable the creation of dedicated funding for mass transit. In addition, he has helped make significant strides in improving mass transit in Nashville: The new downtown transit station Music City Central opened in the fall of 2008. Bus Rapid Transit is being implemented in phases along Gallatin Road with plans to expand it to other major corridors in the future. And Nashville now has a free, downtown circulator, the Music City Circuit, which operates on three routes.

Livability

In the spring of 2008, Dean formed the Green Ribbon Committee on Environmental Sustainability and set a goal to make Nashville “the greenest city in the Southeast.” The committee completed its work in April 2009 and presented a summary report with 16 goals and 71 recommendations. Dean is now working to prioritize and implement the initiatives. Those already underway include developing the first comprehensive Open Space Plan for Davidson County.

In effort to expand transportation and recreation options for residents, Dean formed the Bicycle Pedestrian and Advisory Committee, which works to further make Nashville a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly city. BPAC helped launch Nashville’s first bike share program with 30 cruiser-style bicycles that are available to the public for free at two stations at Shelby Bottoms Nature Center and the Music City Star Riverfront Station.

Dean also addressed Nashville’s need to improve water, sewer and stormwater infrastructure through the creation of the Clean Water Infrastructure Program. The program is funding $500 million in capital projects for Nashville’s water and sewer systems and more than $50 million in stormwater capital projects over five years.

Background

Dean first held public office when he was elected as Nashville’s Public Defender in 1990, a post he was re-elected to in 1994 and 1998. Dean served as Metro Law Director from 1999 to January 2007, when he resigned to run for the office of mayor. Dean completed the program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1999. He has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Vanderbilt.

Dean is married to Nashville native Anne Davis, who he met in law school. Anne practiced civil and criminal litigation with Bass, Berry & Sims and Neal & Harwell. She has taught at Vanderbilt Law School for nearly two decades, including courses on white collar crime, trial advocacy and legal writing. They have three children: Rascoe, age 23; Frances, age 16; and Wallen, age 15.