Good morning, everyone.
To Vice Mayor Henderson, Pro Tem Sepulveda, Budget & Finance Chair Porterfield, and our Metro Council, representing the great neighborhoods and people of this city …
To my colleagues in public service across local, state, and federal government, and especially the dedicated Metro workforce and my team in the Mayor’s office …
To our special guests, including the Consul General of Japan, Shinji Watanabe, and our neighbors who led us in spirit and song this morning …
And to my fellow Nashvillians …
Thank you for everything you do to make this a great city—one with a great library system—and thank you for being here today. Welcome to the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library.
For 62 years, Mayors have delivered a State of Metro address on behalf of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County and in each one, you can see a reflection of our city’s values, successes, challenges, and opportunities.
The locations of these addresses have also had meaning. This building is a choice Nashville made years ago, an investment in our future, a place of discovery that connects people to worlds beyond these walls.
It’s a manifestation of community will, people rallying behind the belief that this city deserves a great library system.
Government didn’t do it alone. We started a conversation that focused the public sector, business, community organizations, philanthropists, and residents on a dream we could build together. As a friend once reminded me, Nashville is bigger than Metro. We’re sitting in a dream that partnership built, something bigger than government could’ve accomplished alone.
And it’s a dream in motion.
As this building came to life, we made investments across the other branches in the system. We’ve been extending its reach beyond these walls ever since—in places like the new Donelson branch, the Nashville After Zone Alliance, and new offerings that let us check out artwork, health equipment, laptops, musical instruments, vinyl records, or even seeds for your garden.
And now, thanks to Dolly Parton, our Nashville Public Library, and the Nashville Public Library Foundation’s Begin Bright campaign, we’re about to extend the reach of this building and the power of reading where it’s needed most for maximum impact.
So that more of our children can access the joy of reading and all its benefits, we’re going to have little libraries full of books from Dolly’s Imagination Library at every childcare center in Nashville.
No other U.S. city has accomplished what the foundation is trying to do here.
Begin Bright starts with 30 childcare centers. They’ll add about 50 each month after that. The carts, books, and training app for pre-K readers will be rolling into childcare centers starting this fall. Every book in the Little Libraries will also be available for checkout at NPL, or at home through Imagination Library.
Metro jumped in early to help kickstart the funding—with a pledge of $1m that I’m fulfilling today in our recommended Fiscal Year 2026 operating budget.
If you see Director Terri Luke, a member of the library team or the library board, please thank them for their work and for hosting us all today. And I hope you’ll consider supporting the Begin Bright campaign.
This library says something about us. It reveals our educational priorities, certainly, but also our path to getting things done. We believe in partnership, win-win possibilities, and the power of conversations to spur action.
This is a place where I’ve brought my daughters to see puppet shows, watched former mayors lead citywide reads, and had the opportunity myself to read excerpts from some of my favorite books. Books like Strong Inside, the story about Perry Wallace that offers an important glimpse of sports and society anchored here in Nashville.
In the final chapter, there’s a gorgeous illustration of humility and hope in Perry’s office. Here’s the description:
“And in this simple poster, the whole story. High aspirations, it reads. And above those words, a photograph — a … boy holding a basketball, looking up at what appears to be an impossibly tall goal.”
We must not lose sight of our high aspirations despite the challenges of the time. Our response to the chaos of the moment is the competence of the city. This is the Nashville story.
We believe in the job of local government, its capacity to respond to the needs of residents, and broker important community conversations. We’re focused on affordability and quality of life – a better Nashville for Nashvillians. That’s the spirit that motivated our transition into office 19 months ago, and it’s the same spirit that drives Metro departments today and all the days between.
But the world has certainly changed since September 2023.
This is a moment to reflect on these changes – to take a deep breath and reckon with what we’ve lost and recognize what we’ve gained.
Earlier this year, we grieved the loss of a bright young woman. We grieved with her family and friends, the Antioch High School community, with all of Antioch. We grieved as a city. To Principal Dr. Nekesha Burnette and the wind ensemble from Antioch High – thank you for being with us today.
We’re with you, too. And we won’t forget Josselin. We also won’t forget that it wasn’t the first time in recent years we’ve lost young people to gun violence at school.
We also lost great public servants, like North Precinct Commander Anthony McClain and District Fire Chief Bobby Connelly; philanthropists Steve Turner, Bill Freeman, and Jim Ayers. Every year, I read the In Memoriam issue of the Nashville Scene, and I think it’s worth a little heartbreak because it’s important to feel the memories of people who mattered to us.
But we’ve gained some things, too, as the community moved some long conversations into action this past year.
It’s worth a few moments to celebrate what we accomplished in November with Choose How You Move, our transit improvement program.
We've been called a beacon for the country because hundreds of thousands of us came together to secure dedicated funding for transit and infrastructure. Two out of every three of us voted for this generational change-maker. Thanks to Metro Council for the feedback and review, and thanks to the voters for your trust.
In our recommended budget, you’ll see the reflection of Nashville’s first – and Tennessee’s first – dedicated funding for transportation improvements.
Choose How You Move is now in motion with that funding:
- Our 15-person Advisory Committee on Transportation is seated, with appointments selected by both Metro Council and our office.
- Our first Chief Program Officer, Sabrina Sussman, joins us in a few weeks to ensure the program’s successful implementation.
- We’ve funded and started the first 11 foundational projects.
- Beginning July 6, WeGo is increasing the service frequency of several routes, expanding WeGo Access, a service for riders with disabilities, to the weekends for the first time, and later this year, will launch a low-income fare program.
- And we’re investing in safety. Earlier this year we announced MNPD Captain Brian Williams as our first MNPD/WeGo Transit Liaison. Captain Williams represents the first step toward building a Transit Security Division at MNPD, and this year’s budget includes funding to begin standing up that new division by adding officers to provide security onboard transit vehicles and in transit centers as part of the new division.
We’ve chosen to move.
On the other side of the river, you see the first buildings rising from the ground and a long dream taking shape on the East Bank. While the new Titans stadium is on track for 2027, new neighborhoods are in progress. Imagine East Bank was one of the biggest community input exercises we’ve ever done, and we’re excited to work with you and many partners to bring that vision to life.
- The new East Bank Chief Executive Officer Ben York and East Bank Development Authority are in place.
- The Landings apartment buildings at the River North urban waterfront district are filling up with the neighborhood’s first residents.
- Our master development agreement locks in a century of affordable housing on Metro-owned property.
Transit and East Bank are two big things that don’t happen without help. Partnership itself is a strategy. And a choice. Residents are partners, too. And we choose to listen to you and respond to your needs. Because customer service matters, and the little things sometimes matter most.
It's said that we campaign in poetry, but we govern in prose. And there are great sentences in governing.
It’s refreshing to hear so many people say some version of, “I’ve never seen a snowplow on my street, but I did this year.”
Then there’s this from Christy Pruitt Haynes. She lives in Donelson, is legally blind, and she estimates the expansion of WeGo’s service for people with disabilities to the weekends will save her about $400 dollars a month.
Here's what she said:
“Programs like Access on Demand shows the concern a city has for ALL of its residents. A city that sees and serves a small percentage is going to do everything it can for the larger group.”
She’s right, and we will.
Because here’s the thing about little things: They’re not little things. Sometimes they’re everything.
That includes helping our unhoused neighbors find their home. This past year, thanks to the work of many previous mayors and compassionate residents, we celebrated the city’s first public permanent supportive housing facility. And we remember the man whose name is on the building, which is now at capacity with residents and opportunities. Charlie would be proud, and I was certainly proud to help cut the ribbon on Strobel House.
There are also immediate needs. We’ve been leaning into customer service and the core responsibilities of local government:
- We filled 14,000 potholes already this year, cleared snow on 2400 miles of road – including 642 miles of road that had never seen a plow before.
- We supported our schools in smart ways, and our students responded with the best graduation rate in Metro Schools’ history last year.
- We supported our first responders, engaged more second responders, and crime is significantly down year over year in Nashville, both total crime and across categories, many of them double-digit percentage point decreases.
- As we try to ensure Nashville is a city where everyone thrives, we pay attention to safety in many ways. Pedestrian deaths are down. Opioid deaths are down. Deaths of homeless residents are down.
These trends are by action, not by accident. Local government has to work. The work of Metro touches each of our lives in various ways each day.
But we’ve lost a reliable partner in the federal government, and that’s impacting the community’s work on many levels:
- Estimates reveal nearly 400 Nashville area nonprofits are at risk of losing funding to the tune of $1.5 billion.
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center is cutting its budget by $250 million.
And Metro has been ghosted on awarded funds of more than $14 million. But we’re not standing idly by as the federal government tries to cut funding that’s legally ours. We’ve told them we’ll see you in court.
This is money that we as taxpayers have already sent to Washington, D.C. and the White House is unlawfully telling us it’s not coming back. But Congress said it should, and we’re going to fight for it. We’ve got a great team to lead us in Director Wally Dietz and the 57 professionals in the Metro Department of Law.
Because we know we’re on the right track. This year’s Nashville poll from the Vanderbilt Center for the study of Democratic Institutions was released a few weeks ago with numbers that reflect our spirit of optimism and confidence, even in turbulent times.
More and more people think Nashville is moving in the right direction.
It reminds me what a special place this is, and that we built it together. And, we get to work together to protect what we have and make it better.
I want us all to have more of the things we need. Schools we’re proud of. Services we trust. Safety we deserve.
Local government isn't where we do moonshots; it's where we set up kids like the Hillsboro Burros to take their best shots, whether that’s in the classroom or on the court. When we do it right, they come home state champions for the first time in school history.
They graduate ready for career or college. And if we really do it right, those students have stable housing, great after-school options, and safe and easy ways to get to and from school and all the things we hope they appreciate about growing up in Nashville.
To that end, this budget is about providing stability, resilience, and a baseline of normal in abnormal times.
Today I’m filing our recommended operating budget for fiscal year 2026. I want to thank the team in the Department of Finance, led by Finance Director Jenneen Reed, for working with my team to put together a fiscally responsible budget. Because people rely on local government to get stuff done. And our annual operating budget determines how much we get done and how we pay for it. In Tennessee, there’s really only one meaningful way for local governments to do that.
Property assessments determine the value of your property.
And the value of your property combined with our property tax rate determines how much you pay in property taxes.
This is an appraisal year, our first since 2021. And since then, many areas have seen significant increases in property value.
The costs of serving those areas have gone up, too. Building schools, patching potholes, picking up trash, and keeping people safe are all more expensive.
This is a challenging budget to prepare because there are so many financial variables. Our national economic outlook is murky. We’re phasing out hundreds of millions of dollars of one-time federal COVID relief funding. And we’re experiencing an unpredictable overall federal funding outlook.
But we have to be careful not to get hung up only on cost. We’re trying to responsibly work backward from understanding our needs. Just as Choose How You Move offered a transit improvement program, our recommended budget is really a community improvement program where we provide the funding necessary to deliver quality schools, core services, and safe neighborhoods.
We know it’s important to govern in predictable ways, and that includes accounting for the increased costs of governing and rising expectations for quality of services.
So, our office and the Office of Management and Budget in the Department of Finance work closely and carefully with Metro departments to understand staffing and resource needs.
And we’ve stayed focused on a budget that delivers on the basics, continues what works, pays our public servants fairly, and delivers on the biggest needs and concerns of Nashvillians, including housing affordability.
I know it’s complicated talking about appraisals, equalization, and the impact on tax. Especially because we know two things are true at once: some Nashvillians will pay more in property taxes, even as we’re setting the lowest overall property tax rate in Nashville since 1972. It will also be the lowest property tax rate among the big cities in Tennessee, and one of the lowest among top U.S. cities.
The low rate helps, but it won’t totally offset the market realities of the past 5 years – the last time the tax rate was increased. The median home in Davidson County is now 45% more valuable than it was when last appraised. And that means when we set the new tax rate, some of us will have increased costs.
For any resident of the city, it can be easy to miss all the good ways local government impacts your life, but very easy to see how it impacts your bottom line, especially when your paycheck doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. And it’s not just the cost of governing going up. It’s the cost of everything we buy. That’s why this is a basic, common-sense budget that follows a 2025 budget in which we asked each department to reduce spending.
I believe wholeheartedly in the core services this budget allows us to continue. So, I want to lay out to you our focus on schools we need, services we trust, and the safety we deserve.
Our recommended budget fundamentally continues what works and invests in what we need most. Just like we did for Metro Schools last year when we extended good pandemic-era programs making a difference. But that bridge was built to keep us from going over a cliff for just a year, and we're now strengthening and funding these programs to continue beyond.
And a budget is fundamentally both things at the same time—the expression of need and the way to pay for it. Many of you undoubtedly walked past folks this morning who believe that property tax going up for any Nashvillian by any amount is unnecessary – just more government spending. These are the same people celebrating the chaos of federal cuts—which – make no mistake - are not about efficiency.
What they won’t tell you is that what they’re proposing means we wouldn’t fund our schools, services, and safety. We wouldn’t open a new police precinct in southeast Nashville, wouldn’t have the new police flex unit shrink the amount of time you have to wait when there’s an emergency, wouldn’t expand safety in schools.
But I refuse to tell our students we have to sacrifice safety or that we have to pull nurses out of schools. I refuse to tell them they shouldn’t be safe in the classroom. I refuse to strip away mental health supports we already offer. And you deserve trash pickup to happen when we say it will.
Together, we resolve that a great city must move forward and stand for its vision with solemn duty and a recognition that our government is chartered to do important things that touch our lives daily.
Our recommended budget includes a historic investment for schools. This increase to support education and services for our students — a 13% increase over last year — demonstrates our dedication to serving our growing community and their families.
With federal emergency funding ending, it was extremely important to build a fiscal bridge and continue these services through the annual budget. College and career readiness support, tutoring and summer learning programs, mental health support, Community Achieves, and safety ambassadors are several of the programs supported through this funding. These programs have made a unique difference in the lives of students and their families.
The additional investment in schools will continue to support our teachers and grow services such as exceptional education for children with disabilities, English learner student support, annual textbook funding, the classroom associate program, and security.
This budget lets us keep a nurse in every school, and MNPD will add another 23 new School Resource Officers, to enhance safety.
Like so many of our investments, we’ve seen our work with schools paying off. In 2024, Metro Schools had the highest graduation rate on record. In addition, of the 100 largest urban districts, Metro Schools ranked fourth in math and ninth in reading for post-pandemic recovery and was one of five districts to show up in the top 10 lists for both subject areas - and the only district to make both lists two years in a row.
We are continuing to lay the foundation in this budget for Metro Schools to grow and plan for the future of Metro - our children.
As the son of a teacher, as a former Metro Schools student myself, and now as a parent of two Metro Schools students and as Mayor, I’m so grateful to our Metro Schools staff for the work they do to support our children and for all the sacrifices they make, seen and unseen. Thank you.
Education is the budget’s biggest investment, and it should be.
Thanks to our Metro Council members for their consideration and ongoing support of our public schools. Thanks to Chair Freda Player and the members of the Metro Nashville Board of Public Education for their leadership.
And certainly, thanks to our director of schools and the 2025 winner of the Athena Award, Dr. Adrienne Battle.
If we value their work and our students’ futures, we do everything in our power to keep them safe.
If anyone feels unsafe in our city, we know we still have work to do. For them – for all of us -- we must stay focused on the progress of safety.
I recently signed Executive Order 53, creating Nashville’s first Office of Youth Safety. It’s an idea that came from our youth. And they had help.
We recognize Council Member Delishia Porterfield, Juvenile Court Clerk Lonnell Matthews, and the Southern Movement Committee for leading the charge on that initiative. And please join me in welcoming our first director for that office, Phyllis Hildreth.
The budget we’re recommending makes a significant investment in public safety. We’re adding support in new places and new ways: a new Transit Security Division, a new Southeast Precinct team, and an expansion of our new flex unit.
What we call the D-Detail is effectively working for us as a force multiplier by helping precincts across the city and going where they’re most needed. Since launching on February 1, officers working this new detail have been the primary response unit on more than 1800 calls. And overall police response times countywide are down an average of 10.3 minutes so far in 2025.
Through the first quarter of this year, violent crime in Nashville was down 8% year-over-year, along with double digit decreases in auto theft, aggravated assault, and street robbery. Both violent and property crime are down.
We know these numbers are little consolation to any victim of crime. But we also want to acknowledge progress and success:
- We’re expanding the REACH program, which pairs Nashville Fire medics with clinicians from the Mental Health Cooperative. In 2024, 84 percent of the people we served through REACH avoided an ambulance ride, 70 percent avoided a trip to the ER, and those are two bills that they didn’t have to pay.
- We see progress on accountability, including an unprecedented agreement between the MNPD and the Community Review Board and the revision of sexual harassment and misconduct policies that will benefit all Metro employees.
- We see faster response times, and that’s thanks in part to Metro’s FIRST first responders, our 911 dispatchers at the Department of Emergency Communications. Year to date, they’ve answered 95% of calls in less than 15 seconds, well exceeding national standards, and helped save 294 lives.
The Vanderbilt poll shows strong public approval ratings for our first responders, who risk their own safety to protect ours.
For that and so much more, I want to recognize Nashville Fire and OEM Director-Chief Will Swann, Police Chief John Drake, Department of Emergency Communications Director Steve Martini, and their teams. Thanks to all of our first responders for keeping us safe.
And welcome to the first commander of MNPD’s Southeast Precinct, Carlos Lara. Thank you for your work.
Safety takes many forms, it requires many partners, and I’m encouraged to see the impact of our collaborative work in mental health support and overdose prevention.
We lost fewer people to suspected drug overdoses in 2024, a nearly 27% drop in fatalities. That’s thanks in part to cohesive strategies from our Office of Nightlife and the Behavioral Health and Wellness Advisory Council. It’s also thanks to partnership and proactive response, as MNPD recently installed Naloxone in entertainment venues across Nashville.
We also lost fewer people experiencing homelessness in 2024. The Office of Homeless Services marked a 45% reduction in deaths over the past two years, thanks in large part to the coordinated efforts between Metro and community partners. We’ve now got the best data we’ve ever had on our unhoused neighbors, and that’s making a difference. OHS housed nearly 2,000 people last year.
We’ve talked about schools and safety. Now let’s talk about services, the third leg of the community improvement program. We pick up the trash, fix streetlights, build and repair sidewalks, maintain the parks and community centers, fill the potholes, and help residents and businesses rebuild when disaster strikes. We respond when you call for help.
Through the first 9 months of the current fiscal year, about 230,000 requests came to hubNashville through the website, the app, or by dialing 311. Many were resolved quickly on the first call. All of them kept 911 clear for emergencies, which helps save lives.
Our budget includes additional staff to continue delivering on our goal to create a separate, standalone department to manage our solid waste. We’ve got legislation that will be in front of Metro Council at their next meeting that will complete this step, all in the name of greater reliability and better service.
The budget includes support for health and wellness programs like Nashville Strong Babies, HIV and STI prevention and treatment, vaccinations, mobile health programs, mental health support, continued investment in Nashville General Hospital, and nighttime codes inspectors.
And so much more. We’re providing operational support for the fundamentals that touch the lives of our residents every day. Embedded into this budget are the basics we rely on: Schools, parks and libraries. Water service, trash collection, road maintenance. Police, fire, and medical. Basic. Fundamental. Vital.
We’re in the customer service business, and these are just a few of the things our departments are doing that help Nashvillians move, work and grow.
One more deep breath...this time to note this moment in time. Today marks 15 years since the 2010 flood when Nashville experienced a pair of days of record-breaking rain. The May storms claimed more than a dozen lives, and the resulting flood impacted hundreds more. We just recently passed the five-year mark since a devastating tornado took 2 lives here. That same week, Nashville’s first case of COVID was declared, starting what became a difficult chapter in our global history that has ongoing implications today. We ended the year with a devastating bombing.
In each case, I remember the many heroes and helpers who stepped up to lend a hand. First responders gave way to second responders. Neighbors helped neighbors. More than help, it gave us hope. It’s a truly unique demonstration of community I hope we never lose as a city.
So, as we reflect on the last several years, I hope we can remember those we lost, those we’ve gained, continue to be kind, and look out for one another. Not everyone can be a first responder. But we can all be second responders. We can choose to be responsible for each other. That’s How Nashville Helps – our partnership with one another. And that’s the optimism I see in the city.
I see the same optimism in the data from Imagine Nashville, which last year completed the largest community listening project in city history. Their survey partner has done similar studies in over 100 communities, and said Nashville has the highest scores they’ve ever seen on belonging. That includes very high marks from our foreign-born community, which is now 1 out of every 7 of us.
But there’s a big disparity between who says I belong and who feels included. In the Imagine Nashville study, over half of low-income families said they do not feel a sense of inclusion here, followed by older adults, the LGBTQ+ community, and Black residents. We want them to feel included.
So as a next step, I’m excited to announce a new, long-term partnership with the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, led by Hal Cato, which will be joining Metro in strengthening our sense of belonging as we work together to take what we learned from Imagine Nashville and move it into reality.
The State of Metro today is where many cities would like to be. School performance is up. We’ve improved both benchmarking and performance of city services. Crime is down. People want to be here. And we want to make it easier to stay. And that’s much of the work we’re going to be leaning into even harder starting today.
The median home price in Nashville has risen to almost $500,000. That’s more than 5 times greater than the region’s median income.
So Nashville, it’s time to move on housing.
We need to take a critical look at our housing codes and zoning. 10 years ago, we came together and explored the tension between growth and preservation. We engaged in a comprehensive general plan of the city—NashvilleNext. Every community reflected on its own capacity for growth, and we concluded that we had some natural centers where growth could and should occur. NashvilleNext was a consequential project for the city.
I’ve invited Lucy Kempf, our planning director for the city, to revisit NashvilleNext at the 10-year mark. To reflect on what we got right, how we should prepare for our next chapter of growth, and how it affects what we preserve. Because we can’t afford to preserve the high cost of housing.
We’ve expanded our housing toolbox significantly over the past year, and we’re using every tool we have:
- Awarding $53 million from the Barnes Affordable Housing Fund to create and preserve over 1,300 affordable homes in 2024.
- Launching the Catalyst Fund to provide fast, flexible loans to preserve affordable rentals that would otherwise be lost to the market.
- Unlocking the potential of faith-based institutions through partnerships that led to Clark UMC’s first affordable housing project, the Northview Housing Development for seniors with Born Again Church, and Inspiritus’s new affordable housing for seniors and people living with disabilities that just broke ground in my own neighborhood.
- Going after grants everywhere we can, including winning $5 million through HUD’s first-ever Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing program.
- And building on the success of permanent supportive housing at Strobel House for the people whose housing challenges are the greatest.
And now we have a new tool.
Just in time for this address and the budget, our planning department is moving forward with a Unified Housing Strategy.
This strategy offers a lot of history, context, and analysis and gives us a basis for action for the next decade to help us avoid a deepening crisis.
To be clear, we as a community will need to find room and funding for 90,000 homes over the next decade if we want to have any hope of enough people having secure, stable housing at any income level.
For the first time, thanks to the Unified Housing Strategy, we’ve got a complete picture of the need and how Metro can participate in—and fund—parts of the actions.
And in our recommended budget, we’ve absorbed the strategy and quantified our fiscal commitment. I’m recommending a total commitment of $45M from Metro in our first year of implementation.
That includes …
- Continuing investment in the Barnes Fund
- Increasing capacity for the Office of Homeless Services
- Funding anti-displacement work to help older residents make needed home repairs;
- Expanding a financial incentive to encourage new construction and substantial rehabilitation of affordable housing that has already created or preserved 10,000 affordable homes
We’re accepting a recommendation from the strategy to hire a full-time housing coordinator in the mayor’s office.
In addition to that, I’m excited that the Community Foundation—who have already been leading on setup and launch of our Catalyst Fund—will be pulling together a group of experts who know we need to move quickly and making sure we do.
But Metro can’t do this alone. And it’s imperative that this is understood as a Unified Housing Strategy. We need our private sector partners not just at the table but at the bank.
It’s a project that requires partnership and community will, but those are the same things that delivered passage of a generational transit improvement program in November and the same stuff that brought this building to life. At that time, we rallied around the idea that a city with a great library is a great city.
Today we need to channel that can-do spirit and civic pride to meet a need that has been growing. Because great housing options yield a great city.
Let’s make it happen.
If we get all of this right—the way we move, how Metro works, and coming together to celebrate the place we live and welcome others who’ve discovered it—Nashville will become an ever-easier place to stay.
A place we’re strong inside. A place with high aspirations.
Over the holidays, my brother and I started reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s remarkable book, There’s Always This Year, which you can, of course, check out from NPL.
His reflections on place and staying and leaving are beautiful and tragic and hopeful all at once.
He says: “There are few things more intimate than the history made when a person touches a place, runs a hand along it for decades at a time. Few things more intimate than the history made when a place touches you too, if you are open to it."
Let’s not let difficulty or disappointment in trying times—when the world makes less sense or offers sudden new challenges—be either the thief of joy or the eraser of progress. Let’s be open to letting Nashville continue to be a place that reminds us why we stay. And open to making it easier for others to do so.
Thank you for your partnership, your friendship, and your belief in a better Nashville for Nashvillians. Special thanks to my parents and the first doctor Whitney Boon for being here today.
I’ve lived here all my life, and it’s my life’s honor, doing this work with you.