Nashville shows Dallas that you do not have to be red or blue to run a successful city

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson recently penned a column announcing he will serve his second term as a Republican.

(“Mayor Eric Johnson: America’s Cities Need Republicans, and I’m Becoming One,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22).

Having worked for former Nashville Mayor John Cooper, a Democrat in a nonpartisan office, I disagree with Mayor Johnson’s assertion that the future success of America’s cities depends on adopting Republican ideology.

Being a successful city is not about being a Republican or a Democrat. School funding, emergency response, clean water, policing, parks, and roads – city management is not partisan.

Mayor Johnson is right that public safety and fiscal stewardship are core responsibilities of city management, but those are Democratic principles as much as they are Republican ones.

Nashville, like Dallas, resisted calls to defund the police. In keeping with President Biden’s support for additional police officers and community policing, Mayor Cooper swore in 474 more police officers in four years, and Nashville raised police officer pay by 34 percent.

Another view: Stop the Tennessee-Nashville feud to avoid chaos, decline and regret

Nashville’s property taxes are lower than Dallas

Financial management of a city should also not be partisan; a city has to balance its budget. In Nashville, we made the difficult choice to raise property taxes in 2020 to stabilize city finances and invest in core services.

As a result, Nashville has its highest-ever level of reserves to weather the next downturn and received its first-ever bond rating upgrade. Nashville increased K-12 per pupil funding by 40% in four years and still has lower property taxes than Dallas.

An August 2023 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy showed that the median homeowner in Dallas pays a property tax bill that is 26% higher than in Nashville.

Mayor Cooper worked with Republican state leadership to recruit Oracle and he also deployed American Rescue Plan funds to partner with Nashville’s oldest historically Black college and university (HBCU), Fisk University, to create an innovation and entrepreneurship center. Growing the city’s tax base, bringing in jobs, and fostering small business growth – Nashville is a blue city doing the job quite well.

Another view: I know new Speaker Mike Johnson and he's an authentic policy wonk who lives his faith

Fearmongering drives the myth of the decline of American cities

Republicans do not have a monopoly on fighting crime and addressing homelessness – but conservative media certainly has carved out a monopoly on fearmongering over the supposed decline of American cities. Media outlets like Fox and Sinclair use an intentional strategy to constantly push a narrative that cities like Nashville are failing and ravaged by crime and homelessness. That narrative does not match reality.

Both violent crime and property crime rates in Nashville are lower now than 20 or 30 years ago. Nashville deployed innovative programs to help residents dealing with mental health issues and used funds from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan to house 528 chronically homeless Nashvillians in just 16 months.

The desire of conservative media to claim that cities are failing stems from their need to undermine the success that Democrats have had as executives across the country.

But what city did the Republican National Committee court for their 2024 convention? Nashville. Then they went to another blue city, Milwaukee. And in 2028, the RNC will visit another blue city, Houston. As Mayor Johnson pointed out, over 80% of America’s population live in urban areas. America’s businesses, new college graduates, and even the RNC are choosing blue cities time and time again.

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Nashville’s mayor chose to govern not to play politics

The mayor’s seat is nonpartisan in both Nashville and Dallas. Injecting partisan ideology into governance is not the recipe for success.

Either you can choose to demonize trans kids playing sports or you can get to work making sure that every public high school has a new athletic field.

You can spend your time banning children’s books or you can make sure every student has a laptop and internet access.

You can disparage migrants and immigrants, or you can make constituent services more inclusive with multilingual call operators in Spanish and Kurdish.

In each case, Nashville chose the latter. Inclusion over division. Addition instead of subtraction. Those are Democratic values.

Governing is not activism in office. Cities have always had challenges, and neither party has ever had all the answers. But I’m confident that Democratic cities will continue to prosper.

Benjamin Eagles lives in Nashville, Tennessee and served as senior advisor to former Nashville Mayor John Cooper during his term in office (2019-2023). You can reach him at benjamin.eagles@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville vs. Dallas: Party label does not lead to running a city well