Issues

As Mayor, Freddie Will Build A Nashville That Works Together.

Freddie O’Connell Is The Only Truly Progressive Candidate For Mayor. He Is Not Afraid To Take On Those That Want To Sell Our City Away Or Restrict Our Rights.

Nashville can be a great place to visit – but more importantly, Nashville must be a great place to live. This isn’t a campaign that focuses only on a vision for the future. This is about addressing our needs, now - the challenges we face in our daily lives.

Public Safety

The most important job of a mayor and government is to keep its people safe. We watched our police officers make Nashville proud during the Covenant school shooting, and we should support them. This means ensuring they have appropriate personnel, equipment, and facilities. Our officers also need competitive pay and meaningful housing options, so they can afford to live in the city they serve. But we should do this with the same degree of accountability we expect of any Metro department.

As mayor, Freddie will also work to ensure that our police can focus on crime, enhancing the Partners in Care and REACH programs, which allow mental health providers and paramedics to be involved when someone is experiencing a crisis that is not necessarily a crime.

Crime prevention means thinking beyond policing—because crime is often borne out of hopelessness. We should expand community safety partnerships like the ones we forged in Napier that included an agreement between the housing authority and police that got officers out of cars and into the neighborhood, supported creating a walking school bus to prevent bullying, collaboratively delivered lighting improvements, and implemented traffic calming that actually helped reduce gun violence. We can do this citywide.

Back-to-basics: Customer Service

From day one, a Mayor’s day-to-day work should be improving our day-to-day lives. It might sound simple, but unlike other candidates, it’s Freddie’s priority. He will refocus Metro Government on the goal of great service, from prioritizing pothole requests to addressing the backlog of sidewalk and paving projects.

As part of his work on Metro Council, Freddie worked with the Mayor’s Office and Public Works to develop and implement hubNashville. It was intended to be Metro’s one-stop-shop for consumer service, and it is when it comes to taking in requests. But each department responds to residents in their own way, and those differences mean things fall through the cracks.

As Mayor, Freddie will ensure that Metro acknowledges, responds to, and follows through on every issue, every time.

Neighborhoods

The beauty of our city is our neighborhoods, they make every corner of the county unique. Freddie has worked to protect the culture, history, and affordability of our communities . He has spent the past seven years fighting to protect us from overdevelopment, from short-term rental-filled streets, and even from the transportainment companies hoping to bring party buses down every road.

In Freddie’s administration, the Mayor’s Office will be dedicated to ensuring that Metro is taking a thorough, coordinated approach to the quality of life issues that have erupted from our growth. Freddie will listen to the concerns of all residents, no matter their zip code.

Transportation

As Mayor, Freddie will make Nashville more mobile by using technology to make traffic flow better, ending our standing as the worst in the nation for potholes, and developing an easy-to-use transit system that unclogs our roads.

He will ensure that the complex array of construction-based closures are better coordinated so we can get where we need to go, whether by bus, bike, car, or sidewalk. He will use his experience in tech to fix our traffic management systems so we can get where we need to go faster and stop sitting at red lights when no one is coming the other way.

Freddie will also take on our transit system. Having served on the leadership board of the system, and because he and his family often ride the bus, he knows what’s needed. Without raising taxes, he can implement a three-year plan that creates more crosstown routes and reduces downtown transfers (and traffic).

Housing

Every healthcare or hospitality worker, every first responder, every teacher should have the ability to live in the community they choose to serve. Opportunists are taking advantage of Nashvillians and causing housing costs to skyrocket. We need a Mayor who will act.

Using the levers at our disposal, like the Barnes Housing Trust Fund, and publicly-owned properties, we can bring long-term affordable housing options to our city. Freddie has a track record of bringing in funding for these projects and a plan to reduce red tape for partners looking to provide lower-cost options.

Education and Youth

As a parent of public school students, Freddie knows the importance of ensuring there’s a great teacher in every classroom. He will work to create a multi-year plan to ensure that Nashville teachers remain the best paid in the state.

But even with the best teachers, young people need support outside of school. We need to continue driving down and addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on a citywide basis and pick back up where we left off with the Opportunity NOW initiative to provide jobs, paid internships, and a pathway to success for our youth.

Homelessness

When Freddie worked to create the city’s Office of Homelessness Services, he wanted to be sure that Metro could coordinate care and services on both a temporary and permanent basis. The sad reality is that some of our neighbors will never be able to produce enough income to be consistently housed, often due to disabilities or mental health conditions. They need supportive services that don’t exist in traditional housing scenarios. That’s why as Mayor, Freddie will work to develop both permanent and temporary housing options with the services needed by our most vulnerable neighbors.

As Mayor, Freddie Will Build A Nashville That Works Together.

Freddie O’Connell Is The Only Truly Progressive Candidate For Mayor. He Is Not Afraid To Take On Those That Want To Sell Our City Away Or Restrict Our Rights.

“O'Connell has built a reputation as a pragmatic lawmaker with a sophisticated understanding of Metro's sprawling bureaucracy."

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Paid for by the Ready for Freddie Committee. Isaac Addae, Treasurer