This is an article I wrote for The East Nashvillian magazine.
After serving eight years on the Metro council from East Nashville’s District 6, Mike Jameson has done his time and has passed the torch to Peter Westerholm. He hands over the responsibility to serve a vibrant community he helped build, a community filled with budding businesses, active neighborhood associations, dog walkers, new parents pushing strollers, and packs of roving joggers. But it wasn’t always so.
When Jameson moved to East Nashville in 1990, things were vastly different. “There was sort of a bunker mentality, neighborhood associations didn’t like holding their meetings at night because people didn’t want to come out in the dark,” he recalls. “There was really only one place to eat, The Knife and Fork. But since then, the neighborhood has done a 180. Now you can’t find a place to park at some of the establishments and you see baby strollers everywhere.”
Besides the aftereffects of the ’98 tornado, one area where he attributes the change is the revamp of Lockeland Design Center. “It’s turned into an attractive place for parents and has effectively changed the landscape of the neighborhood,” he says.
What is the secret to Jameson’s success?, “Mike took office at the emergence of extraordinary growth in East Nashville, when our future as an urban neighborhood was still anyone’s guess,” neighborhood activist Catherine McTamaney says. “Because Mike was both immediately responsive and deliberative in his responses, a diplomacy that helped to focus a lot of different interests, and more importantly, created an expectation that this was a neighborhood that rewarded your involvement. He helped establish a culture of engagement that’s likely to define East Nashville for years to come.”
Highs and lows
Besides working with the unique set of needs in District 6, his proudest achievements have been his various efforts to bring “genuine environmentalism” to the council. This included a LEED Certification bill, work with impervious surfaces and storm water legislation, and streamlining green permits. Also, he says he is glad to have been successful in rooting out rules that favored the “Good Ole Boys Club.” When he started eight years ago, there were still many laws on the books that were written to protect incumbent officials and Jameson was able to get many of those issues resolved successfully.
Recently, Jameson worked on a bill that became controversial — the home-based business bill. A constituent brought to his attention that her home-based business was technically illegal. Looking into it further, he realized that possibly 13,000 other home-based businesses, including the untold number of Nashville home studios, were possibly illegal if there were clients coming into the home to do business. Mike researched and found that other cities had addressed it effectively and he tried to come up with something that fixed the problem.
“We had 11 public meetings about it,” Jameson says. But it was largely misunderstood — some people even asked why he wanted to put home studios out of business, which was the opposite of what he was trying to do. He left for vacation and returned to find effective opposition to the bill, too near the end of his term to work it out successfully. He hopes someone will fix it in the future. “Seattle passed it two days after it failed here,” he says.
So what’s next?
After leaving the council, Jameson planned to go back to work as a litigator at North, Pursell, Ramos and Jameson, PLC. “I have clients who have been extremely patient with me over the years,” he says. He also was selected this year for Leadership Nashville, an exclusive executive leadership program that chooses 40 community leaders yearly to participate in their nine-month program. And recently he was asked to write a column for the Nashville Scene, sort of an insider’s view of local government.
In October, he announced he will be running for the recently vacated judgeship in the Davidson County General Sessions court, replacing Judge Leon Ruben who recently passed away. The vacancy will be filled by the Metro council and likely will be voted on at the second council meeting in November. Looking back on his time on the council, Jameson says he is “incredibly glad” he was able to serve East Nashville over the last eight years. And East Nashville is incredibly glad — and grateful too.
