David Fox isn’t flashy, supporters say, but Nashville doesn’t need flash. Instead, it needs someone with a steady temperament to be Nashville’s next mayor.
“He said in one of his forums his legacy might be the David Fox Memorial Sewer Pipe. But he’s thinking about the little things, about the infrastructure,” says Townes Duncan, a former business partner of the mayoral candidate.
Duncan, a Green Hills resident who manages Solidus investment firm, says he’s seen Fox work in good times and bad and amid difficult decision-making environments. In those, Fox showed maturity, good judgment and financial sophistication, Duncan says.
“He maintains his equanimity, just a first-rate guy. Knowing him and seeing him in all those settings is important. Character is sort of fundamental,” Duncan says.
A founding board member of KIPP Charter School, Duncan agrees with Fox on his views about the future of Metro government and Metro Nashville Public Schools, including the operation of charter schools.
Like Fox, Duncan says it’s time to dial back on borrowing and spending for major civic projects, even though he supported Mayor Karl Dean’s moves on investment in the Music City Center.
Metro holds $2.2 billion in debt, while the Sports Authority carries $157 million and the Convention Center Authority $419 million.
“To navigate highly leveraged balance sheets is a tougher challenge than a less-leveraged balance sheet,” Duncan adds. “It doesn’t mean we won’t borrow any money while David’s mayor. We certainly will. It probably will go for less flashy things.”
Fox, who started and ran the Nashville Post for six years and most recently operated a hedge-fund with New York-based Titan Advisors (his brother George is president and founder of Titan), leaves no doubt about where he stands on Nashville’s financial future, at least for the next few years, stating his “cautionary comments” are making people realize the city has invested significant amounts in downtown Nashville and needs to start reigning in debt and emphasizing other areas.
“And so it’s not so much criticism of what we’ve done. It’s a real belief that we need to balance what we’re going to do going forward,” or get into trouble financially, Fox notes.
David Fox
Birthdate: Aug. 1, 1961
Birthplace: Roanoke, Va.
High School: Montgomery Bell Academy
College: University of Virginia
Jobs: Former hedge-fund advisor with Titan Advisors Inc., Metro School Board, 2006-10, founder Nashville Post
Memberships: Nashville Public Education Foundation, American Parkinson Disease Association, Foundation for Athletics in Nashville Schools
Family: Wife Carrington, sons Oscar, Julius,
Simon
Dog: Lulu
Fox wants Nashville to “digest” the projects it has funded, curb the municipal capital budget and spending and steer more money into neighborhoods, especially in shoring up water and sewer lines and roads.
Otherwise, the city risks “severely” reducing the city’s quality of life, he says.
Throughout his campaign and in commercials, he’s played the theme that Nashville needs to avoid becoming the next Atlanta, especially from the viewpoint of traffic congestion.
This stance gave his opponent Megan Barry an opening their first NashForward debate, when she said Fox has a “vision of austerity” while she maintains a “vision for prosperity.”
Fox finished second to Barry in the race for the mayoral runoff Sept. 10, collecting 23,754 votes, 22.8 percent to Barry’s 24,553 votes, 23.5 percent. Early voting is taking place across Nashville and wraps up Sept. 5.
But Fox’s view holds up among many in Nashville’s business community, including David Stansell, owner of Stansell Electric, who held a reception to raise money for Fox’s campaign.
Stansell says civic projects such as the Music City Center are good for Nashville, but he wonders if the city can continue in that direction.
“If you do a lot of that and you don’t take care what’s underneath it all you can’t support the growth that you want,” Stansell says.
And while water and sewer lines and road projects aren’t as “sexy” as massive conference centers, they are vital to Nashville’s future.
“You don’t want to stop good growth, but you certainly have to be ready for it or else you get caught with your pants down,” he adds.
Barry garnered endorsements from former Mayor and Gov. Phil Bredesen, former opponent Charles Bone, Nashville firefighters and 35 current and former Metro Council members. Fox was endorsed this week by the Fraternal Order of Police.
Metro Councilman Steve Glover, who served one term with Fox on the school board, says “David Fox is the man.”
“It’s not sexy to talk about the things David’s talking about. The fact of the matter that’s where we are as a city now,” adds Glover, who represents the Hermitage area.
“We have got to take care of the outer loops. We’ve gotta look past 440. We’ve gotta look past downtown, and we have to focus, laser focus, on the real issues we have and come up with real-life solutions.”
Glover considers Fox a friend with “extreme integrity” and a “brilliant business person” who as soon as he’s elected will start analyzing every part of Nashville’s government to solve problems.
Financial fire
Fox set a $1 million fundraising goal for the first reporting period immediately after making the runoff. In the initial leg, he totaled $2.039 million in receipts and spent $1.91 million with loans totaling $1.56 million, according to Metro Election Commission records.
But the red flag for Fox’s campaign came in the form of Citizen Super PAC out of Austin, Texas, which launched an advertising campaign casting him as the conservative candidate in the race and attacking opponents, including Linda Rebrovick, who finished near the bottom in the first election.
On top of that, the PAC was completely funded by Fox’s brother, George.
The PAC had $128,598 on hand at the end of the last campaign finance reporting period, records show, and is expected to start another wave of TV ads.
While these types of political action committees are the newest form of campaign funding, federal law prohibits candidates from coordinating with the PAC. Considering, Fox’s brother wrote the check, citywide skepticism is following the PAC’s activity, and Barry’s campaign criticized out-of-state money trying to control a Nashville election.
Tennessee Citizen Action, a nonprofit public interest and consumer rights organization, is seeking an investigation of the matter and notified the Fox campaign it would seek an injunction against Citizen Super PAC. The group is calling for David and George Fox to be deposed and states they’ve refused to give sworn statements.
Fox denies he or his campaign director, also from Austin, Texas, had any knowledge of the campaign or coordination with Citizen Super. He told The Ledger he would “absolutely” be willing to sign an affidavit under oath stating he didn’t know the Super PAC ads were coming.
“Sanctions for violating that are serious. And so as much as I am eager to be mayor, I’m not eager enough to be mayor to do something that’s not legal and completely kosher,” Fox says.
Noting he doesn’t want to do anything “improper” to win the race, Fox says outside entities are welcome to help his campaign independently, but he wants to make sure their message matches his.
“What got my goat on that first time was there was some messaging that was pretty terrible. It went after one of the people in the race that I took great exception to. So I got pretty angry about it,” he says.
Asked whether she thinks Fox had no knowledge of the PAC, Barry says she takes him at his word. Yet her campaign director poked fun at the Fox brothers, alluding to them as the Koch brothers, who have spent millions nationally affecting state and federal races.
Stansell says Fox would not coordinate illegally with Citizen Super, saying the ad campaign probably backfired on him in the polling.
“Some of the things the Super PAC did were silly and unnecessary,” he notes, adding it makes no sense to spend money criticizing Rebrovick, “a fine person,” when she’s nearly last in the race.
Philosophical conflict
Fox characterizes himself as a “social centrist” and “fiscal conservative,” thus his views on government spending, and says he supports the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. He just doesn’t make it a primary point in his campaign as Barry does, he adds, calling her a “far-left” candidate in a city where most people are in the middle politically.
Nashville political commentator Pat Nolan points out Barry sounded as if she were running in a Democratic primary when she hammered themes such as gay rights before the first vote. Fox’s best strategy would be to continue selling a more conservative message against overspending in downtown Nashville and increasing debt, according to Nolan.
“Obviously, that resonated in August because once he started getting out that message and putting it on television, his numbers started coming up in all the various polls,” Nolan says.
Fox is a Nashville product. His father moved the family back here after David’s mother died when he was 4. He graduated from Montgomery Bell Academy before earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia.
The Foxes live in the Whitland neighborhood where on a summer morning his children and dog run in and out of the house, hardly a mansion, and people stop by to pick up campaign signs. He and his wife, Carrington, a board member of Conexion Americas, have three young sons, Oscar, 12, Julius, 10 and Simon, 9, who ride herd on Lulu, their dog.
With such a background, he collected most of his votes in Belle Meade, Forest Hills and Oak Hill, Nashville’s satellite cities, and that conservative support is likely to be there for him on Election Day, Nolan points out.
Whereas winning a Nashville election once meant maximizing votes north and east of the Cumberland River, today people win elections by getting votes south and west of the river, according to Nolan.
Yet Fox, who cast himself as an independent in the first debate, is vulnerable in that Nashville is historically a Democratic voting stronghold, now a “blue bubble” in a sea of red in Tennessee, Nolan says.
And there have been enough Republican or conservative “overtones” during the campaign, especially through the Citizen Super PAC ad campaign, to potentially hit Fox at the ballot box.
With the race shaping up as conservative vs. liberal, 25-year-old Rod Wright, who switched his allegiance to Fox with Howard Gentry out of the running, says that scenario could hurt Fox’s campaign.
Wright, who is stumping in primarily black neighborhoods, says Fox can attract African-American voters by letting them get to know him and showing them he’s not a tea party Republican, a label some have tried to pin on him.
If Fox allows other people to “paint a picture” of him, he will struggle, according to Wright.
“And also we’ll lose if they make it Democrat vs. Republican, because it’s about issues moving our city forward,” Wright says, especially in predominantly black areas where voters are heavily Democrat.
Wright recently went with Fox to knock on doors in north Nashville where “word on the street” is that he wants to turn every city school into a charter school.
“He said, no, he doesn’t want to do that. He was one of the advocates to bring in one of the first charter schools because he wanted a solution to fix some of the problems going on right now,” Wright explains.
“He doesn’t want to make all public schools charter schools, but he wants to bring in solutions and take some of the things charter schools are doing and put them into the public schools.”
Education rift
When Fox served on the Metro School Board, he called on Gov. Phil Bredesen to start a process for replacing the elected board by giving appointment authority to Nashville’s mayor. At that time, Fox says he felt the school board was so dysfunctional it was failing the school system and students, and board members held no sense they were responsible for poorly-performing schools.
The move brought criticism from those who felt he wanted to remove voters from the equation.
“They have all the authority in the world to ensure we have a good quality of education,” he says of the school board, “and, unfortunately, the performance level of the elected school boards since we’ve had it a little over 30 years has been by and large pretty weak.
“So my view at the time was let’s create a better governance structure where somebody actually feels accountable.”
Other than some talk between state and local officials, though, nothing came of it. And Fox says he’s dropped the idea.
Still, he says the mayor needs to spend “political capital” in forcing the school board to avoid the status quo on school performance. That means building rapport with the board and creating an appetite for reform, he says.
Asked if he wants to build the number of charter schools in Metro Nashville Public Schools, Fox says he wants to increase “the number of successful schools tomorrow,” and he doesn’t care if Metro or a charter school operates them.
Fox contends charter schools can act more quickly in setting up schools that meet student needs, especially “at-risk” children. And, he adds, Barry doesn’t seem to have the same urgency.
“We now have a politically significant mass of parents who are so thankful for high-performing charter schools, and they don’t care, they don’t care if MNPS runs the school or if a nonprofit charter (runs it). They’re just thankful that they have a great public school, and I share that view,” he says.
Duncan calls Fox’s leadership on the school board “extraordinary, saying he is focused on what’s best for students. He says Fox won’t “cave in” to “adult constituencies.”
“Our public schools should be a calling card for this community, not something we sort of have to explain and apologize for. He is dedicated to that,” Duncan says.
The former charter board member says KIPP, Valor and Liberty Collegiate are proving to be successful, and he takes exception to school board members who say charter schools don’t want to take “higher-risk” students, calling it an “offensive untruth.”
Faith perspective
Fox spoke about his Jewish faith on election night in August and doesn’t shy away from it during public events, though he would be Nashville’s first Jewish mayor.
A few decades ago, that might have been a stumbling block to the mayor’s office but not anymore because Nashville is becoming a more diverse city, he says. The defeat of an English Only language measure for city government in 2009 proved to be important in making Nashville a more welcoming city for “entrepreneurial people” around the world, Fox adds.
Fox calls the Nashville he grew up in during the 1960s and ’70s a “comfortable” place but not “terrible interesting.” In fact, if Nashville hadn’t changed in the last 30 years, he says he probably wouldn’t be living here.
In conversations with Nashvillians during the last year, he says he’s found the perspective of being “reasonable” financially while “welcoming” all types of people.
“Being Jewish, that’s sort of how I was brought up. There’s a thing in Judaism called tikkun olam, or repair the world. So it’s sort of baked into the system.
“One of your obligations as a person, how you’ll be judged in the end, is how much concern do you have for other people and how muscular are you in efforts to help them come back into the rest of society.”
Only through people with different philosophies and backgrounds has Nashville become a “great city,” he says, and he hopes to continue attracting “high-performing” people.
“I’ll do everything I can to keep that coming but to make sure we shore up the basics of our city so this population increase doesn’t cause us to do another Atlanta.”
Sam Stockard can be reached at [email protected].