Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, criticized the handling of Nashville’s recent ice storm, highlighting what he described as systemic mismanagement by city officials and the Nashville Electric Service (NES) board.
More than 108,000 NES customers remained without power Wednesday morning after an ice storm swept through the region over the weekend. The utility company has since faced criticism after multiple union members and contractors reported that NES declined offers of assistance from available linemen to restore service.
Two members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who spoke anonymously to Fox 17, claimed that NES “declined offers of assistance from multiple union crews, potentially opting for less expensive contractors instead.”
In comparison, other Middle Tennessee electric companies have reported far fewer outages. Middle Tennessee Electric, which serves more than 359,000 customers, reported only 284 outages at noon on Wednesday.
On Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pappert attributed much of the prolonged outage to the NES board’s lack of operational experience.
He pointed out that board members, many of whom were politically appointed, “None of them particularly seem to have a lot of expertise in the field.”
Pappert also criticized NES’s communication with residents, calling the utility’s text alerts telling residents to utilize warming centers “patronizing.”
“If it’s freezing and you don’t have heat and you don’t have electricity, do you really need a municipally-owned power company… to let you know that? It’s insulting,” he said.
Pappert went on to call for NES to accept outside assistance in restoring power across Nashville.
“They need to invite these folks from Middle Tennessee Electric and other utilities nearby and say, this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. Please bail us out,” he said. “After all, Democrats are good at accepting bailouts.”
Pappert framed the situation as part of a broader pattern of mismanagement in cities run by Democrats, warning that political loyalty and political correctness often outweigh expertise in critical municipal roles.
“It turns out that the price you pay for Democrat mismanagement is weeks in the dark…This is really what anybody in any Democrat city has to look forward to… you’re going to have mismanagement that can cost lives,” he said, though he noted that Tennessee communities are generally well-prepared to handle crises through neighborly support.
“Fortunately, I think the people of Tennessee are very well prepared for things like this. You have neighbors that take care of each other, but in other states this could be tragic,” Pappert added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Tennesse Power Outage Repair” by MidTnElectric.
The response from this storm is a prime reason why Nashville needs to be taken over by the state. All you have in the mayor’s office and all his minions on the council is nothing but a bunch of activists who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and make money. They have no business experiences the general rule and do not know how to respond to a crisis. Tennessee must take over Nashville in order for the cities to survive and be productive.