Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed Metro Nashville’s City Council Member-at-Large Steve Glover to the studio.
During the second hour, Glover revealed recent polling that shows Mayor Cooper’s approval rating has plummeted by 50 percent. He was dismayed by the Metro Government’s choice to raise taxes and keep the city shutdown for no good reason.
Leahy: We are joined now by our very good friend in studio Metro Council member-At-large Steve Glover. Good morning Steve.
Glover: Good morning Michael. How are you, sir?
Leahy: Well, I’m great. I’m great. I wonder Steve how a conservative survives in this far-left environment that is the Metro Council. That is the Nashville Metro Government ruled under, my words the tyrannical control of Mayor John Cooper. How do you deal with all these guys?
Glover: Well, so for me, it was very important that I do everything I said I was going to do when I campaigned. I was going to fight to protect your wallet. I was going to do these various things. Well, I am a fighter. And the bottom line is simply this. I never could have imagined a 34 to 37 percent property tax increase when we were here talking a year and a half ago.
Leahy: Yeah. You were a district representative council member and had decided to run for Metro council at large right on a conservative, common platform. At that time, no one was considering a 34 percent to 37 percent property tax increase at all. It was not on the horizon.
Glover: I don’t remember the exact phrasing but they’ve never met a crisis they couldn’t take advantage of.
Leahy: Yes.
Glover: And that’s what they did. They’ve said look, we’ve got this terrible thing happening. We’ve got this terrible shortfall of money. Oh my gosh. The sky is falling. The sky is falling. I heard a thing yesterday, you know, the one thing the far left loves to do is try to scare us all the time. and by scaring us all the time, then they will sneak in the door and they’ll put their plans down.
So Mayor Cooper rolls out a 32 percent property tax increase which I thought was ludicrous. And I’ve never seen this as long as I’ve been involved with the Metropolitan government and it’s about 20 years now. Because school board schools, right? And now this okay now at large representing the entire city, I’ve never seen the council say no, no, I think we need to raise it higher. Who does that?
Leahy: Well, so let’s talk about this for a minute. Why is it that if you look at the Metro Council, there are 40 members of the council? There are five at-large members. You’re one. You’re the only conservative of the at large. You got what the second or third mode highest votes third.
Glover: Third highest.
Leahy: Pretty good performance, by the way. Then there are 35 districts and of those 35 districts, I would say probably 27 are represented by left-wing lunatics. These are my words, not you yours. My words. Not yours.
Glover: I don’t understand their way of thinking. I don’t understand the way people think. And let me say this Michael. You know, everybody’s tuned in on this presidential election right now. If you remember a year some odd ago when I was talking about how local will affect your you know life a lot more than the national does normally.
And what you’re seeing is it is happening right now. People in Nashville are starting to wake up. I mean, I polled a couple of weeks ago and I’ll tell you I outpolled everybody and it was a primarily Democratic poll. Because all I’m trying to do is protect the people of Nashville.
I mean if you don’t have a job, I don’t think you can afford a 34 to 37 percent property taxing increase. The other thing I was going to tell you was I was on the phone and I really hate to say it this way but literally, all I could picture was little old ladies. I mean, they’re retired many of them their husbands had passed away.
They are on Social Security. They’ve got a very limited income Social Security and it’s maybe their only income. They were crying because maybe they made $1 too much or $ 5 too much or $100 too much in order to qualify to get their taxes frozen at last year’s rate.
They were crying saying, how am I going to figure out? How do I buy food, prescriptions and now this? You know, maybe if you’re making really good money an additional $70 to $100 a month isn’t going to kill you.
But I will tell you right now if you’re on a fixed income and you’re living in a household with four children three, children two, and both parents are working one of you lose your job. It doesn’t matter what age you are and it doesn’t matter what color you are. Oh and by the way, we’re kind of creating our own destiny here, you know by the mayor keeping us closed and to do that to people…
Leahy: For no good reason for what I could tell.
Glover: No. No, it’s not. I agree with that one and I’ll tell you this is the lousiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Leahy: By the way, we have so many things to talk about but I know I’m rambling, you know, you’re not rambling. Actually, we have an hour and a half today and we’ll hit all these topics one at a time. We’ve got the property tax increase.
We’ve got the what in my view the absolute defiance of the rule of law by the Metro legal counsel and by the mayor to defy the charter and to not allow this that this repeal referendum to go to the voters. And then you have all of the hiding of coronavirus data.
But making when it finally comes out to make decisions not supported by the data. I mean, we’ve got a lot to talk about, and then of course we have the disgraceful conduct of Bob Mendes in his tweet last night. So many things to talk about.
Glover: The night before last.
Leahy: I wanted to go back to this little intriguing thing you said here. I caught it. You said that you’ve been polled on recently. I’m going to assume you have to say who was this is for your own personal information, but I’m assuming it was well-respected polling for him.
Glover: It was yeah. It’s a national firm.
Leahy: Got it. Okay now to me, I don’t know and maybe we’ll break some news here. Maybe not. It would seem to me that when John Cooper was sworn in just a year ago.
Glover: September 26.
Leahy: Yeah, just a little over a year ago. I would guess his popularity rating was probably very his approval rating was high.
Glover: I think he was sitting above 80 percent. It’s now 32.9 percent.
Leahy: His approval rating has dropped from 80 percent to 30 percent?
Glover: If you took the election itself, right, he was sitting just below 70 percent. There was a poll just shortly after the election within the first month and I think I heard and I didn’t see this. So please you can’t take me on my word on this one. You know, I heard it was in the 80s. I don’t know if it was or was not but the one I just did 32.9 percent.
Leahy: That is a huge drop of almost 50 percent in his approval rating here.
Glover: Greater than 50 percent.
Leahy: Yeah, it’s a huge drop. And now in your polling did you take a look at why what were the driving factors in that decline in his approval rating?
Glover: Taxes and closing the city shutdown? Those were the two driving factors.
Leahy: Okay. So these are all bad things. I’m trying to figure out what has happened to his mind.
Glover: You know, I don’t ever like speaking on behalf of someone else. I’ve said this a million times. And I stay by that one. I can’t tell you. I don’t know how you take an economy the size of Nashville that you know, as I said a year year and a half ago. We don’t have a money problem in Nashville. We have a spending problem. We still do have a spending problem. Even after 30 to 35 tax increase.
Leahy: Yeah, everybody else is cutting employees. He increased it by five percent.
Glover: He never touched a thing never and never cut anything. Oh, it Is all smoke and mirrors as far as what they pretended like the cuts were. But what’s driving it, Michael? I don’t know because the only thing I can figure is are you trying to depress the city so much downtown that real estate becomes very inexpensive.
Leahy: Now to me, it looks like he’s trying to crush the Nashville restaurant industry. The bars and the tourism industry out of no good scientific reason.
Glover: After the great people of Nashville have worked years to build this up. Now, look not everything’s perfect. There are people that get completely, you know, they complain about you know, the Pedal Taverns and the this that right and I agree. I mean maybe it went a little too far but you don’t do you don’t drag it back so hard so fast that you kill that economy.
Leahy: But that’s what it appears what he wants to do for no good reason. I mean we looked at the data FOX News 17 a reporter Dennis Ferrier great reporter got the data from the health department only 146 out of 25,000 cases of coronavirus are attributable to restaurants and bars.
Glover: I want to talk about the apology demanded from a couple of weeks ago.
Leahy: Oh yeah. You’ve gotta listen to that. We’ve got the truth for you. You better listen up because you are not going to hear it anywhere else.
Listen to the full second hour:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
Democrats in Davidson County believe they can do whatever they want because the people in that county will continue to vote D. There also may be an element of feeling emboldened by actions of other Ds in other cities and states and the softball treatment they get from the mainstream media. The question is when do they start to vote for some other D instead of you.