Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 Wilson County Republican Chairman Brad Lytle in-studio to discuss why he moved from upstate New York to Tennessee.
Leahy: In-studio, our good friend, fellow upstate New York political refugee Brad Lytle. He is now the chairman of the Wilson County Republican Party.
Big event coming up a week from tomorrow. You can go and sign up at Wilsoncountygop.com. It’s a candidate forum. Candidates running for Tennessee 5th Congressional District. Also local candidates as well.
Lytle: Also local candidates. But only the Tennessee 5 Congressional District candidates will be speaking at that event.
Leahy: So it’d be interesting. So there’s a meet-and-greet, 5:30 to 6:30, for not just the Tennessee 5th Congressional District candidates, but also all the locals.
Lytle: All the locals.
Leahy: And so that will be interesting. You get to meet folks. And if you live in the 5th district, wherever you live, you should come to this event.
Lytle: Absolutely. Please come.
Leahy: Because if you live in Davidson County, Williamson County – I’m actually just on the far edge of this district. I live within the district now. And they’ve got a little bit of, a little corner of Spring Hill, Thompson’s Station.
Lytle: You’re in the 5th now.
Leahy: I am in the 5th district now.
Lytle: That’s mostly east of I-65, right?
Leahy: Mostly. Apparently, they wanted me. I live a little west of I-65, so they drew my precinct in.
Lytle: And then Maury, Marshall, and Lewis counties.
Leahy: So if you live there, you really should go to wilsoncountygop.com, sign up. And it’s going to be in Lebanon. It starts at 5:30. The meet-and-greet is until 6:30.
And then I’ll be the master of ceremonies. And each of these eleven candidates will have an opportunity, probably about three minutes, I would think, to make their case. But we’ll try to make it interesting and lively. But it’s not a debate.
Lytle: Not a debate. No questions from the podium either.
Leahy: We’re just going to give them an opportunity to make their case.
Lytle: To give us their elevator speech.
Leahy: The elevator speech while stationary.
Lytle: Yes. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: In front of 400 people.
Lytle: Absolutely.
Leahy: Now, I want to ask you this because I’m very curious about your background. You grew up in Horseheads, New York, which is in upstate New York near Elmira, about 150 miles from where I ended up in Randolph, New York, and Cattaraugus County. But you moved here to Tennessee. Why did you move to Tennessee?
Lytle: We had kind of an idyllic life in this upstate New York, quaint little village of Horseheads. Six-thousand people at the time, I was the village manager.
Leahy: Very nice.
Lytle: My two daughters lived within two blocks of us. We had 10 of the grandkids that lived within two blocks of us.
Leahy: And you were not very far from the very beautiful Finger Lakes.
Lytle: It is beautiful.
Leahy: If you’ve never been to upstate New York, go in the summer and just go to the Finger Lakes. These are the glacial lakes.
Lytle: And they’re blue, unlike the brown ones here.
Leahy: Well, don’t get me started. Let’s be honest. Native Tennesseans, I’m about to say something that you will find offensive. Okay. You don’t really have lakes here. What you have is dammed-up muddy rivers.
And if you ever grew up in upstate New York and you spent a summer by a lake, particularly the Finger Lakes, which are glacial and deep and beautiful, they are pristine blue.
Lytle: They’re different. Yes. But we like these too, Michael.
Leahy: (Chuckles) You like the lakes down here as well?
Lytle: Absolutely. It’s something about being on the water.
Leahy: Yeah, exactly. But why did you come here?
Lytle: Well, as I said, my two daughters and 10 of our grandkids lived so close to us and it was pretty idyllic for my wife, who’s been a stay-at-home mom her entire life and career.
She made a career out of that. And I think it’s a career that’s not given a lot of credit, raising our kids. And then our grandkids and both of our daughters moved away five years ago around Christmas.
Leahy: Where did they move?
Lytle: One daughter, she’s a missionary. They moved to Thailand with their four kids. And the other daughter, who has six kids, moved to Mount Juliet, Tennessee.
Leahy: There you go.
Lytle: So it was about six months and I could see that Mama wasn’t happy.
Leahy: And if Mama is not happy, no one’s happy.
Lytle: That’s correct. (Leahy laughs)
Leahy: So what happened? You moved to Wilson County.
Lytle: We made the arrangements. And before I came down here, I started looking around because in 2001 I had started a Tea Party, and then we tried that for quite a while.
But as you know, the Tea Party is on the outside. So we encouraged everybody to get inside. So I actually ran for office twice. And was successful and ran.
Leahy: As village manager?
Lytle: No, that’s an appointed position. I was a village trustee, which is like a city commissioner. Got it twice. And then I actually took a job with the village as the village manager for cost-saving.
They’ve been paying somebody $80,000 a year in a 6,000-person village. And I didn’t think that we needed to pay that much.
I thought somebody could do it part-time who had some business acumen. So I proved that we could do it part-time and we dropped it to $35,000 at 22 hours a week.
Leahy: A true conservative. So then what happened is your first daughter moved here to Wilson County and Mama says I need to be near my girls.
Lytle: It was a confluence of different events plus the political environment in New York.
Leahy: Bad.
Lytle: Bad.
Leahy: Worse than bad.
Lytle: Terrible. Yeah. Unbelievable. New York City and the liberals from New York City rule everything because they have such large numbers.
Leahy: I’ve always been a big fan of having two states. Upstate New York and downstate. It would never happen. But it would be a great thing if it were at least for people from upstate New York. So you come here, you move here, you’re semi-retired, and what do you find here? You moved here, what, four years ago?
Lytle: Yes, four years.
Leahy: So you would be eligible to run for state rep or state senate. You’re not doing that.
Lytle: I still have time.
Leahy: You still have time to file. But you’re not going to do that as Wilson County Republican Party chairman. But you’re not quite there at governor yet. That would be seven years under our state Constitution.
Leahy: I moved here 31 years ago, not directly from New York, but from California and so I suppose I think I’m told that definitely wouldn’t be more than three years. You’re not a carpetbagger.
Lytle: Thanks, Michael. (Leahy laughs) You could run for governor.
Leahy: I’d get at least three percent of the vote.
Lytle: I think you’d get considerably more.
Listen to the full interview:
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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.
