Thank you for that kind introduction, Scott, and for your work with the Global Action Platform as the convener of the University Presidents Council.

Thanks also to Hal Cato and the Community Foundation for hosting us today, and to Robert Higgins, Chairman of the Greater Nashville Chamber of Commerce, for joining this conversation.

And to each of the university presidents, representing the top academic institutions in Middle Tennessee, thank you for your work and for your participation in this forum.

This is a rare opportunity, getting everyone together like this. My compliments to your schedulers. I look around the room, and I see the public, private and NGO sectors represented. I see the academic and business community coming together for important conversations about the future of Middle Tennessee.

As part of that conversation, I’m going to share my administration’s vision and priorities, along with our challenges. Universities can be key partners in meeting these challenges. And then I want to leave time at the end for questions and feedback. Because this needs to be a dialogue, not a monologue.

But first, let me give you a quick summary of where we are and where we’re going. Where we are right now is where many U.S. cities would like to be. Nashville was fairly popular two weeks ago at the conference of mayors in DC, but it wasn’t because of my sparkling personality. It’s because of this sparkling city. Everybody wants to talk about Nashville, and for good reason.

Over the past decade, we’ve been welcoming 98 new residents per day. Passengers at Nashville International Airport (BNA) have doubled in the past 10 years, with a record-breaking 21.9 million this past year. Urban Land Institute ranked Nashville as the best overall real estate investment prospect in the country … for the third year in a row. That’s never happened before.

I read about the Urban Land Institute ranking in Forbes. That’s also where I read that Nashville workers have the worst commute in the nation, according to a new analysis.

To afford a median-priced home ($455,000) in the Nashville MSA, a family now needs a household income of nearly 125 thousand dollars, according to Redfin. In the past decade, rents have increased by 50 percent. Nearly half of Nashville’s renters are cost burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing.

So, we’ve had tremendous successes, but we’re also facing great challenges. Our challenges are, to a large degree, indicative of our city’s economic success. They are the consequences of growth – more traffic, lack of affordable housing, greater economic disparities, increases in cost of living, dilution of natural resources.

These issues are highly interrelated. But so are their solutions. And I think you can see how universities can be a part of those solutions and need a seat at the table as we move forward.

When I first started running, and then again upon being elected, I kept thinking about the city’s priorities and what we need to do for Nashvillians to have confidence in our local government, in how we’re growing as a city, and in Nashville overall. And it always circled back to these three themes: How we move. How we work. How we grow.

One of the first things I did after the election was to engage three transition committees that cover each of those themes and capture their recommendations. Collectively, they touch almost every aspect of local government and our most pressing challenges.

Let’s start with How Nashville Moves. This is about how we move around the city, conveniently and safely, however we like. Whether we want to walk to a park, commute by bike, or take transit to a Preds game. How Nashville Moves comes to life through investments in more sidewalks, complete streets that anyone can use safely, a meaningful transit system, and transportation infrastructure that benefits all Nashvillians.

We’re at the beginning of a conversation about how we improve transit quickly and dramatically. And we’ll have more to say in the coming weeks, as we evaluate the possibility of a November referendum on funding. A potential new vote would focus on more incremental improvements than those sought six years ago, along with a more regional approach.

We know it’s needed. According to our friends at ThinkTennessee, of the top 50 U.S. metros, only four don’t have dedicated funding for transit. Two of those four are in Tennessee. Nashville and Memphis.

We know with a frequent transit network and a series of community transit centers, we will make commuting around Nashville more accessible and help people reduce their cost of living. Access to transit and commuting by bike were the keys to my own pathway to homeownership. More people deserve that opportunity.

I’m proud to say that in the first 100 days of my term, NDOT finished eight sidewalk projects and started construction on four more, covering 2.8 miles and touching 14 different districts. We’ve also completed eight new bikeways. And they’ve done a great job clearing major roadways during the recent winter storm, working 12-hour shifts and around the clock.

How Nashville Works imagines how city services work well all the time and how we make customer service a top priority. This is how we lay the foundation to tackle big issues -- from affordable housing to community safety to education.A key tool here is hubNashville. This is a one-stop shop that allows the public to report issues or get answers from Metro without needing to know which department to contact. This is for non-emergency services, and it relieves the volume of 911 calls, which helps our first responders.

For example, you can request snow removal assistance through hubNashville, and many people have. Altogether, in 2023, we responded to nearly 300,000 requests. You can access Hub Nashville online at hub.nashville.gov. You can also reach Hub Nashville by phone by dialing 311 or (615) 862-5000.

The How Nashville Works committee’s recommendations are directly targeted at the systems most visible to Nashvillians: reporting a pothole on your street, streamlining payment services and creating a community safety plan. In the first 100 days, we filled 4,317 potholes, with many of those requests coming through hubNashville.

The idea is that larger projects like the East Bank and a transit referendum could be more doable by getting these basic things right and creating a system that can accomplish city service requests smoothly.

How Nashville Grows is about how we build a better Nashville for Nashvillians and being intentional about that. This includes not just the incredible opportunity for equitable development on the East Bank, but also the other 500 square miles of Davidson County.

To be clear, there are few other projects in the U.S. that can match the size and scope of the East Bank. Possibly none. But our investments cannot stop on the banks of the river, and I’ve directed my administration to ready investments citywide – in neighborhoods across Davidson County – that are equal in scope and impact to what we will do on the East Bank.

So, those are the three pillars of the plan: How we move. How we work. How we grow. We’re responding to the priorities we heard from residents during thecampaign. Our goal is a better Nashville for Nashvillians. We want you to live here. Our mission is to make it easier for you to stay.

We just recently passed the 100-day mark of my first term as Mayor, and we’ve had some difficult challenges thrown our way. The December 9 tornadoes and the winter storm immediately come to mind. But in these challenges, you also see the best of Nashville – the way our community responds when called, neighbors helping neighbors, strangers helping each other.

Beyond that, one of my proudest moments so far was when Metro Nashville was named a 2023 Visionary Digital Inclusion Trailblazer last month. It’s national recognition, recognizing our ongoing efforts to close the digital divide here locally. The pandemic especially showed how important digital inclusion is. Nashville was one of just 22 U.S. cities awarded in the top category.

I’m also very proud of the team we’ve built at Metro. It’s one that truly represents the diversity and excellence of this city, and we’re looking forward to expanding our conversation with the city’s residents and meeting the city’s challenges together. Which brings me back to you and the importance of this group.

Just as we are Music City, we are the Athens of the South. We still are. I’m borrowing a quote here from Henry McRaven’s book on Nashville, where he writes, “Just as Athens, Greece, was recognized centuries ago as the center of learning, Nashville was accredited from its very beginning as a community where the attributes of learning and the appreciation of the fine arts were reflected in the leadership of its men and women in all walks of life.”

The universities here today are the driving force behind the creative culture of the greater Nashville area. You are the incubators of civic leadership, business leadership and collaboration that propels our community forward. That spirit is represented here in this room. Together we have an opportunity to channel that spirit and focus it on the region’s most urgent challenges.

I’ve participated in many, many meetings with our academic partners during the first 100 days, both on campus and in my office. I’ll share one recent example. Just two weeks ago, we hosted Vanderbilt professor Abhishek Dubey in our conference room for an update on Vanderbilt’s collaboration with our Information Technology Service department.

Recently Metro and Vanderbilt partnered to create Connected Nashville’s Intelligent Ecosystem Collaborative, which brings together key stakeholders to discuss partnerships for grant-funded projects aimed at Metro’s challenges, and to better serve the needs of the community through data science and technologybased innovations.

Abhishek came to our office and put together a great slide deck, pulling the greatest hits of nearly 10 years of collaborations between Vanderbilt researchers and Metro departments, covering a range of issues from emergency communications to traffic engineering and multi-modal mobility.

They are all amazing examples of collaboration, technology driven innovation. But they lead to the sustainability question: How do we make these a part ofMetro’s continuous improvement process so that we don't just lose it as a research project? It's great to take it to a conference, but then how do we make sure that we can sustain these efforts so that they positively impact Nashvillians for the long term? That’s part of the challenge.

But so many of you are deeply engaged in challenges and partnerships. Meharry remains critically involved not just in training physicians but in working with Metro on indigent care.

• TSU students are engaged with NDOT on corridor studies near campus.

• Fisk and Belmont partnered to create a social justice hackathon.

• Belmont’s data science team is working on health disparities, partly funded by Metro.

• I created more flexibility for the amazing Nashville GRAD program at Nashville State, enabling more part-time students to access key financial supports.• Lipscomb has been key to the success of the Transit Citizen Leadership Academy.

•Lipscomb has been key to the success of the Transit Citizen Leadership Academy.

• Trevecca is engaged deeply in the Napier and Sudekum communities.

If you’re looking for some fertile grounds for further collaboration, I think about transit mobility as one of the most important processes we have to help mitigate cost of living in Nashville. And then there’s the East Bank, which is an ideal location for urban innovation.

I look forward to your thoughts, your questions, your ideas, your proposals, and your friendship. I’d like to be the Partner-in-Chief for this city. And as such, I hope to collaborate with Middle Tennessee’s best resource and engine for success, which is you. We have a culture of innovation and collaboration in this city, much of it to your credit, and I am very proud of that.