Tourists are still flocking to Nashville despite the delay of autumn colors. A new proposed development means housing options for keeping young residents in the community.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Nashville's Municipal Consultant Dax Norton addresses these issues and more. Listen to the full conversation with Indiana Newsdesk anchor Joe Hren by clicking on the play button above, or read some of the questions and answers below. A portion of this segment airs 6:45 and 8:45 a.m. Wednesday on WFIU.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: Let's let's just start with a quick COVID-19 update. I see Brown County is now on the yellow advisory metric level from the state, cases are going down. It's a 10%, seven day all test positivity rate. Any instances there in town of enforcement of any store mask requirements, are you hearing anything like that?
Norton: Not hearing any of that. There are a lot of people in town - have been for two, three weeks now. Coming to see leaves that are just now starting to turn. But now it seems to be very similar last year, very respectful folks. Haven't heard of any major incidents.
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Hren: I turned on the Nashville leaf cam and see most of the trees are green, just like here in Bloomington. But it sounds like people are still flocking to Brown County?
Norton: Beautiful weather. It's been very busy. We anticipate to be probably two or three fold times more busy in the next two to three weeks with this delay in the fall colors, which is nice. I think it's actually an added bonus for the business owners because you get more time for people to come down and maybe change a plan that you didn't necessarily have for maybe a weekend November as well or two.
I know that it was difficult to drive around town I think it was last week. You start even in the beginning of the week, not necessarily towards the weekend. It was a very packed house. Very exciting.
Hren: I wanted to ask you about this proposed housing development near Nashville, one of our reporters talked to you last week, as you said could benefit the town and all of Brown County by attracting more residents. The area I'm talking about is where the little Nashville Opry was and burned down in 2009. What does this mean to Nashville to add housing stock and what residents are you targeting?
Norton: I mentioned to your reporter whole life, become a whole life community. And that means you have to have housing that's attainable for someone fresh, either out of high school with a skill, well, even if they're out of high school and chosen stay in the community and have a good job, make good wage.
They're now living with their parents, they obviously have no place to go. It's really hard to attain right now. And then of course, you have that starter residence with somebody who's either graduated with a certificate or a skill, which is incredibly important in this day and age or four year degree, whatever that may be starting their lives.
And you go from that all the way to retirement. So what's lacking is the whole life ability. And so I think that the multifamily housing brings an element to the county that may not exist completely.
Hren: Is this part of a trend that you're seeing in increasing residential areas there in Brown County?
Norton: A lot of decreases in available single family housing units because of turning those into vacation rentals. And I guess some of the condos go that way as well. Not much you can do necessarily to stop that progress.
From a sustainability perspective, you're not sprawling out, and then if you could put 194 units on three acres, police and fire don't have to spread, water and sewer - it's really the sewer that's missing. And so to get sanitary sewer there and get people off septic, obviously is an EPA mandate. I'd love to see that.
Obviously always a negative when you look at the planning process, traffic going to a busy highway. There's floodplain issues on the site. But it's better than what it is now, which is a weed infested asphalt lot.
Hren: Something we talked about last time was how much grants are important to fund a lot of this aging infrastructure. And I see the town was awarded $2 million for wastewater treatment.
Norton: Yes, Sanitary Sewer Rehabilitation Project, which towns under an agreed order from IDEM to fix a couple things. One of those is stormwater or rainwater infiltration into the system. That's due to aging, sewer mains and sewer pipes and then some issues in the plant to move some facilities out of the floodplain and some additional infrastructure for the hook on to the DNR State Park to service them with sanitary sewer as a $2 million total project of $6.6 million.
Utility Service Board and council are now talking about well, where are we to come up with the other $4.6 million we have to do the whole project - it can be done in phases. What's the rate impact, they took out a bond slash loan for the $4.6 million over a 20 year period, a 30 year period, a 40 year period. And once that's done sanitary sewer side is pretty whole. And you bring on a pretty large customer in the state park.
Hren: A recent town meeting brought up a couple committees being formed, one is a short-term noise ordinance and the other a skateboard ordinance.
READ MORE: Is Music At Nashville's Hard Truth Hills A Problem? Council Will Wait To Decide
Norton: On the noise ordinance is a it's kind of been an ongoing issue through 2020 and 2021. It it kind of came back up with Hard Truth Hills, I don't want to pick on them. Let's just say as live music comes to multiple venues across the town, and the county, the terrain is such that some people can't hear it at all. And sometimes that sound carries into people's windows and it's like you're sitting on top of stage.
They're creating a group of people to get together instead of arguing and bickering on the Facebook's of the world, which really are about as anti-productive as anything on earth, to get together. People on both sides, people who want an ordinance, people who don't like music, people who like music in moderation.
Skateboards are prohibited back in the 80s, 90s. Some people said, hey there's a resident in town that uses a skateboard as their mode of transportation. And so it's time to look at that - put policy in front of the council that's already been vetted by the community by some council members, my staff, and they can pass good policy after that.
The Town Council is going to start having quarterly town halls. We're going to have discussions just with people. Town Council gets to listen as opposed to council meetings really are about the council's business, although it is the people's business council has things to do. I think there'll be very productive.
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