Breaking: Daniel Singh to receive $200k settlement the day after Metro Arts' Alleged "Deficit" Disappears

Big news day for the Metro Arts watchers

We provide you with a break from our articles on the history of Metro Arts with some breaking news about its current state.

WPLN reporter Char Daston reports a $200k settlement has been reached between Metro Nashville and Metro Arts & Culture Executive Director Daniel Singh in exchange for him dropping the Tennesse Human Rights Commission complaint against the city.¹

Nicole Williams reports that this settlement was approved in the meeting of the Metro Arts Commission by unanimous consent of the Arts Commissioners.

A video of this Commission meeting can be found here.

This comes one day after Metro Finance revealed that the alleged deficit of Metro Arts, the purported cause for Metro Finance to freeze the assets of the Department, no longer exists.

Williams reported on this earlier today in her un-paywalled Patreon post, reproduced below.

Metro Arts Projected to End Budget Year in the Black

Posted 5 hours ago

Contrary to the grave predictions of Arts staff, Metro Finance, and Metro Legal, it appears that the Metro Arts Department will end this budget year with money in the bank.

At the Arts Commission’s Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget hearing yesterday, Amanda Deaton-Moyer from Metro Finance shared some surprising news with the Metro Council: Arts is projected to close out the current fiscal year – which ends on June 30 – with about $48,000 in the bank.

Arts has a budget of $5.461 million. As of April 30, Deaton-Moyer said, the department had spent about $5.061 million, leaving them with a balance of $400,000 heading into the final two months of the fiscal year.

This comes in stark contrast to the information that Commissioner Beverly Watts, who chairs the Arts Commission’s Budget & Oversight Committee, provided at the commission’s May 16 meeting. 

At that time, Watts asserted – with Deaton-Moyer in the audience nodding along – that the department had a current budget availability of roughly $48,000 and would end the year with a deficit of about $1.2 million.

Watts admitted that she was unsure of the reasons for the deficit, and she did not have a line-item breakdown of expenses.

Commissioners made conclusions on the basis of this information – like Commissioner Dawana Wade’s portrayal of the department’s fiscal management as “willy-nilly” – despite not having all of the information.

And who could blame them?

They’ve been warned for months that Arts will end the year in the red. It was just a question of how big the deficit would be.

February 26 Budget & Oversight Committee Meeting: Unknown Deficit Projected

On the heels of some good old-fashioned government-sanctioned extortion from Metro Finance Director Kevin Crumbo, the Arts Commission formed a Budget & Oversight Committee earlier this year. 

Crumbo had informed the commission via a memo from Legal Director Wally Dietz that he would be withholding the department’s $2 million in surplus funding – money intended to go to artists and arts organizations – until the commission agreed to engage in a series of corrective measures.

One of those corrective measures: establishing a Budget & Oversight Committee.

At the first meeting of the newly-formed committee on February 26, Crumbo shared his understanding of the department’s budget position. Based on reports of Arts staff, Crumbo said, Arts was projected to end the fiscal year in a deficit.

Finance had not yet seized control of the department’s finances – a step they would soon take on the assumption that Arts’ spending was flagrantly over budget – so Crumbo couldn’t be sure how much of a deficit there would be.

Despite having little visibility into the budget, Crumbo warned the committee that Finance “may need to immediately implement countermeasures" to include "intervening in Arts procurement, accounting, and other processes."

Commissioners referred to being roughly $300,000 “over budget” in the meeting. I’m not sure exactly where they got this number – the various materials commissioners receive and refer to during their meetings are not made publicly accessible except through a public records request – but it was floating in the ether for a month or so in February and March.

Crumbo told the committee that more information would be forthcoming about the size of the deficit. He’d be “delighted” if it turned out Arts would end the year in the black, he said, but he didn’t think that was likely.

March 22 Memo from Kevin Crumbo: A “Mounting Deficit” of At Least $300,000

On March 22, Crumbo announced in another memo that Metro Finance would be assuming control of the Arts Department’s finances in response to concerns about overspending and a projected deficit of “at least a few hundred thousand dollars” by the end of the fiscal year.

In the memo, he informed the Metro Council that Finance would be allocating an additional $3 million to the Arts budget for the current fiscal year. 

Roughly $1.2 million of that would go toward making artists and arts organizations whole: they would receive the greater of the amount they had been promised by the Arts Commission in either July or August of last year. The remainder would be used to cover the projected deficit and account for administrative costs incurred through the ensuing legal complications.

Notably, the Arts Department was not responsible for the commission’s vote in July – which fully funded Thrive projects and small organization requests, to the detriment of mid-size and large arts organizations – or subsequent revote in August – which reversed the July decision and took money away from Thrive artists and small organizations to make mid-size and large arts organizations whole.

The Arts Department did not file the Title VI Complaint that resulted in a recommendation from the Metro Human Relations Commission that Thrive artists and small arts organizations receive all the funding they were promised in July.*

And they certainly didn’t retain the services of pricey outside lawyers to navigate all of this.

But Crumbo essentially blamed the department for all of it.

*If you haven’t read the MHRC’s report, I encourage you to do so. MHRC staff do an excellent job of explaining how we got here.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The Arts Commission, the media, and the public have been sold a bill of goods.

Now, Metro Finance will tell you that’s not true. Reports of a projected $1.2 million deficit were “a misinterpretation, but not incorrect,” said Deaton-Moyer in yesterday’s budget hearing.

She explained that the $1.2 million number came from the supplemental appropriation from Director Crumbo to make artists whole, as referenced in his March 22 memo. 

If Crumbo hadn’t made the supplemental appropriation, Deaton-Moyer argued, but had unilaterally decided to move forward with the $1.2 million payout to artists – a payout, you’ll recall, that could not have been foreseen by Arts staff and was not the result of Arts staff’s actions – then Arts would end the year at a deficit.

But Crumbo did make the supplemental appropriation. And that appropriation had nothing to do with financial mismanagement by Arts staff. It had to do with the commission’s decision to rescind their July vote and take promised funds away from Thrive artists and small arts organizations.

At least partially on the basis of the constant drumbeat of a looming deficit, the commission is preparing to fire Director Daniel Singh later today. This will be their third attempt, so, third time’s a charm and all that.

It’s not the only reason they want him gone, to be sure. The allegations of workplace misconduct and inappropriate financial practices by Director Singh are alarming. I feel for the employees who’ve feared for their jobs and felt scared to speak up. 

As I’ve shared a few times, I received threats of my own and dealt with a toxic work environment when I worked at Metro, so I know how gut-wrenching it can be to go to work every day with your stomach in knots. It’s awful.

These employees have received something most never do: the director has been absent for over 12 weeks and was placed on administrative leave. And he’s probably about to be fired.

Speak to any given Metro employee, and you’ll find that toxicity runs rampant throughout Metro departments. Employees generally feel they have little recourse other than to suck it up or quit.

I’m not excusing Director Singh’s behavior or advocating for the commission to keep him on as the director.

But with new information coming in at a rapid-fire pace – including this latest bombshell that Finance has been, at best, dead wrong, and, at worst, intentionally deceptive – I have to wonder, what revelations will tomorrow bring?

1. This paragraph was corrected since the first publication. An email was sent out clarifying the correction saying the following:

I have two corrections from my breaking update yesterday that announced a $200k settlement between the Nashville Metro and Daniel Singh.

Firstly, Mr. Singh was incorrectly identified as the “Metro Arts Commissioner.” His role has been the Executive Director of the Nashville Office of Arts and Culture. My writing has at times conflated the name of this department with the “Metro Arts Commission” whose commissioners oversee the office. It is important to get these names and titles correct and will strive to do better in the future.

Secondly, I stated that the arrangement with Singh was in exchange for “him dropping Metro Human Relations Commission against the city”. This was incorrect. Ashley Bachelder, the Director of Policy and Research for the Metro Human Relations Commission provided me with this correction:

Hi Mike! Quick correction on your story from yesterday. Daniel has to drop his compaint with the Tennesse Human Rights Commission, not the Metro Human Relations Commission (MHRC). MHRC complaint from the artist is still active. Daniel had filed a complaint with our state agency equivalent so that’s what’s being dropped.

I think getting even small details right is extremely important, and I appreciate your patience as I correct mistakes.