I kept waiting for the city to release Metro Arts' expense report. So I did it myself.

My FOIA request went through, and I processed the data for an unofficial accounting.

You will probably be happy to hear that this will be my last post regarding Metro Arts.

(A promise I find doubtful I’ll keep, but let’s go with it.)

I’ve got some life stuff happening and I expect my hyper-fixation to veer another way soon. But I made you all a website and a database of every Metro Arts expense from July 1 2022 until Feb 14 2024 (which I received via a FOIA from Metro Finance) as a parting gift.

I think making this data publicly available in a structured way is probably the most useful thing I could do. I was able to do this with some important help.¹

I have confidence in the activists who’ve shown up to ensure artists get paid, in the dedicated staff of the Arts Commission who’ve been doing their best, and invested City Council² people who understand the role of oversight, to use this information for good use.

Why I Did This

Something that has irked me since I began paying attention to this situation is that, ostensibly, much of the conflict between the estranged Metro Arts Executive Director, the Arts Commission, The City Council, and the offices of Metro Law and Finance, has been around what allegedly did or did not happen with the Metro Arts’ expenditures the last few years.

While it seems to me that this is more about who didn’t get funded initially than who did get money, accusations about financial mismanagement have come from the mouth of the Director of Finance, Kevin Crumbo himself, in various public forums.

I found it strange that the Director of Finance was saying, for example, that there was a projected deficit and that all funding needed to stop — but also that he was unfamiliar with the details of the office’s finances and didn’t have the documentation to prove that this was actually so.

There were also critiques during commission and committee meetings about the amount of funding consultants were paid, and debate about if that amount was covered by unused salary budget from a Metro-wide hiring freeze.

All these are concerns that should have had actual, quantitative information attached to them — yet nothing formal was ever presented.

But for that matter, I also found it weird that the Arts Commission didn’t just release its books and demonstrate whether any of this was accurate or not.

Nothing’s been released that looks like an item by item expense report.

It's hard from my position to see if that's because of past bookkeeping processes at Arts, because of a lack of helpfulness at Finance in preparing this, or something else.

But it's public info and I’m the public.

So I figured I’d just release it myself.

My FOIA Request

On March 13, 2024 I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all expenses that were incurred by Metro Arts for the duration of Executive Director Singh’s tenure up until roughly his FMLA leave.

I asked Metro Finance in my FOIA for a spreadsheet, which I knew was easily doable from the “Oracle R12” program that tracks all expenditures. It’s just a few clicks in there, bada bing, you got your expense report. I figured I could throw some pivot tables on that, maybe need to clean up some duplicates, and bada boom, questions answered.

I received the response from Metro Finance on Thursday, May 2, 53 days after the acknowledgement of my request.

I was surprised that instead of a simple spreadsheet that would easily answer questions that have been asked by commissioners, City Council members, artists, journalists, etc., instead I got 1,276 individual PDF files for all Invoices and Purchase Orders during this period.

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding and it was assumed this was what I was looking for: over a thousand unorganized, non-labelled documents, many of them scanned so they couldn’t even be copy + pasted, really only useful for me to just… look at. One. By. One.

Perhaps this was an attempt to make my review of the state of Metro Arts more difficult to do? What one might call “malicious compliance”?

Well the real misunderstanding is that this type of thing does not phase me. For when it comes to matters like this, it is well known that I am, vociferously, a staunch character.

Through methods that I’ve detailed on my published mini-site, I was able to process this data in a couple of hours using AI. I was able to construct a relational database, similar to the one I had to make in the Mayor’s Office for managing our grants.

1,276 unorganized PDFs is no match for unmedicated ADHD and a working knowledge of machine learning APIs!

My Parting Gift

As my fixation begins to migrate, I offer this database, along with the 1,276 PDF files, as a jumping off point for people to start piecing together the accounting for the Metro Arts Department because it, allegedly, does not exist.

I sincerely encourage us to extend this interest and demand for transparency and organization into all departments and public institutions. But let's start with Metro Arts, why not?

I provide this data with the major caveat that THIS IS NOT AN AUDIT or any sort of official accounting of these expenditures.

I am NOT a CPA. Don’t take this to court or budget your next year on it.

But it is a good start…

You can copy the database here and develop your own 2.0 version, or you can download a .csv of it. (How to download a CSV from Airtable.)

Almost all of the processing of this data was done by machine learning aka “AI”, which is quite advanced at this type of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and is used at scale in industries like Healthcare, Finance, and the Legal world — but that means that there are inevitably some errors in it.

That’s why I present this database and view of this department’s finances as “a jumping off point.” It needs to be double-checked, but it gets the ball rolling.

My Big Findings

Here are my big findings of what’s in this data.

I don’t have any. That’s for you all to figure out.

I was able to make some pie charts, but I don’t have a point of view to say if they’re damning, vindicating, or just plain boring. It’ll take you all to interpret what’s in the data for it to mean anything.

Does not include Thrive’s “Individual Artists”

Interpretation is everything, but you need to have something to interpret.

Does it look good? Does it look bad? That’s not for me to say, and frankly not the thing that interested me the most here.

I am sure people will point to things in this and say “See! This is what I was saying!!!” But now other people can also point to it the data and say “Well actually, if you look here…”

That’s called having an informed conversation, rather than whatever kind of solipsistic turf war has been waged in countless fact-free commission meetings by people who know better.

No longer is this an asymmetrical conversation where we just have to take one side’s word for it. We can point to actual numbers and make informed arguments about something very important: how can we best use our limited shared resources?

Has My Axe Has Been Sufficiently Ground?

Since my first article on this topic, the thing that’s bugged me the most is how the lack of transparency in how our city spends its $3.2B budget is, in my opinion, a form of weaponized incompetence.

The fact is that how every government department spends money is public information. It should not be for weird pedants like me to happen to have their hyper-fixation settle on this topic (with Open AI credits to burn), for any clarity to come to light.

It is the city’s job not just to spend our money, but to tell us precisely how they are doing it.

If I were to pinpoint who exactly is supposed to implement a system to do this well, it’s the Director of Finance (according to the City Charter at least).

But I also think it’s on any department to implement transparent, modern databases to track spending. The Department of Finance is not on top of this, but it will hold it against you for not being on top of it either.

Here’s why I think this is important:

As a nation, we need to implement intentional, effective, anti-racist methodologies into all funding initiatives because our society has racist outcomes baked into how we do business. I believe we have to actively overcome the inherent “moving walkway of racism” that leads us unconsciously towards inequitable outcomes by intentionally funding things with an awareness of race (and this is, as the MHRC report details, fully constitutional).

But I know from experience that doing that type of equity-focused work will garner undue scrutiny. People become Milton Friedman all of a sudden and don their green accountant visors as soon as it’s not the same pasty good ol’ boys getting a slice of the pie (or most of the pie, to be precise).

When you’re trying to do anything new and progressive, people that want to maintain the status quo start acting as if any unturned rocks must have snakes under them, that all vagueness hides deception — and if you can’t give a precise accounting for every penny at a moment’s notice, there will be people who accuse that penny, with no actual proof, of going into the wrong pocket.

Having a transparent financal tracking platform is a great way to shut down those racially charged accusations before they happen. Maybe Metro Arts was doing this type of tracking already. My work is redundant then — but at least you have a copy.

What Now?

Please… media, arts advocates and artists, commissioners, city council people, defense lawyers, Arts Commission employees, Mayor O’Connell, check out my database: have at it.

Don’t take the numbers in my database for granted, they’re almost certainly in the ballpark, but don’t assume AI doesn’t make mistakes. A misplaced comma could have it be off by $1M (but I don't think it is).

Before making an assertion about any spending line, double check everything with the underlying raw files that are linked to in each line, and downloadable here.

For the novice data geeks, here is the link to make a copy of my Airtable “base”. Begin your journey in relational database management with a how-to here.

I’m not sponsored by Airtable but I should be.

This type of data organization and structuring is a core facet on any sort of scalable social innovations that we may want to accomplish. To put it another way, in the modern world, doing a good job with data is a requirement to do good.

We cannot afford to use systems that are not designed efficiently.

It’s only natural to ask “qui bono?”, “who benefits?”, where there is such obvious and avoidable inefficacy like this.

If I were a stakeholder in this situation with Metro Arts, and frankly a stakeholder for anything using public funds, I would demand a much higher level of organization and transparency for how they are being used.

Metro Finance has the ability to implement a robust relational database across all of Metro using the technology that it has. There could be complete transparency at all times as to how much each department is spending, from which bucket of money, and is what ways.

Here is an article on how why and how to do that from Oracle, the actual provider of our city’s poorly implemented financal management tool. Any Metro employee familiar with our finance system might be shocked to learn that our vendor is ranked the #6 Most Innovative Company in the world (not to mention the 82nd most profitable).

I’m not sure why the city is paying Oracle fifteen million dollars for a system that can’t accomplish what I did in a weekend. Maybe since the CEO is (allegedly) moving the global headquarters here we can ask him next time he’s in town next.

Integrating data systems is hard, daunting work. Just ask Freddie O’Connell who left his job as a “Integration Architect” at HealthStream to be our Mayor. This type of data integration is precisely what he did, and I hope he champions this work in his time in office.

So let’s get serious people.

We have crises coming our way as a society the likes of which humanity has never faced and may not survive.

I think we can learn how to track some invoices, write some checks, and agree to disagree on the best use of public art funds (and not overturn legal decisions just because we didn't like the results).

Let’s consider this crisis a practice. I’d give us a D- on our performance. But we need to learn our lessons and move forward.

We have bigger problems to solve.

1. This would not have been possible without some important help from the dedicated activists who’ve been working tirelessly to get artists paid. They helped me categorize what expense types the different transactions likely fell under, something the data from Metro Finance did not include.

2. A standing correction: This podcast refers to the Nashville Metro Council as a “City Council”. It is, in fact, a City-County Council, known colloquially as the “Metro Council.” More information on this distinction can be found in this previous post.