Nashville airport board votes unanimously to rename itself for Dolly Parton, still hasn't picked a name

…(cont) The math tells the story better than the eulogy can. By Aug. 28 — days after Parton's death — a petition asking Tennessee to rename the airport had already collected more than 155,000 signatures, and Gov. Bill Lee had a proposal on the table that same day. Two weeks later, on Sept. 11, the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority's board voted 6-0 to make it official. Two weeks, start to finish, for a name that had sat on the building for decades. Petitions asking Congress to do considerably smaller things have died of old age waiting longer than that.

What the board actually approved, per the Washington Examiner's reporting, was the renaming itself — the final wording, the paint on the sign, is still, in the paper's phrase, to be determined at a later date. The name is dead. Its replacement does not yet legally exist. For two weeks or however many more it takes to pick a font, Nashville's airport has no name at all, which is either the most honest state a piece of public infrastructure can be in, or just some administrative shit nobody's in a hurry to fix.

None of this is a knock on the honoree. A unanimous vote inside two weeks is not something this desk sees for a bridge, a bill, or a pothole, and it says more about Dolly Parton than about the county's business. It says a government can move fast when the ask is free and the applause is guaranteed.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the same board find its 6-0 urgency the next time the ask isn't a name change but a runway repair, a wage floor, or anything else that costs money instead of just requiring a vote.