She doesn’t answer phone calls. She doesn’t reply to emails, and she’s now deleted her entire social media history, the most significant of which was on twitter @Delishia4D29. Newly elected Metro Council Member Delishia Porterfield has started off her new council career as possibly the least accessible, and certainly the least transparent member of Metro Council, and she’s only been seated a few weeks.
Porterfield has yet to reply to multiple emails, or accept phone calls about her new position. After receiving a notice that her once-private twitter account could be subject to open records request if used for discussing government business, Porterfield has since nearly wiped it clean, in response.
Porterfield has received some feedback from both press and constituents over her private twitter account which she also lists as her Metro Council account. Before making the account public late this week, Delishia Porterfield has spent the last few weeks deleting 5,342 former tweets, spanning from 2013-2019. She removed 784 ‘likes’ from tweets she had previously shown preference for. She also removed 262 people from her past that were following her, and she unfollowed 76 questionable accounts, herself.
We’ve been reaching out to Porterfield since March, but she has not responded to phone calls, emails that are confirmed as ‘read’ by records requests, or twitter direct messages that show ‘seen’. Porterfield works as a special education coach for MNPS as her daytime job, and made $50,837.32 for last fiscal year, and most of her campaign contributions were from former MNPS director Shawn Joseph and other MNPS employees, who essentially bought her seat on Metro Council. She will earn an additional $15,000.00 per year as a Metro Council member. Delishia Porterfield, what were you hiding in over 5,000 tweets that you were afraid for the city of Nashville to see?
Porterfield was elected by only 25 votes, receiving 561 votes in a special runoff election, in which only 1,097 people voted.
