Olivia Hill Made History in Tennessee. Now It’s Time for the Hard Work.
18.10.2023 - 03:59
/ metroweekly.com
“When I announced that I was running for public office, I called a lot of other politicians in the Middle Tennessee area, and heard the same thing from everybody,” recalls Olivia Hill, the recently sworn-in Metropolitan Nashville Council Member At-Large, who became the Volunteer State’s first out transgender officeholder. “All those politicians told me, ‘Olivia, on a campaign, you’re going to meet some really, really nice people.
And two, you have no idea how big Davidson County is until you start campaigning the entire county,’ which is 526 square miles,” Hill says. “I’m sitting here in my car that I foolishly bought brand-new in February, and I’ve already got a little over 16,000 miles on it — and it hasn’t left the Nashville area.
Those are all campaign miles.”Hill was ultimately elected to one of the Council’s five at-large seats last month, placing fourth in the runoff election and making history in the process. The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund hailed her victory as a milestone for the transgender community, which has been targeted by a slew of bills championed by the state’s Republican-led legislature and signed into law by Gov.
Bill Lee in recent years. A U.S.
Naval veteran who previously worked for the Vanderbilt University Power Plant for 26 years, the 57-year-old Hill is now retired, meaning she can focus her efforts on her job, which is technically considered a “part-time” position, despite requiring 40 to 50 hours of work per week.“I didn’t run because I needed the money. I ran because I wanted to fix the broken parts of Nashville,” she says.It was work experience that Hill leaned on heavily while campaigning, using her familiarity with utilities to speak to the stress placed on Nashville’s aging infrastructure by an
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