NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
This is the second story in a two-part series. Read part one here.
Historians recognize disruptions in trash collection as markers of societal collapse.
So it was no surprise that Metro Nashville officials raced to find solutions when the city’s main trash collector filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Metro diverted its own resources and sought out emergency help from outside vendors in a scramble to restore regular trash and recycling pickup.
One such vendor was Cumberland Capital, owned by Nashville real estate developer Mack McClung.
The on-paper relationship between Metro and Cumberland Capital began on Dec. 9, 2021, according to records obtained by the Banner through public records requests.
“Mack, I will need to rent the following for minimal one and half to two years,” then-Metro Water Services assistant director John Honeysucker, overseeing waste services at the time, wrote to McClung, with local engineer and land planner Roy Dale copied on the email. “We can get together at Roy’s office to discuss details.”
Cumberland Capital LLC wouldn’t be registered as a business with the Tennessee Secretary of State until a week later. (The city ultimately signed deals with Cumberland Capital Nashville LLC, a different LLC formed by McClung shortly before the arrangement was formalized.)
What followed was a multi-year, multimillion-dollar saga, with Metro eventually taking on 14 trucks, at a cost of $26,000 each per month on an emergency contract that did not require Metro Council approval. Though the city initially budgeted $3 million for the first year of the two-year deal, Metro ended up paying more than $16 million to Cumberland Capital. And some of the men involved — Honeysucker, McClung and Dale — are currently the subjects of an ongoing federal investigation.
Emergency purchase
Trucks were hard to come by in the aftermath of the pandemic, with supply chain backlogs leaving the city unable to quickly build up its fleet. Missed trash pickups across Davidson County, and a suspended curbside recycling program, were infuriating residents and Metro councilmembers, leading the city to take on the long-term equipment lease that officials acknowledged was not typical.
“I am grateful for your willingness to step in and help Metro navigate the many challenges we are facing with trash services delivery,” Kristin Wilson, chief of operations in then-Mayor John Cooper’s office, wrote in a February 2022 email to McClung, Honeysucker and others. “I appreciated your patience in sharing more about your business model and approach as well. As noted, it’s not our usual approach to fleet, but we recognize that our usual approach isn’t meeting the need.”
It eventually took about six months to get the deal in place, after lengthy discussions with lawyers, insurers, truck brokers and Metro budget officials. As the process continued through the first half of 2022, Honeysucker forwarded one exchange about the trucks to Dale with the note, "fyi."
As the Banner exclusively reported in July, Honeysucker, McClung and Dale are the subjects of an ongoing federal investigation. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee will not confirm the nature of the investigation. However, when the Banner first requested documents related to Cumberland Capital LLC, Metro attorneys initially said they couldn’t be released because of rules that apply to ongoing criminal cases. Metro eventually released the records after reassessing the legal standard.
Honeysucker retired late last month ahead of a disciplinary hearing regarding charges that he maintained unethical relationships with Nashville developers. Throughout the time Honeysucker was soliciting, advocating for and expanding the multimillion-dollar truck deal with McClung, the two maintained a robust relationship, especially surrounding real estate projects being advanced by McClung’s development company Vastland.
As city officials continued to work out the kinks of the truck proposal, there was some concern about the emergency nature of the procurement. The records show officials asking Honeysucker to document the process of selecting Cumberland Capital, like whether he had called around to other potential vendors, but the emails don’t include any evidence of that taking place.
"Emergency Procurements at this level must have steadfast documentation," Amanda Deaton-Moyer, then a finance official at Metro Water, wrote to Honeysucker and other top officials in May 2022. "Using government funds without proper procurement causes significant risk."
Honeysucker signed off on the emergency purchase justification form with the following explanation for circumventing the normal process:
"Due to supply chain issues and delays caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, Metro has experienced longer than normal delays (as much as 24 months) in receiving new equipment to provide residential trash collection services. Currently Metro does not have enough equipment to ensure regular and consistent weekly trash collection service. Leasing equipment for two years will bridge the gap and provide the needed equipment to avoid service delays."
Communications around negotiations
As the contract details were further hashed out, Honeysucker again forwarded information about the negotiations to Dale. Then on June 27, 2022, Deaton-Moyer wrote to Honeysucker and others to say that Cumberland Capital had executed the multimillion-dollar lease.
Honeysucker forwarded it to Dale with the note, "FYI Done deal."
In the week that followed, Honeysucker forwarded three more exchanges to Dale, one about adding trucks to the deal and others about McClung's ability to get paid.
The trucks started coming in in July.
That’s when Dale shared a couple of invoices with Honeysucker. Dale had billed McClung, with one past due line item being the “balance of mothly [sic] fee for 6 truck contract for first year” and shared the document with Honeysucker’s Metro email.
A breakdown by the Vastland accountant shows that the company would pay $375 per truck per month on the account, with both Dale and Honeysucker included on the accounting email. (That’s completely separate from the $26,000 per truck per month that Metro was paying to rent the trucks from McClung.)
The per-truck charge was payable to Dale, according to the invoice, but he apparently sent Honeysucker to pick up the check.
“Thats perfectly acceptable,” Dale wrote in a Nov. 8, 2022, email to Vastland’s accountant, with Honeysucker and McClung copied. “I can have John pick it up tomorrow if that is Ok.”
The first invoice is dated July 23, 2022, just as the first trucks were being delivered. The sums aren’t entirely clear, but it appears that McClung paid $90,000 for the first year of the truck contract.
By early August, Honeysucker was setting up a meeting with McClung and Nashville Department of Transportation Director Diana Alarcon. McClung and NDOT negotiated potential leases for salt trucks with Cumberland Capital in the ensuing months, but a deal never materialized. Honeysucker forwarded one of those NDOT exchanges to Dale.
A series of issues
Issues with the Cumberland Capital trucks quickly surfaced. By late August 2022, finance officials realized they were paying for trucks they had not received. Around the same time, several of the new trucks were already off the road and in the shop. Two more wrecked later in September. Still, officials were grateful to have the additional resources, despite the occasional hiccup.
“I just want to reiterate the sense of urgency on this,” Metro Councilmember Courtney Johnston wrote in a March 2022 email, urging Metro to move more quickly to secure the equipment.
Johnston was an advocate of the deal with Cumberland Capital — the only councilmember advocating for the deal in the records released by Metro, and the only one copied on communications by both Metro officials and McClung. Johnston was involved in negotiations about the number of trucks to be leased and the insurance provisions in the agreement. She was later looped in when the lease was extended in 2024 and when Metro was negotiating the purchase of trucks and the closeout of the agreement in 2025.
She maintains that the city’s waste management was in crisis and that the deal was necessary to get Metro’s fleet back on track.
“At the time this contract was negotiated, Metro was in the middle of a trash collection crisis,” Johnston told the Banner in a written statement. “Our sole contractor had declared bankruptcy, Metro did not have enough trucks to serve the county, and replacement trucks already on order were years behind schedule due to COVID-related supply-chain delays. Metro was looking at every possible option to get us through that crisis, including emergency contracts with other service providers. This contract provided another critical piece of the solution: renting trucks so that our own Metro employees could get back on the road and pick up trash for our residents. At the time, this contract was a Godsend. It gave Metro access to equipment we simply could not obtain otherwise and was a critical reason we were able to resume trash collection at the level of service our residents deserved.”
Throughout 2022, Honeysucker kept signing off on more leased trucks. The plan was originally to take on nine or 10, according to emails between Metro Water officials. But Honeysucker eventually approved 14. The additions would cost the city more than $100,000 per month moving forward.
"Yesterday: for the third time John has said to me, I've never looked at my budget and I need to sit down and really look at it," Deaton-Moyer wrote in an email to MWS Director Scott Potter in December 2022.
Potter wrote to Honeysucker that "this continues to cause me a great deal of consternation."
"As a personal plea from me, please work closely with Amanda to remain within the process," Potter said.
Conversations about the trucks died down until 2024, when the two-year leases were nearing their conclusions. Deaton-Moyer encouraged Honeysucker and others in March 2024 to begin thinking about the plan for the end of the leases later that year. Metro Water officials started trying to talk to McClung about buying some of the trucks and returning others at the end of the lease.
Inconsistent responses from McClung and an inability to get the trucks fully repaired and in one place at a time when Cumberland Capital could inspect them meant the end of the first lease came and went. Officials began discussing extending the leases for six months.
In August 2024, Honeysucker sent a new proposal to Metro purchasing officer Dennis Rowland, who was not on the job when the original deal was approved two years earlier. Rowland was not impressed.
"The current agreement was off of an Emergency Procurement approval and that has expired," he wrote. "Also, signing an emergency supplier agreement for two years is a long time, not to have a strategy in place now. Why are we leasing? Do we have terms and conditions in place? Has a Make vs Buy study been performed? Honestly speaking, this is not a sound agreement that you are requesting me to sign so please help me understand your strategy."
A new emergency procurement form agreed to by Honeysucker said that MWS "continues to have issues obtaining fleet in the current economic atmosphere" and the extension would "allow the department time to pursue alternative sources for fleet needs.”
More money
Shortly after the lease extension was approved in 2024, Dale forwarded another invoice to Honeysucker’s Metro email.
The description: “Continue Current Metro Truck Contact [sic] for 6 months.”
The total: $72,000.
That amount is in addition to the totals in invoices sent to Honeysucker and describing other Metro-related work, previously reported by the Banner.
Recent case law might prove challenging to overcome for federal prosecutors. (No charges have yet been filed.) In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with an Illinois mayor who received a payment from a company that had secured a contract for trash trucks.
In 2025, the extensions were expiring and Metro was again sweating over what to do about the trucks. As Metro lawyers were workshopping a letter to McClung about the situation, Honeysucker was introducing McClung to a lawyer who could help him resolve the dispute with Metro.
"John indicated that you would still be interested in retaining my services for the equipment lease with Metro," the attorney, Nick Leonardo, wrote to McClung with Honeysucker copied.
Leonardo, a former judge and Metro councilmember, has since gone on to represent both Honeysucker and McClung in different real estate legal disputes. He could not be reached for comment.
Eventually, Metro offered to pay $1 million to settle the matter: $800,000 to purchase four of the trucks and $200,000 for repairs to the remaining trucks. But Metro ultimately paid $3 million, plus additional insurance costs, for all of the trucks. The final payment of $3.26 million was sent to Cumberland Capital on May 30, 2025, bringing the total spent to more than $16 million.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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