Good morning, Nashville. As we sit here shivering at our keyboard, we’re basically just wondering whose idea it was to throw snowflakes at us after we thought it was spring. But we digress. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of the Nashville Flood and Mayor Dean’s flood team is getting ready to study some options for keeping our city safer during (heaven forbid!) another similar disaster. They’ve kicked around a series of possibilities including retractable flood walls, higher levees, spongy athletic fields and some sort of beefed-up protections around the water plant, but they’ll have to weigh each option against what Metro can afford even with the Army Corps of Engineers potentially footing 65% of the bill.

• Nashville State is looking at the possibility of doing away with its federal loan program because too many students aren’t able to pay up, which means the school risks losing its Pell Grants and work-study funding.
• A judge denied the request of plaintiffs in the Murfreesboro Mosque case to view 31,000 emails exchanged between the county mayor, planning director and assistant planning directors, saying the request was too broad. The plaintiffs believe these emails will reveal shady closed-door dealings that resulted in the passage of the mosque’s building permit.
• Bits & pieces. Someone stole dozens of bronze gravesite vases from the Mount Olivet Cemetery … One Metro teacher is getting a little creative by incorporating Twitter discussions into his classroom … The Titans are scoping out Cam Newton as a potential new quarterback.

Photo by Eva Maria.