All-star panelist Ben Cunningham joined Friday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy where he discussed what may be included in Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s anticipated transit plan.
O’Connell, who was elected mayor in last year’s runoff election, vowed during his campaign to address Nashville’s “infrastructure and transit concerns.”
The mayor, according to Cunningham, is expected to release a transit plan in the near future as O’Connell initially said he would disclose his plan by the end of January.
“We think there’s one brewing. He has said that he would disclose his transit plan by the end of the month, meaning January. And we are now beyond the end of the month, and there is no transit plan,” Cunningham explained. “He did have one of his staffers, who was apparently a major part of what was going to be the transit referendum, has left. She had to go back to her business. Apparently, the minority status of her business was in jeopardy if she was not there. And so she had to go back and leave the administration. They still have the guy who came over from Vanderbilt, who is a transit guy at Vanderbilt, essentially on loan from Vanderbilt. So he may be the one kind of in the driver’s seat.”
Cunningham predicted O’Connell’s transit plan will be “vague”; however, there will be a “very definite tax revenue” released with the plan.
“I think probably what we’re gonna get is some very vague plans, but a very definite tax revenue…The Democrats love a revenue source, gotta have a revenue source for transit. And of course that’s probably going to be a sales tax increase,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham said one of the “hints” he’s gotten from O’Connell’s anticipated transit plan will be the implementation of a light rail from downtown Nashville to the Nashville International Airport.
“About the only hints we’ve had at this point is that we will probably get a light rail between downtown and the airport,” Cunningham said.
“We are in a very good place where downtown is about a 15 minute drive, maybe on a good day, it may be 10 or 12 minutes from downtown to get to the airport. There’s good parking at the airport. Why in the world you would spend, I’m sure it’s going to be a billion dollars. It’s going to destroy traffic probably for, you know, five or six years while they’re building the damn thing. It’s crazy,” Cunningham added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Music City Star” by Keith HInkle. CC BY 2.0.
