Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said the Nashville Mayor’s $3.1 billion transit referendum is a “ripoff” of the taxpayers who are not given a proper voice in the media to express opposition to the transportation plan.
Mayor Freddie O’Connell unveiled his $3.1 billion transit plan, “Choose How You Move: An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety,” last month.
The plan would be funded by a half-cent increase in the city’s sales tax, which would be used to construct miles of new sidewalks, bus stops, transit centers, parking facilities, and upgraded traffic signals.
For O’Connell’s plan to be presented to Nashville voters on the November 5 ballot, the Nashville Metro Council must first review the plan and referendum ballot language via ordinance.
O’Connell argues that the half-cent increase to the city’s sales tax to fund the plan is permitted under the 2017 IMPROVE Act. This bill passed the Tennessee General Assembly in 2017 and permitted local governments to seek a dedicated funding source via surcharge to support mass transportation projects through a local referendum.
However, Cunningham has consistently pointed out that O’Connell’s plan appears to be illegal under the IMPROVE Act, as the law only allows certain counties to increase taxes through a voter referendum for mass transit systems—such as bus routes—and not for installing simple projects such as sidewalks and traffic signals which should be part of a city’s budget.
Cunningham also said that the transit plan’s implementation would inevitably raise property taxes for residents on top of an anticipated property tax increase next year.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Cunningham said it is “depressing” that local media has not raised any objections or legality concerns with the mayor’s plan, which taxpayers would essentially be funding.
“It’s crazy and it’s depressing, really, that the taxpayers do not have a voice and that really is the bottom line here. Everybody talks about the stakeholders, how we have to ‘consider the stakeholders.’ The taxpayers are a pretty damn big part of the stakeholders here. We better talk about this,” Cunningham said.
“It’s depressing as hell because the taxpayers – the people who are actually going to pay the damn bills – just simply don’t have a voice,” Cunningham added.
When it comes to the mayor’s plan, specifically the creation of more bus routes, Cunningham said O’Connell is “targeting the poor people from North Nashville and South Nashville” as he knows the “affluent Nashvillians are not going to get out of their cars.”
“He’s targeting the poor people from North Nashville and South Nashville…The safety and convenience and privacy of a car is what people love, and you’re not going to get affluent Nashvillians out of their cars. ‘Hey, poor folks in North Nashville and South Nashville, we’re the ones that, you’re the ones that we are looking to fulfill our utopian transit dream here’ – That’s basically what Freddie is saying,” Cunningham said.
“It is a complete and total insult and we see this so many times from Democratic policies. The very people that they supposedly are helping are the people that they hurt and that is the real crime here. The fact that the taxpayers are going to waste billions of dollars on this ought to be a factor, too,” Cunningham added.
Cunningham also offered alternative solutions to bypass a $3.1 transit plan to ease traffic in Nashville, saying, “There’s so many things you can do.”
“You can go to the corporate citizens downtown… like Amazon, and Oracle, and AllianceBernstein, and all of the big companies downtown and you can say to them, ‘Hey guys, we need your help to reduce traffic congestion. We need you to start staggering your start times. We need you to start scheduling employees so that there’s staggered start times.’…There are all kinds of things we can do other than spending billions and billions of dollars on a transit system that nobody will ride,” Cunningham said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Freddie O’Connell” by Freddie O’Connell.
