Choose How You Lose

Last week, we sat down with Ben Cunningham, veteran anti-tax crusader and founder of Tennessee Tax Revolt. Cunningham is less than optimistic about O'Connell's transit proposal; over the past couple of months, he's taken to calling the mayor "Freddie Two-Tax," on the hunch that transit plan's sales tax increase will be shortly followed by a property tax hike. Now he doubts O'Connell's dedication to buses, calling it "old-fashioned."

We're here to talk about Mayor Freddie O'Connell's robust transit initiative, but some would call you an anti-tax activist. This isn't your first rodeo. Do you want to explain a little bit about why you're looking into this transit referendum, what you see, and what it is that you're pushing back against?

Just to give you a little history, I had a little internet company in the 90’s which turned into a full- service internet provider, and I sold it in ‘99. I've always been a low tax, limited government kind of guy, and around that time is when the income tax protest started, in 2000 basically. That was just a revelation for me and everybody else involved. Thousands of people would show up, literally honking their horns and driving around the Capitol….That was 25 years ago, but that's how I got my start. 

At that point, we formed a little nonprofit called Tennessee Tax Revolt, which was a 501c4, and that’s when I started my self-assigned career of helping and facilitating taxpayer groups around the state. In 2018, when the transit referendum was proposed by Megan Barry, I started researching it. I love doing research. I'm kind of a research nerd, and it became fairly obvious pretty quickly that it was a complete and total boondoggle and a way to throw money down a bottomless pit. I got involved with several transit experts at that point. Randal O'Toole, who used to be with Cato, is a big transit expert. He and I started exchanging emails and have continued to over the whole six-year period. 

So when this initiative came forward, and we knew, obviously, that Freddie was going to do this, I started doing research, and it became very clear that the bus system here is a very, very tiny part of commuting. In fact, less than one percent of people use the bus to commute. It is an old-fashioned, 50-year-old technology with fixed route buses where you have to somehow get to the bus stop. You go to your destination, probably after changing buses two or three times, then you have to connect to the correct bus stop to get to your work. It's a very clunky, time-consuming, obsolete way of commuting. 

Through my research, I found that it typically takes twice as long to commute via public transit, and buses are the most time-consuming mode of public transit. The average commute time one way is 46 minutes. So, when Freddie starts saying, “Oh, this is going to be a boon to immigrants or low-income commuters,” that's absurd. It's the worst possible way that they could get to work. 

The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory did a study to find out how many jobs are accessible via a 20-minute car ride and via a 20-minute ride on transit. In Nashville, they found out that you can access about 2,000 jobs via a 20-minute ride on transit. If you take that same 20 minutes and you're in a car, you can access literally 100 times more. It's 200,000 jobs that are accessible to you. So to claim that low-income commuters benefit from transit is absurd. 

We all talk about affordable housing, but because the far-left folks ultimately want to get us all out of our cars, they never talk about affordable personal transportation, about facilitating the purchase of the car:which is precisely what any immigrant does when they come to America.  When you get into the opportunity cost of what we're spending on the bus system now, which I think is $50 million a year, what could you do with that $50 million for this very small number of people that take transit? You could give them an Uber voucher. You could buy them a car. You could do all kinds of things which would give them much greater economic opportunities than putting them on this crime-plagued bus system that is losing riders all over the country. 

In Houston, for example, they just canceled the second phase of what's called the Silver Line, which is their bus rapid transit. They built the first phase of the bus rapid transit–I mean, it's this beautifully dedicated lane, got these beautiful buses with the accordion kind of thing in the middle of these long buses, and spent millions and millions and millions of dollars—and they found out that nobody was riding the buses, so they canceled the second phase. Thank goodness they did, and saved the taxpayers a bunch of money. 

 There are countless examples of that if you follow the news and research transit all across the country. All of the suburbs, or many of the suburbs around Dallas, are trying to get out of their contracts with DART because they're not getting any ridership from it. People are not riding it, and they're having to pay to contribute money to DART. But that's what happens in so many ways with these transit systems. They simply become bottomless pits for taxpayer money, and because so much of the money comes from federal grants, the local taxpayers don't know what's going on. And of course, federal taxpayers are in the dark about these transactions. They're bureaucrat-to-bureaucrat transactions.

Right now, the Biden administration is passing out billions of dollars for these initiatives through Pete Buttigieg, through these transit grants. And of course, it's all political. With the grants, they typically use our capital expenditures, which means the operating expenses aren't paid for. So the taxpayers in the future are going to be on the hook for all these operating expenses, for whatever they do with the bus system. We all know that once they start, it's going to be difficult for the politicians to do without this money. So anyway… I can't think of enough metaphors to characterize this disaster, because it is. You've got a bus system nobody's using, essentially, except people who absolutely have no other alternative. And if they did have another alternative, they would gladly take it. In the Nashville area, 99 percent of people would choose to use their cars. When Freddie says, “Choose How You Move,” people are already choosing how they move. They use their car. 

It sounds like you aren’t a “if we build it, they will ride” kind of guy. Nashvillians see empty buses. They don't take the bus themselves. Why do you think that Freddie O'Connell has been able to muster up such a frenzy in support, even from local nonprofits and businesses? Clearly, you've talked about the media not going in and seeing what's really underneath the veneer, but you still have community buy-in despite everything that you're saying. Why do you think that is?

Getting people out of their cars, as unrealistic as it is, that appeals to people. That idea that, you know, you're going to save the environment by getting people out of the cars. That's absurd. Of course you're not going to, but I think it's aspirational, and people like to be part of something that they identify as a kind of  heroic goal. Also, part of this proposal is the purchase of land for affordable housing, and of course, the NEST zoning and the high density zoning is all kind of wrapped in this, also.

I think people feel good–the liberal mindset feels good—about that, and about giving poor people access to transportation, the general notion of that. But in fact, poor people don't want to ride the bus any more than anybody else does, because it's so inconvenient, it's so plagued with crime. They won't ride the bus unless they absolutely have to. ChooseHowYouLose.com addresses this. It addresses why this plan is a disaster for both taxpayers and low-income commuters.

We've seen the campaign that Freddie O'Connell has rolled out. What do you think of it? Do you feel like he has been forthcoming with what this plan is?

Absolutely not. I mean, to start with the ballot wording compared to 2018, there were two numbers on the ballot. There was what's called the current cost, and then there was the total cost. In other words, how much money will the taxpayers have to put out over the term of this project? That's the number we taxpayers should know, because that's literally what taxpayers are going to have to take out of their pocket over the term to pay for this boondoggle. But he and the Metro council decided not to put that total cost number on this current ballot language, and it's an absolute lie. It's deception. It is an active deception to say to voters, “We're not going to tell you the total cost when you're at the voting booth, and you're going to decide whether or not your taxes ought to increase.” That’s malfeasance, and it may well be illegal. 

The ballot language is something I think is vulnerable to legal challenge… but there's also the other question of the legality of the transit proposal itself, and if people want to see that argument laid out, there's a one page explainer, which they can go to by going to the domain name, EmptyBusTax.com. There are many elements of the proposal that are clearly not authorized by the IMPROVE act. The IMPROVE act is several hundred pages long, and there is this small section called the “Local Option Surcharge” in there. During the passage of the IMPROVE act, the legislators asked, “What is this local option surcharge for?” The sponsor of the bill said, very clearly, it's for mass transit. And in the wording of the bill, in very plain language, it says it's for shared public access mass transit. That's clearly a bus or a train. 

Well, here's a bus system that less than one percent of people use, and it was going to be a hard sell. So, Freddie had to put in these other elements, like the sidewalks, like the bicycles, like the synchronized traffic lights, like the land purchase for affordable housing—none of which, as stand alone projects, are authorized by the IMPROVE act. But Freddie, in his own words, has said many times, even if you don't take the bus, you can benefit from this transit proposal. Well, the IMPROVE act didn't anticipate any of that. It was specifically for mass transit. So there is a very clear case to be made, and we've discussed this with a number of attorneys, and people are considering legal action.

My final question to you is: We've heard you speak about dedicated funding as a bottomless pit. How it's never ending, and that we don't really know where the money is going to end up or what concessions will have to be made. Would you support a different funding initiative to improve things? 

There is a golden opportunity, and I'm not even sure you would even have to raise taxes. Robo taxis are being used by people every day in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and they could be in Nashville if Freddie would seize the moment and say, “We're going to be a city of the future.” I mean, we're talking about a 15 year project that's funding technology that's 50 years old. Fixed route buses are a thing of the past. 

You think he's old-fashioned?

Old-fashioned and ineffective, obsolete. It's just absurd. The only reason Freddie is doing it is because it's a dedicated revenue source that is available to him because of the IMPROVE act. This is about a revenue source to match federal grants. I think in a quiet, contemplative moment, Freddie would say, “Yes, the bus system really is not the future.” I think to anybody, any person looking at transit trends over the last 20 years, that's obvious. 

Rather than trying to stretch the IMPROVE act and cover stuff that was never intended to be covered, let's be a city of the future. Why in the world would he want to try to embrace this 50-year-old, obsolete technology that is crime-ridden? Embrace new technology, but don't put a burden on the taxpayers to fund obsolete technology just because it's your only option under the IMPROVE act.