The Transit Referendum to Nowhere

Last week, the Pamphleteer sat down with leaders of the Committee Against an Unfair Tax, a new coalition united against the mayor’s proposed transit referendum. Though the group says they’re not anti-transit, they are less than enthusiastic about O’Connell’s plan, calling it unnecessary and unfair. Included among the ranks is Patsy Harvey, Tennessee attorney Dianne Neal, and former council member Emily Evans, whom you may remember from her 2015 effort to reduce the number of council members and extend term limits.

So, let’s get things started with a brief rundown of exactly why this PAC has come together, and what you all hope to accomplish before November.

Emily Evans: The first thing we hope to accomplish is some accountability. For the last 20 years or so, I have watched these proposals come forward—everything from the Convention Center to property tax increases— without a sufficient amount of scrutiny, or maybe more accurately, a decreasing amount of scrutiny…. Our sense of it is that we’re sleepwalking into a fairly regressive approach to funding a basic city service.

Are you all planning to do a grassroots type of campaign? Door knocking? What's the approach here?

Dianne Neal: I think it’s fair to call it that. To tie into what Emily said—the decreasing amount of scrutiny—I mean, we don't have an effective daily paper any longer, so the decreasing scrutiny from the media means that information just sort of is who gets there first. What we feel is essential for people…is for them to be fully informed, and that's what we would like to be a part of doing.

What are the things you're specifically looking at? The ballot language, the sales tax within the plan, the implementation of the funding mechanisms, the longevity of this? What are the things that you think aren't necessarily clear coming out of this very robust campaign we've seen from the administration and essentially all of Metro Council?

Evans: Let me start with the financing mechanism. The first thing is the sales tax. Taxes are a necessary evil. Here in Tennessee, we don't have an income tax to fund operations. We rely very heavily on a sales tax, but we try to use it with great discipline.

When you're considering a sales tax, I think you ought to be really straight with the public as to what exactly that means, and in the Choose How You Move pitch deck, the administration has said, “Well, 60 percent of the sales tax (and it's not clear which sales tax they're talking about in the document) is paid for by non-residents,” which, on its face, should be rejected. The biggest contributor to sales tax receipts in this state is the purchase of motor vehicles, and most people buy a motor vehicle from their local dealer…. Just using some basic logic, it's probably not an accurate number. So, why use it? Why obscure the burden, the real burden, from the public, and pretend somebody else is paying for that? The pitch deck also seems to rely heavily on some old information from 2018 about commuting patterns, which I think everybody knows have changed very dramatically since 2020. 

So, the financing piece of it is, one, regressive. Number two, I'm not sure that the administration is being particularly straight about who will bear the burden, probably because they know it's very regressive. It hits the poor much, much harder than the middle and upper income people. And then, the next part of the financing piece of it is bond issuance. Most of this is going to be bonded out, which means it will add to the debt load, which has been a fairly significant problem for balancing the books in the city since around 2010 when we made a very egregious decision to refinance our debt in order to avoid raising property taxes. 

The additional debt, of course, will pile on top of other debt we already have. And I think one of the more humorous conversations that's going on is, “Well, the debt—the sales tax—will go away when the debt is retired.” I’ve spent 25 years in the municipal bond business, and I can assure you that the debt never gets retired. It gets refinanced, it gets extended, it gets added to, and to say that and to present that as a palliative to the assessment of this tax is absolutely disingenuous. So those are just some of the most important parts of the financing system that the public really needs to understand before they vote “yes” or “no” on the tax.

Patsy, do you have some insight as to the other things that you all are looking into?

Patsy Harvey: I think everyone would agree that we have a traffic problem. Everybody would be for transit. I mean, I took the Imagine Nashville survey and I voted for transit. You're not going to not vote for transit, but the survey didn't give you options to choose from. For instance, I wouldn't have voted for more bus service because people really don't ride the bus. It's not packed. You can see all the time there's barely anyone in there, but…I am for transit. I want the traffic to be better. 

One of the things that we’ve talked about was the bus service sort of just being outdated. We want transit, but we want a different type of transit that makes more sense. Having buses everywhere would, you know, clog up the lanes. It is interesting to choose more buses. You know, if you get behind a bus now you can't move. 

Another one of our concerns is safety. In (Metro Director of Transportation) Michael Briggs’ speech that he gave at some of these meetings, he mentioned safety, which I was like, “Good, great safety.” But, when he talked about safety, it wasn't the safety I imagined he would talk about at the transit centers, or on the buses, or at the bus stops. He talked about safety in terms of a plan called Vision Zero, And I don't know if you know anything about that, but it wasn't what I assumed safety would be about.

Were you given a pledge card promising you wouldn't violate the traffic laws and all those things?

Harvey: Well, it was very interesting because (Metro Director of Strategic Communications, Policy, & Legislation) Cortnye Stone gave a long presentation about Vision Zero, and I appreciated that we certainly do not want anyone to die—a pedestrian, anybody in a car—but I was just surprised that that was their safety focus when there was a young girl at the meeting who said her friends were concerned about the safety aspect of riding the bus.

What’s the message that this group particularly wants people to take away before they hit the ballot box?

Evans: I think our mantra, if you will, is that what is being proposed is not fair, it's not safe—and there doesn't seem to be real acknowledgement yet that the safety will be an issue—and it's kind of unnecessary. 

Here we are in the 21st century, and in your purse or your pocket is a dispatch system where you're allowed to communicate with Uber or Lyft, and there are all kinds of non-emergency transportation businesses that are developing. You can communicate to them, “Oh, I'm here, and I need to be picked up,” and you don't have to be on a route. 

I think the complacency [in regards to O’Connell’s plan] comes from, “Oh yeah, I go to New York and I ride the subway, or I go to Chicago and I ride the L.” But those solutions were developed in the 19th century when there was no other way you could communicate to people. Why are we not, as a city of the future, reimagining transportation to think about the way in which people can choose how they move and not necessarily invest so much money?

Neal: To follow up on both the finance piece and on what Emily and Patsy were saying, among our friends, what you hear a lot is this: “Oh, it's such a little amount of sales tax and look, it will allow a dedicated funding to be established and that way we can get federal grants.” Well, that's an issue that is seldom explored. For those of us who have looked at that whole process, getting a federal grant locks you in for about 30 years, which means that even if it fails, according to the federal grant, you must keep on going with that program. That also means that [you would be] forced to keep a stagnant program…in a period when you could have looked to a better technology program or to one that had greater adaptation to change. 

Putting more money into the buses—assuming that is, in fact, what they do— is a system that has already proved it doesn't work. It doesn't get people to jobs, and this plan is amorphous in that regard. It talks about something all over the county, but if you look at it, the main funding is still on the main corridors.

Harvey: And we just want people to also really look at it, to really read [it]. There are things in there that most people don't realize. For instance, there are twelve transit centers in the plan. There's one that's already been built in North Nashville, and I drove out there and looked at it. It's an incredibly nice building. I don't know if they're all going to be like that, but when I called NDOT… [they] could not tell me exactly where they would be, and I just could not vote for a tax increase without knowing some of these very important facts. To me, that's just common sense.

Evans: One very effective way for Mayor O'Connell to attack transit would be through a planning process that made that detail available to everybody. And that planning process, connected to a funding source that is property taxes, is the natural nexus. It's the natural relationship. When you have to fund something in advance without knowing what it is or how it's going to affect people, you are naturally going to make a lot of people unhappy. A lot of people are going to be disappointed and, central to my thinking is, you're going to punish the people that you say you are trying to help.

It's important for people to think about it, not as, “Oh well, it's not that much money, it's no big deal. Thank God it's not the Amp, let him have it.” People really need to think about how, number one, it's regressive, but number two, everything in [O’Connell’s] plan can be accomplished via property tax. 

Now, that involves making decisions… that means tradeoffs. I absolutely don't deny that, but it's there, you can plan, you can have community meetings, and you can actually execute using the property tax base, which is infinitely more progressive and fair than a sales tax.

Neal: I think that's key. Mayor O'Connell, in his campaign, had a very appealing message, which was, if you were among those who felt disenfranchised, “I want you to stay.” And yet, arguably, a sales tax, especially in a time of very, very serious inflation on goods and services, is contra to that appeal to the disenfranchised. According to him, he wants them to stay. He is not deaf and he is very bright. This makes no sense. So, a good question is, “Why this, why now?”