Nashville has thousands of new residents and worsening traffic.
Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times

Can Nashville Persuade Voters That a Sales Tax Increase Is Worth the Price?

Desperate to compete with other growing cities, Nashville’s leaders are trying once again to convince voters that a sales tax increase is worth the price.

by · NY Times

Asked in 2018 to pay for a transportation overhaul that would include a new light rail system and a downtown tunnel, Nashville voters bluntly said no.

Six years later, as the city bursts with thousands of new residents and worsening traffic, Nashville leaders are trying again. This time, however, they are focusing on the barest of basics: new buses and routes, more sidewalks and the synchronization of traffic lights, all for the price of a half-cent county sales tax increase.

It is still unclear whether it will be enough to persuade voters.

The modest ambitions of this referendum underscore the reluctance of voters to pay for infrastructure improvements, even in a car-centered city struggling to keep pace with explosive growth.

“This is how we catch up on a generation of underinvestment,” said Mayor Freddie O’Connell, a Democrat who has spent much of his first year in office pushing the transportation improvements.

“Plan B is realistically the status quo,” he added.

The vote, carefully timed to the higher turnout of a presidential election, pits the city’s deeply ingrained aversion to tax increases against a palpable frustration with its poor infrastructure. It also comes at a critical moment, when Nashville is competing against bigger and more developed cities for a rare influx of federal money.

“If we want to be them — because Nashville does — it needs to be walkable,” said Kristina Clements, 49, a music teacher who voted in favor of the measure.

Nashville is not alone in facing this dilemma. Building new roads, bridges and other foundations of infrastructure are broadly popular; paying for them isn’t.

Other communities will also decide whether to trade tax increases or more money for infrastructure improvements on the November ballot. Among them, Cobb County in Georgia will vote on a 30-year sales tax increase for more bus and shuttle routes; Fairfax County, Va., will decide whether to send $180 million in bonds toward the Washington metro system; and a few counties in South Carolina are debating whether to allow a sales tax increase in exchange for road and public transit projects.

When Congress finally wrangled passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill early in the Biden administration, most Republicans opposed it.

But as the bureaucratic red tape has cleared and the federal coffers have opened, millions of dollars have been directed across the country — and into the South.

In Mississippi and Louisiana, passenger rail could restart along the Gulf Coast for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. North Carolina and Georgia have seen millions set aside for crucial repairs to roads and bridges. And in Memphis, a new, earthquake-resistant bridge over the Mississippi River is set to receive nearly $400 million.

By not having a dedicated source of infrastructure funding to match that flow of federal dollars, Nashville and its surrounding county have effectively been kneecapped in competing for a bigger share of the money. (ThinkTennessee, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the region is one of just four of the 50 largest metro areas in the country without a dedicated source of funding for transit.)

The federal funding is guaranteed only through the end of next September, leaving a short window.

Estimates show that Nashville’s plan would cost about $3.1 billion, relying on a half percent increase in county sales tax. Officials estimate that the additional revenue — which puts it in line with neighboring county taxes — would allow the city to leverage more than $1 billion in federal money.

The plan includes proposals for nearly 90 miles of new or improved sidewalks, 54 miles of transit lanes and corridors, and a dozen new centers to serve as hubs for more buses and bus routes. It would also help synchronize the traffic lights in Nashville, a 30-year-old system that until very recently ran on a dial-up connection.

Barbara Chadwick, 68, who has lived in Nashville for 50 years, could not remember whether she backed the 2018 plan. But, she added, “that was way more radical than what Freddie’s proposing.”

Nashville once “was a small town with big city amenities,” she said, noting the city’s array of musical and cultural venues. “Then it became a big city with poor infrastructure.”

The burden remains on Mr. O’Connell and his allies to justify the tax increase, though opposition has been muted compared with the 2018 vote.

Some of the plan’s critics argue that the added tax increase will not effectively address the city’s congestion problems and that the package should be broken down even further, rather than combine sidewalk and service improvements. And while a lack of streamlined bus routes has hampered ridership, opponents of the plan are skeptical that it will lead to an uptick in use.

“I don’t necessarily disagree with having a dedicated revenue stream, I don’t necessarily disagree with signalization modernization,” said Courtney Johnston, one of the most conservative members on the Metropolitan Council that governs both Nashville and surrounding Davidson County. “But are we going to get what we want out of this?”

But for some voters, a chance to match progress elsewhere in the country is enough to vote yes.

Keisha Gardner, who manages a cemetery her family owns in what was once the heart of the Black community in Nashville, said she took photos of Houston’s metro rail system and sent them to someone on the referendum campaign.

“All things could be happening,” she said. “If we wanted to.”

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