May Day

For Bells Bend, part of Nashville's largest remaining agricultural and forested landscape, the bell may toll this week. In a pivotal meeting that will decide nothing less than the fate of Davidson County's last holdout against the urban bustle of outlying counties, the Planning Commission will vote whether to allow developers to build essentially a second downtown Nashville over an oasis of working farms and rolling fields.

Unfortunately, the commissioners are scheduled to make one of the most important decision of their careers without the necessary facts. The whole premise for the land use change is economic impact. But to determine the degree to which the proposed project will boost the tax rolls, the commissioners must rely on statistics produced by the developers who want to build that shadow downtown.

"We don't have the resources to do our own economic study," explains the Metro Planning Department's Jennifer Carlat.

The developers are Jack May and Tony Giarratana, who propose to build May Town Center (MTC) on 500 of the 1,400 acres already owned by the May family in the southern peninsula of Scottsboro called Bells Bend. May and Giarratana are chanting the mantra that MTC would enable Davidson County to compete with places like Cool Springs and create tax revenues for Metro. The scope of their project is enormous: 10 million square feet of office, 1.5 million square feet of commercial and 5,000 residential units—all to be built on a pristine swath of rolling, grassy hills nestled near a tranquil bend of the Cumberland.

Downtown Nashville currently has 7.1 million square feet of office. And at the end of construction, in 2026, the proposed development's workforce of 40,000 would rival downtown's 47,000. A new bridge across the Cumberland River would shuttle office workers to the new jobs, but no one knows, including the planning commissioners, who will foot the bill.

Metro's Planning Department supports May Town and has incorporated the dramatic change in land use the project requires into its plan for Scottsboro/Bells Bend. Executive director Rick Bernhardt defends his department's proposal as taking the "middle ground" between economic development and preservation of the Bend. He points out that the planners have dutifully put in place a series of conditions to mitigate the impacts of MTC on the rest of the area.

That's not good enough for Scottsboro residents, who are overwhelmingly opposed to the development. "We thought we had a plan for the community that would conserve the natural areas and farmland," says Sharon Work, a fifth-generation resident of Bells Bend. "Now they want to bring a satellite city out here."

Technically speaking, the commission will vote only on the change in land use for what the plan coyly calls the "Alternate Development Area"—and not specifically on May Town. It will take a separate vote by the commissioners, and then by Metro Council, to change the zoning to fully enable the development. But don't let that fool you. If the commissioners agree it's a good idea to insert something like May Town into Bells Bend, they'll have no rationale for opposing the zoning change for the real thing.

For the Planning Commission, this is an important vote that could upend the rural state of affairs in Bells Bend. It will also defy the wishes of the Scottsboro community. The commissioners are deciding, not merely if a development like May Town is good for Davidson County in general, but if it's appropriate and feasible for this specific site in the county. The one undisputed fact is that if the land use and zoning changes go through, allowing development of a much greater intensity than the property is currently zoned for, the value of the May family's land will escalate sharply. Their $22 million investment could be worth as much as $800 million.

One would hope and expect that the commissioners would bring to their vote piles of information and analyses supplied by Metro staff on the impacts of the project, not only on Scottsboro, but on the rest of Nashville. They'd have reviewed objective numbers on revenues and costs to Metro. They'd have weighed traffic count projections, mass transit feasibility, water and sewer capacity, costs of providing schools and fire and police protection. They'd have considered the tax breaks that the corporations May and Giarratana hope to capture routinely charge to relocate.