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.

If the commissioners vote yes, they would chart Nashville on the course of devouring farmland to feed the city's tax base. That would be a curious choice after more than a decade of government support for initiatives designed to strengthen the central core of downtown with infill development—arena and stadium, Rolling Mill Hill and the Gulch, to name a few.

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.

Sadly, such is not the case. That's because Metro staff won't officially begin to crunch numbers until after the vote on land use change. As planning staffer Carlat explains, "Government jumps in when they have a 'client.' And that won't happen until the MTC developers apply for the zone change." What the commissioners will bring to their vote is the plan itself, an economic impact study produced by MTC developers and an analysis of the MTC study commissioned by MTC opponents. The commissioners will also come equipped with a pile of press releases and evocative videos—the soundtrack for the latest features chirping birds and rushing waters—produced by, you guessed it, MTC developers.

The economic impact study commissioned by May and Giarratana projects that MTC will deliver to Davidson County, in property and sales taxes, $578 million through 2026. This study includes absolutely no calculations of potential costs to Metro.

The analysis of the MTC study prepared for the opponents by Chattanooga's Community Research Council questions many of the developers' assumptions. It points out, for example, that for the economic projections to be accurate, MTC would have to capture—for 15 years—almost half of the average annual market for new office space in the entire Nashville area. The analysis also questions the assumption "that none of the office space at May Town and none of the office jobs will come from firms currently located in Davidson County. If this assumption were inaccurate...May Town Center would have a negative impact on vacancy rates, especially in the [Central Business District]."

Recent history says the assumption that all the tenants in MTC will come from outside the Nashville region is inaccurate. According to Janet Miller of the Nashville Chamber, in the last five years only 20 percent of job growth has come from outside the region, while 80 percent is the result of expansion within the region.

Given that the whole rationale for the land use change to enable May Town is to boost the local economy—and not merely shuffle companies around the county—the planning commissioners should be able to do more than play "Who Do You Trust?" with dueling reports before casting their votes.

Council member Emily Evans, who's something of a number cruncher herself, calls this week's vote by the commission "premature. I have questions about the potential impacts, especially traffic, for my district," which includes West Meade and parts of Belle Meade. "And I don't want all the entitlements"—and use and zoning changes—"to be in place before they're answered."

The current proposed bridge alignment links MTC with the larger Nashville world through Cockrill Bend to Briley Parkway. Evans sees this alignment as setting MTC up for failure.

"In order for May Town to succeed in the upscale way it's envisioned," those in charge of retail placement for carriage trade stores "are going to want the best access to the best demographics," she explains. "They're going to look at the map and immediately see that the highest density of the highest incomes is in my district and the adjacent districts south and west. They're not in Cockrill Bend." Cockrill Bend is an area of prisons and warehouses lying next to the Nations neighborhood of West Nashville.

Evans says retailers will want a bridge that provides the most direct access to the affluence in the southwest. And MTC developers will want to give it to them. "So I could be looking at a bridge link to Hillwood Boulevard." And if the planners insist on a Cockrill Bend bridge, "May Town will develop more like an office campus, like Metro Center--look at what happened to retail there. And I don't think we should sacrifice beautiful land for mediocrity."

A change in land use of the magnitude the "Alternate Development Area" requires is risky business without an objective assessment of all the impacts. If the commissioners vote to take that risk, the only certain impact known at this time is windfall profits for land speculators.