The Week That Was
Sporting subsidies
It isn’t helping his tax crisis argument that Gov. Don Sundquist is supporting state funding to help Memphis convince an NBA team to come to the Bluff City. At play is a possible move by the Vancouver Grizzlies, which is considering other cities besides Memphis. Of course, it would be contingent on the city building a publicly financed $200 million arena, and the governor says he’d be willing to offer aid similar to the $55 million in bonds and $12 million in infrastructure improvements he supported for the then-Houston Oilers’ move to Nashville.
Firing off
Former Mayor Phil Bredesen, who has remained relatively quiet about matters of city policy since leaving office in 1999, has broken his silence on the issue of retiring the downtown Thermal plant. He told The Tennessean this week essentially that while there may be a case for closing Thermal, as current Mayor Bill Purcell is trying to do, it can’t be justified on an economic basis. He also told the newspaper that it’s not necessarily an environmentally sound case to make either, given that the plant is currently burning trash, a renewable resource, and that Purcell is proposing to burn natural gas, a nonrenewable resource.
Growing large
During the last decade Nashville saw more aggressive growth than the other three major cities in the state, according to the latest Census figures released last week. There are more than 59,000 new residents in Nashville—an 11.6 percent hike—since the last Census count. The population of Metro Nashville stands at 569,891. Mayor Bill Purcell says the city’s growth should keep it in the ranks of the nation’s 25 largest cities.
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