Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Around Town / Politics / The Economy / Woods Planning Commission Ready to Whore Down for Weird Rich Guy Jack May
Posted by Jeff Woods on Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 5:47 AM
Comments (10)
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You can only choose one:
1) May Town Center
2) Drastic increase in Metro property taxes.
3) Hundreds/Thousands of Metro Employees laid off. Significantly reduced services - including cuts to schools, police and fire.
Choose wisely.
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If apartments and tall buildings lowered property taxes all of us could easily afford to live in Manhattan.
Look at the developer's own figures: if you don't count a bunch of public expenses, this thing will bring in, max, 1.7% over current Metro revenues. A few expenses, like a bus terminal in Charlotte Park (which magically appeared in the planning staffs recomendations),or a sewer plant (which doesn't seem like a frill, exactly) and that tiny number will go negative, and our schools will be paying to keep Maytown afloat.
Of course, Jack May will be back in his Mexican villa, and Frank will still be in Belle Meade. Much richer.
If The May Center and The Convention Center are such great ideas, why don't we have a vote to determine if they should actually be built? Seems like the best way for WE THE PEOPLE to determine how our money is spent. Or we could just leave it up to a few politicians and businessmen who will all get rich off these ideas.
And don't say "because it would cost too much". We had a vote to determine English Only and I would think spending a couple of billion dollars of the tax payers money is way more important to the long term success of our community than a racist attempt at self glorification like English Only.
You know why we won't have a vote, because they are scared of the outcome and they'll do anything they can to stop us from getting in their way.
We are getting robbed and they are smiling while they do it.
Their kids get a trust fund and your kids get more debt.
"If The May Center and The Convention Center are such great ideas, why don't we have a vote to determine if they should actually be built? Seems like the best way for WE THE PEOPLE to determine how our money is spent. Or we could just leave it up to a few politicians and businessmen who will all get rich off these ideas."
Because it's not your money being spent. The opposition, along with politicians leveraging that opposition, have made damn sure that everything related to developing Bells Bend is paid for by the Developer; all the bridges, all the utilities, all communications, all the archaeological studies. They own it all.
Planning even recommends that projects already slated to be done by TDOT as of 2005 but must be moved forward, like widening Briley and the future OHB bridge (the "third bridge"), will be paid for with their money, not ours.
Chisel it into granite: that's how you lose your fight with a developer. Not only make his project a net profit to government by insuring a positive net tax liability, but actually have the developer PAY for what's already on the drawing boards to be done with public funds. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The argument that it could be a total failure economically just isn't much of a concern to government when so many benefits, like bridges and road improvement will be done up front, probably before said failure.
I think this is a situation where if taxpayers had more "skin in the game" then WE THE PEOPLE would have more say over how things get done. It may have been better to rope-a-dope the developer by conceding one bridge and the other things already on the state's 2005 long-range plan, then once their financing was in place, tie a hundred strings to the deal and/or cry poverty when time to fund them.
You're right, David. It's not our money being spent. At least not now at least.
But what happens when one of those roads/bridges/power lines/sewer pipes/etc needs to be fixed? Whose money is it then? And what happens if May Town, if not an abject failure, isn't quite the 50,000-new-workers success the developers claim it will be? What happens if there aren't that many people out there to cover costs? Where will NES and the other utilities make up those discrepancies? You think they might raise rates for folks in Bellevue or Woodbine or East Nashville? I think they just might.
Jeff, speaking of hypocracy, the opponents of May Town are so concerned it will be another Metro Center that they're actually coming up with ideas to make it successful... just kidding! No, they're hell-bent on killing the project with a thousand cuts, even when it's apparent that the project is moving forward. And they'll keep bleeding the beast even if the project gets approved, hoping it will eventually succumb to its wounds.
Pay for the bridge! Give us some farmland! Pay for traffic and economic impact studies so we can ignore them because you paid for them! Now, pay for a study of those studies so we can pan them, too! Get an army of archaeologists out there, dammit! Widen Briley and Centennial! are you writing this down?! Build another bridge for public transit! And a third! Pay for all your public schools because our public schools suck! And don't you DARE fail and leave us a half-built town that's another Metro Center! We're not obstructing, we only want what's best for Nashville!
I call that epic hypocracy. Either support May Town or reject it in EVERY aspect. And per my previous post, I think that hypocracy has doomed the opposition because financially it's a no-loose situation for Metro to approve this project, whether or not it succeeds.
"But what happens when one of those roads/bridges/power lines/sewer pipes/etc needs to be fixed? Whose money is it then?"
By that time, the thousands of taxpayers using that infrastructure will have their taxes fix those things. Is that somehow unfair? Do you think the future inhabitants of May Town should be bound to paying taxes to fix every OTHER part of Nashville? It's certainly chepaer to maintain infrastructure on a per-taxpayer basis where there are 70 taxpayers per acre than where there's only a couple of taxpayers per acre like in Bellevue.
"And what happens if May Town, if not an abject failure, isn't quite the 50,000-new-workers success the developers claim it will be? ... You think they might raise rates for folks in Bellevue or Woodbine or East Nashville? I think they just might."
That would be bad for Nashville, but not in the way you posited. If the upper percentiles of wage earners keep settling outside of Nashville because that's where the bulk of their jobs are landing, and the lower percentiles gravitate to Nashville because commuting gets too expensive or prices of new homes elsewhere remain out of reach, our tax base will dwindle and costs will be transfered to the taxpayers who can afford to shoulder them. That's already been a trend in Middle Tennessee WITHOUT high fuel prices.
Commenters continue to ignore the consequences of the 2035 population projection actually coming to pass; that being 900,000 more people in the 10-county Nashville MSA. Look at page 2 of the staff rerport recommending approval of May Town and see how bad population and job sparwl can and most likely will be if we don't turn a corner. A HARD turn.
The lady(in this case David Shumaker) doth protests too much, methinks.
Or in the immortal words of Jimbo, that smacks of effort Shumaker.
Alex, any attempt to try to reason with obstructionists requires pledging exceptional effort.
If that's all the thinking my posts generated in your noggin, you're not much. The choice to shut down cognative effort by un-curious folks such as yourself exposes you as willfully ignorant rather than simply ignorant.
Or, maybe put some effort into your own retorts without regard to what Jimbo will think about said effort. I frankly don't give a rat's ass.
