Show me. That’s what skeptics in Williamson County are asking the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) to do. In an attempt to force the state road-building agency to study more thoroughly the environmental impacts of the controversial state Route 840, a group of concerned citizens led by the Southwestern Williamson County Community Association has been taking TDOT to court.
And, now, for the first time in a three-year legal battle, a judge has been willing to halt the bulldozers, even temporarily.
The Southwest Williamson County Community Association has been tirelessly fighting TDOT in court in its attempt to stop 840 and make the department produce a more complete study of the impacts of the road on the southwestern part of the county. And if Williamson County Chancery Judge Russell Heldman, who has issued a temporary injunction, eventually finds for the plaintiffs, he could break the road’s circle of inevitability—defying the pseudo-logic of throwing good money after bad—and initiate stricter standards of accountability for TDOT.
State Route 840, if completed, would be a 185-mile ring road that would encircle the Metro Nashville region with a concrete belt, keeping an average distance of 35 miles from the city’s center. The highway would connect interstates 24, 40, and 65 on both the northern and southern sides of the city. The northern half would cut through Dickson, Montgomery, Cheatham, Robertson, Sumner, and Wilson Counties; the southern loop would slice through Rutherford and Williamson Counties.
In July, the citizens’ group filed a lawsuit in Williamson County Chancery Court claiming that TDOT failed to follow its own procedures in planning and building the southern loop of 840. Specifically, the suit alleges that TDOT did not execute a full environmental impact study for the road, and that TDOT must obtain the approval of the Williamson County Commission before acquiring right-of-way for the thoroughfare in that county. TDOT has been buying land and building the road on it even though the commission tabled a resolution to approve the land buy three years ago.
In response to the Williamson Countians’ suit, Heldman issued the injunction stopping work on the roughly 17 miles of 840 from Highway 100 east to Thompson Station Road. And he has scheduled a trial Sept. 6-8 to decide whether or not TDOT can proceed with that section.
The estimated cost of 840’s southern loop is a cool $485.9 million, or $6.3 million per mile—all state tax dollars. That figure is $30 million more than 1997 estimates. The southern half of 840 is complete from I-40 in Lebanon to I-24 in Murfreesboro; except for the section under injunction, the rest is under construction or undergoing right-of-way acquisition. At this point, the northern loop is just a line on a TDOT map. An environmental impact study—the kind that the litigants want for Williamson County’s section—is under way to make the northern half eligible for federal funds.
At a total project cost of $1.25 billion and climbing, 840 is clearly a major investment in infrastructure. And the complaints in this lawsuit represent just the tip of the iceberg of issues associated with the ring road as a whole. More and more politicians and just plain citizens are questioning the wisdom of spending more than a billion dollars without proof that the road will do what it claims—bring the kind of economic development the region needs and reduce congestion on existing interstates and arterials—and that the road will be built in a way that minimizes the inevitable damage to the land and waterways it crosses. Many fear that 840 will just redistribute the currently thriving economy into more sprawling patterns. And the evidence is mounting across the country that the social and economic costs of sprawl are not sustainable.
Last week, the Heritage Foundation, a not-for-profit group dedicated to the preservation of the historic, cultural, and geographic resources of Williamson County, joined the suit against TDOT. “If they’re going to build it, they should build it right,” says Mary Pearce, Heritage Foundation director. “We feel that this road deserves the same integrity of process as the Natchez Trace Parkway.”
Roads-R-Us
Trucking and road-building interests have dominated Tennessee politics since the late 1950s. In the 1952 gubernatorial primary, incumbent Gordon Browning had the support of the railroad interests. Challenger Frank Clement needed transportation backers of his own, so he made friends with the truckers. When Clement won the primary, and eventually the gubernatorial election, highways became all-important.
Since then, it’s been desirable for any potential TDOT commissioner to have road-building experience on his résumé. Jimmy Evans literally paved his way to that position in Ned McWherter’s administration, and Don Sundquist’s current transportation commissioner, Bruce Saltsman, used to build bridges. A 1996 profile in Construction News even described Saltsman as “a contractor at heart” and noted that having him in charge of a $1 billion budget “is a great situation for those of us in the construction industry.”
In 1986, Lamar Alexander had no trouble convincing the Legislature to increase the state’s gas tax, the stated purpose of which was to pay for a 13-year road-building program. The southern half of 840 was part of that package. It was one of a series of Bicentennial Parkways—“bicentennial” because each was supposed to be finished around the time of the state’s 200th birthday in 1996.
When state legislators got their hands on Alexander’s bill, they kept the gas tax and the roads but got rid of the parkway concept. The outdoor-advertising lobby feared that the term “parkway” sounded too green and that environmentalists might assume that a park-like thoroughfare should be protected from unsightly signage. The Legislature was happy to oblige.
Planning for the southern half of 840 began in 1987. That was the period when Nissan and Saturn appeared on the landscape and the state wanted to move workers and freight to and from the plants. Legislation in 1993 gave the go-ahead to construction of 840’s northern half, but no funding sources were—or have yet to be—determined. Even though the gas tax soared again during McWherter’s administration, the state coffers probably can’t finance the northern section, where hilly terrain makes construction more expensive. TDOT is following such procedures as an environmental impact study to make the northern loop eligible for federal funding.
TDOT lumps the state gas tax, the diesel fuel tax, and motor vehicle registration fees together as “highway user fees.” The state uses these fees to pay for highway construction and maintenance. Tennessee’s gas tax is now 21.4 cents on the dollar; anticipated state revenues from highway user fees in 2000-2001 are $606.8 million. Fuel taxes guarantee eternal life for a state’s highway program. Citizens drive cars, buy gas, and pay the tax—and the state builds more roads. These roads attract more traffic and create more sprawl. As a result, citizens drive more, buy more gas, and pay more taxes—leading the state to build more roads. Perhaps this logic of self-perpetuation explains why TDOT will spend 25-and-a-half times more on roads and bridges—new construction and maintenance—than it will spend on mass transit in 2000-2001.
Former Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen is no fan of the sea of concrete 840 promises to be. And he doesn’t have a lot of respect for the flawed planning strategies driving the project. “The rural areas of the state see roads as the link to the outside world. But TDOT—and it’s the Department of Transportation, not the department of highways—needs to recognize that a rural strategy does not work for metropolitan regions,” which require a more balanced transportation system.
Bredesen recalls that when he was mayor, some of the leaders of Tennessee’s larger cities approached Gov. Sundquist and TDOT head Saltsman “begging for some badly needed investment in mass transit. We weren’t asking for a reallocation of existing monies, just a little share of new money. We got nowhere. TDOT is in the business of building roads, and they just look for places to build them. There’s no law that says you have to keep building more new roads, but TDOT is a law unto itself.”
A case for study
Critics of 840 in Williamson County have made much of the fact that the roadway began not as a state route but as an interstate—a federal highway. They say that as late as 1998, the road was characterized in TDOT documents as I-840. The folks at TDOT insist that how the road was originally conceived has no bearing on the current debate. They say 840 is now a state route because only state money is being used to build the southern half of the circle. TDOT admits, however, that the department is building state Route 840 to interstate specifications.
To the non-bureaucrat, this debate seems a case of irrelevant hair-splitting over nomenclature. A four-lane divided highway with access limited to interchanges is the same animal, no matter what it’s called or who foots the bill. The environmental impact is the same either way. Yet the legal debate hinges on the rules and procedures for building a road with state—as opposed to federal—funds.
At the heart of the pending Williamson County lawsuit over 840 lies the mind-numbing distinction between an “environmental impact statement” (EIS) and an “environmental assessment” (EA). TDOT performed an EA for 840-South in 1989 and claims that’s all the department is legally required to do. Meanwhile, the lawsuit alleges that TDOT should have done an EIS, a more thorough pre-construction test than an EA and something the federal government requires for new interstates and four-lane highways that use federal dollars.
Both an EIS and an EA study how a particular transportation project might affect the environment. And the word “environment” means something much broader than snail darters and old-growth forests. Transportation bureaucrats, sometimes assisted by consultants, are supposed to consider the road’s or rail’s impact on planned growth and land use; on natural, cultural, recreational, and historic resources, such as parks and historic houses; on air and water quality; on our travel patterns; and on the number of people who will be displaced. They hold public hearings and gather documentation. They produce documents that are an efficient alternative to Sominex.
But an EIS and an EA are, if not different species, at least different breeds. The feds require an EIS for federally funded road projects that, according to their rule book, “significantly impact the environment.” The point is to consider if the benefits outweigh the damages, and if so, the least harmful way to build the road and how some of the damage can be repaired. Two types of roads where the feds expect significant impacts are “new controlled-access freeways” and “a highway project of four or more lanes on a new location.” Sounds a lot like 840.
The feds use an EA to assess road projects “in which the significance of the environmental impact is not clearly established.” In other words, an EA assesses whether or not the environment will take a major hit if the road is built. As such, an EA is “meant to be a little less in-depth than an EIS, where typically you go into a lot more detail,” says Gary Corino, a member of the local Federal Highway Administration staff. “But you never really know until you get out in the field.” The result of an EA is either a decision that the road will cause no significant impact—and thus needs no further analysis—or that the road will have a significant impact. In the latter case, the further study of an EIS is required.
“Since TDOT prepares so many impact studies for the federal government, we go with their definitions and procedures even when we aren’t doing the study for them,” TDOT spokesperson Luanne Grandinetti explains. “Ours are modeled on theirs.”
Well, federal rules require an EIS for roads like 840. Yet TDOT has done an EA for the southern half of 840, not an EIS. The feds expect a road like 840 to have a significant impact on the area it passes through. TDOT’s EA says otherwise.
Quick assessment
In the 1989 environmental assessment for the 53-mile stretch of 840 from Murfreesboro to Dickson, TDOT personnel surveyed the various alternative paths suggested for the roadway with regard to terrain, wildlife habitat (both land and water), the economic base of the area, and its social makeup. The result is a superficial document, devoted primarily to description rather than analysis, identifying areas of potential impact but not exploring the full nature of that impact. A member of Tennessee’s road-building industry is less kind, calling the EA “laughable.”
The 840-South EA devotes a mere three sentences to assessing the “no-build” alternative, i.e. the impact if 840 were not constructed. The EA concludes that if 840 is not built, “accident potential, congestion, delay, and automotive pollution will continue to increase.” No alternative modes of transportation infrastructure—i.e., mass transit—are considered.
That TDOT didn’t bend over backward to assess the environmental implications of the project doesn’t come as a surprise to many critics of the road-building agency. In June, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) announced the second-largest civil penalty the agency has ever leveled against an industry or institution for environmental breaches. But the culprit was not a forest-destroying chip mill or a water-polluting textile manufacturer. The guilty party was the state itself, TDOT, which agreed to a combination of cash penalties and environmental cleanup totaling just over $3 million.
Meanwhile, most transportation planners would predict that 840 will ultimately produce more air pollution, not less. Several thoughtful studies of road building in other parts of the country consider the phenomenon known as induced travel, which means that adding road capacity actually increases the number of trips and miles people will drive. The idea is that when new lane-miles decrease the amount of time a trip takes, more drivers will take more trips. And new roads built to access new land will provide a further incentive for more and longer trips. In the long run, congestion increases and the air quality erodes further.
“The linkage between increased highway capacity and changes in land-use patterns is increasingly being recognized by policy makers,” Robert Noland and William Cowart recently wrote in a paper for the Transportation Research Board. “The efficiency and long-term sustainability of urban areas is threatened by development patterns that...generate excessive (and auto dependent) patterns of travel.” In Middle Tennessee the biggest threat is TDOT’s 840.
The TDOT EA acknowledges the land-use impacts of 840-South in its glancing, two-paragraph assessment of the issue. The EA states that there will be a loss of farmland, that commercial development will likely increase at the interchanges, and that the residential and industrial development potential will increase along the entire corridor. Yet the report does not consider the impacts on air and water quality and wildlife that such development will bring.
The only sentence in the entire EA dealing with 840’s impact on air quality states: “Based on the analyses of rural interstate highway projects with similar meteorological conditions and traffic volumes, the air quality impacts of the project have been judged to be minimal or insignificant.” The EA ignores the fact that once 840 goes through, the rural nature of the area is endangered because of the development potential that TDOT has already acknowledged in another section of its report.
The assessment of impact on the land habitat of wildlife is the TDOT version of “let them eat cake.” The EA concludes that there is an abundance of fields and forests “along the proposed section of 840 that could absorb displaced wildlife due to construction.” But once 840 delivers the subdivisions and commercial strips, those trees won’t stand for long, and the fields will fill up fast.
TDOT’s EA ignores many of the springs and small streams that feed the Harpeth River, waterways that I observed to be freely flowing during the drought of early August. But the EA does describe the characteristics of 19 streams in the Harpeth River watershed that 840 will cross or come near as “average or above average in water quality and the abundance of aquatic life.” But in analyzing the impact of 840 on them, the report states, without explanation, “No long term adverse impact is anticipated for these streams.” As 840 critics found this past spring, that promise of “no impact” didn’t hold true.
Mud flap
For the short-term impact of 840, consider the case of Nails and Turnbull creeks. Beginning in January, employees of the Turnbull-White Bluff Utility District, which supplies water to 35,000 residents of Dickson County and the city of Fairview, noticed that the creeks feeding the water treatment facility were unusually muddy. They traced the sediment trail to the construction site for 840 and the I-40/840 interchange.
After further study and escalating levels of sediment, Elmo Lunn, chairman of the utility district, complained to TDOT and the TDEC. He explained that all the mud was clogging the water intakes, and that the high level of sedimentation “poses a major health hazard for the district’s customers.” Lunn asked that construction be halted until the problem could be addressed. TDOT Commissioner Bruce Saltsman responded that he had asked the contractor to redouble his efforts regarding siltation and sedimentation, but refused to halt construction.
In May, the utility district staff inspected the Turnbull Creek watershed after a rain, which exacerbates the mud flow from construction. They found record high levels of sediment in the streams below the construction site and no erosion protection in place. They notified the water treatment plant that “a slug of mud” was on its way. On May 25, after a more severe storm delivered even more mud, the water treatment plant had to shut down for seven hours (as reported in “State of Repairs,” Nashville Scene, June 1).
In an angry letter to TDEC Commissioner Milton Hamilton, Lunn identified the cause of the problem as the TDOT culture. “TDOT wants to address symptoms of the disease, leaving the disease unresolved,” wrote Lunn, who is, ironically, the former top water-quality regulator for TDEC. “The ever-apparent central issue is that TDOT has no environmental commitment. There is no system of accountability for results on environmental measures for construction projects such as [840].” Lunn said that a system of monitoring and measurement of the road contractors’ performance should be in place for all TDOT construction work. Because TDOT has no such system, Lunn concluded, “it appears that TDOT is allowed to operate outside the requirements imposed by your department on all others.”
Attached to Lunn’s careful report were the relevant sections of TDOT’s environmental assessment for the I-40/840 interchange. The TDOT EA concludes that “construction of this project will have no impact on streams or other aquatic systems. There are no continuous or intermittent flowing streams within the impact areas of the interchanges. As a result, there will be no direct water-quality impact resulting from interchange construction.”
So much for the predictive value of a TDOT environmental assessment.
Water water everywhere
A multitude of springs and streams and creeks feeds the Harpeth River. Some have names—West Prong Branch, White Oak Creek, Franklin Springs. Others are anonymous members of the watershed that flows down the slopes of the West Highland Rim, the ridge on which TDOT plans to lay 840.
Franklin Springs, which indirectly feeds the Harpeth and which TDOT failed to note in its environmental assessment, was once the source of Franklin’s drinking water, supplying the city with 450,000 gallons a day. Today Franklin still draws one-fifth of its drinking water from the Harpeth River, according to former Mayor Lillian Stewart. The city also discharges all of its treated sewage water into the river.
Those facts have Stewart, the head of Citizens for Good Growth in Williamson County, concerned. She says her organization is contemplating bringing legal evidence to show the environmental impact of 840 on Franklin, even though the road will pass five miles south of the city.
“When TDOT starts blasting and bulldozing, it could disrupt the Harpeth River watershed,” Stewart says. She explains that water comes to the Harpeth by rain soaking into the ground and then oozing into small streams which then flow into creeks before reaching the river. Paving and rooftops—which 840 will bring with the economic development that is the rationale for the road—subtract ground for rain to soak into. “And parking lots and lawn treatments bring pollution. Right now the Harpeth is severely depleted, which means that it pools and doesn’t flow at certain times of the summer,” Stewart says. “We need to get more fresh water into the river, and the first thing you don’t do is bomb out the watershed. TDOT should do an environmental study that’s not a lot of hokum.”
One watershed flowing into the Harpeth that has been studied, although not by TDOT, is Kelley Creek. In 1998 the Nature Conservancy of Tennessee identified over 370 species of plants and 32 species of fish in the Kelley Creek watershed, some of them globally rare. “The outstanding plant and animal diversity encompassed by the watershed, coupled with the high water quality of the system, are unparalleled in the region,” the Conservancy report concluded.
Paul Sloan, who with his wife owns property through which Kelley Creek flows, says that although TDOT received the Conservancy’s report, the department has not made any significant alterations to its construction planning in response. Sloan wants to halt construction until TDOT does its own detailed study of the topography and plant and animal life and develops plans to prevent damage, such as building bridges over the environmentally delicate areas rather than laying 840 on the ground.
Taking the political pulse
In 1997, when the Scene first reported on 840 and its potential to suck the heart out of Nashville and spew it all over the surrounding countryside, only a few Middle Tennesseans were willing to say “stop and think.” Politicians, ever mindful of TDOT’s ability to punish dissenters by tying up every paving project in their district for the foreseeable future, spoke tepidly in favor of the project, if they spoke at all.
While serving as mayor, Phil Bredesen told the Scene, “I don’t see [840] as enhancing the level of sprawl significantly.” Now that he’s out of office, Bredesen says that 840 “can’t but hurt Nashville. It will encourage the diffusion of new jobs and industry, creating more suburban sprawl. And cities benefit from concentration. My dream has always been to see a vibrant core as a magnet, with people living in a variety of neighborhoods and small towns surrounding that center. It’s counterintuitive to spend billions to insure that people will move out.”
Nashville’s current mayor, Bill Purcell, speaks more circumspectly. That’s what you’d expect from a civic leader with his experience at the state level as the former House majority leader. Purcell is frustrated by the lack of hard information about 840’s impact. “There has been no real study of any kind that tells us the effects the road will have, good or bad,” the mayor says. “One of the problems with the discussion of 840 is that it’s a combination of anecdote and local pride: ‘It’s just better for people in Clarksville to get to Dickson County quicker.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I think so.’ That’s just not good enough for an investment of this magnitude. Underlying 840 is the suggestion that it will bring major economic advantages to individual counties and the region as a whole, making the investment worthwhile. There’s no data to sustain that argument.”
Purcell also points out that when the interstates were constructed, “the financial risk to the state was only 10 percent of the total cost—the rest was federal dollars.” With the southern loop of 840, “it’s all our state tax dollars. This project—which is likely to be the most expensive single highway project in the history of the state—cries out for a cost/benefit analysis.”
Purcell notes that the other change from the past is “the region’s interest in a balanced transportation system. At the time the 840 discussions began, that was not part of our thinking, either in Nashville or the areas around us. That should be factored into the analysis.” The mayor says a comprehensive look at land use and transportation alternatives is also needed “before we commit such a large share of our transportation dollars. We’re just smarter about all this than we ever were before, and we need to apply that knowledge before proceeding.”
The politicos of Williamson County are also taking a second look at 840. When the Southwest Williamson County Community Association was founded by activist Gene Cotton in 1997 in response to 840, its members were characterized as radical NIMBYs(“not in my backyard”) and tree-huggers. “My impression is that it’s a few rich music types who are making all the fuss, and that most people out there really want the road,” said one Franklin resident.
Well, there are a lot of double-wides-on-acre-lots in the path of 840. And recently, what are viewed as more mainstream voices—such as that of Mary Pearce of the Heritage Foundation—have publicly criticized 840. They say they’re not trying to stop the ring road permanently, just make sure that the road is built in a way that mitigates its negative impacts. This more moderate position gives Williamson County officials a compromise plateau on which to stand.
Williamson County Executive Clint Callicott sighs when asked his take on 840, saying that the road is a political “dilemma” for him. He says he’s well aware that “planning across the country is going against loop roads.” And he firmly asserts that 840 “won’t increase business. We’re already growing commercially at a great rate. We have 1.5 percent unemployment. The biggest problem we have is getting workers into the county—from Dickson, Hickman, and Maury Counties—who can’t afford to live here. I suppose, although I don’t honestly know, that the road might be beneficial in getting them here in a safe manner,” he says with a notable lack of enthusiasm.
The transportation infrastructure his county really needs, Callicott says, is more capacity on Highway 96 from Franklin to Murfreesboro. “It’s an old horsepath, highly traveled and dangerous. Has been for years.” He agrees that it “would make more sense, and would sure be cheaper than 840,” to enlarge 96 and “fix Highway 100, which is often bumper to bumper, and build a new road from CoolSprings to Sam Ridley Parkway. We have 450 Nissan employees in the county and they can’t get to the plant.”
Callicott doesn’t believe that 840 will create more sprawl in Williamson County than it already has. He says that’s because there are no water/sewer lines near the southwestern part of the road path, and the County Commission will keep the zoning rural at the interchanges. That attitude is either naive or disingenuous. Callicott says that low-density residential development is one of his definitions of sprawl. Well, according to Williamson County’s planner, Joe Horne, a rural classification doesn’t permit commercial development, but it does allow one house per five acres. And Horne points out that the suburban estate zoning category, which allows one house per acre, lies near parts of the 840 route. Say hello to subdivisions, and more schools, and higher property taxes.
In response to his constituents’ growing concern about the environment of Williamson County, Callicott says he feels TDOT “needs to do a formal environmental impact statement” for the 17-mile stretch under injunction. “There are issues connected with the ridge and creeks that need to be looked at, and weren’t considered at the time” TDOT planned the road.
State representative Mike Williams, whose district includes Williamson County, also thinks “it’s time for TDOT to take a deep breath and do an environmental impact statement. I sponsored legislation to get them to do one, but I couldn’t even get it out of committee. The road builders’ lobby was not going to let that out on the floor. I also asked TDOT to do an economic impact analysis, and they said ‘get the funding and we’ll do it’—and I couldn’t.”
Williams says a high-speed commuter rail line to Nashville would help alleviate the county’s labor shortage more than 840 would, because it would enable blue-collar workers to commute from Davidson County. “I’ve always thought that TDOT is building 840 in the wrong place. It should join directly into Saturn Parkway, which would give Maury County part of the road and avoid the environmentally sensitive areas.”
Steamrollering
Rational voices are questioning the logic of 840, but so far they’ve not been able to drive a stake through the project’s heart, because the road is not a reasonable construction but a cynical one. TDOT is building a rural transportation project for an area of Middle Tennessee where rural is a tiny remnant—and will be stamped out if 840 is built. The project has an arrogant disregard for its impacts, and makes no attempt to justify that the benefits will outweigh the costs.
In terms of transportation planning, 840 is a fossil. We know from the examples of ring roads and bypasses all over the country—around Atlanta and Cincinnati, Boston and Washington, D.C.—that such roads ultimately make for sprawling patterns of development, greater congestion, and air pollution; that they have a crippling effect on the traditional downtowns of large cities and small towns; and that they leave county administrators pulling out their hair, wondering how they’re going to pay for the new schools and police and fire service.
State Route 840—and the northern federally funded loop, if it is ever built—will create more sprawl because the ring is designed to create sprawl, which feeds the pockets of the pavers and the homebuilders and the concrete suppliers—who contribute to the campaigns of the politicians. And the politicians who know better, and who could stop it, have been cowardly, whispering over the phone that the road is not the best use of public money but has gone too far to stop. They ask “What can you do to fight Big Government?” when they are our government.
One telling example of the cynicism that pervades the building of roads in this state is that Kent Starwalt, the executive vice president of the Tennessee Road Builders Association, has founded something called—I kid you not—the Tennessee Smart Growth Alliance. Its stated mission is a noble one: “Promote better understanding about the positive and compatible goals of a strong economy, lifestyle and mobility choices, and a clean environment for Tennessee.” Its members include, in addition to the road builders, the Tennessee Ready Mix Concrete Association, the Tennessee Petroleum Council, the Home Builders Association of Middle Tennessee, and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Middle Tennessee.
The group’s unstated mission is to demonize anyone who questions its collective wisdom as anti-growth, and to make sure that—even in the midst of a state budget crisis—no one spends any of the gas tax on something like education. Starwalt spouts “freedom of choice” when what his alliance is all about is to restrict our freedom to choose any lifestyle other than the sprawling one they want to give us—driving over the roads they’ve built for us, to the subdivisions they’ve built for us, to the malls and office parks they’ve built for us.
“The money, which means the power, is all on the other side,” says one opponent of 840 in southwest Williamson County. “We’re over here having bake sales and shit. The politicians and the TDOT types are flying around in the road builders’ jets.”
