Nashville Mayor John Cooper on Thursday disparaged a referendum to roll back the city’s property taxes and called it “a poison pill” that would stagnate the city and threaten future progress.
Cooper said this at a press conference.
As The Tennessee Star reported Thursday, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee announced that members of the group had turned in roughly 20,000 signatures to the Metro Clerk’s office in support of the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act.
Members of the group helped gather the requisite number of signatures for the initiative for the December 5 ballot. The Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act would roll back Cooper’s 34-37 percent tax increase and limit property tax rate increases to 2 percent every year without voters approving it.
Cooper, at Thursday’s conference, said he expected that the topic “will be actively discussed in the community.”
“Ultimately, I do worry that the result of this is just forcing a stealth election on Nashville, a very expensive stealth election on Nashville, in order to give the city a poison pill. And it’s not just about the property taxes, it has all kinds of stuff on it that is, quite frankly, a poison pill for our city,” Cooper said, although he did not elaborate.
“Everyone who serves the city, every teacher, every police officer, [and] every citizen of the city would need to be deeply concerned that this is a poison pill. We want to create a great city — going forward in the 21st century — and not create a backwater here and have us swallow, unintentionally, a poison pill, particularly through a stealth election.”
As reported last week, Nashville attorney Jim Roberts said that Metro officials “clearly don’t like having power taken away.”
Roberts said more on Thursday, after Metro officials received the signatures.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Thanks to the dupes at WTN: Phil Valentine, Dan Mandis and Michael DelRINO, who gave Mini Cooper unlimited air time and pass himself off as a “fiscal conservative”. I wonder if any of them have apologized?
Incidentally, the GOP had better line up someone to run against this idiot’s idiot brother for Congress in a couple of years. Jimbo could have been picked off this time. Next time he or the Leninist who beats him in the primary is toast.
Baltimore, Washington DC, Chicago, LA, Portland and Seattle. Now Nashville.
….and Comrade Cooper is a cancer. Happy to have moved out of Metro Davidson county.
…WHAT RICK & DAVE SAID X’$ A MILLION!
Given property tax statements will issue in the next few weeks, the referendum will win in a blow out. There will be tons of negative ads and commercials against it, funded by wealthy interests such as the Chamber, sports leagues and other special interests, and the local propaganda outlets will oppose its passage, but this is a done deal. People can read their tax bills.
As far as the courts, the only portion where Metro may be on less shaky ground is the retroactivity portion of the referendum. Otherwise, fiscal responsibility is about to be forced on th eMetro Council and the mayor’s office.