If voters have a chance to approve the proposed Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act referendum and roll back Mayor John Cooper’s 34 to 37 percent tax increases then that might extinguish the city’s current Capital Spending Plan.
Metro Nashville At-Large Council Member Steve Glover said as much to The Tennessee Star this week.
Cooper and Metro Council members, Glover went on to say, would then have to craft a new spending plan.
“I am not involved [with the referendum], but I will tell you this much. I hope they get enough signatures, and I hope the petition gets on the ballot. You’ve got two choices,” Glover said.
“You can either keep electing the kind of people that will not watch out for your best interests, or you can go and support this ballot.”
As The Tennessee Star reported this week, by a vote of 30 to seven, Metro Nashville Council members passed a nearly $500 million Capital Spending Plan.
Glover compared Metro Nashville officials and their spending habits to those of an undisciplined child.
“You tell your child ‘Here’s your allowance.’ And week after week after week after week, the child keeps spending over the allowance. They go break this or go do that and say ‘Mom and Dad, I need more money,’ and they’re constantly going into Mom’s and Dad’s wallets. Well, that is what the city is doing. The city is an overgrown spoiled child,” Glover said.
“They can’t live on the allowance that they have been given — or taken — from the taxpayers. And we seem to think that it’s OK just to raise taxes in the middle of the pandemic. The highest we have ever had in our history. It was OK because the government needed to make sure we didn’t lay anybody off or furlough anyone or anyone lose their job. But yet we didn’t let businesses operate at 100 percent.”
As The Tennessee Star reported last month, Nashville attorney Jim Roberts is pushing to get the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act referendum on the ballot. His petition proposes that voters go to the polls on either May 28 or June 14 of this year.
Roberts said Thursday that either March 24 or March 25 is the final date to submit a signature to show support for the referendum.
“The Capital Spending Plan is not a set-in-stone plan to begin with, and I think they might have to go back and make some hard choices. They might even have to delay some of the things that they want to spend money on,” Roberts said.
“I think the fact that they went ahead and voted for a large Capital Spending Plan knowing that this [referendum] was coming really, in some ways, exemplifies the head in the sand mentality of the Metro Council. It is just business as usual for them. They don’t really care. They will just spend everything that they can get their hands on, and the only way we will stop that is to turn off the money spigot or lower it so that they have to start making real decisions.”
Roberts said Davidson County residents who wish to add their names to his petition may do so at 4goodgovernment.com
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Nashville City Hall” by Nicolas Henderson. CC BY 2.0.
