The people who oppose the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act unleashed a paid media campaign this week to tarnish the referendum as the brainchild of “radical extremists.”
But Nashville attorney Jim Roberts, one of the referendum’s architects, told The Tennessee Star this week he and his supporters are currently crafting their own media counteroffensive.
The Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act, if voters approve it, would roll back Cooper’s 34 to 37 percent property tax increase.
A coalition of the city’s civic and faith organizations who oppose Nashville’s Taxpayer Protection Act recently formed Save Nashville Now to fight the referendum. This week Save Nashville Now members released two 30-second television commercials. In both ads, they peg the people behind the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act as fanatics who accept dark money. One ad warns the referendum will force Metro Nashville Public School officials to make deep funding cuts. The other ad warns the referendum will force Metro Nashville officials to cut police, fire, and other emergency services.
The Star informed Roberts of the ads this week.
“Where is their proof [about dark money]? You can say anything. Why not say it was sponsored by aliens or the Mexican cartels. It’s stupid to say something like that,” Roberts said.
“You just get to make up things, and that becomes evidence? Every single dollar that has been spent on this and probably will be spent has come from the citizens of Davidson County.”
Nashville Mayor John Cooper this month delivered a speech that invoked race and even Donald Trump as a means to frighten voters out of supporting the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act. Cooper spoke these words before an audience at Nashville’s Cathedral of Praise Church of God in Christ. Church officials uploaded the speech to the church’s Facebook page.
“You are creating a path for anarchy in Nashville, Tennessee that will not end well, all because there is this path of [a] super-small weaponized kind of Trump-oriented divisiveness that enters into Nashville,” Cooper told audience members.
Various unions, religious organizations, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, the Nashville Visitor Convention Bureau, and the Greater Nashville Realtors Association oppose the Nashville Taxpayer Protection Act.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Thank you Jim Roberts for standing up to the outrageous property tax increase! The increase hurts the young and the old! Cuts across all races negatively impacting the the black, white, Asian and Latino communities! Metro councilman Bob Mendez and Burkley Allen love to take our tax money and spend it on wasteful services! Recall Allen and Mendez! Please put a referendum where metro council can’t raise their pay snd benefits without voter approval!