Early voting on Nashville’s light rail transit plan ended Thursday, April 26, but one group advocating for alternative transit planning is making a final push for Election Day.
There is one more opportunity to vote on the transit plan as Election Day is Tuesday, May 1.
In a newsletter Thursday, the NoTax4Tracks PAC said, “This plan is incredibly flawed and costly. What’s worse, it’s being forced onto Davidson County families and businesses before we have seen any alternatives. There are better, less expensive options than making families pay $43,000 in new taxes for a light rail system that won’t even reach them.”
In a separate communication, NoTax4Tracks referred people to listen to an episode of the Nashville Sounding Board podcast discussing the light rail transit plan. Nashville Metro council members Freddie O’Connell and Angie Henderson were guests.
O’Connell said, “I think that as a councilmember trying to do the best job of representing my constituents… I will say I think a mistake was made by the administration in preparing this plan was a lack of council engagement.”
Henderson said, “Absolutely, I concur with that.”
James Pratt wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in The Tennessean on Wednesday, April 25. Pratt is a former Tennessean reporter and press secretary to the former U.S. Sen. Jim Sasser.
His letter said in part, “It (pro-transit’s argument) assumes that only a ‘Far Right’ voter would dare to question and be concerned about a half-baked project that proponents are seeking to cram down the throats of Davidson County taxpayers.”
He adds, “Finally, I believe it is an axiom in political campaigns that you only go negative if you are losing.”
[…] Days before the May 1 $9 billion transit plan referendum, which Nashville/Davidson County voters rejected by a 64 percent to 36 percent, Henderson, who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she majored in “The Growth and Structure of Cities,” said she would vote no on the transit plan and criticized the Briley administration for its handling of that proposal, as The Tennessee Star reported: […]