Nashville Stadium Committee Chair Details His Opposition to $2.1 Billion Titans Stadium Deal

by Jon Styf

 

The chair of Nashville’s East Bank Stadium committee detailed in a post how the Mayor’s Office, lobbyists and communications staff have pushed false narratives about a $2.1 billion new Tennessee Titans stadium over the past year and why he will be voting against the project when it’s expected to reach the Metro Nashville council in March.

“It’s not good for the city or it’s finances,” Council member Bob Mendes wrote. “It’s too large of a subsidy with not enough benefit for Nashville.”

The council and Nashville Sports Authority will be asked to approve multiple documents to both amend the current lease and then create a new lease, bonds, parking agreements, state funding agreements and non-relocation agreements.

The council will also have to approve a 130-acre boundary near the stadium where 50% of the state and local taxes will go to a fund estimated to collect a total of $2.9 billion to go toward paying off revenue bonds and paying for future capital expenses and stadium repairs. And it will be asked to approve the sports authority issuing bonds and an intergovernmental.

Mendes’ post highlighted times he believes the Titans, city staff and Mayor John Cooper have been deceptive about the project, including Cooper writing an op-ed saying that the deal will put the responsibility of future stadium costs on the Titans.

“To be more accurate, the statement should have been, ‘The Titans will take on the financial responsibility of maintaining a new stadium USING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS,’ “ Mendes wrote. “For months, the Mayor’s Office and the team continued to push the idea that the team is taking Metro ‘off the hook’ for future new stadium improvement costs.”

Mendes also pointed to a public records request from Nashville resident Justin Hayes published by The Center Square that showed how difficult it was for Mendes and the committee to obtain proof about the specific details of a Titans renovation plan that Venue Solutions Group reviewed, claiming it was a renovation required to be paid by Nashville due to lease stipulations.

Mendes pushed back against an analysis from VSG of the cost of the Titans’ preferred renovation, which included everything from a three-story sports bar to a rooftop food and bar area to a Song Writing Café, Theater Boxes and a new seating total of 59,271 fans with a capacity of 64,108.

“We know that Metro’s obligation under the current lease is definitely not $1.8 billion,” Mendes wrote. “And we know that Metro has no public analysis of its minimum obligation under the current lease.”

Mendes has led the committee through meetings with experts, Cooper’s office, the team, city staff and public feedback meetings. Mendes felt a large role of the committee was figuring out what was the truth about the deal and informing the public, despite what the mayor’s office and team was pushing.

“For several of the facts I’ll discuss here, the narrative from the Mayor’s Office and the team was able to stand for six months or longer before being shown as incomplete or inaccurate,” Mendes said. “Unfortunately, in the public dialogue about the stadium, once something has been ‘true’ for six months, it’s hard to change that perspective even if the ‘true’ fact was actually false from the start.”

Finally, Mendes pointed toward recent state legislation that would pull state funding and tax capture zones for bonds debt on Nashville’s Music City Center after Metro Nashville voted against a plan for Nashville to host the Republican National Convention.

“Recent events show that there is now a serious risk that the State will one day snatch this revenue from the stadium,” Mendes said. “If that happened, Metro would find itself a few years down the road having to fill a $25 million per year budget hole.”

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Jon Styf is an award-winning editor and reporter for The Center Square who has worked in Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and Michigan in local newsrooms over the past 20 years, working for Shaw Media, Hearst and several other companies.