Ben Cunningham, founder of the Nashville Tea Party, said he is optimistic about a forthcoming court ruling in the case challenging Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s “Choose How You Move” transit plan which Davidson County voters approved in November.
Earlier this month, the Tennessee Court of Appeals heard arguments in the lawsuit challenging the transit plan brought by the Committee to Stop an UnFair Tax, the group which sued Metro Nashville arguing that “Choose How You Move” it is illegal under a Tennessee law that empowers cities to levy sales taxes to fund mass transit.
The Committee to Stop and UnFair Tax argues that the transit plan’s funding of additional incentives outside of shared mass transit via tax increase—including traffic lights, sidewalks, and the purchase of property for “affordable housing”—is not permitted under the 2017 IMPROVE Act.
The 2017 state law allows cities to create a surcharge on sales tax to pay for “costs associated with the planning, engineering, development, construction, implementation, administration, management, operation, and maintenance of public transit system projects.”
The plaintiffs argue, however, that the definitions supplied under the state law do not allow for the sales tax revenue to be used for the miles of sidewalk and road construction or new traffic signals prescribed under the Nashville transit plan.
Cunningham, a vocal critic of the transit plan, said the transit plan’s funding of new traffic signals and the construction of sidewalks were simply “goodies” to attract voters to approve the plan.
“The mayor…your classic big government Democrat said, ‘Maybe the law doesn’t exactly authorize me to put in streetlight synchronization and sidewalks that have nothing to do with transit, but I’m going to do it anyway because I don’t think people will approve this unless we throw in all these goodies.’ He basically pushed the boundaries of the law, but he pushed way beyond the boundaries of the law,” Cunningham explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Noting how the lawsuit challenging the transit plan was rejected in Davidson County Chancery Court, Cunningham said he “feels pretty good” about the Court of Appeals’ forthcoming ruling after hearing the case on an expedited basis and, unlike the chancery court, acknowledging that the challenge to the transit plan was a “valid election challenge.”
“We feel pretty good about the court hearing because one of the first things that happened was the judge said to [Metro Nashville’s] attorney, ‘This looks to me like a valid appeal of an election.’ He wasn’t commenting on the merits of the case, but he was saying they are claiming fraud, and fraud is a valid claim. We are claiming fraud because they lied basically to the electorate about what it costs, about so many other things about the financial feasibility, and anyway, got their attorney to admit an open court in contradiction to the chancery court that yes, this is a valid election challenge,” Cunningham said.
“So anyway, long story short, we feel pretty good about the hearing. It’s a three judge panel and majority rules, of course, and we hope to get a ruling in about 30 days or less. They heard it on an expedited basis, so we anticipate that they’ll give us a ruling on an expedited basis,” Cunningham added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mayor Freddie O’Connell” by WeGo Transit.
