Mayor Freddie O’Connell Discusses Transit Referendum and How Good Transit Policy Can Help Affordable Housing
Mayor Freddie O’Connell has been a long-standing transit advocate. Early in his political career, he served on the boards of Nashville MTA (now WeGo Public Transit) and Walk/Bike Nashville, a civic nonprofit that advocates for safe means to move through the city by foot, bicycle, and transit. Eventually he chaired both of these boards. All this was prior to becoming a member of the Metro Council and eventually moving on to the city’s top position.
Having built a reputation as the Transit-Advocate-In-Chief for the city of Nashville, it came to no surprise when the Mayor announced that his office would work swiftly to try to get a referendum before voters that would create a designated revenue stream to upgrade Nashville’s transportation system. One day after the announcement to add a transit referendum to the Nov. 5 ballot, the mayor spent some time chatting with The Contributor about his goals around the referendum.
O’Connell said that it was time to build a, “safer, more convenient, and less expensive future for how we move around our city.” To him, he explained, that means to invest in sidewalks, signals, service and safety.
In other words, while the city wants to ensure the public transit system, particularly bus services, are more readily available and accessible across Nashville, all types of transportation modes will be considered from walking, bicycling to driving cars. If the November referendum passes, O’Connell said, the Transportation Improvement Program would deliver sidewalks to communities that otherwise would not see them in a generation. The program would include bike lanes, greenways, and it would break up the logjam of outdated traffic signals making car rides smoother.
WeGo, Metro’s department that runs the city’s public transit system, and the Nashville Department of Transportation (NDOT) have already been starting to move toward aligning transit infrastructure programs. O’Connell said the Transportation Improvement Program would accelerate this existing work by utilizing the IMPROVE Act, which is state legislation that enables municipalities to establish a dedicated funding source. A first step is to develop a Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), which has to be ready to be audited by the end of March.
But Nashville is not exactly starting from scratch. Over the last decade, the city has conducted more than 70 plans and studies receiving input from 65,000 Nashvillians. O’Connell is clear that there is still intense public input underway before a final TIP will be presented to the State Comptroller’s office. Debriefing of the 40 city council members started immediately after the announcement. In addition, the city is working with a technical advisory committee and a community advisory committee to inform the process over the next few weeks.
“We expect this to be a pretty quick, but also a pretty robust check on the work that’s been underway now for decades,” O’Connell said.
The Community Advisory Committee met on the day of the announcement as well, correct?
Indeed. They had their kickoff meeting [that afternoon] too. It was great because the introductory part of that committee’s process included our Director of Transportation Policy doing an exercise with them that he actually did with the entire Mayor’s Office staff, which was inviting everyone to share their transportation stories. It was a really great experience to hear all that community input into that first real official day of the conversation.
Besides WeGo, NDOT, the Mayor’s Office and the two committees. Are there other departments and private consultants or firms on the team that puts this program together?
We brought in Michael Briggs into the Mayor’s Office from Vanderbilt University. He is serving in the role of director of transportation planning. He also is the lead on coordinating all of this. We also have Kendra Abkowitz, who stayed with our administration after joining the Cooper administration. She is the director of sustainability and resiliency, and she’s supporting the policy work that Michael is coordinating across departments. Metro Planning has been involved early because a lot of the current policy planning emerged just around the time that Nashville Next [was developed] almost 10 years ago. Lucy Kempf (the executive director of the Metro Planning Department) and her team are pretty instrumental in this.
There are a lot of different ways that Metro departments are involved. Metro Social Services through the Know Your Community and Community Needs Evaluation work has mapped commute times. We know how important transit access has been to homeless residents, and so we are making sure the Office of Homeless Services is engaged in this work. First responders, because we know that the planning process is going to need input on emergency vehicle access and overall routes and traffic because we hear all the time that congestion issues are actually impacting response times.
There is very much a whole government engagement. But the two main organizations, as you identified, are WeGo and NDOT, and then Planning is probably third in that.
WeGo and NDOT had already engaged HDR as one of the principal consultants, working with them on a master mobility study. We [are taking] this opportunity to make sure that this planning and study work underway would be suitable for a Transportation Improvement Program that could go on the ballot. That has actually worked out very nicely.
What is it exactly that people will actually vote on in a referendum on Nov. 5?
What we’re asking voters to do is give us a future that lets us choose how we move around the city. At the end of the day this is an opportunity to secure dedicated funding for transportation infrastructure investment over a multi-year period. That’s what the vote will be about.
There are already speculations that the ask will be to fund this transit plan through an increase in sales tax. What are some other funding mechanisms that are on the table and when will a decision be made about which one to use?
The IMPROVE Act gives us a handful of revenue options that we can dedicate. Sales tax is one of those. Hotel/motel tax is one of those. There is a residential development surcharge. There is a rental car option. I think there are one or two [options] that may not be applicable in Nashville, but it is those kinds of things.
I think after the Titans Stadium deal already added the one-percent hotel/motel tax increase, it’s going to be pretty difficult to consider increasing that again so soon. We haven’t gotten the final plan in the 2018 Transportation Improvement Program that was offered by Mayor [Megan] Barry. The IMPROVE Act revenue only amounted to about a third of the overall anticipated revenue required to build out the program and that is very likely going to be similar for us.
I do think sales tax is on the table.
We think that getting something approved, even if it’s not as large an investment as the 2018 program that was proposed, will jumpstart something that will give us better access to funds that we get to bring back to Nashville.
We know we’ve got our committee and council members and some of the community conversations on a quick timeline, but we’re trying to meet a Comptroller requirement to have something done by the end of March. So, we’ll be working on that six-to-eight week timescale.
What do you hope will be the estimated annual revenue a successful referendum will create?
WeGo’s operating budget hovers at a little over $70 million, and we’re trying to put $10 million or more in the capital spending programs into sidewalks and other things [to provide] safer infrastructure. Looking at that, I’m not sure we know yet what that revenue target (for the referendum) is.
So, I’m not sure I have an answer yet about how much we should be spending. We’re focusing on the additional things we’d really like to do, like ensuring that we can run our transit service 24/7/365 and that we can offer more cross-town routes that are often linked to community transit centers.
If the referendum passes, which departments will receive and oversee the new revenue?
Most of it will go to WeGo and NDOT because they will be the ones primarily in charge of implementation. Some of it will go to ensure that WeGo can acquire vehicles to support the new service levels. It will go to hiring more bus operators. NDOT will get more capacity to construct more sidewalks and do some of the streetscape improvements that we’ll have on some of the major corridors.
There probably will be some amount that would go to Metro Planning, or for instance, a lot of the cost for sidewalks ends up being curb and gutter improvements, so there may need to be some capacity for Metro Water to be involved in it. Sometimes there is utility coordination when you’re doing corridor improvements but the biggest implementing parts in Metro will be WeGo and NDOT.
Nashville’s transit referendum failed in 2018. What will make the difference in this new transit program for the 64 percent of Nashvillians who voted against the 2018 plan?
I think a few things happened. For one, [and] even for me as a long-time transit advocate, I admit, I was surprised that the 2018 plan included a $1-billion tunnel under Downtown. That was not something I was expecting. I think a lot of Nashvillians were not expecting that. And as somebody who tries to advocate for how useful transit is as a tool for financial empowerment, affordability, and accessibility, that plan had most of its capital allocated to light rail.
We are anticipating a plan that is a little more regional in outlook, a little more practical in terms of service levels, and much more modernizing in terms of technology and things that benefit motorists and all users of the road. We’re expecting this to be something that expands basic service levels. And, again coming back to that, one of the top priorities of the plan is to give us a much faster opportunity to put sidewalks in communities that need them and that can help people connect directly to transit.
I also think [there was] such a sudden drop in trust after Mayor Barry’s administration ran into challenges, and she wasn’t in office by the time of the 2018 referendum vote. So, we are spending as much time as we can this year focusing not just on fiscal responsibility but on delivery of core city services within our existing budget. We’re trying to showcase [an] effective approach in government that works for people to build confidence and restore trust.
Let’s talk about the interconnectedness of affordable housing and transit for Nashville’s poorest neighbors. When transit systems improve, housing costs around improved public transit corridors could potentially increase. In other words, this could speed up gentrification along major corridors and possibly displace poorer neighbors. How will the city balance that to ensure Nashvillians get to stay in Nashville?
I’d be interested in the data of this. I guess one thing I will say is that transit improvements are very popular. People want to live where transit access is good. And so, certainly the demand goes up.
One of the things we’re already consciously looking at, and why Metro Planning has been at the table from the get-go, is that the Housing Division of Metro is in the Metro Planning Department. Metro Planning is already mapping along some of the existing corridors that are consistent with nMotion, our strategic plan for transit. They’re looking at where we’ve got not only Metro-owned land or Metro buildings that are currently unused or underused but also combining that with a recent report from the Urban Institute that showcases land owned by churches, other faith communities, educational and healthcare organizations that could support housing. So, we are looking at where along these corridors we can ensure that we get the opportunity to actually build long-term affordable housing.
We’ve also gone back and reviewed the old affordable housing and transit task force that Mayor Purcell chaired, and we’ve got the Housing Division looking at anti-displacement strategies. The whole point is, we want to build access to existing communities. One of the biggest points of the overall program should be to increase access to the city for Nashville’s working class and people who are not in higher income [brackets].
There is no dedicated funding for affordable housing or support services to keep people in housing. Is that something your administration is looking at next?
The IMPROVE Act specifically empowers us to offer dedicated funding for transportation infrastructure. We don’t have any equivalent of an IMPROVE Act for housing. This is why when I was on the Metro Council it was so important for me, and I know this is equally important for so many of my colleagues, to follow the recommendations of the Affordable Housing Task Force report (of 2021) to put $30 million for three years continuously into the Barnes Housing Trust Fund. While that wasn’t dedicated funding, it certainly helped us get that fund up to the $100-million mark, which was critically important for continuous delivery of affordable housing. When we tried through the Metro Council to dedicate some of the Convention Center surpluses to affordable housing, the state actually intervened and effectively said we can’t do that. When we tried to build tools like inclusionary zoning, the state intervened to say we can’t do that. And so, it’s very tricky to get dedicated funding for affordable housing.
We do have a study underway, the Unified Housing Strategy, that the Housing Division is working on to evaluate some of the revenue recommendations in the Affordable Housing Taskforce report. I think some of them are very likely not legal at this time, but if others are, we will be looking at how we could enable those streams of revenue. But it is much more challenging right now under Tennessee law to dedicate revenue to housing than it is to transit.
You know I have been an outspoken critic of Metro’s use of some ARPA funding and the lack of oversight, especially how it’s been used towards homelessness. Will this new Transit Plan include clear measures of how Metro intends to provide solid oversight of how the city spends the taxpayer dollars?
Yes. When the state cleared this legislation, they knew how important that question would be for anyone who chooses to go do this.
The initial program has to be audited by the Comptroller. It has to demonstrate not only enough planning details but also the financial details that come along with it. So, it’s not like we can put something on the table that is one map, go get voter approval, and then switch it out with some other map. There is a lot of structural accountability in the way the program would even work with a necessary audit by the Comptroller before we can even put it on the ballot. And then that stays intact over the life of the program. There is a lot of structural accountability here.
As you know well, we on the Metro Council did create a COVID Oversight Committee, and while I worked with my colleague Councilmember [Courtney] Johnston to put some accountability measures into the homelessness money, it isn’t quite the same thing. It was one-time discretionary funding, which I think is always a little harder to build systems around. I think overall the Oversight Committee did good work. But I think you’ll remember, I was not fully supportive of the design of this allocation of money, and it’s challenging because our administration wants to ensure that not only are we using the money as effectively as we can but that we also are delivering accountability around that to ensure that we’re doing what we said we were going to do. I’ll say that’s a work in progress for us right now.
But the IMPROVE Act ensures stronger accountability measures out of the gates than what we did with our American Rescue Plan funding.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Coming back to that question of designated funding for housing versus transit. I do see transit as affordable housing policy. It really was a financial empowerment tool for me and is the only reason I was able to become a homeowner when I was younger. And I think more people deserve that opportunity, and I think this program will deliver that opportunity for more Nashvillians to lower their overall household cost through transportation as a part of the affordable housing conversation.