Mayor Freddie O’Connell on Thursday officially kicked off the campaign to put a transit funding referendum on the November ballot.
The Metro Council still must approve the proposal before it can go before Nashville voters. O’Connell said his effort would focus on sidewalks, signals, service and safety.
O’Connell is establishing two committees, one focused on community priorities and one focused on the technical aspects of a transit plan, to meet in the coming weeks. A specific plan is expected to go before the Metro Council after March.
“We’re a big city, and it’s time to start acting like one,” O’Connell said.
The effort will be the first major test for the administration of O’Connell, a longtime transit advocate who previously led the Nashville MTA board and was elected mayor last year.
The mayor declined to offer a cost for the plan, though said it would be “in the range of starting with a ‘B'” over the course of multiple decades. O’Connell said he is not focusing on light rail. He stopped short of promising dedicated bus lanes, though acknowledged dedicated lanes would likely be a significant part of the discussion.
In 2018, Nashvillians overwhelmingly voted against an earlier transit referendum led by then-Mayor Megan Barry, who was forced to resign shortly before the vote. This year’s effort is smaller in scale than that of six years ago, when dreams of light-rail lines running up the city’s pikes and a tunnel underneath downtown led to questions about cost and need.
“[The 2018 referendum] had a crazy over-investment in light rail that I don’t think was appropriate to the city with the limited density that Nashville has,” O’Connell told the Post during the 2023 campaign. “We’ll apply the lessons learned. We’re going to focus on the things we know work, that are cost effective, that are useful, that are visible, that are popular. And that’s how we are going to get to a majority of support.”
The smaller scale of the latest push was reflected in the venue of its announcement, a media room adjacent to the mayor’s office, compared to the celebratory kickoff held at the Music City Center in 2017.
O’Connell’s transition advisers recommended putting the transit referendum on the November ballot in order to take advantage of higher turnout for a presidential election.
Tanisha Hall, a local transportation planner, was tapped by O’Connell in part to lead a referendum effort, but she quickly left the mayor’s office in order to preserve her consulting company’s Disadvantaged Business Enterprise status.
In partnership with Vanderbilt University, the mayor’s office has brought on the school’s director of transportation planning, Michael Briggs, in a temporary capacity expected to last a year or two. Briggs previously led the Metro Planning Department’s multimodal transportation planning division.