East Bank = Stadium

The Mayor is holding a press briefing today to discuss development on the East Bank. He’s likely not going to mention a football stadium. If he does, I think he will claim that East Bank development and a new football stadium are two entirely different, separate things. That’s silly. The two are closely linked. Their planning and finances will overlap deeply.

Not long ago, Mayor Cooper argued that the city needs “Nashville’s next great neighborhood” to pay for the football stadium. In a January 6, 2022, article, the Tennessean expressly made this “we need to build a new neighborhood to pay for the stadium” argument quoting the Mayor:

“It’s going to be important to present to the community a stadium-solve which allows us to not only keep the team and to have a Super Bowl, but that has no burden on the general taxpayer,” Cooper said. “A lot of the work that’s been going on is then creating Nashville’s next great neighborhood around the stadium.”

This was the pitch until the media started adding the cost of the stadium and the cost of East Bank infrastructure together to get a price tag around $3 billion. The Scene said this most directly in its May 17, 2022, piece Mayor’s Proposed Stadium District Pushes $3 Billion. The same day, the Nashville Business Journal also tied the area infrastructure costs to the stadium, albeit less directly.

In the several days around the time of these articles in May, I became aware of a major push from the Mayor’s communications staff to tell the media that the East Bank and the stadium are two totally separate things. Under this new messaging, each of the stadium and East Bank development supposedly could exist without the other. This prompted me to write this May 18 blog post questioning the new claims. Frankly, I knew then that the Mayor’s Office and the team have bigger bullhorns than I do. As a result, if they were intent on claiming that East Bank development and stadium negotiations are completely separate (even though they are happening precisely in lock step), I’d have an uphill battle reminding everyone that this messaging was invented in May 2022 as a result of media reporting that the total stadium and East Bank spending was pushing over $3 billion.

Since May, the Mayor has started to talk about building a new TPAC on the East Bank and several leaked renderings have shown PSC Metals as being gone. Conservatively, adding new TPAC and deleting PSC Metals would push the approximately $750 million of proposed East Bank general obligation bond spending currently in the Capital Improvements Budget to well over $1 billion.

I don’t have a position at this time on the stadium deal itself…mostly because no terms have been announced yet. However, I won’t let the new argument invented in May 2022 that flatly contradicts the Mayor’s comments to the Tennessean in January 2022 go forward without pushback. The entire East Bank is about 300 acres. A new stadium and its sales tax capture zone would be 130 acres dab smack in the middle of the East Bank. As the Mayor said in January, the idea is to create a new neighborhood around the stadium. Don’t buy into the idea that one can exist without the other. The planning and financing for both will be deeply tied together.