At the Council Budget & Finance Committee yesterday, the administration gave an extended description of how beneficial Amazon will be for Metro. The numbers were flying so fast, and (so far) not supported by any documentation, and it was hard to keep up. But the gist of the administration's argument is that there will be many tens of millions of dollars of financial benefit to Metro because Amazon is coming to town and, therefore, the $500 per job proposed incentive is a no-brainer.

I pushed back on that...and that got some twitter coverage:https://twitter.com/joeygarrison/status/1069725826432806917I'm going to try to give more nuance to my argument on this.

For context, remember during transit when the core foundation of the argument in favor of the referendum was "a gazillion people are going to move here in the next 20 years...so we better do whatever it takes to accommodate them." Compare that to now when 5,000 of those gazillion are in fact going to move here in the next 2 to 7 years. Now, the argument is "these 5,000 people are going to create a huge amount of new property tax, sales tax, and personalty tax revenue that we really need and want, so let's pay them an incentive."I view the claim that the 5,000 will create enormous new revenue that Nashville could never otherwise obtain to be false, or at least a half-truth. If someone wants to make the argument that Amazon is bringing Nashville a certain amount of new revenue more quickly than we would otherwise get it, I am all ears. But when you figure the value of them moving here, you just can't count ALL of the revenue they create -- we should only be counting revenue that we would not get in some other way.

As an example, let's talk about property tax revenue. I feel confident that the owners of Nashville Yards fully intended to build a building on the Amazon site sometime in the next 5-7 years, at the latest. Now with Amazon coming to town, the building might be built in 3 years. So, I am open to a discussion about the value to Nashville to getting the property tax revenue for those extra 2-4 years. But don't tell me that ALL the property tax revenue for the rest of time is due to Amazon coming to town.

Like most everyone, I'm glad that Amazon has chosen Nashville. We need a fully honest discussion of the economic benefit. Not pie in the sky overblown statistics.