Update on 11/19/12 Budget & Finance Committee Meeting

Watch the HCA discussion


This meeting is just under an hour. One learns a lot more about the important issues facing the city by watching the B&F committee meeting than they do by watching the council meeting.

The HCA discussion is the first item on the agenda and all three bills concerning the HCA deal are discussed together. Anyone wanting to know more about this deal should watch this discussion. A presentation is made explaining where the upfront money will come from (a UDAG grant fund) and why we are doing this and how it will benefit the city. This development is subsidized in two ways: property tax abatement and a payment for new employees HCA will have working at this site who do not now work in Davidson County.

Watch this and learn why the Palmer Lake is in a “pocket of poverty.” Yes, that area close to Vanderbilt University and Music Row and on West End, just down the street from multi-million dollar hotels, just a couple blocks from Union Station is a “pocket of poverty.” We will pay the developer $500 per “incremental Davidson County position.” I myself do not see how this benefits the community or the city government. Those jobs are jobs that are now in Williamson County. We do not have a payroll tax so how does having these people work in Davidson County benefit us? I doubt many of them will be moving into the county if they already have homes in Williamson County. They are not moving; their job is moving a few miles away.

If this development occurs, the site will generate considerably more property tax for the city than it does now. However, the pressure on infrastructure and the cost of providing services to new development is not calculated into the equation. There seems to be an assumption that growing the tax base is always a good thing, yet no one stops to consider that bigger cities almost always have higher tax rates than smaller cities. There seems to be almost a fetish for growth that I am not sure is well founded. 

 I am still not sure, how I would vote on this if I had a vote. I abhor this practice of enticing businesses to develop in your area by paying them to do so. Unfortunately, this is the way things are done now. If other communities are paying someone to move to their county, then if we don’t play the game, then we lose. However, I am still not convinced that growth, just for the sake of growth is a good thing. Also, eventually, something would develop to fill that hole in the ground if HCA does not build there. Assuming the economy develops and the convention center is a success, someone else would eventually want that prime piece of property for hotel or office building.

I am glad to see the council deferred these bills. This is one of those things that if I was making a decision on, I would need more time to think about.

In other committee business, Duane Dominy’s bill requiring the Chambers Partnership 2020 contract to be approved by resolution of the Council is deferred indefinitely, due to a technical reason concerning a discrepancy between the caption and the body of the bill. A new bill addressing this topic will be drafted and introduced. Dominy’ similar bill requiring all single-source contracts of over $250,000 be approved by the Council fails by a vote of 3 for, 4 against and 5 abstaining. Council Member Megan Barry and Ronnie Stein present arguments against the bill and Charlie Tygard defends the bill.

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