Is 2018 failure of Nashville transit plan a bad omen for Austin’s Prop A vote?

In 2018, advocates for rail transportation had their eyes keenly set on Nashville, Tenn.

The capital city of the Volunteer State had proposed a $5.2 billion transit plan, which called for building 26 miles of light rail, along with several bus rapid-transit lines and a downtown tunnel.

Developed by the area’s local transit authority, the plan called for increasing local taxes to fund an initial investment into a public transportation system for the future that advocates said would address socioeconomic inequities sowed in the past.

Generations of discrimination in housing and transportation policy had resulted in Nashville becoming a segregated city. In East Nashville, minority communities were seeing the effects of gentrification at their doorsteps. Section 8 housing was slowly disappearing as property owners salivated over rent prices that had risen an average of 60% or more since the beginning of the decade.

By 2018, rapid growth amid soaring tourism and business development had engendered the political strife that often accompanies increased housing prices and rapid redevelopment.

The likelihood of the Republican-controlled statehouse contributing any significant funding to mass transit was minuscule. But the political leaders of Nashville, a progressive city centrally located in a state that votes solidly for Republicans, had decided to take matters into their own hands by putting the multi-billion-dollar plan to voters.

Sound familiar?

In Austin -- which like Nashville is a fast-growing liberal city in a conservative state -- voters are about to go to the polls to decide on a similar proposal. Proposition A -- a $7.1 billion mass transit plan to be funded by its own proposed tax hike -- is on the November election.

In Nashville, the transit proposal collapsed in a 2018 election, rejected by voters by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio.

What’s not clear is if what happened in Nashville should serve as a cautionary tale for Austin, which is seeking to do something just as ambitious.

“It broke my heart because I thought going big was the thing to do,” said Rick MacKinnon, the head of a Nashville sexual health and wellness clinic who previously lived in Austin and advocated for Austin’s failed 2014 rail bond. “We went big and the voters said, ‘Too much.’ There was suburban backlash and it got voted down.”

Concerns over taxes

Prop A likely is the most ambitious infrastructure voter referendum to go before Austin voters in more than a century. It is the result of several years of planning from Capital Metro that resulting in a proposal to build three new rail lines and add a host of other bus line improvements.

The most expensive portion of the plan is the Orange Line, a light rail line along the spine of Austin, starting with a park-and-ride site at U.S. 183 and Lamar Boulevard and running to Stassney Lane and Congress Avenue. The other light rail track proposed is the Blue Line, running from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to downtown Austin, where it would link with both the existing Red Line commuter rail and the Orange Line.

The intersection of those lines would result in what might be the most dramatic portion of what Prop A envisions -- a downtown tunnel system with underground stations akin to subway stations.

The proposition has drawn support from the Austin City Council members, but has faced opposition from portions of the city’s dominant liberal contingent more wary of a permanent property tax hike’s effect on housing affordability in an ever-more-expensive city.

MacKinnon, currently a Nashville resident who was previously chairman of Austin's Urban Transportation Commission and a proponent of Austin’s 2014 rail bond, said he sees Prop A failing just as Nashville’s transit plan did.

“What I have seen in Austin is that when you propose something big, the electorate says, ‘No, that’s too much and we can’t afford it,’” he said. “Then you go small and cheap and the electorate says, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that.’ Then they complain about how you built something so small.”

Peck Young, executive director of the nonprofit Voices of Austin, an organization that says it does not have an opinion in Prop A but regularly promotes views that are against the proposition, questioned Austinites’ appetite for a property tax hike that amounts to about $363 a year for the owner of a median-value Austin home, according to figures from the Austin Board of Realtors.

“I question whether people want a 25% tax increase on their homes or a 26% increase on rental and commercial properties,” Young said of Prop A’s increase to the city of Austin’s share of property taxes.

To be sure, voters in recent years have approved ambitious rail plans in the liberal bastion Seattle in 2018, and Los Angeles as well as in Phoenix in 2019 that include tax increases. But those areas often had more robust rail systems in place that had earned the trust of their respective electorates.

Meanwhile, Austin’s Red Line remains a small portion of Capital Metro’s overall bus-centric transit system, accounting for roughly 2% of total ridership in 2020, according to the transit authority. And so, like the failed 2018 voter referendum in Nashville, Prop A would mark a significant investment into a newer mode of mass transit.

But the prospect of asking voters to approve a big-ticket spending item during a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on the economy has rail advocate Susan Somers worried about Prop A’s chances on Election Day.

“In the absence of COVID and the recession, I would have felt so confident in its passage,” said Somers, a self described “transit geek” who works with the rail advocacy group AURA. “That has made me worry a bit.”

Election Day

One major difference between the two elections is that the Austin City Council chose to hold a vote during a presidential year that could see record breaking progressive turnout from local voters chomping at the bit to vote against President Donald Trump.

“I think Prop A passes if everyone shows up,” Mayor Steve Adler said. “It is all about turnout at this point.”

The council saw similar success with a slate of bond propositions placed on 2018’s high-turnout mid-term elections. Each of the seven bond proposition, totaling more than $1 billion in spending, won approval.

However, Nashville held its transit election that year on May 1.

Mykle Tomlinson, head of the pro-Prop A campaign Transit Now, says that is an advantage.

“Our election is in November of a presidential year,” Tomlinson said. “We want the most people possible to have a say in this and the direction of the city.”

A scandal

Prop A is also not facing something that plagued Nashville’s rail election: a scandal.

Then-Nashville Mayor Megan Barry had been a chief proponent and major hand in the shaping of the rail plan that was put to voters.

However, in the months leading up to the election, Barry admitted to having an affair with the head of her security detail, a police sergeant who retired the same day Barry’s infidelity became public.

Later, both Barry and the sergeant pleaded guilty to charges of felony theft after investigators found they had used taxpayer money for overtime pay in trips that often resembled lovers’ vacations. As terms of her plea agreement that avoided jail time, Barry resigned from office.

That came less than two months before the election and the cause lost its chief proponent.

Barry “was pulling the rail along with the force of her own personality,” MacKinnon said. “Unfortunately, the rail proposal probably died with that scandal.”