Nashville Left With Bad Options, Builds $2.1B New Stadium
Metro Nashville will build an enclosed stadium in downtown Nashville to host the Tennessee Titans football team. Unfortunately, years of mismanagement put the city between a rock and a hard place, leaving the city with either billions in refurbishment costs at their old stadium, or leaving the state with billions in investments in a new stadium.
Nashville opted for the latter. It will build a brand new, state-of-the-art stadium at a cost of $2.1 billion, with $1.26 billion from taxpayers. This is the preferable alternative, Mayor John Cooper claims, to the $1.75 to $1.95 billion it would cost the city to maintain its old stadium lease.
Tourists and visitors will also fund the stadium through a new 1% hotel/motel tax.
While Nashville officials bragged that Metro would save big by not tapping into its general fund, those savings are coming on the back of state taxpayers. While $840 million in funding will come from the NFL, the rest is financed by Tennessee taxpayers. The state is issuing $500 million in bonds, and Nashville’s Sports Authority is issuing $760 million worth of bonds to cover the rest.
This also isn’t the end of the story, as Nashville plans to develop 66 acres of land, including the existing Nissan Stadium site, with a large park, greenways, affordable housing, a multi-modal boulevard, local businesses, and more. That’s going to cost taxpayers plenty.
“It's unclear if the Metropolitan Council ever considered getting out of the stadium business and simply asking the billionaire owner of the Titans to pay for the team's own upgrade,” Reason wrote. “This is not an impossible task: SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles is the most expensive stadium ever built and reportedly had no direct government subsidies. It's probably the finest stadium in the world and routinely hosts special events.”
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