Friday, July 25, 2008

CM Evans Corrects the MTC Team Misconceptions & Offers Ideas for Competing with Cool Springs

My summary of Metro Council feedback on the Bells Bend Plan did not accurately portray the bang-up job that CM Emily Evans did last night addressing the median income differences between the Scottsboro/Bells Bend Community and Cool Springs (as well as similar development in Reston, VA, which Tony G. cites as a model for MTC).  She made some irrefutable points about the absence of a median income base on which to build MTC.

Today she is blogging her reservations about MTC (though not with the idea), and she is correcting wrong information that the MTC team put out.  First she challenges the dubious claim that there is no parcel of undeveloped land comparable to the Bells Bend acres:
Contrary to the testimony last night, there are a good number of parcels that exceed 50 acres in Davidson County. Fifty acres is the amount of land necessary, supposedly, for a "corporate campus." My search turned up about 710 properties. Some of those are occupied but quite a number are classified as vacant or rural. Interestingly, there appear to be a few on this side of the river, not terribly far from the "executive housing" that apparently is another way to say the 23rd District.
In well-reasoned style, CM Evans challenges Tony Giarratana's claims that Williamson County is wealthier than us thanks to developers building Cool Springs.  She points out that the WillCo machine is better greased than ours and they were coordinating development long before Cool Springs was built.

Finally, she offers a solution that would involve the Mayor's Office taking a more pivotal role through the General Plan and its Office of Economic Development than it has in the past.  The OED would work closely with Council Members to coordinate a county-wide economic strategy.

There you go, mainstream media.  Rather than hitching your wagon to a greenspace-gobbling land speculator (who came off last night as self-important and not above using growth as a bludgeon) while you christen it the only viable option, why not hitch it to a smart rising star like Emily Evans?

1 comment:

  1. Re Evan's corrections:

    1. How many of those 710 parcels are flat?

    2. 710 X 50 acres minimum = 35,500 acres minimum, which also torpedos the hyperbole that the loss of 500 acres in Bells Bend will be the end of local produce and bird habitats in Nashville.

    3. Middle Tennessee polulation growth will be 300,000 to 400,000 more people within 20 years. An MTC anticipates cherry picking the best jobs for Nashville, raising the median income of Nashville. Agrarian jobs, the suggested alternative, will lower our median income, resulting in lower per capita tax colleection and more difficulty in funding education, etc.

    4. That brings us to the issue those blindly opposed to MTC won't address: Growth. The alternative to planning for the density of an MTC on only 500 acres is that many of those undeveloped spaces Ms. Evans found to be vacant or rural will be lost to traditional suburban developments as they are developed over the next decades to acommodate the same amount of growth MTC anticipates. Additional to the loss of 10,000 acres for this sprawl (vs. 500 for MTC or similar) will be the impracticallity of threading public transportation through those spread-out 710 properties, when public transportation finally catches on.

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