Tennessean Reporter Points Out that Tony Giarrantana Has No Clothes on May Town Survey

Kudos to journalist Michael Cass for calling Tony G. to some accountability on his fast and loose spin of how Nashvillians view May Town Center:

In his latest bid to turn a loss into a win, May Town Center developer Tony Giarratana has released a poll saying “a large majority” of Nashville residents support the controversial proposal.

But that’s not really true, according to the fine print. In fact, 50 percent of the 400 surveyed voters said they support the potentially $4 billion mixed-use project itself, while 40 percent said they’re opposed and 10 percent are unsure.

Rather than highlight that inconvenient fact in his news release, Giarratana tries to make his case by pointing to other findings from the poll by Larry Powell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Powell found, for example, that “voters want elected and appointed officials to focus on economic development and job creation (61%) and not on preserving open land (24%).”

We also need to listen very carefully to how Metro Planning and the Planning Commission might use Tony G's spin on popularity after the commissioners admonished the public that planning decisions should be based more on reason than on popular opinion.