Growth in Tennessee, and especially here in Hamilton County, has become a toxic topic over the past few years. Let me be the first to say that I “get it” and understand the angst and anger, but what I don’t understand is the blame game, especially around election season. In Apison, Ooltewah, Harrison, Georgetown, and even across the lake, it seems that every election cycle there is another round of finger-pointing.
Who is to blame for the rampant growth unleashed upon our county’s 542.2 square miles since the late 1990s? I doubt I will make any friends when I say “we are” — meaning we, the voters of Hamilton County and across the state, are to blame. For the past 16 years, one party has controlled Tennessee and spent its time in power making Tennessee No. 5 in its overall regulatory framework for ease of development, ninth overall for doing business and third for area development, per the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.
We completely rescinded the Hall Income Tax in 2021, cut taxes by over $8.1 billion, and gave away millions in tax credits, tax exemptions, workforce training and infrastructure support over the past 17 years to encourage industrial growth. Thankfully, we still have a budget surplus year over year for the state government, but that surplus has dropped to $1.2 billion from 2021 and 2022, when we had almost double that amount. This year’s surplus was largely due to corporate tax revenue being $757 million higher than projected and $320 million in sales tax revenue, which was in part higher because of inflation.
Now, we also have the second-highest sales tax in the United States, rank No. 1 in property tax increases and receive less money back from Nashville for our counties and cities year over year. Estimates from the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations place our total state Department of Transportation backlog anywhere from $35 billion to $58 billion against $2.8 billion in combined state and federal funding this year. Due to our “pay as you go” policy, it takes an average of 15 years to fully complete a major road project from conception to finish.
For years, we all celebrated as new factories were built and opened, as new glass edifices rose up into the sky, as new subdivisions were built and highways were widened. Then a few years ago, a majority of my fellow voters seemed to wake up to the reality that all this growth, especially unplanned and barely regulated growth, was a certain degradation of our collective quality of life. It turns out that building thousands of houses on two-lane roads that haven’t been truly improved since the days of the Ford Model T was perhaps not the best idea.