The Tennessee cities of Bristol and Nashville could not look less alike. Their populations range from just 28,000 to over 700,000, respectively. One is the nation’s fast-growing capital, and the other a quaint Appalachian border town. Despite their differences, both cities share something in common. They raised property taxes by double digits just two years after building municipal pickleball courts.
Bristol spent $2.7 million on its pickleball complex in 2023 and subsequently raised property taxes by $3.8 million two years later. Nashville sandwiched its foray into publicly funded pickleball between property tax increases of 34 percent in 2020 and 26 percent in 2025.
Numerous Tennessee cities have built pickleball courts while raising property tax rates in recent years. This is not a critique of pickleball itself – it is but one example of local governments failing to prioritize and live within their means, resulting in runaway property tax hikes on their citizens.
A similar situation is occurring in Iowa with local “investments” in sports and aquatic complexes. In Des Moines, which faced a $17 million budget shortfall in 2026, the city council approved $7 million to help subsidize the construction of a pro-soccer stadium. The project also received support from Polk County, of which Des Moines is the county seat. This is indicative of the belief by many local governments in Iowa that economic growth must be ignited through government spending. Within the past two years, local property taxes have increased by over 10 percent across Iowa, totaling a combined $6.4 billion in property tax collections this fiscal year.
In Iowa and Tennessee, and in many states across the country, voters are sounding the alarm over property tax hikes resulting from this reckless spending. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is even calling for the outright repeal of some property taxes, to widespread applause.
Seventy-two percent of Iowans support capping property taxes to a growth of no more than two percent per year, a proposal recently submitted to the state’s legislature by Gov. Kim Reynolds. A similar percentage of Tennesseans support limiting local property taxes, at least without a voter referendum. And while it was eventually stalled by the local governments’ taxpayer-funded lobbying brigade, Tennessee lawmakers filed and began to advance property tax reform legislation similar to Reynolds’ this year.
Reynolds correctly identified the cause of high property taxes when she stated, “We need to go after the real driver of the problem: spending…Spending is what drives taxes—always has, always will. And the most reliable way to protect taxpayers is to limit the growth of the government itself.”
Local governments are already resorting to scare tactics to torpedo her property tax cap, cautioning that it will lead to painful cuts to vital services, especially police and fire. The Des Moines Register editorial page even joined the chorus, arguing that “hanging on to a few hundred dollars won’t mean much to Iowans if it also means they’re less safe or more susceptible to blowing a tire in a pothole or seeing sewage back up in their basements.”
To the contrary, the recent rise in property taxes is not a result of inadequate resources; it stems from a lack of fiscal discipline. When local officials can raise taxes unchecked, they do so time and again. They get away with it thanks to concentrated beneficiaries (the pickleballers) and dispersed costs (higher taxes, borne by everybody else).
Without property tax limitations, homeowners, renters, and businesses will continue to get squeezed until there’s no more juice. And all the hard work state leaders have put into making their states attractive places to live, work, and raise a family will be squandered.
While pickleball courts are the trendiest expenditure in wasteful municipal spending, there are many things local governments should shed in favor of funding the basics. Let’s make subsidized pickleball and soccer the last egregious examples of local government spending run amok. By imposing limits on property tax growth, states can make local governments live within their means, just like their residents are expected to do.
