(The Center Square) – The Tennessee Transportation Modernization Board took the next step in constructing toll lanes along a 26-mile corridor from Murfreesboro to Nashville with the approval of a private consortium of companies that will oversee the project and pay the state billions over the next 50 years.
The consortium consists of Cintra, Transurban and Tikehau Star Infrastructure, along with construction firm Ferrovial and engineering firm AECOM, Brian Ledford, major projects bureau chief for the Tennessee Department of Transportation, told the committee.
The companies will fund 100% of the $9.2 billion project and the state will receive $24.8 billion over the next 50 years, Ledford said.
“We know that modernizing transportation would bring new opportunities but this is by far bigger and better than we could have imagined it,” Gov. Bill Lee said before the board meeting. “The trajectory of transportation in Tennessee has changed beginning today.”
The toll lanes, known as “Choice Lanes,” are expected to ease traffic in one of the state’s most congested areas. Drivers will pay to use the lanes in hopes of avoiding congestion.
But Ledford said the $24.8 billion value concession is not a “silver bullet” to ease Tennessee’s transportation funding issues, as presented in a June report from the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
“The state needs roughly $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2028 just to maintain its existing infrastructure; $3.6 billion to make improvements as Tennessee continues to grow,” the report said.
“This should not, it does not and should not replace the need to discuss sustainable transportation funding,” Ledford said. “This is urban congestion addressing urban congestion. That $24.8 billion of value that will be realized over a 50-year period does not solve an $87 billion root problem. Nor does it shore up the gas tax or anyone’s view of what will happen to the gas tax over the next 50 years as a support for our normal program.”
Lee signed an executive order on Wednesday establishing the Tennessee Strategic Transportation Accountability Council, which will oversee revenues from public-private partnerships. The 14-member board will be chaired by the governor and consist of the governor’s cabinet members and General Assembly leadership. The council will hold quarterly meetings, according to the executive order.
But not everyone is happy about the new toll lanes. Residents along the toll lane route “outright, overwhelmingly” oppose the project, said state Rep. John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville.
“Now, you’re here today to announce a winner, or winners, who’ll profit off the backs of Tennessee’s working families in this region for half a century,” Clemmons said to the board. “I stand here fighting for those working families because they are the losers here. They’re the ones who are going to be detrimentally impacted by this governor’s last biggest boondoggle.”
Allen Dyer, who lives in the Glencliff community, said the neighborhood will lose 20 to 30 homes.
“We’ll have a lot of construction, our community will see elevated highways going through our neighborhoods and there’s a great deal of anxiety and fear about that,” Dyer told the board. “What is TDOT going to do to minimize that impact on our neighborhood. Can you meet with the residents and have productive conversations and take recommendations and have exchange the residents that are being affected?”
Two public meetings on the project are scheduled for Sept. 8 at the Nashville Public Library Pruitt Branch and Sept. 9 at the Smyrna Event Center.
