Despite a successful display and turnout for Dale Jr.’s CARS Tour earlier in the year, Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway has managed to move one step away from racing. A petition to demolish the Speedway has cleared its first hurdle, with 75,000 signatures submitted for validation.
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According to the Nashville Banner, the signatures were presented by Restore Our Fairgrounds at the Metro Courthouse on Friday morning, and they will need to be certified as legitimate signatures by the Davidson County Election Commission. For the track’s future to be put to a vote, the Election Commission will need to ensure that a little more than 40,000 signatures are legitimate to meet the ten per cent of voters needed to set up the vote.
The anti-racing organisation previously had its petition rejected because the Court found the language to be misleading to the signatories. But now they have accumulated 75,000 signatures and only need 40,000 of those to be legitimate to proceed towards voting against the speedway.
According to Restore Our Fairgrounds leaders, this is believed to be the largest petition drive for a ballot measure in state history.
“I think a really important distinction here is that the intent of this petition is simply to get it on the ballot,” the group’s co-founder Mike Kopp said. “We’re about to go through a little less than a year of essentially a campaign to educate the community.”
All of this is to make an amendment to a referendum passed in 2011 that dictates the purposes and usage of the Nashville Fairgrounds, the property on which the speedway lies.
The 2011 referendum was made when former Mayor Karl Dean planned to raze the fairground to build an office park. That plan was rejected by the Metro Council after a citizen driven petition to save the fairgrounds.
It is important to note that the Fairgrounds not only house the speedway but also a flea market, fairs and a park, amongst other things. The referendum was held to stipulate that those grounds must always serve specific purposes, of which racing was a key component.
What Restore our Fairgrounds aims to do is have that referendum amended to remove racing from it, thereby allowing them to start development on their plans.
“We’re talking about nearly 75,000 Nashvillians who want a chance to vote for green space over asphalt,” Kopp said. “We’re talking about nearly 75,000 Nashvillians who want a chance to vote for neighborhoods over noise and nuisance.”
While the Restore our Fairgrounds organization continues to oppose the existence of the historic track, another organization has taken shape called Decline to Sign. Members representing this organization were present for the submission of the signed petitions to oppose their validity.
“With signatures submitted to the Davidson County Election Commission for review, Decline to Sign intends to make sure that all signatures counted by the commission are valid signatures from registered Davidson County voters who knowingly signed,” the group said in a statement. “Decline to Sign will pursue any necessary avenues to ensure that only actual, valid registered voters are counted. The integrity of the process is already in question, as registered voters report they have received postcards from the campaign thanking them for a petition signature they never gave.”
According to Decline to Sign, there were an estimated 1700 false signatures, which, according to Restore Our Fairgrounds, are being verified and removed, while that count doesn’t even account for one per cent of the signatures on the petition.
Who is backing whom?
One of the most interesting parts of the entire debacle around the future of Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway is that both sides for and against seem to be backed by a billionaire on each side. What’s surprising here is that the billionaire who is claimed to be the man funding those in favour of the track’s demolition is a man who said that he would support racing.
John Ingram, owner of Nashville SC, the local soccer team, had asked the Metro Council’s support to build Geodis stadium at the Fairgrounds. When he first sought support for permission to build the stadium, he said that “we at soccer support racing.”
That support didn’t last long, as the track is a direct threat to Nashville SC’s potential to draw larger crowds or organise events when racing happens simultaneously.
The billionaire on the other side is Marcus Smith of Speedway Motorsports Inc., who wants the support of the county in helping restore the speedway to its former glory. Part of his plans includes revamping the track and the stands, as well as creating a sound barrier to tackle the most voiced issue against the track: noise complaints.
Smith proposes leasing the track to SMI so that they can use the lease period to make up for the investment that they had planned to put into the track, a number that was reportedly $164 million. Those plans were presented to the mayor but put on the back burner after pressure mounted from the anti-racing group backed by Ingram.
Ingram sees Smith’s revamp proposal as a direct threat to his Geodis Stadium. And right now, by the look of things, Ingram has better footing, but nothing about the track’s future will be known for certain until the petitions have been confirmed as legitimate and the referendum is put to a public vote.