NASHVILLE—State Representative John Ray Clemmons is calling on Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti and his office to investigate the bidding and awarding process for the state’s newly-awarded contract to build Governor Bill Lee’s toll lanes on I-24 from Rutherford County to downtown Nashville. Earlier this month, the state’s Transportation Modernization Board awarded a six-company consortium doing business as “DriveTN” a $9.2 billion toll lane construction project on I-24 in Rutherford and Davidson Counties from which the private companies will profit for the next 50 years. While the project will be completed as a public-private partnership, the publicly funded Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) has executed all related tasks to date and will provide project oversight and other related roles in the future, as instructed by Governor Lee. In its bid, Drive TN alleged that the state would receive approximately $28 billion in “cost value” over the next 50 years.
According to reports, the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) recommended DriveTN saying it presented the “best value” and saying its “cost value” of less than $1.8 billion per year over 50 years would somehow help the state overcome its current $58 billion backlog in road maintenance and construction projects. In spite of a history of bankruptcies and price-gouging complaints, TDOT curiously said the consortium presented no “red flags” that concerned them. Today, published reports document how a temporary hire by the Lee administration who served as TDOT Chief of Staff in 2022 promptly departed the state to work for one of the companies, Ferrovial Cintra, just months before it submitted its winning bid.
Rep. Clemmons, the Chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said there are too many unanswered questions surrounding the awarding of the contract:
“Today’s report in the Tennessean has raised everyone’s eyebrows a little higher, especially when you consider the Lee administration’s history of no-bid contracts and alarming lack of transparency over the past eight years. The fact they have never been able to, much less try to, justify how privatizing our roadways is going to help alleviate traffic congestion in our region only serves to create more suspicions about Lee’s real motivations with this entire project. Even more red flags are raised because of TDOT’s vigorous defense of these winning companies and its attempts to downplay their well-documented history of serious legal and financial issues.
As both a state legislator with a fiscal duty to taxpayers and a concerned tax-paying citizen, I respectfully request General Skrmetti investigate the entire toll lane project procurement process. He has the statutory duty and investigative powers to carry out this request, as well as the resources to do it. At the very least, Tennesseans deserve to know: the real reason for Governor Lee’s toll lane legislation, whether the relevant procurement laws were followed; the identity of every former Lee administration official who enjoys a fiscal interest of any kind in the winning bid and companies; and, whether any of those individuals communicated with anyone inside the Lee administration, the date of the communications, and the substance of the communications.
The truth of the matter is that, despite Bill Lee’s claims to the contrary, significant taxpayer dollars and state resources will continue to be tied up in this proposed boondoggle for years to come while billionaires profit off of working families. At the very least, those families have the right to know whether everyone involved in this project has clean hands or whether this project is nothing more than Bill Lee handing out golden parachutes to former employees on his way out the door.”
