Initial Commitment
"It needs to be this incredible path into the 21st century, and that's going to require a redevelopment plan. That's going to require infrastructure and that's requiring all of these separate [university] campuses connecting to this plan that in the future people are going to go, 'Wow, that is the greatest street in the South.’"
Status
In progress
Most Recent Update (Summer 2022)
NDOT is proposing planning, design, and construction of the Jefferson Street Multimodal Cap and Connector to reconnect a community divided by I-40 through federal grant programs. The cost of the project is estimated at $120 million. Rep. Jim Cooper secured $3 million for planning through Congress' Community Project Funding. (Two public forums had been held in 2021 and based on community feedback the project was placed on temporary hold.)
Mayor Cooper has proposed $10 million to renovate Fisk University's Burrus Hall into an "innovation incubator facility" for small business.
Mayor Cooper has allocated $4 million to the North Nashville and Bordeaux communities for participatory budgeting to date (and recently proposed $20 million to expand participatory budgeting opportunities county-wide).
Previous Update (Fall 2021)
Mayor Cooper's transportation plan proposes a $175 million investment in a bicycle/pedestrian-accessible, green-space Interstate cap at I-40/I-65 to help reconnect the bifurcated west and east sides of Historic North Nashville at Jefferson Street. This project was originally envisioned in the Nashville Civic Design Center’s Plan of Nashville and received substantial community engagement through the 2016 USDOT Every Place Counts Challenge, and through the Greater Nashville Regional Council's 2020 Inner Loop Study. Additionally, Mayor Cooper created the Director of Development position within the Metro Planning Department to address Nashville's infrastructure challenges in historically underserved neighborhoods. Mark Sturtevant, former Director of Metro Public Works, filled this role.
In late 2021, NDOT prepared and submitted a INFRA grant request to the US DOT to fund design and construction of the Jefferson Street cap project. While not awarded funding in this round, NDOT has continued to advance the project and prepare for a future grant submittal. In September, NDOT started a community design process to engage the Jefferson Street area stakeholders and create a vision that will direct the future design of the cap"