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The Tennessee Conservative Staff –
Metro Nashville is now one of six cities who, along with several nonprofit organizations, are part of a lawsuit aimed at ending President Trump’s federal funding freeze.
According to a lawsuit filed March 19 in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina – Charleston Division, the plaintiffs bringing the suit are either nonprofit groups or cities who were awarded federal grant money.
Those funds were awarded by Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and other similar federal programs.
The plaintiffs allege that the funding freeze has caused disruption to their various projects, forcing them to change their plans or stop progress altogether. These projects “address health, environmental, agricultural and climate challenges in communities facing disproportionate pollution and environmental harms”, according to a press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center, the group leading the lawsuit along with the Public Rights Project.
For Nashville, the funding involves two grant awards. The city was awarded $4.7 million for the “Electrify Music City” program and had plans to expand on electric vehicle charging options in the city. The other award of $9.3 million was allocated to the “East Nashville Spokes” project and would be used for a transit project that would include protected bike lanes, along with other improvements.
Plans to use the funding for both projects were included in Metro Nashville’s Transportation Improvement Program budget for the year, but city leaders say that the frozen funding has caused the projects to “languish in uncertainty.”
Metro Director of Law Wally Dietz asked in a press release that the awarded money be delivered “as promised.”
“For more than 200 years, local, state and federal governments have reliably worked together to implement programs that benefit people all over America,” Dietz said. “Metro Nashville filed this suit because the constitutional separation of powers must be maintained. No president, much less a non-federal employee at a fictional agency, has the authority to freeze funds appropriated by Congress.”
