Fairgrounds Speedway

Signs are all around Nashville reading, decline to sign.

A direct response to what some say is a misleading petition drive about the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

This summer, canvassers began showing up at public places with a petition called Restore Our Fairgrounds.

They say the racetrack is being demolished and people who sign support replacing it with affordable housing.

has been that unless you sit down with both sides, you're not getting the whole truth.

But the people we've seen in green shirts that appeared practically overnight are about as close as we've been to those behind the petition to end racing at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

And what we heard

couldn't

10th annual.

We went last year to Golden Corral, which is where it was last year, and this year it's actually going to be at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway during the race night.

During the home race.

It's not all

Boys, we got Phil Spickard on the line right now.

Hey, you got Phil on the line? Yep.

We're going to be talking about the Racers' Reunion at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway, the 10th annual, October 3rd, at the Fairgrounds Speedway at a race.

Up in the party deck.

And Ricky, tell us real quick who you are and what you do.

Well, [clears throat]I've been, um, I've been around the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway since 1968.

Been around a while.

I raced out there for a time, um, around the southeast as well.

Been doing that since 2018.

So, but, um, back in 2020, uh, Gary Neil, Donnie Red, those guys got in touch with me.

Um, they wanted to start doing something special for the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway Hall of Fame.

Uh, 1987 was the first inductees into the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway Hall of Fame.

So how would you respond to that?

Well, I would respond the same way as before, that any redevelopment that enhanced the Fairgrounds Speedway would have to, in my view, come with noise mitigation and additional parking.

Anybody who's been to a Nashville SC game or a concert at the Geotis Park knows that there's a parking debacle over there already.

So if improving the current facility is on the table, then that's a bargain that Nashville should take in order to improve the neighborhood environment as well as the racing environment.

A lot of the affordable housing that is built by for-profit developers like Market Street is 100%, if not close to 100%, non-union.

It is often performed by contractors who misclassify workers as independent contractors.

And so, unless a monumental set of conditions were put on a project like this, replacing a piece of cultural infrastructure like the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway with, quote, affordable and or workforce housing, which is a much higher threshold for affordability.

Doing that does not guarantee anybody great union jobs.

Now, NASCAR and Speedway Motorsports do not own the land, again, cannot unilaterally demolish a city facility.

The Fairgrounds Speedway is protected under the Metro Charter of Nashville and Davidson County.

The obligation of the Metro Charter is that the city government must preserve historical activities, explicitly including auto racing, at the fairground site.

So now you've got Citi, you've got probably a private investor who says this will be a great place to build 140 apartments or houses or whatever, and look at it.