November 4, 2007

TACIR Report Comes Under More Fire

The Shelbyville Times-Gazette continues to expose questionable data in the recent report released by the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations estimating the cost of future public infrastructure needs across the state.

But while TACIR corrected figures for Bedford County schools, other amounts remain unchanged. Local officials are still scratching their heads, wondering where TACIR got its data. One utility said it has not even submitted data to the state body.

The report claims that officials in Bedford County reported their top areas of need to be transportation at $87.1 million and water and wastewater at $21.1 million. David Crowell, general manager of Shelbyville Power, Water and Sewer, told the T-G Wednesday that his office had not sent any records to anyone regarding infrastructure. "I guess we need to find where these came from," he said, speaking about the TACIR figures.

Given that that TACIR report is guaranteed to be used in coming years to support calls for higher taxes, and given that all the problems being exposed with the latest TACIR report just involving its data from one of Tennessee's 99 counties, the media across Tennessee needs to dig into the rest of the report and find out if the Bedford County errors are an isolated problem or the tip of the iceberg with the report. Republicans in the legislature may wish to hold hearings on the report's data errors and methodology before accepting any of its conclusions as accurate.