But wouldn't life be much more boring for people like you and I if there wasn't such stupidity in government?

I'll be bailing in the next few years. It's absurd the way they've slaughtered the golden goose around here. My taxes went up by over 50% 2 years ago... and my home value is tanking because of this and the unchecked over-development without regard to infrastructure or aesthetics.

Old Hickory through Nipper’s Corner over to Bell Road was once one of the nicest drives in town. Now we get to sit in traffic for a long time looking at the scalped hilltops with a view of the backs of cheap vinyl-sided homes and ugly water towers where attractive woods once stood.

Nashville will become New Memphis on the Cumberland within the next 10 years as we with the means flee to the outlying communities where home owners still have some meager semblance of control.

This reminds me of my home town. It's a small suburb of Seattle, with railroad tracks running down the center of town, with no over or under passes. It seems the problem was that sometimes long freight trains would block traffic for quite a while, stopping fire fighters from responding quickly to emergencies. The city council hired a consultant for some enormous amount of money. The consultant came up with a brilliant solution - one no one else could have invented. That was - build a fire station on the other side of the tracks. Duh. They could have given me the half the fee they paid the consultant, and I'd have given them the same answer in under a minute. And politicians wonder why people get so exercised over their tax dollars being wasted.