Julia Masters | Nashville Business Journal
$3 million to $67 million.
$5.6 million to $58 million.
$6.7 million to $48 million.
$10 million to $57 million.
That’s the difference a few years make in Nashville.
The numbers represent property valuations from 2021 to 2025, released in May, for Lower Broadway’s Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, Eric Church’s Chief’s, Broadway Brewhouse & Mojo Grill and Lainey Wilson’s Bell Bottoms Up.
The list goes on.
To Lower Broadway businesses, the numbers are the basis for new property tax bills received in October. One operator said some spots are looking at tax bills that exceed their profit. “You’re going to see people leaving,” Bill Miller, founder and CEO of Icon Entertainment & Hospitality, told the Business Journal. “It’s not sustainable — business on Broadway is the lowest I’ve seen in all the time we’ve been here. … This will absolutely lead to people going out of business. You’re going to have vacant storefronts, and the politicians can say I’m being dramatic, but the politicians don’t balance my books every month.”
Just between Show Pony, which closed earlier this week, and Nudie’s Honky Tonk, Miller, who’s been an operator on Lower Broadway since 2013, will now pay more than $500,000 in property taxes. He and many other have filed appeals, though some may not be heard until the end of the year. Property tax bills, meanwhile, had to be paid by the end of February.
“Anytime a big line item like your property taxes [go] up by 50% to 100%, you as a small business are going to struggle, and it is one of the contributing factors why we’re seeing so many local restaurants closing,” Caren Nichol, an attorney in the property tax group at Evans Petree who is representing many Broadway players in their appeals, told the Business Journal. “The question is, if they’re going to get relief, and the county board is the quickest way to get relief, if the county board doesn’t give them any relief, the state board is going to take years.”
Time is something a business on tight margins doesn’t have.
