In a city famed for its music, a new kind of underground movement is stirring up more controversy than applause. Nashville’s proposed Music City Loop—a $300 million, 10-mile (16-kilometer) underground tunnel connecting Downtown Nashville to the Nashville International Airport—is at the center of a heated dispute between local officials and Elon Musk’s Boring Company. On October 22, 2025, work officially began on the ambitious tunnel, but the project’s rapid progress and lack of city involvement have left many in Nashville’s Metro Council both frustrated and wary.
At first blush, the Music City Loop sounds like a transportation dream come true. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, who first announced the project, called it “the coolest announcement that we’ve made since I’ve been here.” He wasn’t alone in his excitement. The tunnel, privately funded and stretching beneath the city’s bustling streets, has been touted as one of the state’s most ambitious infrastructure projects to date. But as the green fence went up around the property leased to the Boring Company and the first hole was dug within weeks of the announcement, unease began to ripple through Nashville’s local government.
Metro Council member Delishia Porterfield has emerged as one of the project’s most vocal critics. “I’m looking at a back-room deal that our state did with the company without engaging the people or the local government,” she told WTVF, echoing concerns raised across the council. For Porterfield and her colleagues, the speed at which the project has advanced is less a sign of efficiency and more a red flag. “Government does not move that fast, so for this to move so quickly without real community engagement, without having questions answered, without engaging with our local government... it is very frustrating,” Porterfield said, according to NewsBytesApp.
It’s not just the pace that’s raising eyebrows—it’s the process. Porterfield and other council members say they learned of the Music City Loop only after rumors began swirling, and by the time the public was invited to ask questions, key decisions had already been made. “This is public land. Public land should always be used for the good of the people, so that’s very frustrating. There’s been a lack of transparency around this project. There’s been a lack of community engagement around this project, and this project has failed in other places,” Porterfield added.
The Boring Company, for its part, insists it has been in talks with state officials since March 2024 and is committed to transparency and community engagement. Yet when council members invited the company to present the project at a formal committee meeting, the Boring Company declined, stating it had “no business before the Metro Council” and was instead working directly with the state. Later, company officials expressed a willingness to meet but reportedly failed to respond to requests to schedule such a meeting. As of now, no meetings between the Boring Company and the Metro Council have been scheduled, and the company has not responded to further requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time the Boring Company has been accused of bypassing local governments or abandoning ambitious projects. According to WTVF and NewsBytesApp, experts like Dr. Warren Sturman, former vice mayor of Fort Lauderdale, and Juan Matute, deputy director of transportation studies at UCLA, have observed a pattern: the company makes grand promises, communications eventually fall through, and cities are quietly dropped from the company’s website. Projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, and Fort Lauderdale were all announced with fanfare but never broke ground. Only Las Vegas and test tunnels in Texas have seen meaningful progress.
“There seems to be this idea that this is going to solve some transportation problem and there’s a fixation on trying to demonstrate that they’re right,” Matute told WTVF. Sturman admitted he was intrigued at first by the proposal for a tunnel to the beach in Fort Lauderdale, but soon realized it wasn’t practical. “Does it actually solve a problem or does it create more of a problem?” Sturman asked, reflecting a broader skepticism about the company’s track record.
There are also environmental and regulatory concerns. In California, the Boring Company sought exemptions from state environmental review laws, prompting lawsuits from neighbors. The company ultimately settled and abandoned the project, citing delays. Musk himself has advocated for a “dig first, pay penalties later” approach, arguing that lengthy environmental approval processes stifle innovation. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong,” Musk said, as quoted by WTVF. “We do not need to go through a three- or four-year environmental approval process.”
The company’s only public tunnel in Las Vegas has also come under scrutiny. A ProPublica investigation found that the Boring Company violated environmental regulations nearly 800 times over two years. Nevada regulators fined the company more than $240,000 for unauthorized digging, releasing untreated water onto city streets, and spilling construction materials. These incidents have done little to reassure Nashville officials, who worry about unknown environmental, financial, and safety impacts. “There are too many unknowns. The environmental impacts on this, the financial impacts and the safety impacts on this. We don’t even know,” Porterfield said.
Despite these concerns, the project continues to advance. Soil sample testing has begun along the proposed route, and the Boring Company reportedly requires at least 45 separate permits to proceed. However, as of the announcement date, NewsChannel 5 Investigates found that the Governor’s office, the Tennessee Department of Economic Development, and the Tennessee Department of Transportation had no proposals or permits on file. Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell submitted a list of questions to the company and received what he described as incomplete answers. Some responses have been posted on the company’s website, but many questions remain unanswered.
For Porterfield and other Nashville leaders, the stakes are clear. “While I understand that this project is a project that’s a partnership with the state, it will have a direct impact on the residents of Nashville and Davidson County, and those are my constituents,” she said. The council’s frustration stems not just from being sidelined, but from the potential precedent the project sets. As Matute noted, if the Boring Company can bypass local government and environmental regulations by digging below state property and avoiding taxpayer money, it could replicate this approach in other cities across the country.
As the first machines begin to bore beneath the city, Nashvillians are left with more questions than answers. Will the Music City Loop deliver on its promise to revolutionize transportation, or will it become another ambitious project that falls short? For now, the only certainty is that Nashville’s tunnel to the future is being built with more controversy than consensus.
