Metro Nashville has filed seven lawsuits against the federal government over funding losses since President Donald Trump began his second term.

The cases, which are jointly filed with other localities and supported by the Public Rights Project, allege that the Trump administration has acted unconstitutionally by canceling or redefining the terms around dollars that had already been appropriated by Congress.

The seven challenges can be categorized into two types: There are four lawsuits challenging federal grants that were eliminated outright, while the other three cases take issue with the federal government attaching new conditions to grants that had already been appropriated.

WPLN’s Cynthia Abrams has followed the cases and reports on where they stand.

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Photos: Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP Photo

Money from a legal settlement with Volkswagen is helping pay for more electric vehicle chargers for Tennessee renters.

The new program focuses on apartments and multi-family housing. Owners and property managers can get rebates of up to 60% of the cost for new chargers.

To understand where the funding comes from, you have to go back roughly a decade to a scandal known as “Dieselgate.” For years, VW had been marketing cars as “clean diesel,” while installing devices to cheat on emissions testing. In reality, the cars were sometimes emitting dozens of times the legal limit of pollution.

That eventually led to VW paying a $15 billion settlement, some of which helps pay for program to lower pollution and support EV adoption. In past years in Tennessee, that’s included efforts to add a statewide network of fast charging stations.

EVs have been slow to gain popularity in the state. About 5% of new passenger vehicles sold in Tennessee are EVs; that’s about half the national rate, and far behind the global average of around 25%.

Tap link in bio for the full story from environmental reporter Caroline Eggers.

Images: Anderson-EV/Unsplash

Notable quotables for the week took a dive into the common threads in Nashville’s seven ongoing lawsuits against the Trump Administration. They’re largely focused on federal funding — canceled grants, new conditions on money Congress already promised. The cases have seen early successes, with the courts at least temporarily halting the revocations.

State Rep. John Ray Clemmons is among the critics of Gov. Bill Lee’s “Choice Lanes” project on Interstate 24. The state awarded the construction and management contract to a consortium of private-sector companies called Drive TN. It spans 50 years and is expected to be worth $10 billion.

There is a lot of discussion about data center proposals in Tennessee, but Gallatin has already had a hyperscale project operating in its borders for two years. It’s the top tax revenue contributor for the city government, but it still has critics in its neighborhood.

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License plate readers (LPRs) have been on the front lines of debate this summer.

And now lawmakers say they will take the reins on writing legislation to potentially place regulations on the policing technology when session starts in January.

For now, activists and police don’t see eye-to-eye on licence plate reader usage.

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Reporter: Emily West
Photo: Emily West

Notable quotables for the week looked into the disconnect between public pushback on surveillance technology and its growing popularity among law enforcement agencies in Tennessee.

They also looked into an underexplored risk of data centers: noise pollution. In Memphis, Elon Musk’s X-AI data centers and the gas turbines that power them are creating inescapable walls of sound for their neighbors.

A new state report detailed moment-by-moment how workers at Ascension Saint Thomas Midtown accidentally filled epidural syringes with potassium phosphate instead of anesthesia drugs. That medication can wreak havoc on the cardiovascular and nervous systems. Several patients of the four surgical patients went into cardiac arrest, and all of them were paralyzed for an unknown amount of time.

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Don’t you hate it when you go to buy a concert ticket and the price suddenly jumps because of mysterious additional fees?

New research from Vanderbilt shows price mark-ups from online scalpers and those fees cost ticket buyers $11 billion per year.

Most tickets are bought online, and scalpers create algorithms and bots that can buy thousands of tickets in an instant and resell them all at a higher price. Primary ticket platforms often try to restrict this activity by having volume caps, but those are easy to get around with proxy IP addresses.

A new estimate from the Vanderbilt research estimates net resale price inflation costs ticket buyers $4.5 billion dollars a year alone.

The paper calculates that $20.4 billion in processing fees are collected each year, of which $6.8 billion of that is excessive.

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Photo: Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP (File), Illustration Getty Images, Paul Sakuma AP