Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway racing will go to voters as 2027 ballot measure

Nashvillians will get to decide the future of racing at the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

A petition drive has been seeking to remove auto racing, and now the Davidson County Election Commission has certified that there were enough signatures collected to send the question to voters. The topic is is scheduled to be on the ballot in August 2027.

In 2011, Nashville voters decided that the Metro Charter should protect racing as a required activity at the fairgrounds. But the new campaign seeks to reverse that and instead create affordable housing and green space.

Election staffers spent the past month working overtime to review roughly 75,000 petition signatures. About one-third of those names were rejected, but there were still enough confirmed to trigger the ballot measure.

This Is Nashville: Our racing roots

There has been a deep divide over the fairgrounds and racing, ranging from a proposal to rebuild and greatly expand the speedway to the current referendum campaign.