A company with all-star clients including Reba McEntire, Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears and Meghan Trainor is adding 60 jobs in Nashville — without needing a single extra parking space.
In fact, they're growing while cutting parking on their Midtown property. With parking spaces scarce and increasingly expensive, and given how the region's traffic is worsening by the rush hour, you don't have to have that kind of world-famous clientele to find their innovation and precedent-setting solution useful.
Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group plans to more than double its Music Row office building, to 25,000 square feet. The company handles a whole host of accounting and financial services for A-list celebrities (did we mention Jennifer Lopez?), and also has an office in Los Angeles.
The Nashville expansion would eat up part of the company's parking lot. Metro regulations require commercial properties to have a certain amount of off-street parking, calculated based on a building's square footage and its use. Under those rules, Tri Star would need 37 off-street spaces after its expansion. But Tri Star would only have 14 spaces left after the expansion, leaving the company 23 spaces shy of complying with zoning regulations.
The Metro Board of Zoning Appeals, on unanimous consent, granted Tri Star an exemption from those rules on Dec. 15. Within 30 days of occupying the expansion, Tri Star must provide proof to Metro that it's signed a contract with a ride-sharing company like Lyft or Uber. Under the terms of that contract, Tri Star would pay monthly rates for the commutes for 23 employees, equal to the number of parking spaces at issue.
"It's an incredibly bright thing to do. It's something a lot of other companies in Nashville are going to have to start doing," said Tom White, a veteran partner at law firm Tune Entrekin & White, who represented Tri Star in the matter.
To White's knowledge, this is the first time Metro has agreed to such a deal. There's reason to think other local companies will look to replicate the arrangement as surface lots, especially downtown, become construction sites for high-rises.
David Ewing, chairman of the zoning appeals board, praised the solution as "very creative." The neighborhood around the building stands to benefit because the arrangement, should Tri Star adhere to it, would not add to the number of drivers jockeying for on-street parking.
Louise Taylor, the CEO of Tri Star Sports & Entertainment Group, told the board she pays for Uber and Lyft rides for some of her staff in Los Angeles, in a similar desire to encourage alternative forms of transportation. In Nashville, Taylor said she will provide ride-sharing to and from the office for employees living within five miles of the office.
"We're so excited Nashville is tapped into being creative. We love that we're able to expand here successfully," Taylor told the board. "As we started to expand our Nashville office — we're creating 60 new jobs ... my idea in meeting with my lawyer was, 'Why can we not adopt a Lyft or Uber program?'"
Tri Star Sports also has a joint parking agreement for the lot next door, owned by an entity tied to music executive Mike Curb.
A message for Taylor at Tri Star's Nashville office was not returned.
