Willie Shane broke the asphalt on Elon Musk’s Music City Loop project this summer. Seven of his crew had been the sole excavators, fabricators and dump trucking company on The Boring Company’s proposed tunnel through Nashville for months.
Then came Monday night, when they walked off the site.
“I moved the equipment myself,” Shane said in an interview with the Banner on Tuesday.
“We were really skeptical from the beginning, and then since then, things pretty much just went downhill,” he added.
Musk’s company has a spotty record of completing similar tunnels in other cities, often snagging on government regulations and contractual issues. When Shane’s company, Shane Trucking and Excavating, which works with major local clients like the Grand Ole Opry and the Nashville International Airport, was approached by The Boring Company, he said he had some reservations.
“I told them very bluntly — and I don’t want this to come across like egotistical — but I told them, ‘Hey, my dad worked really hard to build a reputation in Nashville, and my brother and I work very hard to keep that reputation,’” Shane said. “If you guys are actually serious about doing this, you need to be 100 percent serious, because this is going to be our reputation as part of this too.”
After being reassured, Shane’s team took the job in July.
He and his crew left the state-owned property on Rosa L Parks Boulevard, where they had been working on the proposed 9-mile tunnel from the state capitol to the airport after months of safety and financial issues with Musk’s company.
It started about a month in with a change in pay.
“We were supposed to be paid every 15 days. And then they switched accounting firms, and then it went from 15 days to 60,” Shane said. Now it’s been 123 days since they started digging, and Shane says The Boring Company has only paid out about five percent of what he’s owed.
According to Shane, he has still been able to pay his employees on time, but the local trucking company is left holding the bag for money unpaid by The Boring Company. Other subcontractors, he says, have also severed ties due to nonpayment on the project.
The final straw that caused Shane to pull his crew from the site was when multiple employees reported that a representative of The Boring Company was soliciting them to bail on Shane and work directly for TBC on Monday.
“One of their head guys texts two of my welders, offering them a job for $45 an hour from his work phone,” Shane described, noting that the same TBC employee denied sending the texts when confronted with screenshots. “That’s actually a breach of contract.”
Shane also says he and other vendors have filed multiple OSHA safety complaints since working on the site but have gotten no response. His biggest concerns have been Boring employees on the jobsite not wearing proper personal protective equipment, such as hard hats, and unsafe shoring, which he says he’s repeatedly complained about to the Boring Company.
“Where we’re digging, we’re so far down, there should be concrete and different structures like that to hold the slope back from falling on you while you’re working,” Shane explained. “Where most people use concrete, they currently have — I’m not even kidding — they currently have wood. They had us install wood 2x12s.”
The safety concerns are why Shane says he decided to make the issue public.
“We’re not coming forward in like a vindictive way,” Shane said. “I just don’t want someone to get hurt, sure, and then, in the future, I have to be like, ‘Dang, I worked on there, and I turned a blind eye to it.’”
In the meantime, Shane said that the amount of backpay owed to his company is in the six figures and that he has retained a lawyer.
Boring Company response
After the Banner contacted The Boring Company about Shane’s claims, Vice President David Buss said he connected with Shane and would make good on the outstanding invoices by the end of the day Wednesday and would do a “full audit” on the error.
“It does look like we had some invoicing errors on that,” Buss told the Banner. “It was, you know, unfortunately, too common of a thing, but I assured them that we are going to make sure that invoices are wired tomorrow.”
Buss later clarified that he does not believe The Boring Company has a “common” practice of missing payments to vendors, but rather missed payments happen sometimes during “the normal course of business.”
“You hate to have an unhappy vendor. We certainly aim to have great relationships,” Buss said. “And so my goal will be to figure out what happened in this incident and then make sure that that’s not extrapolated to any other incidents.”
Buss also said he was looking into Shane’s claims about The Boring Company trying to hire contractors.
“It is definitely not our practice to try to poach anybody, so I understand the frustrations on their side,” Buss said. “Hopefully it’s something where we’re able to smooth that over and correct some of the things that happened on site and that led to this.”
Asked about the safety complaints, Buss said Shane did not raise any concerns on their call Tuesday and said he was unaware of any OSHA complaints, but would look into it.
“Safety is existential to our company,” Buss said. “We thankfully have a long history of seven years of tunneling in Las Vegas, and we’ve had one construction-related injury that was not the company’s fault in a violation.”
Hiring headaches
According to Buss, the projected timeline had not changed, and work had not been slowed by the crews’ departure from the site. Shane, however, painted a different picture.
“Actually, we were the crew that was building the tunnel boring machine. So there’s nobody building the tunnel boring machine right now, and the Boring Company has been trying to hire welders, but they haven’t been able to secure any help,” Shane said Tuesday, noting that many prospective employees won’t work on the project because of Musk’s reputation.
“A lot of people don’t like Elon and their payment terms; the way that they pay their employees, is not traditional,” Shane said.
Buss denied any hiring trouble.
“We’ve had zero issues finding great talent thus far in Nashville,” Buss said. “I think we’ve hired about 14 people now, and we’re going to start to grow the team as we begin mining operations.”
Instability and safety have been pervasive concerns around the project since its hurried public rollout this summer, in which little-to-no public input was received by the state before approving a lease of the state-owned property where digging is taking place.
As reports of a second Boring tunnel under Broadway and West End surfaced, Boring Company CEO Steve Davis hosted a two-hour live update session on X, the social media website also owned by Musk Monday evening, in which he touted progress on the Music City Loop and described the project as smoothly underway, with boring set to begin around January after the proper permits are secured.
An hour later, Shane’s team left the site.
During Davis’ virtual meeting, members of the public could submit questions, some of which were answered by Boring Company leadership. Many of those questions came from State Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville), who represents the area and has been a vocal critic of the project since it was announced.
“I would say the promotional session that they had last night on on Twitter was disingenuous at best, if not dishonest, because it was, it sounded like a utopian project and then, lo and behold, the very next day, we find out that there are people leaving the site because they’re not getting paid and they’re not being treated well,” Campbell told the Banner.
In addition to her concerns about irreparable damage to the site and whether the project would even be completed, Campbell said she was concerned about the state’s liability if there were unsafe working conditions on the leased property and whether there was any way for lawmakers to stop the process.
“There is nothing to hold The Boring Company accountable for any of these things,” Campbell said of the lease. “They’ve already dug a big hole. But then on top of it, if they move forward, forward in any capacity, they have not proven that they are reliable to take care of the damage that they cause.”
When Shane first spoke to the Banner, he said he did not intend to return to the job even if they received payment, noting that his employees had expressed discomfort “because they didn’t feel the management there was very good.”
Hours later, after hearing from Buss, Shane said he would consider returning “if they correct the situation on their end.”
Demetria Kalodimos contributed to this report.