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Feature article
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3 levels of government in the state
By Garren Shipley
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Tennessee’s local politics can appear complicated from the outside looking in. But in most cases, a few principles remain constant all across the state.
As many as three different levels of government can be found in some places below state officials in Nashville.
Counties are the basic organizational structure for governance in the state.
Every square mile of Tennessee belongs to one of the state’s 95 counties, which range in population from just less than 900,000 in Shelby County, to just more than 5,000 in Moore County.
Unlike Virginia to the north, each city in Tennessee is contained within one or more counties.
For example, a resident of Kingsport is also a resident of either Hawkins or Sullivan counties, depending on location.
That means that municipal residents wind up paying two sets of property taxes and local sales tax rates are set by the city within state limits.
Most cities operate under a finite number of charters established by the state.
Smaller cities have a board of mayor and aldermen, or a council by some other name, in which the mayor is the CEO of the town and manages city departments.
Many of these cities are small enough so as not to need or have little professional staff.
Larger cities often operate under the council-manager charter, which has an elected city council, BMA or other legislative body over an appointed city manager, who serves at the legislature’s pleasure.
Locally, Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City all have a city manager, while Bluff City, Church Hill, Mount Carmel and Rogersville do not.
There are some special exceptions to this rule, however, that can be found in the form of metropolitan or consolidated government.
In this situation, the county and its major cities vote to consolidate themselves into one larger government effectively turning the county into one large city.
The state capital, Nashville and Davidson County, along with tiny Lynchburg and Moore County, have both adopted this form of government.
The structure of a metropolitan government will vary from instance to instance, as its charter is negotiated among the consolidating governments and approved by voters.
In most other counties though, the local legislative body is known as the county commission, which is populated by anywhere from nine to 25 commissioners.
This body approves budgets, sets tax rates and passes other laws in the entire county, so long as a city does not have jurisdiction.
For example, Sullivan County levies a property tax in Kingsport, but it cannot set the local option sales tax rate inside the city limits.
The CEO of the county is the county executive, who can veto actions of the commission, but can be overridden with a 50 percent plus one vote majority in most cases.
Both cities and counties can operate schools systems, but only counties are required to.
By state law, these systems are not run by the local legislative body, but by an separately elected board of education, or school board, depending on the locality.
Of course, there is always the exception to virtually all of these, made possible by a "private act" of the legislature — a law that affects only one or a certain set of local governments.
In Washington County, the county’s legal representative is appointed, but in Sullivan County, a private act allows the voters to choose who they want as the county’s attorney.
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