Five Rooms, Five Nights, One Question on the November Ballot. The First Set of Chairs Is Out Tonight.
The chairs go up tonight at Mt. Juliet High School, and they will go up four more times between now and the middle of October. The city has scheduled five public information meetings on the question it is putting to voters November 3 — whether to repeal the Home Rule Charter Mt. Juliet adopted in 2006 — and each one is anchored to a different district, with that district's commissioner hosting.
If you have been meaning to get a straight explanation of what the ballot question actually does, this is the month it is being offered, in a room, by the people who will have to live with the answer.
The schedule
- Monday, September 21, 6:30 p.m. — Mt. Juliet High School. District 1, hosted by Commissioner Art Giles.
- Tuesday, September 22, 6:30 p.m. — Providence Church. District 4, hosted by Commissioner Jennifer Milele.
- Tuesday, October 6, 6:30 p.m. — West Wilson Middle. District 3, hosted by Commissioner Scott Hefner.
- Thursday, October 8, 6:30 p.m. — Green Hill High School. District 2, hosted by Commissioner Bill Trivett.
- Tuesday, October 13, 7 p.m. — Mt. Juliet Middle. Hosted by Mayor James Maness.
Note the last one starts at seven rather than six-thirty. The meetings are organized by district, but a ballot question is a citywide decision, and there is nothing stopping a District 2 resident from going to the District 3 night if the date suits better.
What is actually on the ballot
Mt. Juliet is one of fourteen Tennessee cities operating under a Home Rule Charter, a form of local government the city voted itself into in 2006. The November question asks whether to give that up.
The argument driving it is about growth, and specifically about who pays for it. Under the current arrangement the city cannot levy impact fees — the one-time charges assessed on new development to help fund the roads, sewers and services that development creates demand for. Repealing Home Rule is the mechanism by which the city could begin charging them.
The scale of the problem is not subtle. When Mt. Juliet adopted the charter in 2006, roughly 19,000 people lived here. The figure now is around 45,000. That is more than a doubling inside two decades, and every one of those households arrived needing pavement, water and a place for their kids to go to school.
What would not change
This is the part most likely to get lost, and the commissioners have been explicit about it. Commissioner Milele has said that the day-to-day shape of the city would be largely unchanged by a repeal: residents would still elect the Board of Commissioners, the City Manager would still run daily operations, and city services would continue as they do now. The change is narrower than “Home Rule repeal” sounds — it is principally about what revenue tools the city has access to.
Which is exactly the sort of distinction that is hard to absorb from a ballot summary and easy to absorb from a person standing at a podium answering questions. Five chances, four weeks, and the first set of chairs is already out.
We have written about the substance of the question at more length — what Mt. Juliet is being asked to give up, and what it would get, and why only fourteen Tennessee cities are in this position at all. The same November 3 ballot also carries two commission seats with four names on them.
The image above is illustrative — a representative public-meeting setup, not a photograph of any venue named in this story.
