Fourteen Cities Have It. On November 3, Mt. Juliet Decides Whether to Give It Up.
Mt. Juliet has been a city for a little over fifty years. It was incorporated on February 1, 1972, and chartered that December, and from the start it has carried something most Tennessee towns do not: a home rule charter.
Home rule is a piece of state constitutional machinery that most residents have never had cause to think about. It became available to Tennessee municipalities by constitutional amendment in 1953, and the cities that took it up gained one specific and considerable power — the ability to write and amend their own charters without the General Assembly's involvement. Just as importantly, it took something away from Capitol Hill. Under home rule, the legislature cannot pass a private act that applies to the city.
Fourteen Tennessee cities and towns operate this way: Chattanooga, Clinton, East Ridge, Etowah, Johnson City, Knoxville, Lenoir City, Memphis, Mt. Juliet, Oak Ridge, Red Bank, Sevierville, Sweetwater and Whitwell. It is a short and slightly lopsided list — two of the state's largest cities, a handful of small ones, and Mt. Juliet.
On November 3, Mt. Juliet voters will be asked whether to give it up.
How the question got on the ballot
The ordinance putting the repeal to voters cleared the first of its two required readings on Monday, July 28. Ahead of the vote, the city has said it will hold five town hall meetings — one in each of the four districts, plus a citywide session.
The reason a city would voluntarily hand a power back to the state comes down to a charge it currently has no way to collect: an impact fee.
What an impact fee would actually do
When several hundred new homes go up, the roads, stormwater systems, sewer lines and parks those rooftops require do not pay for themselves. In Mt. Juliet, that bill lands on the city's general revenue, which, as District Four Commissioner Jennifer Milele has pointed out, comes overwhelmingly from sales tax and property tax. Developers sometimes contribute toward long-term infrastructure voluntarily. Nothing requires them to.
A structured impact fee system would. But Mt. Juliet cannot build one by itself. The mechanism runs through a private act of the General Assembly — and home rule is precisely the thing that keeps private acts from applying here. So the sequence city leaders have described goes: repeal home rule, commission an impact fee study, then go to the legislature and ask for the private act that establishes the fees. Milele has said the system should cover roads, sewers and stormwater, and has added parks to her own list.
Her argument for doing it now rather than later is a simple one about arithmetic. If the city does not set something up while the growth is still arriving, the burden stays where it currently sits — on the taxpayer.
The trade-off voters are actually being handed
That is the case for repeal. The case against is the same coin, flipped. Repeal reopens the door the 1953 amendment closed. A legislature that can pass a private act to help Mt. Juliet can also pass one Mt. Juliet never asked for. Home rule has been, for fifty years, the city's insurance policy against exactly that. The November ballot asks residents whether the impact fee is worth the premium.
Why it is being asked this year
The timing is not accidental. Mt. Juliet has spent 2026 negotiating with its own growth on almost every front. The city landed $12 million in federal money to widen Lebanon Road to five lanes, a project that has been discussed for years and is still years from orange barrels. The Board of Commissioners takes public comment on annexing 190 acres off Central Pike and Chandler Road on August 24. And at Beckwith Road, Golden Bear Place is rising across 80 acres with 660 homes, a hotel and a bowling alley in the plans. The commission has also raised the city property tax rate in recent budget cycles, pointing squarely at growth and infrastructure when it did.
Every one of those threads runs back to the same question, which is the one on the ballot in November: who pays for the city being built on top of the city that is already here.
Town hall dates and early voting details will come from the city and the Wilson County Election Commission. The charter question itself appears on the November 3 ballot.
