Lee Mills thinks someone wants to sabotage his run for state representative. Incumbent District 99 Rep. Tom Leatherwood says he’s not the culprit.

At issue is the recent Shelby/Fayette county line discrepancy that left Mills’ home and approximately 200 other Arlington residences in between the assessed county line and the census map line. That discrepancy meant Mills couldn’t challenge Leatherwood in the Republican primary later this year, despite the two squaring off against each other for the District 99 seat in 2020.

Last month, Mills won his Chancery Court case, the ruling supporting his belief that he lives in Shelby County and is eligible to run for the district that stretches to the Shelby-Fayette county line.

Amber Mills cleared by Chancery Court for reelection run

“The line that they used did not change from 2010 essentially until 2022,” said Mills, former chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party and a GOP state executive committee member. “I ran in 2020 with the same line. Nothing has changed. The only thing that changed is my opponent has gotten in a little bit of trouble lately. So all of a sudden, miraculously, the General Assembly attorney (Doug Himes), who works on redistricting, found out that I live in Fayette County mysteriously.”

Himes reported his determination to Mark Goins, the state coordinator of elections, who then informed the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) that Mills was not eligible to run for office because his home that sits within Shelby County’s assessed line was not within the census tract line for District 99.

Interestingly, he and Leatherwood actually live just a handful of blocks away from each other in Arlington.

Mills points out that three elected officials live in the affected “gray” area, including his wife, Shelby County Commissioner Amber Mills, Arlington Mayor Mike Wissman and Arlington Community Schools board member Dr. Dale Viox. Viox and Commissioner Mills are also running for re-election this year, and Amber Mills endured a similar situation as her husband earlier this week in Chancery Court. She also won her case and will be able to be on this year’s ballot.

“My wife and I are out tens of thousands of dollars just to defend this nonsense, so who’s responsible for it? I think we need to get to the bottom of it because not only was taxpayer money wasted but our money was wasted,” Lee Mills said. He cites the fact that the Tennessee Supreme Court and appellate court gave local election commissions the power to determine candidacy, but the SCEC instead sent the Millses to Chancery Court for a resolution.

Mills believes the SCEC could have ruled on this matter a couple of months ago when the issue came to light and everything would have been settled.

“Here we are a month and a half later bleeding money,” Mills said.

To be clear, Mills has not directly accused his opponent of intentional malfeasance, but he feels he should have noticed the problem during redistricting. He thinks it is “beyond belief” that Leatherwood, as Register for Deeds for nearly two decades, did not know about the line discrepancy prior to earlier this year.

Assessor finds disputed area in Arlington is in Shelby, not Fayette

“During redistricting, legislators have a heightened sense of their district boundaries. They know where big donors live and where potential opponents live. This is done by both parties,” Mills said. “This is why I say he was either incompetent or complacent.”

Leatherwood asserts he had nothing to do with any attempt to keep Mills off the ballot, saying he also just found out about the county line issue roughly two months ago and noting that as Register of Deeds from 2000 to 2018 he never dealt with the census lines.

He says the problem with the federal census blocks being wrong possibly was discovered as far back as 2010, but no one at the state or county level created the problem. He points out the Shelby County Commission, independent of the state redistricting process, redrew its lines based on the federal census blocks and got them wrong as well.

“So there’s no conspiracy here. If there was, it would have to be a conspiracy with drawing the state lines as well as independently drawing the county commission lines,” he said. “And as we know, there’s a sitting county commissioner who voted for these lines that’s impacted by this, and this conspiracy would have had to start as far back as 2010. To think all of this is something nefarious to have an impact on an election in 2022, it just doesn’t pass the logic test.”

As for why this is all happening now, Leatherwood believes it is simply due to it being a redistricting year. Also, attorneys challenged those redistricted lines all the way to the state Supreme Court. The Shelby County Election Commission did what it had been doing for years — manually adjusted the district lines, which made the area in Arlington pop up on the radar of the officials watching those lines.

He notes that on April 1, the Shelby County Election Commission, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III had a conference call and determined the lines could not be changed since the state was defending those lines, and SCEC Administrator of Elections Linda Phillips agreed to move them back.

“Even if I had the power, why would I go in and change federal census blocks in 2010? And if I had done that, why wouldn’t I have pulled the trigger in 2018 or 2020 to keep him from running against me?” Leatherwood said. “Why would I do anything questionable ethically to keep (Mills) off the ballot?”

He points out that as Shelby County Register of Deeds, he got the county lines right.

“And I think the judge in both of these cases (regarding Amber and Lee Mills) made the correct decision,” he said.

“To me, what’s really important is fixing this problem,” said Leatherwood, who stresses he has worked on just that, including speaking with State Comptroller Jason Mumpower about resolving the issue. “And he is on board with helping to facilitate the process with the State Board of Equalization, which is under his purview.”

Arlington to appeal census maps over county line discrepancy

Leatherwood has also worked with U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty’s office and Rep. David Kustoff’s office to get the federal census blocks moved.

He says he plans to take Mills’ candidacy very seriously. Leatherwood defeated Mills with 67% of the vote in the 2020 election, and in 2018 after the death of Ron Lollar, Leatherwood won the position on a 2-1 vote after both Amber and Lee Mills, who sat on the county Republican party executive committee (Lee was chair of the committee), recused themselves from voting.

“There’s some questions about what went on behind closed doors and why Tom was chosen,” said Mills, who suggests Leatherwood needing a job, his government pension and insurance benefits after being term-limited for the Register of Deeds position in 2018 and then losing his bid for Circuit Court Clerk that year may have been part of the equation.

“People need to wake up. They need to understand who they’re voting for — I don’t care of it’s Republican or Democrat,” Mills said. “We’ve got lazy, ineffective people who just run on their name.”

Arlington Mayor Mike Wissman, who also lives within the area in question in Arlington, notes that state officials met with Fayette and Shelby County officials in November 2019 about the issue. He said it was never resolved for reasons that could have included a change in county administration or personnel, the onset of COVID or other factors.

“We also found out that Shelby County filed paperwork with the Census Bureau back in 2010, but they pushed it aside for whatever reason,” he said.

Wissman wonders if there was not enough documentation at the time or if they might not have thought it was a big deal because much of the land in question was not developed in 2010 or registered with the Census Bureau.

He sees the current situation as an unfortunate chain of events in which the Millses became entangled.

“It’s unfortunate that it took an election issue to bring this to light at this time, but it came to light between the counties before any of this election stuff. The election stuff just amplified it,” said Wissman, who stressed that Arlington is working parallel with the counties to get it resolved as quickly as possible.

He feels the situation is an example of how slow government moves because something that should be so easy to fix with the counties essentially agreeing still involves a lengthy procedural process.

“All I know is it’s a county-to-county issue, and we’re going to get it corrected,”he said. “We just don’t want this to be an issue for any residents or any governments in the future to this level.”