Tennessee lawmakers stopped local governments from enacting laws related to police, pipelines, voting and more during the legislative session that ended last week, continuing a long trend of preemption.

Many of those laws target Memphis and Nashville, the two biggest, most diverse cities in Tennessee. Republicans from the Shelby County suburbs are often the ones who carry these bills in the state legislature.

A quick guide to what legislators did this session

The Daily Memphian reported on preemption last year, mentioning a 2020 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank. According to the EPI, Tennessee preempts local governments more than almost every other state, and the South uses preemption more than other regions.

“The use of preemption in the South is deeply intertwined with a long history of events and actions that have reinforced anti-Black racism and white supremacy,” that report stated.

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State Rep. Karen Camper (D-Memphis) said the Republican supermajority is “intoxicated with this power.” She said everyone professes to believe in local control.

“We all believe that,” she said at a press conference last week. “They say they believe it but their actions don’t reflect it.”

Steve Mulroy, a law professor at the University of Memphis and a Democratic candidate for district attorney, echoed that.

Tennessee General Assembly finishes legislative session

“Preemption has an outsized impact on Memphis, because we’re so often its target,” Mulroy wrote in an email. “The General Assembly majority professes local control, but departs from it at the drop of a hat whenever a local government does something they disagree with, which Memphis often does.”

Residency requirements

The General Assembly banned residency requirements for cops and firefighters, making local governments unable to require these first responders to live in the communities they serve. Memphis voters and the City Council have pushed for these requirements in recent years.

The law bans residency requirements across the state, with an exception allowing Hamilton County, which includes Chattanooga, to enact them. An earlier version that didn’t become law targeted Memphis — just the city, not all of Shelby County — which would have made it the only preempted jurisdiction.

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The amendment making an exception for Hamilton County refers to residency requirements as a “legitimate government interest.”

Such a ban has been a top priority of Sen. Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) for years. He had the support of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, Police Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, and the police and fire unions; all argued residency requirements would make hiring more difficult.

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Kelsey’s argument was simple: people should live where they want.

“The rationale is freedom,” Kelsey said last year.

The governor signed the ban into law on March 24.

Some Memphis Democrats oppose residency requirements, but voted against Kelsey’s bill because of the principle of preemption — and because the bill’s sponsor in the state House lives across the state in the Smoky Mountains. Reps. Joe Towns and Barbara Cooper, both Memphis Democrats, supported the ban.

Ranked-choice voting

Lawmakers also banned ranked-choice voting, which Memphians have supported multiple times in local referenda.

This method of voting allows voters to rank their choices. If no candidate is the top choice of a majority of voters, a counting process is triggered which factors in voters’ next choices. The counting process eliminates the need for runoff elections, which often have low turnout and awareness, and require governments to administer elections on short notice.

Supporters, many of whom are Republicans, say the winners of ranked-choice elections are often less polarizing.

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Opponents say it’s too complicated.

“Let’s just have straight-up elections the same way that we always have here in Tennessee,” state Rep. Kevin Vaughan (R-Collierville), who cosponsored the bill with Kelsey, said at a Feb. 2 hearing.

“You’re asking the voters to do a great deal more research,” Vaughan said Feb. 8, “and you’re asking the voters to compromise on their ideals and principles in who they want to serve in office.”

Vaughan said he would answer emailed questions, but had not replied by the time of publication. If and when he does, we will update this story.

Kelsey did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Strickland nor Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. The Greater Memphis Chamber declined to comment and The Equity Alliance did not respond.

Pipelines

Following the activism that (at least for now) stopped the Byhalia Connection Pipeline in Memphis, Vaughan and Sen. Ken Yager (R-Kingston) sponsored a bill limiting local regulation of energy infrastructure.

The bill is unclear, banning rules that interfere with the “feasibility of the project,” but allowing “necessary rules or policies related to the electric or natural gas system.”

Opponents said a spill from the Byhalia pipeline could result in an environmental disaster and contaminate the aquifer that provides water to Memphis. Supporters say local activism shouldn’t kill important energy infrastructure projects that would serve millions of people across state lines. 

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“(The bill) implements, or enacts, a very focused prohibition on local government in order to ensure there is multi-jurisdictional integrity in these projects,” Yager said in a committee hearing. “(These companies) have already gone through exhaustive federal regulatory control which, I might add, includes ample time for public comment.”

Examples abound

During the battles over COVID mitigation last year, Gov. Bill Lee allowed parents and students to opt out of school mask requirements, making them unenforceable. His executive order was seen as a compromise; more conservative governors banned mask requirements outright.

Sen. Sara Kyle (D-Memphis) tried to raise the minimum wage, but failed. Then she sponsored another bill allowing local governments to raise the minimum wage; that failed too.

State law prohibits inclusionary zoning, a policy supporters say would lead to racial and economic integration. A number of laws limited local rules seeking to slow the spread of COVID. Other laws require close oversight of public transit projects, one of which was blamed in part for the death of a bus rapid transit project in Nashville. State law has also made it harder to remove Confederate monuments.

“They’ve done it more and more and more every year,” Camper said.

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Then there’s the controversy in Mason, the majority-Black Tipton County town over which the state Comptroller wants to exercise more financial control.

Mulroy, the law professor and DA candidate, said the bills banning ranked-choice voting and residency requirements were “particularly egregious,” because they overturned the will of voters.

“They’re not just substituting their own judgment for that of local elected officials; they’re overturning the results of a popular referendum amending a city charter,'' he said. “The contempt for the people’s judgment, the arrogance, is appalling.”