In recent years Tennessee has experienced an explosion of growth fueled by migration of new residents coming here to escape high-tax, over-regulated, woke blue states. This has produced a consistent warning from conservatives to new arrivals: “Don’t California my Tennessee.”
This admonition is not only sound conservative thinking, it is also common sense. All you need to do is look at California to understand why Tennessee should never copy its policies. California residents are crushed by punishing taxes, burdened with one-third of the nation’s homeless population, plagued by failing schools controlled by the teacher unions, governed by laws that punish law-abiding gun owners while going easy on violent criminals, and have a state constitution that protects late-term abortions.
No serious conservative would want to import California’s failed policies to the Volunteer State. Or so one would think. Legislation currently before the General Assembly, HB 2419 and its companion bill SB2311, sponsored by Representative Monty Fritts and Senator Joey Hensley, would do precisely that. With this legislation, Fritts and Hensley are attempting to force Tennennesse’s cities, towns, and counties to use the California model for addressing the growth challenges they are facing.
That is a horrible idea. This legislation is foolish from a policy perspective and liberal from an ideological one. Tennesseans need only to know what happened in California with this state government mandate approach to managing growth. The results were catastrophic.
In 1963, facing a postwar population boom not unlike what Tennessee is experiencing today, California enacted the Knox-Nisbet Act. The state’s government mandate to its county sounded reasonable and will sound familiar: encourage orderly growth, discourage urban sprawl, and protect farmland and open space from development. What followed was a masterclass in how state government intervention in local matters produces the opposite of its intended results.
Rather than containing growth and sprawl, the Knox-Nisbet Act accelerated it. When developers found land near existing cities effectively off-limits, they didn’t walk away. Instead they leapfrogged over restricted areas and built further out, either in unincorporated areas or in neighboring counties with fewer development restrictions. This created isolated communities disconnected from existing infrastructure, surrounded by undeveloped land, and the worst traffic in the nation where residents face grueling times to reach their jobs and to get the kids to school. Sprawl was not stopped. It was relocated and made drastically worse.
The jurisdictional gaps compounded the damage the state mandate inflicted. When a city is blocked from annexing a parcel of land, that land does not become permanently protected open space. The property owner retains full rights to the property, as is enshrined in the United States Constitution. A county may well approve a subdivision of houses on the very same parcel where the annexation had just been rejected. The annexation is stopped, but the development is not. Farmland disappears. Highways, water supplies, and schools are strained if not broken.
Yes, “urban sprawl” was stopped, but what rises in its place is something far, far worse: a suburban wasteland of low-density subdivisions overwhelming roads, utilities, and public services, with no city government accountable for managing any of it.
This is bizarrely the failed liberal model from California that Monty Fritts and Joey Hensley want to mandate on the cities, towns, and counties of Tennessee.
HB2419/SB2311 would require municipal governments to obtain county approval before annexing any new territory. Fritts and Hensley claim the bill will protect taxpayers from the costs that city expansion imposes on county infrastructure. They argue that giving counties a formal voice in annexation decisions will produce more deliberate, fiscally responsible growth. What they have apparently failed to consider is that their bill comes directly from the government mandated regulatory policies of Gavin Newsom’s California that have failed spectacularly.
If conservatism stands for anything, it stands against exactly this kind of government overreach. Whether it is the federal government putting mandates on the states, or the state putting mandates on cities and counties, that is not how our constitutional republic is supposed to function. Tennessee’s growth challenges are real, yet they are challenges that local elected officials are fully capable of addressing by working collaboratively, without state politicians imposing mandates from above.
The last model any conservative should want to follow is California’s. HB 2419/SB2311 does not merely risk repeating California’s mistakes, it risks importing them wholesale. Rep. Monty Fritts and Senator Joey Hensley should withdraw this bill. That is unless their real goal is to make Tennessee more like California. If that’s the case, we have a much bigger problem on our hands than population growth.
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Brian Floyd is a Board Member of the Tennessee Conservatives Coalition.
I am not sure how the California link applies. In Tennessee, cities and towns have municipal growth boundaries. Murfreesboro can’t annex outside that border no matter how much it wishes to.
The simple question of whether counties should interfere with towns or cities expanding in their established growth boundaries is a different question. And, by thr way, the majority of Californians coming to Tennessee are more far-right than most long time residents.
I am no genius on this matter, but I believe those being annexed should be able to stop their annexation. Land grabs for taxes is a common motivator for annexation.