Nashville can keep its 40-member Metro Council size intact after another court panel ruled against Tennessee Republican lawmakers in their quest to dictate the operations of the state’s capital city.
The latest decision negates a 2023 state law requiring all forms of metro government to have 20 or fewer members on local governing bodies. Tennessee has only three metro governments, and Nashville is the only one with more than 20 members.
In a 2-1 ruling, the judges said that despite the law applying to all metro governments, it only impacts Nashville, running afoul of Tennessee’s home rule law. This law prevents state lawmakers from passing legislation specifically targeting a local government without its permission.
Tennessee’s Republican supermajority passed the council law, along with several others targeting Nashville’s boards governing sports stadiums, the airport, the convention center, fairgrounds, and police oversight.
These laws all came after the Democratic-controlled Nashville council blocked the city from hosting the 2024 Republican National Convention in the months after Republican lawmakers split the city across three U.S. congressional districts during the 2022 redistricting, eliminating a Democrat-controlled seat and leaving the city with no congressional representative from it.
Metro Nashville’s legal department sued to block every state law targeting them except for the law eliminating its police oversight board.
The department has won injunctions or rulings in every case it has sued over.
The legal department chose not to sue over the police oversight law because it applied to oversight boards across the state, making it less likely to succeed in a home rule challenge.
This decision angered much of the Nashville community, which organized in 2018 to establish the police oversight board through a charter amendment. Metro Nashville has since created a police oversight department, which has less authority and power than the board.
A whistleblower has since alleged that the Metro Nashville Police Department lobbied the state for the law.
The ruling
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