Three bills. One simple idea.
Tennesseans should decide what happens in Tennessee — and the folks making the mess should pay to clean it up. Not you.
I didn’t run for office to write press releases. I ran to fix things that are broken. Right now, three of them are broken in the same way: somebody far away gets to make the decision, and somebody here at home gets the bill.
A multinational company ships a mountain of packaging into our state, and your county pays to bury it. A data center picks a spot next to your neighborhood, and you find out when the bulldozers show up. Tennesseans spend money on cannabis every weekend — they just spend it in Illinois, and Illinois fixes its roads with it.
These three bills fix all three of those. None of them raise a single penny of taxes on working families. All three have one thing in common: they put the decision, and the money, back in Tennessee hands.
Don’t Tread on Tennessee
Local control over data centers. Your county, your call.
Data centers are landing all over Tennessee — and communities are finding out after the deal is done. McMinnville. Coffee County. Washington County. Hawkins County. Cedar Hill. One by one, local governments have hit pause or said no outright, because they were never asked in the first place.
These facilities are not small. A single proposed data center next to the Nashville Zoo would draw fifty megawatts. Elon Musk’s operation in Memphis is on track to pull enough power for a million homes. That is your water, your power grid, your roads, your quiet — and your electric bill.
Don’t Tread on Tennessee does one thing, and does it clean: before a data center gets built, your municipal commission has to approve it. That’s it.
We already have a law exactly like this. It’s called the Jackson Law, and for decades it has given municipalities the final word on landfills. Nobody thinks that was radical. A data center can impact your community just as much as a landfill does. It should require local approval
“From water, to traffic, to sound, to the electrical grid — the impact of data centers is all local. So the decision should be, too.”
Requires local legislative approval before a data center is sited — modeled directly on Tennessee’s Jackson Law.
Doesn’t ban anything. If your community wants the jobs and the tax base, your community says yes.
Blocks Nashville from stripping your county of a say. We’ve watched the state preempt local government too many times to count.
Add your name → Tell the legislature: our country, our call
The Tennessee Waste to Jobs Act
Multinationals pay for their own packaging. You stop paying for it.
Every time you buy a product, you’re subsidizing a company in New Jersey or overseas, and every time you take out the trash you’re doing it AGAIN. They designed the clamshell, the shrink wrap, the box inside the box. You and your county pay to have it hauled and buried. That’s the deal we’ve got right now, and it’s a bad one. 31% of the world works with corporations to subsidize infrastructure and education that incentivizes reduction, reuse, and recycling. The cost of this is already built into their products.
Meanwhile, our landfills are filling up. East and West Tennessee have roughly ten years of capacity left. Middle Tennessee is worse off than that. When landfills reach capacity, guess who pays to dig new ones? You do! It’s built into the tipping fees that your county/city pays, and it’s charged back to Tennesseans. Big business interests are looking to Tennessee as a dumping ground for the Eastern United States.
The Tennessee Waste to Jobs Act is a pro-business bill that will annually bring in hundreds of millions of dollars for recycling infrastructure and education, at no cost to Tennessee taxpayers. Big packaging producers fund the recycling system through what’s called Extended Producer Responsibility. Companies under $10 million in revenue — which is better than 99% of Tennessee businesses — are exempt, and small counties can opt out entirely.
EPR isn’t a green policy- it’s a smart one. It’s a pro-Tennessee, pro-manufacturing bill. Kaiser Aluminum, Florim USA, The Sustainability Food Policy Alliance (Unilever, Mars, Nestlé and Danone), and IKEA all back it, because it’s good for business. Republican mayors and legislators across the state support it and co-sponsored the bill because they know that Tennessee factories need recycled material they currently can’t buy here, and with increasing affordability issues for Tennessee families and businesses, throwing valuable materials away becomes even more problematic.
TWTJ brings roughly $300 million a year into recycling infrastructure, and more than 7,000 jobs.
“Why are we burying valuable materials that Tennessee businesses need in the ground? That’s not conservative. It’s wasteful.”
Shifts recycling costs off local property taxpayers and onto the multinationals producing the packaging.
Exempts businesses under $10M in revenue — over 99% of Tennessee companies — and lets counties under 200,000 people opt out.
Backed by Tennessee manufacturers who need recycled feedstock, and by mayors from Nashville to Dyer County.
Projected 7,000+ jobs and about $300 million a year in recycling infrastructure investment.
Read the full bill at tnwastetojobs.com →
The Pot for Potholes Act
Legalize it. Tax it. Fix the roads with it.
Tennessee has over $58B in road problems, and no plan to pay for it that doesn’t eventually reach into your pocket. We also have a cannabis market. We just don’t have the revenue from it, because the sales happen in Illinois, Missouri, and Virginia — and those states are paving their roads with our money.
The Pot for Potholes Act legalizes cannabis for adults 21 and up, licenses and tests it like the regulated product it should be, and taxes it at 15%. Three-quarters of that money goes straight to the Highway Fund. Twenty percent goes to counties for local roads.
Last session the legislature banned hemp and put Tennessee small businesses under — an industry worth an estimated $180 million to our economy — while cutting off patients who used those products to manage real conditions. They didn’t make cannabis disappear. Now it’s just untaxed, unregulated, and untested, and good Tennessee businesses left our state.
A Vanderbilt poll found 63% of Tennesseans support legalization — including 53% of Republicans. This isn’t a fringe position anymore. It’s just a position the Capitol hasn’t caught up to. Cannabis is not going away- we owe it to our families to legalize it, regulate it, and to make it safe.
“Republicans didn’t make cannabis go away. They just made it unsafe and untaxed. People will still find it — whether that means driving to Illinois or buying from someone with no license.”
Legal for adults 21+, with licensing, lab testing, and real regulation instead of a black market.
15% state tax: 75% to the Highway Fund, 20% to counties, 5% to administration.
New road money without raising the gas tax or anything else on working families.
Brings a Tennessee industry back above board and stops sending our dollars across state lines.
Sign the petition at pot4potholes.com →