The Volunteer Plan

In 2008 Tennessee promised Hemlock Semiconductor a $95 million capital grant to build a plant in Clarksville, part of an incentive package above $300 million with no clawback provisions. The plant was abandoned in December 2014 without ever producing a single commercial batch, and no state office ever published an evaluation of whether the grant delivered. Tennessee's evaluation law reaches business tax credits only, and cash grants fall outside it entirely.

We'll require annual evaluation of every state program above $25 million, rate each one by the strength of the evidence behind it, and publish a quarterly cure-or-sunset list with mandatory hearings. Colorado's audit office identified an average of $346.8 million a year in financial benefits over five years.

We'll stand up a Federal Opportunity Office with a $25 million flexible match pool, so federal matching requirements clear inside a single budget cycle. Every agency will publish its datasets in machine-readable form on one portal. Your government's data belongs to you.

Eighty-seven percent of private-sector job creation is homegrown; companies moving across state lines account for three percent. Tennessee's economic development money leans the other way, and the state law built to line up training with local employers has not funded a grant round since 2016.

We'll fund it. Nine or ten regional partnerships will pair community colleges and Colleges of Applied Technology with employers in advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and construction. Every employer signs a hiring commitment at named wages before a dollar moves. San Antonio's version of this raised participant earnings by about $6,000 a year, with gains still showing twelve years on.

Federal food assistance reimburses half of every eligible state dollar spent training participants, with no ceiling, and Tennessee leaves about $3.7 million of that unclaimed every year. We'll claim it. Beyond that, we'll add 15 communities to the Main Street program, weighted toward rural counties, and put two more small business centers and eight advisors into rural Tennessee. All of it runs about $10.5 million a year, $9.5 million of it state money.

Washington awards more than $4 billion a year in small business research grants. Tennessee companies won $41.9 million of it last year, roughly half the state's per-capita share, and most of the difference is applications nobody had the time or money to write.

We'll cover that cost with a $3,000 reimbursable stipend for preparing a competitive federal submission. A pool of one to two million dollars a year can pull $30 to $60 million in federal awards into Tennessee once the larger second-round grants land.

Eleven Tennessee counties are classified as distressed on the state's own index. We'll weight the state matching fund one and a half times for a company headquartered in one of them, with the budget to absorb that demand rather than crowd anyone else out.

A first-time founder shouldn't have to work out alone which of half a dozen state programs is the right door. We'll stand up one office whose job is to answer that.

We send police officers into the worst moments of people's lives, murders, fatal accidents, suicides, active threats, and then act surprised when the job breaks them. Officers experience post-traumatic stress and depression at up to five times the rate of the general population, and in most years more officers die by suicide than are killed in the line of duty.

Nearly a quarter of officers report suicidal ideation over a career. Only about one in six sought mental health care in the past year, though one in four screened positive for symptoms. Burned-out officers make worse decisions under pressure, and communities pay for that.

We'll set a statewide trauma-informed training standard and fund competitive wellness grants, so peer support and confidential counseling are within reach of every department at every rank. Nashville's police already run free counseling, critical incident support, and a 24-hour crisis line for officers and their families. Every department in Tennessee should have that.

The pharmacy benefit manager system takes a cut at every step between the manufacturer and the counter, and hides the real price from the people paying it. Tennesseans spend more per person on prescriptions than residents of most states.

Oregon and Washington built the alternative. Their public purchasing cooperative, now called ArrayRx, buys for programs covering more than half a million people and passes 100 percent of manufacturer rebates back to those programs instead of keeping them. It has delivered more than $155 million in savings since 2018. Nevada joined it outright and had discount cards in residents' hands within a year.

Tennessee's cooperative purchasing law already lets state agencies buy together, and we'll pass a short bill extending that power to every resident. Joining costs the state nothing. No state-run drug factories, no new agency, just seven million people at the table instead of one patient at a time.

Tennessee keeps paying to create affordable housing that stops being affordable. Tax credit restrictions run out, subsidized owners sell at market rate, and the public money walks out the door with them.

A community land trust closes that door. A nonprofit owns the land, sells the house to an income-qualified family below market, and a ground lease caps what the next sale can bring. The Lincoln Institute followed 4,108 homes in shared-equity programs over three decades and found 95 percent were still affordable when they resold, through boom, crash, and recovery. Nashville and Memphis already have trusts on the ground, with a third organizing in Chattanooga. We'll capitalize them with $11.5 million of federal housing money Tennessee already administers (enough for roughly 115 to 460 permanently affordable homes) and rewrite the state's housing tax credit scoring to favor permanent affordability.

We'll also make it legal to build a duplex. Small apartment buildings are banned on about 94 percent of residential land in Middle Tennessee, and allowing them by right costs the state nothing.

Towns from Jonesborough to Collierville to Cookeville already have walkable downtowns residents love. What they don't have is money at scale: the state's multimodal grants run about $4 million a cycle, cap at $1.25 million a project, and only pay for work on state routes. The streets that need sidewalks are local.

We'll expand Green Corridors into opt-in partnerships with any community that wants one, offering matching grants, technical assistance, and transportation department pilots for speed tables, wider crosswalks, protected bike lanes, and pedestrian-priority zones. Each community decides what fits, because a town square in Pikeville needs something different from a corridor in Murfreesboro.

Only 44 percent of Nashville residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, against 76 percent across the hundred largest American cities, and the difference is where parks get placed. We'll set a statewide goal of 70 percent park access within a 10-minute walk in every Tennessee city over 50,000 by 2035, and pay the state match that unlocks federal conservation grants for pocket parks, greenways, and trail access where green space is scarcest.

Every major storm can knock out power to thousands of Tennessee homes, and every time that happens we rebuild the same vulnerable lines. Overall, high wind and tornado frequency declines from west to east, putting West Tennessee at the highest risk. That includes parts of Memphis containing the region's only Level 1 trauma center, major area employers, and pumping stations that serve over 250,000 customers.

We'll start putting the most exposed lines underground instead, in a pilot program along the Memphis-to-Jackson I-40 corridor. At $3 million a mile, the state can buy seven to ten miles on its own. In addition, we'll seek federal dollars that match up to 75 percent of the cost for undergrounding as hazard mitigation, so our state money can stretch further and expand the pilot.

We'll track outage data before and after so we can understand the potential value of expanding for over 100 miles of the highest-priority lines statewide. Long term, those same trenches can also run power, water, and broadband together.

A 2023 Tennessee law forces every city and county to count natural gas as clean energy, and a 2020 law, widened in 2023, bars a city from restricting gas hookups in any building but its own. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and so are diesel, coal, and petroleum. This isn't a real misunderstanding, it's a loophole that needs to be closed.

We'll repeal both laws and write one definition into law. It will also clarify that any fuel made from a fossil fuel is still a fossil fuel, so hydrogen made from natural gas does not count as clean, nor does pipeline gas, regardless of the certificates attached to them.

We'll also take gas fueling stations and gas-fired heat and power plants off the state's certified green energy list, including existing certifications, so that neither gets tax breaks reserved for clean energy. With the hookup ban repealed, every city and county will be able to set the fuel type and emissions standard for its new buildings.

Between 2019 and 2022, an average of 63 percent of the corporations filing in Tennessee paid nothing in excise tax. Many of them paid the franchise tax as well, and for most the bill was the $100 minimum.

Tennessee closed the old Delaware shell loophole twenty years ago. What the code still permits is quieter: a company earns money here, books it to an affiliate offshore, and the state taxes none of it, because Tennessee still lets related corporations file their returns as though they were strangers.

We'll require every multistate corporation doing business here to report its worldwide group's income and pay on Tennessee's share, apportioned by actual activity in the state. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia already require this within U.S. borders, and profit-shifting doesn't stop at the water's edge. We'll also restore the franchise tax base the legislature gave away in 2024, rebuilt to survive the constitutional objection raised against the old version. Between $539 million and $1.3 billion a year, and it pays for taking the tax off groceries.

About 91,000 Tennesseans earn too much for TennCare and too little for any marketplace help at all. Every year Tennessee doesn't act, federal dollars Tennessee taxpayers already paid go to other states instead.

We'll file a Section 1115 waiver, the federal permission that lets a state run Medicaid its own way, and cover every adult below the poverty line at Tennessee's regular match. Wisconsin has run that design for a decade under governors of both parties. Full expansion covers more people for less apiece, and for states that expand, the 2025 federal budget law phases down the hospital assessment that finances TennCare. With 61 percent of Tennessee's rural hospitals already vulnerable to closure, we won't trade the financing that keeps them open for a better match on fewer people.

The day Washington confirms that penalty doesn't reach a newly expanding Tennessee, TennCare expands to 138 percent of poverty. We'll add the adult vision benefit TennCare still won't pay for either way.

Tennessee's crisis response network covers all 95 counties on paper. In practice it cannot meet the demand, and in rural counties response times lag while clinical positions stay vacant. Tennessee ranks 44th in the country for mental health, with about 52 mental health workers for every 10,000 residents. Nearly two-thirds of young people with major depression get no treatment at all.

We'll add roughly 160 clinical positions to the community mental health centers the state contracts with, and open three 16-bed crisis stabilization units in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville, using renovated or shared space rather than new construction. That gives someone in psychiatric crisis somewhere to go besides an emergency department.

We'll take mobile crisis teams to round-the-clock coverage statewide, adding new rural satellite teams, and pay loan repayment to clinicians who commit to crisis work. That is how we staff what we build.

Federal law requires the Tennessee Valley Authority to buy power from qualifying state-owned generators under 80 megawatts, but only at its own calculated avoided cost. Lately that is 3 to 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour, roughly a quarter of what Tennesseans pay at retail. We won't build a state generation program on selling cheap power back to TVA.

We'll create the Tennessee Renewable Power Authority and put generation where it earns full value: solar behind the meter at prisons, campuses, and office complexes, so every kilowatt-hour avoids 12 to 15 cents of retail cost. A ten-site battery pilot will test whether the state can cut peak-demand charges at its costliest facilities. The bonds that build at state facilities are repaid out of the electricity savings there, not the General Fund.

Every megawatt-hour from an Authority-financed project writes a check to the community that hosts it, a flat $2.50 per megawatt-hour split between host county and municipality, owed whether the project is publicly or privately owned.

Tennessee's legislative districts are drawn by the politicians who benefit from them. If a judge ruled on their own case, we'd call it corruption. When legislators draw their own districts, we call it redistricting.

We'll hand map-drawing to an independent commission of citizens, using criteria anyone can check: equal population, geographic compactness, and respect for existing community boundaries, with no partisan data and no incumbent protection. Michigan and Arizona give the job to independent citizen commissions, and their elections are more competitive and their voters more engaged.

Tennessee's constitution assigns legislative maps to the General Assembly, so a binding citizen commission takes a constitutional amendment: passage by two successive legislatures, then ratification by the voters. We'll start where a statute can reach: an advisory commission whose maps the legislature has to vote on in public, plus binding fairness criteria for congressional maps. Then we'll take the amendment to the people.

About 2,000 Tennesseans are chronically homeless, up from roughly 1,700 the year before, cycling through emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, jails, and shelters at $30,000 to $50,000 a person a year with zero housing outcome.

The answer is well proven: put people in apartments with clinical support and keep them there. In a five-city randomized trial, 73 percent of high-need Housing First participants were stably housed at twelve months against 31 percent under treatment as usual. Savings in shelters and emergency services offset 69 percent of the cost. We'll hold funded providers to the full model: scattered-site apartments, standard leases, no treatment preconditions, and services for as long as they're needed. Programs that water those elements down house fewer people.

Housing First is clear about its limits, and the trials show it neither worsens nor improves addiction itself. So we'll fund a sober track alongside it, with first-year recovery housing vouchers and 300 new certified recovery residence beds.

Private prisons create a financial incentive that runs directly against public safety: the company does better when recidivism is higher and sentences are longer. Tennessee's own Comptroller found CoreCivic facilities running at a 42 percent security-staff vacancy rate, with turnover reaching 188 percent at Trousdale Turner. Trousdale has had the highest prison homicide rate in the country. The state has assessed more than $45 million in penalties since 2022, most of it tied to chronic understaffing.

Ending these contracts will cost money before it saves any, and we'll say so plainly. Tennessee has no spare beds, so a phase-out means the state takes over running the same buildings as contracts expire, starting with South Central in 2028 and Hardeman County in 2029, both of which the public already owns. Host counties keep their revenue, and incumbent staff in good standing get hiring preference at state pay.

Then we'll put a prohibition in the constitution, so the next governor can't sign these contracts again.

Tennessee has been filling its classrooms by lowering the bar to enter them. Unfilled positions fell from 1,434 in fall 2023 to 817 in fall 2024 while the state issued 6,579 emergency credentials in a single year. About 13 percent of Tennessee teachers leave public school classrooms annually, against 2,966 who finish a state preparation program.

We'll repeal the Education Freedom Scholarship program and spend all $303.9 million a year of it on what decides whether a qualified teacher is in front of a Tennessee classroom next fall. A hundred and eleven of the state's 140 districts have no school social worker at all, so we'll hire counselors and social workers toward the 250-to-1 standard, starting where vacancies and emergency credentials run highest. Every teacher in their first two years gets two full years of trained coaching, because one year of it produces nothing.

Teachers who stay tell the state they stay for staff culture and school leadership. We'll pay for both.

In a survey of more than 200 lower-income Tennessee families, 85 percent had hit a benefits cliff, half said they had resisted better-paying work, and one in four had turned down a raise. A raise that costs a family its childcare subsidy leaves them worse off than before.

We'll take the cliffs out one rule at a time. On health coverage, we'll hold eligibility steady for twelve months at a time so a raise in March doesn't end coverage in April, and use sliding-scale premiums where the rule today is a hard cutoff. On cash assistance, we'll replace the flat $250 earnings deduction, the sharpest cliff Tennessee controls outright, with a graduated disregard that lets a parent work more hours and come out ahead.

Tennessee is re-procuring the system that decides who qualifies for TennCare, the software where every one of these rules actually takes effect. We'll write configurable benefit calculation into that solicitation before it goes out, rather than buying that capability later at a change order's price.

Tennessee is one of eight states that still taxes groceries. The 4 percent you pay at the register is part of what makes Tennessee's the third most regressive tax system in the country. Eighty-nine percent of Tennessee voters want the grocery tax cut. The legislature passed a $58 billion budget in April 2026 without a dollar of relief in it.

We'll drop the state rate to 2 percent in the first year and to zero by the third. Counties and cities keep their local grocery tax, and the state replaces the local share of what it collects, so no county loses a dollar.

The state gives up $856 million a year, and we'll pay for it by closing the corporate tax loopholes that let profitable companies book their Tennessee earnings somewhere else. School funding is set by formula and paid from the General Fund, which the corporate reforms keep whole. A family of four saves up to $400 a year. For a household making $30,000, that is about two weeks of groceries.

Tennessee lost roughly 2,600 people to drug overdoses in 2024, seven a day, more than car accidents or gun violence. The state has 23 licensed opioid treatment programs, the only clinics allowed to dispense methadone, for all 95 counties.

Arresting people out of addiction has never worked. Treatment does. We'll expand medication treatment to every county on Vermont's hub-and-spoke model, which pairs regional specialty hubs with local clinic spokes so patients get care close to home. On top of settlement dollars, we'll put new state money where treatment doesn't exist today.

Surviving an overdose should be the moment treatment starts. We'll begin the medication in the emergency room at the forty Tennessee hospitals seeing the most overdoses, open ninety respite beds so anyone who says yes has a safe bed that day, fund a thousand recovery housing vouchers for the year after, and make naloxone free in every fire station and school.

Every person pulled back from addiction is a parent who comes home, a worker who shows up, a neighbor who contributes.

xAI ran 35 gas turbines, more than 400 megawatts, in Memphis for a year without proper permits, calling them temporary. Shelby County's health department then issued the permits after the turbines had been running.

To prevent this from happening again, and to fight for clean air retroactively, we will build an Environmental Justice Division (EJD) within the Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC).

The EJD will create and publish the Tennessee EnviroScreen, a public map tracking cumulative burdens of pollution, disease, food insecurity, water quality, and more. In named communities with abnormally high burden, the division will analyze major sources in or beside communities, screen permits and deny any that would push a community beyond safe limits, and require net-benefit agreements between communities and new major sources within safe limits. Local programs will be allowed to set higher standards, but no program in a named community may issue a permit without EJD review and approval.

Permit fees will pay for community organizations to take part in permit proceedings and for neighborhood air monitors, and frontline groups will hold reserved seats on the board reviewing each local program. The EJD will also be tasked with reviewing and screening all computing facilities by size from one megawatt up and be empowered to order any source running in or beside a named community without a required permit to stop operating, regardless of the temporary or permanent status of their equipment.

Furthermore, we will make sure that Tennesseans are able to enforce our environmental laws in state court themselves, with attorney's fees when they win, to help ensure that a livable world remains available to us all.

Tennessee already gives its own employees twelve weeks of paid parental leave. Every other working Tennessean is on their own when a baby arrives, a parent is dying, or a diagnosis takes them out of work for months.

Colorado stood its program up in three years and paid more than 135,000 claims worth $687 million in the first year alone. The premium there started at 0.9 percent of wages, split evenly between employer and employee, and has since dropped to 0.88 percent because the program came in under budget. Small employers are exempt from the employer half, and we'll write that exemption into ours.

On Tennessee's $242 billion wage base, that premium raises roughly $2 billion a year, which funds every benefit and the cost of running the program. The state's part is a $57.5 million loan to extend the claims platform the Department of Labor already runs, repaid out of premiums once collections begin. It's insurance: every working Tennessean pays in, and every working Tennessean is covered when they need it most.

Farm bankruptcy filings under the federal provision written for farmers rose 46 percent nationally in 2025, and 69 percent across the Southeast. Tennessee has rich agricultural land and has grown dependent on supply chains that stretch thousands of miles, and when those chains break, our communities suffer.

We'll build two regional food hubs with cold storage so Tennessee-grown food stays in Tennessee, and require state institutions, including schools, hospitals, and state facilities, to buy Tennessee-grown first, with the state funding the price difference so school food budgets are held harmless.

Pick Tennessee Products already has nearly 3,200 members. We'll scale it into a statewide brand with dedicated marketing and retail partnerships, the way Kentucky Proud reached 70 to 80 percent recognition. And we'll issue tariff buffer grants at roughly $4.60 an acre across Tennessee's 2,775,000 acres of tariff-exposed row crops, reaching the crop diversification, value-added processing, and specialty crops federal aid misses.

More than one in five Tennessee children lives in a food-insecure household. In March 2025 the federal government cancelled the local food programs that had already put more than $12 million into Tennessee schools, food banks, and farms. The state has no replacement plan, so this is the replacement.

Tennessee already counts which of its schools are poorest. Federal rules let 242 of them feed every student free today, and not one has signed up. The rules leave part of the meal to whoever will cover it, and nobody does. We'll cover it. In year one we'll serve free breakfast and lunch in the 100 highest-need of those schools, and by year three all 242, about 202,000 kids, paid for out of money the state now sends to private schools.

We'll take the federal summer grocery benefit Tennessee refused in 2025 and again in 2026, and we'll fund kitchen grants of $50,000 to $200,000 so schools can cook from fresh ingredients instead of reheating.

Chattanooga's city-owned electric utility built the first community-wide gigabit network in the country, financed with revenue bonds and a federal grant, not a dollar of local tax money. The $220 million network returned $2.69 billion in community benefits in its first decade, and its fiber division now sends $48 million a year back to the electric side, holding power rates down.

Electric cooperatives have been free to sell retail internet here since 2017, and we'll back their buildouts across rural Tennessee first. City utilities are still fenced in: state law forbids a municipal utility from selling broadband outside its electric territory, and a federal court held that only the legislature can lift that. We'll lift it, keeping the protections already in state law, including a comptroller-reviewed business plan and a ban on subsidizing broadband out of electric rates.

Federal money is putting wire in the ground for the addresses that have none. The co-op and municipal lanes add competition, lower prices, and local accountability once that wire is laid. Every county, within five years.

A $20,000 rooftop solar system or a $3,000 to $5,000 whole-home weatherization is out of reach for most Tennessee families without accessible capital. Heat pump water heaters alone save up to $550 per year for a family of four. The savings are real, but the upfront cost is the barrier.

We'll create the Tennessee Green Bank, a state-chartered financing institution capitalized with $100 million in state funds. Modeled on the Connecticut Green Bank, which has drawn nearly seven dollars of private investment for every public dollar, the Tennessee version will finance residential solar, batteries, heat pumps, and weatherization. On-bill or income-based repayment ensures monthly loan payments stay below the energy savings each project delivers so households save money from day one. Manufactured housing will be prioritized since Tennessee has one of the highest manufactured housing shares in the country, the population with the highest energy burden and the highest return on weatherization investment.

Tennessee is one of only six states that pays for its roads without debt, on a 26 cents a gallon gasoline tax set in 2017. That discipline is worth protecting. The repair backlog is $38 billion, and it falls hardest on rural counties, where locally owned bridges are rated poor more often than state-owned ones, 4.7 percent against 3.8 percent.

We'll draw down Tennessee's $226 million federal bridge allocation before the window closes. At least 15 percent of it must go to locally owned bridges at up to 100 percent federal share with no county match. Tennessee had put only 44 percent of it under contract by March 2026. Small rural counties can't navigate that paperwork alone, so we'll bundle their projects and provide the engineering help that puts the money within reach of every eligible county.

We'll also shift maintenance toward sealing and treating roads while they're still in fair condition, which cuts lifecycle costs by roughly 25 percent against waiting for reconstruction.

Hunters and anglers pay for much of Tennessee's wildlife agency, and license fees haven't risen since 2015 while the agency's costs have climbed more than 30 percent. In 2025, the agency withdrew a fee increase after legislators promised dedicated funding instead. That funding never came, and now the agency is seeking an increase averaging 29 percent.

We'll deliver that funding. Our wildlife agency will get steady money of its own at no new tax or fee, and conservation money will go back to conservation.

We'll send 20 percent of the state's Tennessee Valley Authority payments in place of property taxes straight to the wildlife fund, roughly $33.6 million a year, without touching what counties and cities receive. The first roughly $11 million each year will match our full share of federal wildlife grants.

Only $2.2 million of this year's $23.5 million wetlands fund is left for wetlands, so we'll repeal the 2025 changes that let it cover payroll and have the Comptroller certify publicly every year that our conservation revenues stayed with their purpose. We'll also put $120 million over the term into the Heritage Conservation Trust Fund, which buys land and got nothing this year, renew the trust before it expires, and publish an independent assessment of state parks' upkeep needs.

Those of us who hunt and fish have paid for this agency for generations and were told we wouldn't have to pay more. This funding keeps that promise and keeps the wild places we all share funded for good.

More than half of beginning farmers nationwide leave agriculture within their first decade, and Tennessee is no exception. The barrier is land, and a landowner sitting on acreage has no particular reason to lease it to someone unproven.

Tennessee already runs the pieces: equipment cost-share through the Agricultural Enhancement Program, Extension training in all 95 counties, a matching service that connects new farmers to available land, and a $25 million fund for permanent conservation easements. What's missing is a reason for the landowner to say yes. Nebraska and Minnesota solved that with income tax credits, and Tennessee has no income tax, so our tools have to be different.

We'll add land lease cost-share to the Agricultural Enhancement Program, lower the acreage minimum in the Greenbelt law so small operations qualify for agricultural use-value assessment on their property taxes, and direct farmland preservation money toward easements that include beginning-farmer lease provisions. Every one of those runs through a program Tennessee already has.

Tennessee has about 400,000 veterans, and roughly 163,800 of them receive VA compensation or pension benefits. The state does not publish whether its county veteran service officers are filing claims, whether those claims get approved, or how much federal money they secure. Tennessee's veteran suicide rate is 48.2 per 100,000, about four veterans a week, well above the national rate of 35.2.

We'll fund a full-time service officer in all 95 counties, publish claims filed, claims approved, and benefits secured by county, and we'll deploy digital screening tools that work offline so rural veterans don't drive hours for a form. A veteran-to-veteran peer support network on New York's Joseph P. Dwyer model starts in 30 high-need rural counties and reaches all 95.

Employment specialists at Tennessee's VA medical centers will run Individual Placement and Support, which put 68.6 percent of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder into competitive jobs against 57.0 percent in traditional programs. The state pays only on verified placements.

Tennessee's November 2026 ballot lists 15 candidates for governor, and 13 of them are independents. A list that long dilutes the signal of the most viable candidates, the ones most prepared for late-campaign work like serious debates.

We'll shorten that list in August. On primary day, voters already ask for a Republican ballot, a Democratic ballot, or neither. We'll make that third ballot the Independent ballot, open to anyone who doesn't take a party ballot. Voters will rank the independents, and each round will drop the last-place candidate until two remain.

An extra contest sounds like extra work for counties, but it will print on the ballot no-party voters already receive, adding no election day, polling place, or poll worker, and the state will reimburse 100% of each county's certified added cost.

In November, we'll see the party nominees and at most two independents who each won their place, so our choice no longer gets lost in a list of 15.

Tennessee has no minimum wage of its own. The floor here is the federal $7.25, unchanged since 2009. The MIT Living Wage Calculator puts what each of two working parents needs to raise a child in this state at nearly $20 an hour.

We'll close that distance on a published schedule: $12 the first year, $15 the second, $18 the third, and $21 the fourth, indexed to inflation after that so the floor holds its value. California raised fast food wages to $20, and researchers at Harvard and Berkeley found no drop in jobs, hours, or benefits, though other economists read the data differently. Small businesses get tax credits, technical assistance, and simpler rules while they adjust.

We'll also repeal the 2013 law that forbids Tennessee cities from setting their own wage floors. If the legislature drags its feet on $21, the voters of Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga shouldn't have to wait for it.

Hurricane Helene disrupted operations at up to 24 drinking water plants and forced boil water advisories across East Tennessee. But despite federal money to harden those plants against future storms being available, Tennessee did not ask for it.

Federal disaster law sets aside up to 15 percent of what Washington spends on a declared disaster for work that keeps the next storm from doing the same damage. Across fifteen declarations in five years, Tennessee drew $8.5 million of it. We'll file on every plant that qualifies, in every round that opens, and pay our share out of the $30 million in grant money we're already sitting on.

We'll also put the federal money Tennessee already holds to work, starting with the $298 million for lead service lines that the state has lent to nobody. Lastly, we'll backfill an expiring federal subsidy that lets Tennessee forgive loans to its water systems in the poorest areas.

Nashville wrote Tennessee's first local data center rules in 2026, and a developer sued within weeks. Counties on their own could lose fights against billion-dollar operators, which is why we need statewide legislation.

We'll write one standard into state law for every data center, AI campus, and crypto mine at one megawatt and above, and let any city or county set stricter standards if they choose. These operations belong on heavy-industrial land, set back from homes, schools, and places of worship, and set back farther as power and floor area grow, up to two miles. Everything a company runs on a site or wires to it will count as one facility, including what it calls temporary or somebody else's property.

We'll require closed-loop cooling so facilities recycle water instead of draining the county's, and in a declared drought households and farms will get access to water first. Each facility will hold to 55 decibels by day and 45 at night, measured at the property line, and file a quarterly public report of its power, water, and emissions. Outages will run on batteries sized to meet full load for at least two hours, and when those batteries are spent the computing shuts down rather than drawing on the neighbors' power. Engines may run only for life safety, in a real, unplanned outage, and never as a result of a spike in energy costs.

We'll ban nondisclosure agreements between an operator and any unit of government in Tennessee and put every community benefit agreement in a public registry. Every facility will register with the state each year, pay the fee that funds its own oversight, and post a bond that pays to clear the site if it's abandoned. The state will refuse registration when a facility would push a community's pollution and health burdens above the lower of the state or county median.

Tennessee has the land and power these companies want so we get to set the terms and make sure no county has to win their fight on their own.

The word "Tennessee" comes from Tanasi, a Cherokee town that now lies under Tellico Reservoir. At Red Clay the Cherokee Nation held its last councils before removal. Roughly 8,000 people were held at Fort Cass before being forced west, about one in four of them dying in the camps, on the trail, or soon after arrival.

One piece of that history is sitting in the United States Senate right now. A bill returning 76 acres of ancestral land near Vonore to tribal trust, including the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and the Chota and Tanasi memorials, passed the House by voice vote without recorded opposition and has gone nowhere since. Supporting it costs Tennessee nothing, and we'll push it across.

Beyond that bill, we'll give Indigenous sacred sites real enforceable protection in state law, work with the State Board of Education so every Tennessee student learns this as Tennessee history, and accelerate the return of remains and sacred objects. The University of Tennessee alone reports more than 3,000 ancestors still waiting to go home.

Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga are each building transit on their own. Nashville voters approved a $3.1 billion plan and Memphis won federal money for bus rapid transit, and no dedicated state operating funding or state-led rail program ties any of it together.

We'll create a Tennessee Transit Investment Program that pays cities 10 to 20 cents on every dollar they raise through the local transit surcharge, capped at $25 million a year statewide with no jurisdiction taking more than 40 percent of the pool. Statewide design standards will require dedicated lanes, buses every 10 minutes at peak, and committed institutional anchors like hospitals and universities before construction, which can raise ridership as much as 60 percent.

Memphis needs this most: its transit authority has lost roughly three-quarters of its ridership since 2013 and remains one of the few major American metros with no dedicated transit funding. Rail starts with $7.5 million for corridor feasibility studies, so when a city proves demand and wins federal dollars, Tennessee shows up as a partner.

When Tennessee builds, Tennesseans should build it. A 2016 state law blocks cities like Nashville from the local-hire programs their own voters approved and bars the state itself from preferring Tennessee workers on state-funded projects.

We'll replace it with a local workforce law for state-funded projects over $500,000. Contractors will meet hours-based Tennessee-workforce goals, with a good-faith off-ramp instead of punitive debarment. The goals target economic disadvantage rather than residency mandates. Built-in safeguards include published and objective bid scoring, a neutral first-source referral center so no official ever hand-picks a hire, certified-payroll reporting with an annual public compliance report, and an apprenticeship floor that turns projects into careers. This way every dollar Tennessee spends building its own infrastructure can come back as a Tennessee paycheck.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is a public utility and must stay that way. No privatization, no sell-off; the only transfer we'd accept is of our portion of the grid to Tennessee itself.

Through TVA, Tennessee is already a nuclear state. The Authority runs four reactors at Sequoyah and Watts Bar that generate enough baseload power for more than 4.5 million homes, and is developing a small modular reactor at Clinch River on a $400 million federal grant with up to $50 million in state money. But the state doesn't license reactors, so we'll control what we can and insist on accountability: that $50 million will come with quarterly public cost reporting, overrun caps with clawbacks, ratepayer protection so overruns stay off power bills, and a full public accounting of waste management and decommissioning.

Tennessee also hosts more licensed radioactive-waste processors than any other state, and processed waste has been reaching ordinary household landfills, a practice we must end immediately. We'll tighten release standards, require public notice and county consent first, track every out-of-state and foreign shipment, and pay the state's radiological inspectors from fees paid by the industry's use of our land.

Tennessee's hospitals tax themselves to pay for TennCare. The assessment collects about $1.4 billion a year and draws billions more in federal match that flows back out as payment for care. The tax expires every July, so hospitals budget around financing guaranteed twelve months at a time.

We'll authorize it for multiple years, keeping the protections already written into it: the assessment voids if TennCare funding falls below the recommended budget level, and not a dollar of the trust fund may be moved into the General Fund.

The 2025 federal budget law froze the revenue base at what hospitals earned in 2021, so the financing covers less of its job every year. Only Washington can unfreeze it, so we'll press Tennessee's delegation for a fix that lets states refresh a frozen base. That same law cuts the assessment ceiling for states that expand Medicaid, and nobody has said whether it reaches a state expanding now. We'll demand that answer in writing, because 27 rural hospitals are vulnerable enough that this money is the difference between open and closed.

Sixty-three percent of Tennessee voters support legalizing recreational cannabis, including 53 percent of Republicans. Tennessee is now one of the only states with no legal cannabis market of any kind while nearly every neighbor has one. The legal industry employed 425,000 people full-time across the country in 2024.

We'll establish a regulated adult-use market with real guardrails and send every dollar of the 15 percent excise on retail sales to the Future Families Fund. In April 2026 the federal government moved state-licensed medical marijuana into the tier for drugs with accepted medical use while adult use stayed in the strictest tier. That hands Tennessee a defensible first step: a full medical program, on the way to adult use.

We'll clear every cannabis-only record automatically, with no petition process that costs money and takes years. A Cannabis Equity Fund will make capital grants to entrepreneurs in the communities enforcement hit hardest, and social equity applicants will pay nothing in license fees.

The median home in Nashville now costs more than five times what the median household there earns. Tennessee cannot set interest rates or lumber prices, and it can decide how long a permit takes and where the state's own housing dollars go.

Most small projects start with months of architectural review and thousands of dollars in design fees before a permit is even filed. That prices out the builders most likely to put up a duplex or a garage apartment. We'll publish a library of pre-engineered, code-compliant plans through the state housing agency, free to any builder, and cities can add their own designs to it. Build from a library plan and the state review fee is waived and the local decision comes back in five business days. Drawing the whole library costs about $345,000.

Tennessee also awards roughly $25 million a year in federal housing tax credits. The scoring sheet gives location four points out of a hundred, while a gazebo and a pergola together score the same. We'll fix the scoring. Same money, better places.

For years the major equipment manufacturers locked their diagnostic software, restricted access to parts, and steered every repair back through their own dealers. Federal regulators sued John Deere over it, and in July 2026 the company accepted a ten-year settlement giving farmers and independent shops the same repair tools its dealers get.

That settlement is one company for ten years. The nearest authorized dealer may still be hours from the field, and the wait can still cost a crop.

We'll pass a right-to-repair statute covering every manufacturer that sells agricultural equipment in Tennessee, requiring diagnostic tools, parts, software, and documentation on fair and reasonable terms. Federal law already says choosing your own mechanic cannot void a warranty, and our statute makes that promise enforceable in a Tennessee court. A manufacturer keeps every right it has to refuse a claim for damage an improper repair caused. It costs the state nothing, and it's a bill we can pass on day one.

Tennessee has lost 16 rural hospitals since 2010, more per capita than any other state. Three-quarters of the 25 essential-access rural hospitals still open are at high risk of closing. Ninety-three of 95 counties are designated, in whole or in part, as shortage areas for primary care, dental, or mental health care.

Anyone who wants to open a hospital or many kinds of clinics here still needs a state ruling that the service is "needed." Certificate-of-need review was supposed to hold costs down. Federal antitrust staff told Tennessee's legislature in April 2026 what they have argued for decades: the review protects the hospitals already in a market and keeps new providers out of the counties shortest of care.

Lawmakers have started unwinding it and exempted new hospitals effective July 2028. We'll move that date up so providers can break ground now, and repeal what is left for freestanding emergency departments, diagnostic centers, rehabilitation, home care, hospice, and nursing homes. None of it costs the state a dollar.

Tennessee still sends about 48 percent of its Medicaid long-term care dollars to institutions, against about 36 percent nationally, and ranks 47th in the country on long-term care. Nearly 14,000 TennCare members live in nursing facilities, and by 2040 Tennesseans 85 and over will grow 72 percent to 205,000. The state cannot build nursing homes fast enough to meet that, and it cannot afford to.

Tennessee pays about $93,000 a year for a nursing facility resident and about $40,000 for someone served at home. We'll fund 400 transitions out of facilities every year on top of what the state already does, publish an annual target, and report the count quarterly. The moving allowance has sat at a $2,000 lifetime cap, and we'll raise it.

Home health aides here earn about $16 an hour, below the national average, while turnover runs near 80 percent. We'll raise their pay, build pathways from aide to licensed nurse, and fund the meals, transportation, and elder abuse prevention that make home viable.

Memphis voters chose ranked choice voting in 2008 and defended it by 25 points in 2018, yet never got to use it. A 2022 law bans it for any statewide or local office. Meanwhile, Tennessee's constitution hands the governor's office to whoever gets the most votes, so a crowded field can elect a governor most voters opposed.

We'll repeal that ban and let any city or county use ranked choice voting for its own offices, at its own cost.

For governor, we'll pass a ranked-count law and amend the constitution to explicitly allow it going forward. The 2030 race will go by most votes, and the ranked count will start in 2034.

A ranked count gives every candidate a reason to talk to people who don't already agree with them. Best of all, a vote for a long shot is never wasted: if a voter's first choice is eliminated, the ballot counts toward their next choice.

On August 26, 2025, Tennessee opened a childcare waitlist. A family of four earning up to $87,324 still qualifies on income, and qualifying stopped being enough. On October 1 the state began charging every approved family 5 percent of gross income, about $134 a month for a family of four at the poverty line. It also dropped the higher rates it paid providers in rural counties and outside business hours.

We'll start clearing that waitlist in year one out of the Future Families Fund's annual draw, and finish it by year four, because these are families the state told they qualified and then told to wait. In year four we'll waive the copay again below 150 percent of poverty and restore the rural and off-hours rates, because a subsidy is worth nothing where no provider will take it.

Then we'll raise the income line to $99,000 for a family of four. Parents choose the provider: center-based, home-based, faith-based, whatever works.

In Tennessee communities with data centers, residential bills rose 3.2 percent from 2023 to 2024 while commercial bills fell. It could get worse: the Tennessee Valley Authority has fielded roughly 11,000 megawatts of data center requests, five times the data center load it serves today. If our grid cannot support a data center, it should not be built here, and none should run at full power beside a neighborhood that has gone dark.

We'll require every data center, AI cluster, and crypto mine at 1 megawatt or above to buy its power from the grid. Facilities will pay up front for their wires and post one security covering what the utility has yet to recover and the clean power they are still committed to buy, recalculated every year and released as those balances fall.

To stop the gas buildout driven by current demand, we'll require every facility to match 110 percent of its use with new clean generation on that same grid. One that falls short must pay a rising charge per megawatt-hour until it contracts the supply, and three short years in five will suspend its registration. A quarter of those charges and whatever security is left after payouts will fund home batteries and efficiency upgrades for households in host communities.

Facilities will install shutoff equipment before they run and keep battery storage sized to at least two hours of their load. In grid emergencies where a utility orders a load cut the facility may draw no grid power until the cut ends, and must operate on battery storage only with no engine start and no compensation.

The security is held by the Tennessee Renewable Power Authority, and the grants run through the Tennessee Green Bank. Neither exists yet, so until they do the State Treasurer will hold the security and the state's Office of Energy Programs will run the grants.

This way a company building here covers its own costs and depends on the same grid we do, so the houses next door keep their money safe and their lights on.

Tennessee has a proud tradition of gun ownership, and nothing here changes that. You can still buy a gun from a private seller in this state with no background check at all, so we'll require one on every firearm sale.

Firearms are the leading cause of death for Tennessee children, and the state's only storage policy today is a sales-tax break on gun safes. We'll require gun owners to store firearms securely when children are in the home. For someone in crisis, we'll create a court process to temporarily remove firearms, replacing the 2024 law that barred local governments from acting on their own. Tennessee lost 878 people to gun suicide in 2023 and 667 to gun homicide. Indiana's version of this law cut gun suicides by 7.5 percent, Connecticut's by 13.7 percent once it was actively enforced.

The key word is court. A judge reviews sworn evidence before any order issues, and the owner gets a prompt hearing to contest it.

Between 2023 and 2025 Tennessee sampled 607 public water systems and found PFAS, the chemicals that don't break down in water or in people, in 407 of them, 34 of those above the federal limit. Two national settlements were paying out at the time, 3M's $10.3 billion package and $1.185 billion from Chemours, DuPont, and Corteva. The state's own guidance pointed those communities toward loan programs and never mentioned the settlements.

Every primary claim window closed in 2026. What remains is a supplemental fund open through December 2030 for systems that file within 45 days of a new qualifying test. So we'll require the state to notify every water system within five business days of a result that opens a window, and to publish a running list of open deadlines.

Tennessee's Attorney General has sued more than 20 PFAS manufacturers. We'll ring-fence every recovery in a cleanup fund that pays for treatment, gets PFAS firefighting foam out of Tennessee fire stations, and tests the wells of the one in ten Tennesseans nobody monitors.

At a community health center, the bill is set by what you earn, not by whether you have insurance. Tennessee has 30 such organizations running about 220 sites, and whole counties have no site at all.

We'll put state matching money behind every new site that opens in an underserved county, $23 million to build satellite campuses and mobile units, and $8 million a year to keep them staffed. Tennessee's medical schools are already sending dental care units into rural counties; that should be the norm rather than the exception.

We'll also get community health workers paid through TennCare. They are trusted people from their own neighborhoods, trained to connect clinical care to daily life, and they reduce emergency room visits. Tennessee funds their training and a state association accredits the employers who hire them, and TennCare still won't cover the work as a benefit. More than half the states already do, and we'll file the amendment that makes Tennessee the next one.

Data centers have already requested roughly 11,000 megawatts of power; that's five times the data center load served today. Right now, the facilities in that queue cannot be properly evaluated because Tennessee has no office to enforce environmental justice or to comprehensively evaluate and track how new and existing operations affect communities. Building that office could take up to two years, which is why we're calling for a 24 month moratorium until that office is stood up and standards are in place. The moratorium may end earlier, provided our work is done.

On day one we'll direct the state's environmental agency to design the Environmental Justice Division and the Tennessee EnviroScreen map so they're ready. The moratorium's design ensures that no data center, AI campus, or crypto mine at a megawatt or above will register or break ground until the office is staffed, the map is live, and the siting, water, noise, emergency, outage, renewable matching, and backup-power rules are in force. The pause will reach back to the day the bill was filed so companies cannot race to apply before a vote. If regulatory bodies and standards are not enacted within the 24 months, our environmental agency will run the review process in the interim and issue only conditional registrations until the bodies and standards are in place.

Affected facilities already permitted or under construction will be required to meet the new standards within twelve months. Projects filed during the pause will pay their fees up front, so the queue can fund the standup of the EJ Division. Projects in a community the EnviroScreen map flags for pollution and health burden will have to leave that burden lower than they found it and sign a binding agreement the EJ Division enforces. Data centers can wait. The air, the water, and the quiet the rest of us enjoy cannot.

Tennessee farmers lead the country in no-till and reduced tillage, which they use on 93 percent of our cropland tillage acres. Even so, most landowners receive little or nothing for keeping that land a carbon sink. The practices are there; the payments aren't.

We'll start those payments. Farmers who plant cover crops, cut back on plowing, or rotate their grazing will earn the federal rate, which for cover crops is $74.10 an acre, up from the $50 the state pays today. We'll pay for 50,000 acres and skip any acre that already draws federal cost-share, so every dollar is new money in farmers' pockets.

We'll also protect the land itself by making the state's farmland preservation fund permanent and putting $40 to $60 million into it over four years. Those dollars will become Tennessee's match for a federal easement program, so each state dollar buys roughly two dollars of easement.

That way the farmers who already do this work get paid for it, and the land that feeds us stays farmland.

The 2020 Cookeville tornado killed 19 people at 1:50 in the morning and the 2021 Waverly flood killed 20 people because warnings couldn't reach them. Nighttime tornadoes kill at 2.5 times the rate of daytime events, a disparity directly tied to warning reach.

Tennessee has invested in disaster infrastructure: a $100 million reserve fund, a statewide weather mesonet now under construction, and FirstNet integration for all 118 public safety answering points. What hasn't been built is the local capacity to use it. The hard part is the last mile, getting a warning to a house at 2 a.m. Tennessee also has no published shelter list with accessibility information, despite over 1.7 million adults with disabilities.

We'll fix all three with a 95-county emergency management assessment, last-mile warning pilots in the highest-risk areas, and a statewide shelter inventory with accessibility details and live status reporting so families can find a confirmed-open shelter when a storm hits.

In 2025 Tennessee dissolved its independent Human Rights Commission and folded enforcement into the Attorney General's office, and pending cases were dismissed in the transition. Federal enforcement shrank at the same time, so Tennesseans who face discrimination are left with fewer and weaker places to turn.

No state law here stops a landlord from refusing an apartment, or a restaurant or hospital from turning someone away, over sexual orientation or gender identity. In employment only a federal backstop remains, and it does not reach employers with fewer than fifteen workers or offer any remedy in a Tennessee court. Twenty-one states and Washington, D.C. have enacted full protections.

We'll repeal the 2011 law that stops Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis, and Chattanooga from protecting their own residents, enact statewide protections in employment, housing, public accommodations, and lending, and restore enforcement that is genuinely independent. Without that, protections are promises written on paper.

In November 2024, 69 percent of Tennessee's ballots were cast in person during early voting. Tennesseans vote when voting is accessible, and Tennessee ranks as low as 45th nationally in turnout. Eight rural counties have registration rates below 75 percent, and an estimated 156,000 eligible residents in the four counties around our biggest cities aren't registered at all.

We'll register voters automatically at the driver's license counter, with an opt-out, the way 24 states already do. No-excuse absentee voting means a shift worker or a farmer doesn't have to explain why they can't show up in person. A flexible voting holiday gives every worker one paid day off during early voting, with the employer choosing which day so businesses aren't all shut down at once.

Tennessee elections are run by Tennesseans. We'll bar armed federal personnel from our polling places without an invitation from the county election commission, and make intimidating a voter here a state felony.

Tennessee's agencies produce good data. Environment and Conservation runs daily-updated viewers on water, air, and site cleanup; Health has surveyed adult health every year since 1984; and the Comptroller added an economic-incentives dashboard in 2025. Every agency measures its own corner, and nobody puts the picture together.

We'll create a Tennessee Outcomes Commissioner under the Comptroller, on a six-year term that spans gubernatorial transitions, whose job is synthesis rather than collecting anything new. The Commissioner publishes a Wellbeing Report tracking economic security, health, education, housing, and opportunity across all 95 counties. An Environmental Quality Report tracks water quality, air quality, soil health, forest cover, and species at risk across the state's major watersheds.

A cap of 30 indicators across both reports, written into the law, keeps them readable. The Comptroller audits the methodology, the legislature holds an annual hearing on the findings, and the Governor addresses them in the budget message.

Tennessee puts anyone on the ballot for governor who collects 25 signatures. In 2026, 27 people filed petitions and 15 made the November ballot, and none had to swear they can legally serve.

We'll raise that bar for every candidate, Republican, Democrat or independent. Each will file a petition signed by 2,500 registered voters, with no fee and no option to pay instead. A higher bar can sound like shutting people out, but 2,500 is about 0.14 percent of the 1,739,882 votes cast for governor in 2022. Candidates will also swear they meet the Constitution's qualifications and aren't barred by a felony conviction, and lying will be perjury.

Behind that oath, the state will remove a candidate the law bars, including independents, whom today's election code can't reach. It will act only on a certified conviction or another conclusive public record. A candidate who withdraws on their own by the 50th day before the election will come off the ballot, and one who withdraws by the 40th will leave the race with their name kept on ballots already printed. Where voters mark one name, votes for a removed or late-withdrawn candidate won't count.

We choose our governor from the November ballot. Every name on it will belong to someone who has shown real support and sworn they can serve.

While Tennessee's voice-cloning ban was the country's first, it stops at voice and likeness and could go much further to regulate AI. Right now hiring algorithms can screen out Tennessee applicants without any information or appeal to a person's judgment and chatbots can impersonate personal relationships to keep your attention without disclosure. Artificial Intelligence now touches our work and our personal life unchecked, and we need to rein it in.

We'll ban social scoring, subliminal manipulation, real-time mass biometric surveillance without a judge's order, and systems built to push a person toward self-harm. No AI will simulate romance, sex, or intimacy with a minor, and parental consent will be no defense. Any system that talks with you will say it is a machine, and applications with over a million monthly users will mark every synthetic image, video, or sound their systems make as machine-made.

When a machine makes or shapes a decision about your job, home, or medical care, a person must review it before you're denied, you'll have the right to know what data was used for the decision, and the right to appeal to a person who can overrule the decision and get an answer to your appeal within 30 days. Lastly, we'll make it illegal for a business to price essential goods and services like groceries, rents, or emergency services based on your data.

A permanent Tennessee AI Commission will write the rules, register every system that's affected, and demand records necessary for enforcement. We'll also make sure the Attorney General enforces every duty, and that persons harmed can sue.

Tennessee's forests, rivers, and elevations are what make our state's outdoors so unique, and each is under pressure. We'll put state and federal dollars behind all three.

The forest is most urgent. Cherokee is Tennessee's only national forest, and most of its 660,000 acres are fast-tracked for expanded logging. We'll oppose that publicly and file state comments on every proposed timber sale.

Next our rivers hold more freshwater species than almost anywhere on Earth. The Cumberland River Aquatic Center had produced 170,990 juvenile mussels across 17 species by early 2021 and has kept producing since. The work is limited by money, so we'll draw down every federal dollar available, up to 75 percent of planning and 65 percent of implementation, and scale recovery across the Tennessee and Cumberland river systems.

Lastly, we'll help protected places succeed by keeping them connected. Tennessee has no corridor plan and no crossing program, and never applied to the $350 million federal program that seven other Appalachian states have used. We'll fund a plan ourselves and seek federal dollars to tie Cherokee to the Cumberland Plateau and West Tennessee's bottomland hardwoods, so what we protect can be held together.

Federal redlining maps from the 1930s graded Black neighborhoods across Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville as hazardous because of the color of the people living in them. When Interstate 40 needed a route through Nashville, the original plan ran near wealthy white neighborhoods, so the state moved it north through Jefferson Street, demolishing more than 620 homes and displacing 128 businesses, 80 percent of them Black-owned. Federal Reserve researchers have documented that the effects persist today on the same blocks: lower homeownership, lower property values, lower credit scores.

We'll create a Community Restoration Fund for communities with documented histories of government-caused disinvestment: neighborhoods on the federal redlining maps, communities displaced by highway routing, areas disrupted by urban renewal. The fund will pay for down payment assistance and community land trusts so longtime residents build equity, and startup grants for entrepreneurs. Anti-displacement protections mean the people who stayed through decades of neglect aren't priced out by the recovery.

The receipts are in the public record.

Most Tennesseans share the same goal regardless of politics or faith: fewer abortions, healthier families. The question is which policies actually get us there. Making abortions illegal doesn't stop them. It makes them costlier, riskier, and later, the opposite of what the law claimed to protect.

What reduces abortion is preventing unintended pregnancy. When Colorado expanded free contraception access, teen abortions fell by more than 40 percent. We'll fund affordable contraception access and rewrite the family life education statutes that today center on abstinence, so Tennessee teaches comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education. This is the pro-life case for prevention.

Tennessee protected access to in vitro fertilization and birth control in 2025, and legislators have already moved to weaken that law. We'll enforce and expand it. Every Tennessean has the right to make their own medical decisions without the government standing in the exam room.

Roughly three-quarters of Tennessee's 95 counties have no fixed-route bus at all. What they have is demand-response service you book a week ahead. That works for a one-off errand and not for a shift that starts at six every Tuesday morning, an evening class, or a standing appointment at the regional hospital.

We'll set up opt-in Regional Transit Authorities through Tennessee's nine Development Districts, using the Human Resource Agency networks driving those routes as the operators, with no unfunded mandate on any county. Each participating county seat gets at least two fixed-route round-trips per weekday to its nearest regional hub. Fares are capped at $5 round trip, free for seniors and veterans, and schedules published in the standard format so the routes show up in map apps.

New state operating dollars will sit on top of the roughly $21 million a year in existing transit investment grants and the federal rural transit money Tennessee has been leaving on the table.

About 570,000 Tennesseans buy health insurance on healthcare.gov, and the fees they pay on their premiums, roughly $120 million a year, go straight to Washington. Tennessee has no say over the platform, the enrollment help, or the fees.

We'll create a Tennessee Marketplace Authority with a citizen board to run the marketplace here as early as the 2029 plan year. Insurers keep competing exactly as they do now; what changes is who runs the platform and who keeps the money. Running the marketplace costs about $95 million a year, leaving roughly $25 million. The surplus funds a reinsurance pool that pays the most expensive claims so insurers can price everyone else lower, targeting a 10 to 15 percent premium cut.

When the enhanced federal credits expired, more than 70,000 Tennesseans dropped coverage in a single year. We'll cap premiums at 5 percent of household income for families up to 300 percent of the poverty line, and step that subsidy back down if Washington restores its own.

Tennessee farms are dwindling, down to just over 60,000 farms, and we're projected to lose over a million acres of farmland by 2040. If we want to save these farms, we need to save the farmers first. According to the National Rural Health Association, farmers and ranchers die by suicide at up to 3.5 times the rate of the general population. With farm debt approaching record levels, crop prices down roughly a third since 2022, and 70% of rural counties without a single psychiatrist, stress can turn into despair. Farmers shouldn't have to face that alone.

The Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network established a Farmers Task Force in 2018, but we still need real infrastructure: agriculture-specific crisis services, expanded rural mental health through telehealth, and peer support networks modeled on programs working in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Reaching out for help isn't weakness, it's a strength. Tennessee needs to make sure that help is actually there when farmers need it.

Pregnancy-associated deaths in Tennessee more than doubled from 63 in 2019 to 134 in 2021 and still stood at 96 in 2023. The state's own Maternal Mortality Review Committee found roughly three-quarters of them preventable. Black women died at 2.5 times the rate of white women. More than a third of these deaths happen between 43 days and a year after delivery, long after most mothers have lost contact with the healthcare system.

Tennessee extended TennCare coverage to twelve months postpartum, and coverage on paper means nothing if the services aren't there. We'll cover doulas through Medicaid, where a review of 26 trials found continuous labor support cuts cesarean deliveries by about 25 percent. Group prenatal care gets paid for, and addiction treatment goes inside prenatal care in East Tennessee, which accounts for 56 percent of the state's maternal deaths from substance use.

No woman should have to choose between getting help and keeping her child.

The Duck River supplies drinking water to more than 250,000 people in nine fast-growing counties south of Nashville, but the state's planning partnership for it expires on December 31, 2026, before the next governor takes office. Nobody in Tennessee decides how much water a growing region can take, or from where, before it runs short.

We'll put someone in charge of that decision. A day-one executive order will bring the Duck River partnership back, and regional councils will write five-year plans saying how much water their region can take and from where. Those plans will decide state water grants and loan priority, and only a published waiver will get around them.

Tennessee's drought plan, last revised in 2010, says only that priorities for hospitals, nursing homes, and firefighting "should be established." We'll write down who cuts back first, putting human health and safety first, protecting livestock water, and making lawn and other discretionary watering the first to go. When a dry summer comes, we'll know ahead of time that our health, our safety, and our livestock come before anyone's lawn.

Tennessee cities already built the working models. Memphis invented Crisis Intervention Team training in 1988, the year after police shot a man in crisis. Nashville runs a police co-responder program and, separately, a fire-based alternative-response program. Knoxville's co-responder teams resolved 97 percent of interactions without an arrest in 2024, with zero uses of force, and the city voted to expand from four teams to six.

The job is to scale what Tennessee cities have proven into more cities and into 911 itself. We'll offer competitive matching grants to cities expanding crisis response, each city free to choose its model. The grants fund the expansion margin rather than existing operations, and each requires outcome reporting and response-time standards. We'll station behavioral health clinicians inside metro 911 dispatch so a crisis gets routed to a crisis team at the point of the call.

Far from defunding the police, this frees officers to focus on real crime. Let cops be cops.

Local law enforcement answers to Tennessee voters, and the legislature has spent two years taking that choice away. In 2025 it paid agencies to sign federal immigration agreements and made it a felony for a local official to vote for a sanctuary policy. In 2026 it required every county sheriff to sign one by January 1, 2027, or lose state funding. Two Tennessee agencies took part in January 2025; by April 2026 it was forty-nine sheriffs.

We'll champion repeal of both laws and restore each county's right to decide how its own deputies spend their shifts. Nothing here asks a sheriff to release someone wanted for a violent crime. Repeal asks the state to stop spending Tennessee deputies on a federal mission.

Most of these agreements run through the jail, and word of what happens there travels a neighborhood faster than any outreach program. A county where people are afraid to call 911 is not a safer county.

Tennessee buries about a million tons of recyclable material every year, worth roughly $150 million, well short of the state's own 25 percent waste-reduction goal. Middle Tennessee's largest landfill for household garbage is projected to reach capacity around 2029, and the industry's answer is to site new mega-landfills on rural counties.

We'll do the opposite and spend the recycling money Tennessee already collects. The Solid Waste Management Fund took in $11.6 million in 2024 and disbursed only $8.8 million, closing the year on a $24.2 million balance. We'll accelerate grants from the fund's uncommitted portion into drop-off convenience centers, recycling equipment, and composting grants in the rural counties with the worst access.

At least 55 counties and 18 cities have adopted the law letting a community reject a new landfill, and a 2026 state task force is trying to weaken the law's siting criteria at the waste industry's urging. We'll protect that authority and publish model host-community-agreement standards so counties consenting to host landfills stop getting shortchanged.

Tennessee rewrote its K-12 health and lifetime wellness standards in November 2024, and they reach classrooms for the first time in the 2026-27 school year with nothing behind them. We'll pay for that rollout: instructional materials matched to the new standards, training for the teachers delivering them, and the content the revision left thin. That means current nutrition science, mental health literacy, and digital wellness lessons that did not exist when the 2016 standards were written.

On money, Tennessee got there first. The state has required a half-credit personal finance course to graduate since the class of 2013. The same rule lets a single Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps course substitute for it, so a student can finish high school without ever taking it. We'll close that substitution and modernize what the course teaches, from buy-now-pay-later apps to crypto scams and student loans, so students learn what a lease commits them to before they sign one.

Tennessee ranks dead last in the country on school spending, about $12,100 a student against a national average near $19,400. Our kids didn't create that, and they can't fix it.

We'll create the Future Families Fund, a state-owned sovereign wealth fund that never spends its principal, built the way Alaska built its Permanent Fund. Five sources pay in: a 15 percent cannabis tax, a higher cigarette tax, a contribution on estates above $5 million, a 7 percent contribution on capital gains above $1 million, and voluntary gifts. We'll seed it with $1.25 billion of last year's surplus. What the state spends each year is a draw set by formula against the Fund's trailing market value, and everything earned above it is reinvested.

Statute will bar that draw from vouchers, from sectarian schools, and from any line the school funding formula already pays. The first term's draw goes to child care and finishes it. We'll put the Fund in the constitution so no future legislature can reach the principal.

Tennessee spends about $48 million a year training doctors through TennCare, and none of it depends on where those doctors end up practicing. We train them and watch them leave, while rural emergency departments cut hours because they cannot staff a shift.

In 2007 Mississippi started identifying rural kids who wanted to be doctors, paid for medical school in exchange for a commitment to come home, and tracked what happened. Fifteen years on, about 85 percent of those who completed the commitment were still practicing in rural Mississippi. The program works because it doesn't fight human nature; you pay for the training and you enforce the deal.

A Tennessee version will start with one anchor training institution and an opening cohort of 25 to 50 rural-origin students, with contract enforcement and retention tracking from day one. We'll fill all thirty physician visa waiver slots the state holds each year and fund the match to the federal maximum on loan repayment. About $6 million a year, planted now because a pipeline takes eight years to bear.

Tennessee has the research universities, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and one of the country's largest healthcare industry clusters. What it doesn't have is the connective tissue between a breakthrough in a lab here and a company here that hires people here.

Georgia has spent about $20 million a year on that problem since 1991 and reports more than $16 billion in research grants, venture capital, and matching funds drawn into the state. We'll start at a third of that, $7 million a year, aimed only at the hard sciences: medicine, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation.

When one of our universities recruits a leading researcher, we'll match its investment in lab equipment dollar for dollar, and the state keeps title, so if the researcher leaves, the lab stays. A researcher ready to commercialize gets matching grants for proof-of-concept work, and we'll take no equity, no board seat, and no share of revenue. The grant is repaid only if the company is acquired or goes public.

CoverKids already insures Tennessee children up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level. We'll raise that to 300 percent, the highest income at which federal law still pays Tennessee's enhanced match under the Children's Health Insurance Program. At that match Washington pays about three of every four dollars, more than double the state's share under regular Medicaid.

Kids are the cheapest people in the healthcare system to cover, about $3,600 a year for a Tennessee child, a third less than a working-age adult. Children in working families who earn just above today's cutoff get full medical, dental, vision, and mental health coverage, and businesses now covering dependents take a real expense off their books.

Beginning in October 2026, federal rules narrow which lawfully present immigrant children draw that match. We'll cover those children with state dollars rather than let Washington's rules leave them behind.

Right now a Tennessee homeowner who installs solar would wait roughly 20 years to break even because the Tennessee Valley Authority's buyback pays only 3 to 4.5 cents a kilowatt-hour for exported power, and some local utilities pay nothing at all.

We'll fix the economics directly to make lending viable. Every solar household that enrolls in a buyback program will receive a state-funded credit bringing the total to a fair 11 cents, paired with an upfront rebate of up to 30 percent, a sales-tax exemption on home solar equipment, and instant online permitting. Together these measures bring payback to roughly 10 to 12 years. If the Authority adopts a fair buyback rate of its own, then the state's provisions will sunset automatically. We'll also expand community solar to support families who rent or can't put panels on their own roof.

Lastly we'll designate three to five Renewable Energy Zones through a competitive program open to every local power company in Tennessee, and award zones with matching grants to build solar and storage.

Tennesseans hold more past-due debt than the average American, and medical bills contribute to a majority of personal bankruptcies nationally. Most of that medical debt already sits on a collector's ledger, written off by the hospital and sold for a fraction of its face value.

Undue Medical Debt buys those portfolios on the same market and forgives them outright, with no tax consequence to the family. It already operates in Tennessee, where it has erased roughly $142 million for about 73,000 people.

We'll scale that statewide with $10 million in the first year, enough to retire roughly $665 million in medical debt, more or less depending on what portfolios come up for sale. After that, up to $5 million a year keeps us buying. Ten million dollars is a rounding error in a state budget, and it clears the bills that push Tennessee families into bankruptcy.

Tennessee has no standing way to learn which priorities Tennesseans want it to work on. Elections come every two and four years, public comment periods draw the usual suspects, and surveys get filed and forgotten. In one poll, 72 percent of Tennesseans agreed the state is not transparent about the incentives it hands corporations.

We'll create the Office of Civic Design under the Comptroller of the Treasury, with a director serving a fixed six-year term so the office outlasts any administration. Every year a representative sample of 2,000 to 3,000 Tennesseans, drawn to mirror the state by region, age, race, and income, will set the official citizen priority list. Two or three times a year, 75 to 100 randomly selected Tennesseans will deliberate a problem from that list, with lost wages and childcare covered so participation isn't limited to people who can afford to volunteer.

The relevant committee holds a hearing within 90 days and its chair answers in writing. The legislature can say no. It cannot make the recommendation disappear.