Key Points

  • The Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously held that a 2023 statute capping metropolitan councils at 20 voting members does not violate the Exemption Clause of article VII, section 1, of the Tennessee Constitution.
  • The court read the Exemption Clause to relieve consolidated governments only of article VII, section 1, paragraph 2's requirements for county legislative bodies, not of limits the legislature imposes by statute.
  • The court held that Metro Nashville's Local Legislation Clause challenge became moot after the legislature's 2026 amendments (H.B. 2186), vacated the Court of Appeals on that issue, and directed dismissal of that claim on remand.
  • In a companion case, the court held Metro Nashville's challenge to the 2023 airport authority board law moot after S.B. 2473 repealed and replaced it, declined to apply the voluntary cessation doctrine, and vacated the judgments below with directions to dismiss.

The Tennessee Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 2023 state law limiting metropolitan councils to 20 voting members. The ruling rejected Nashville's argument that the state constitution bars the legislature from shrinking the 40-member council the city's charter has provided since its 1962 city-county consolidation.

Justice Sarah K. Campbell wrote for a unanimous court. She held that the constitution's Exemption Clause, a 1978 provision excusing consolidated governments from certain rules for county legislative bodies, frees those governments only from the constitution's own requirements, including a 25-member ceiling. "But it does not create a freestanding immunity from restrictions originating elsewhere," she wrote.

The decision affirms a Court of Appeals ruling against the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County. When the law was passed, Metro Nashville was the only metropolitan government whose council exceeded 20 members. With the law's original compliance timetable repealed in 2026, the court said it saw "no basis for concluding that the current twenty-member cap could not be enforced against Metro Nashville."

In a companion opinion issued the same day, also written by Justice Campbell, the court threw out Metro Nashville's separate win against a 2023 law that reshaped the board of the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority. The court held that case moot, meaning no live dispute remained, because lawmakers repealed and replaced the challenged provisions after oral argument.

The council-size law, House Bill 48, passed the General Assembly on March 9, 2023, and Gov. Bill Lee signed it the same day. Metro Nashville and a group of Davidson County residents sued. In July 2024, a three-judge trial panel held that the cap violated both the Exemption Clause and the Local Legislation Clause, which voids acts "local in form or effect" that apply to a particular county or city unless they are approved in the manner the clause specifies.

The Court of Appeals reversed in June 2025, with one judge dissenting in part. On April 15, 2026, after the Supreme Court heard argument, the legislature passed House Bill 2186. It deleted the phrase "as further provided in this section" from the cap and largely repealed the implementation provisions.

That amendment ended the local-legislation fight. Metro Nashville had argued that the cap worked only through implementation provisions that applied to Nashville alone, making the law local in effect. Both sides agreed the claim was moot, and the court vacated the lower-court ruling on it.

The Exemption Clause claim survived the amendment because the 20-member cap itself was unchanged. Article VII of the Tennessee Constitution says a county legislative body "shall not exceed twenty-five members," and the Exemption Clause says any consolidated county "shall be exempt from having a county executive and a county legislative body as described in this paragraph."

Metro Nashville read the clause as a ban on any legislative cap at 25 members or fewer. "In essence, Metro Nashville asks us to read the Exemption Clause as establishing a constitutional right to have a legislative body with more than twenty-five members," Justice Campbell wrote. Relying on dictionaries from the era, she reasoned that an exemption is relief from a specific duty. She also cited the longstanding rule that a proviso is confined to the provision in which it sits. "The Exemption Clause releases metropolitan governments from the obligation to comply with those requirements, but nothing more," she wrote.

The court rejected Metro Nashville's reliance on statements at the 1977 Limited Constitutional Convention, which drafted the amendment. Metro Nashville said those statements showed the exemption's purpose was to spare existing metro governments from having to reaffirm their structure by referendum. Those remarks, the court said, show only that delegates did not expect the amendment to disturb existing governments. "Nothing in these statements evinces an intent to strip the General Assembly of authority to regulate consolidated governments by statute," Justice Campbell wrote.

The court likewise rejected Metro Nashville's argument that a statutory cap would erase the difference between metro governments and other forms of county government. What sets a consolidated government apart, the court said, is "the merger of two separate corporations," not the characteristics of its council. The state had separately argued that metro councils are not county legislative bodies at all, but the court did not reach that question.

The airport case involved Senate Bill 1326, a 2023 law that vacated the airport authority's board, cut it from 10 members to eight, and gave the governor and the House and Senate speakers power to appoint six of the eight. It reached only airport authorities in metropolitan counties with more than 500,000 people, and no one disputed that it affected only the Nashville board. The trial panel and the Court of Appeals both held that it violated the Local Legislation Clause.

In April 2026, the legislature passed Senate Bill 2473, which replaced the provision with language covering all metropolitan airport authorities and some regional ones. Metro Nashville invoked the voluntary cessation doctrine, under which a defendant's halt to challenged conduct generally does not moot a case unless it is absolutely clear that the conduct cannot reasonably be expected to recur. It argued that lawmakers acted "after three years of litigation" and in the face of "an imminent decision from this Court," and it cited a "pattern of targeting one local government in the same way," including a 2023 law on a sports authority board.

The court found no evidence that lawmakers would reenact the airport provisions. The doctrine's focus, Justice Campbell wrote, "must be on the likelihood of the specific conduct challenged in the case recurring—not whether the legislature may enact an entirely different law." She added: "The voluntary cessation doctrine is not a license to issue impermissible advisory opinions."

Lawyers for Metro Nashville included Wallace W. Dietz. The state officials were represented by the office of Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti.

The council case returns to the Davidson County Chancery Court, which is to dismiss the local-legislation claim and conduct further proceedings consistent with the opinion. In the airport case, the court vacated the Court of Appeals judgment and the trial panel's order, directed dismissal as moot, and taxed the costs of the appeal to the state defendants. Metro Nashville's sports authority suit had been stayed pending the airport appeal. "If Metro Nashville wishes to litigate the constitutionality of the sports authority law, it may do that in the lawsuit it has already filed to challenge that distinct law," Justice Campbell wrote.