📰 THE DUMP — JULY 24, 2026
YOUR LOOK AT THE WEIRD, THE WILD AND WILLIAMSON COUNTY
Welcome back.
If you’re reading this from inside a house that’s hovering somewhere in the low 70s, kudos — your air conditioner survived another Middle Tennessee heat wave. You may want to give that AC a hug… or a new filter at the very least. And after seemingly weeks of steamy afternoon downpours, Friday has decided to behave itself. We’ll take it.
Good to see you again, friends, and welcome back to another week in the weird, the wild, and Williamson County.
This week, Franklin collects a little more hardware for the trophy case — and a reminder that popularity comes with a price tag. We’ll take a second look at all the handwringing over voter turnout, peek at a surveillance system that’s quietly reproducing at the rate of a rabbit farm, and discover your grocery store hasn’t forgotten about those Ho-Hos you slipped into your cart.
Then we’ll finish where local politics so often does: special interests, political friendships, and the curious habit of people accusing everyone else of exactly what shows up in their own orbit.
Glad you’re here. Let’s dump it out.
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🏆 ALL-AMERICA CITY, ALL-INCLUSIVE PRICE TAG
We did it again. The National Civic League named Franklin one of ten 2026 All-America City winners. That makes two in six years, counting the 2020 haul — not so much an accolade as a loyalty program.
Nobody around here fell out of a chair. The only question is who is running public relations for this town, and whether that person knows they can name their price. Somewhere between the award circuit, the magazine lists, and the drone footage of Main Street, the marketing stopped being a campaign and became an industry all its own.
At this rate, Franklin may eventually win an award for winning awards. Success has a funny way of attracting attention. So expect more visitors, more newcomers, more moving trucks idling on Columbia Avenue. Franklin has been selling itself for years, and people keep buying.
Ward 2 Alderman Matt Brown made it personal. A daughter who teaches. A son who fights fires. Neither one can easily afford the city they serve. His argument was that demand follows jobs, schools, and quality of life. Planning commissions don't create it; they decide where it lands. Say no in Franklin and it doesn't disappear. It relocates south and drives back through here every morning at seven.
Hard to argue.
And Brown is not asking for a blank check. He points to the federal ROAD to Housing Act and Tennessee’s Essential Governmental Employee Housing Act of 2026 as tools, not mandates, aimed squarely at the people who keep the place running.
The math is not mysterious. A place becomes highly desirable, and prices — of everything — rise. That is not a theory.
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WW BOTTOM LINE:
That’s the catch with winning awards for being desirable. Every award attracts another round of attention. Every round of attention brings more demand. Eventually, the people who keep the place running can no longer afford to live in the place they keep running.
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🙂 TURNOUT FOR WHAT?
If you spent any time around Williamson County politics this week, you probably heard the same refrain: turnout is terrible, voters are asleep, and somebody should probably start checking for a pulse.
Turns out, everyone may have been diagnosing the patient before reading the chart.
The newest early-voting numbers tell a different story. Maybe not an earth-shattering story, just an inconvenient one. At the same point in the cycle, Williamson County, as a whole, is running ahead of its early-vote pace from the last August primary. The apocalypse, as it so often does, appears to have been slightly overstated.
Political operatives are funny creatures. Give them a slow Monday, and they’ll predict civilization’s collapse by lunch. Give them a stronger Tuesday, and suddenly they’ve always known everything was fine. Fortunately, the numbers don’t care about the chatter.
Turnout is still modest in absolute terms — as August primaries almost always are — but the countywide trend is moving in the right direction. More than 10,300 ballots have already been cast, well ahead of the comparable point in the last August primary. That doesn’t feel like a county going back to sleep. It feels like a county quietly waking up, one early ballot at a time.
Is there a lesson here? Maybe. Early voting is a curve, not a photograph, and this curve is looking healthier than many people expected just a few days ago.
Regardless, the usual scolds will still scold. And no, if your side loses, it’s not automatically the electorate’s fault.
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WW BOTTOM LINE:
Voting shouldn’t feel like punishment. It should feel like the start of a pretty good Friday. So grab your spouse. Grab your newly minted 18-year-old. Grab your neighbor if they’re willing. Swing by your early voting location, cast your ballot, then reward yourselves with barbecue or maybe tacos.
You’ll feel better for having done it. And trust this one: the chips and salsa just taste a little better after you’ve voted.
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📷 FLOCK IT, WE’LL DO IT LIVE
You might have missed this one last month. Williamson County put it out the way local governments often do when they’d rather not start a food fight — bureaucratically, with just enough sunshine language to make the whole thing sound like a recycling update. But while the national fight over surveillance technology keeps getting louder, the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office quietly moved into the next phase.
If you didn’t know, the county already operates six Flock automated license plate reader cameras. And last month, it launched Connect Williamson, a voluntary registry inviting residents and businesses to tell the Sheriff’s Office where their security cameras are located.
What could go wrong?
Detectives have always canvassed after a break-in, ringing doorbells and asking who has a camera pointed at the driveway. Captain Chris Mobley has explained the registry as a way to solve property crimes faster, and that is not a crazy claim. Stolen car, suspect vehicle passing three businesses on the same road — footage that surfaces in six hours beats footage that surfaces in six days. A plate reader is not a philosophical abstraction, but rather a useful machine. Just a better Rolodex for investigators. (wink, wink).
But technology has a funny habit of growing beyond its original sales brochure.
Today’s promise is: “We’re only storing contact information.” Yesterday’s promise was, “We’re only installing six cameras.” Tomorrow’s promise? Nobody knows yet. Each step sounds perfectly reasonable — until it isn’t.
Meanwhile, Nashville's Flock rollout remains on hold over privacy and oversight objections. A similar platform called FUSUS died there last year for many of the same reasons. Nashville had that debate.
And Williamson County? No debate yet.
Six cameras don't make a surveillance state. Quiet expansion over a decade just might — one procurement cycle at a time, each step individually defensible. That’s probably the most remarkable part. Not that the technology exists. That it arrived almost unnoticed.
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WW BOTTOM LINE:
Sheriff Jeff Hughes is popular with exactly the voters most allergic to a government database of who drove where and when. Plenty of folks will defend the sheriff on Monday and forward a DeFlock article on Tuesday without noticing the two positions are pointed at each other.
The question isn’t whether Flock can help solve crimes. Of course it can. The harder question is whether Williamson County wants a system that knows your patterns better than your neighbors do — and whether anybody ever asked you.
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🛒 THE PRICE IS WRONG
While plate readers track where your car goes, this one tracks what goes in your cart.
Remember when a gallon of milk just… had a price? Simpler times.
Now retailers are using artificial intelligence to determine not what something costs — but what you might be willing to pay. They call it “dynamic pricing.” Critics call it surveillance pricing. Whatever you call it, states are suddenly scrambling to stop it. Maryland just became the first state in America to ban the practice in grocery stores. Others responded; some forty-plus bills are pending across two dozen states.
Tennessee is not among them. At least, not yet — which may be due to the lack of electronic shelf pricing.
The industry’s defense is almost comical. Amazon says it has no plans for grocery surge pricing, despite the FTC accusing it of using a secret pricing algorithm — Project Nessie — that allegedly generated more than a billion dollars by quietly testing higher prices to see whether competitors would follow.
Meanwhile, Kroger says it doesn’t personalize prices. It just personalizes which discounts you see.
Come again?
Consumer Reports obtained a 62-page shopping profile Kroger kept on one customer. The shopper was labeled “non-loyal.” Somewhere, apparently, there’s a file explaining why you buy Cool Ranch Doritos every third Tuesday.
Then came Instacart.
Late last year, investigators found shoppers looking at the exact same grocery item in the exact same store at the exact same time — and seeing as many as five different prices. One carton of eggs ranged from $3.99 to $4.79 depending on who was shopping. Nearly three-quarters of items showed variation. Estimated cost to a family of four: about $1,200 a year. Instacart denied using personal data to set prices, then ended the pricing experiments a few days later.
The awkward part isn’t the technology. Electronic shelf labels can absolutely reduce waste, help discount perishables, and make price changes faster. Academic studies suggest stores aren’t broadly using them for surge pricing today.
The awkward part is that companies keep collecting mountains of personal data, building AI pricing engines, filing patents for customized pricing, and then acting shocked that customers suspect the pieces might eventually get connected.
On this one, the polling isn’t close and it isn’t partisan. Sixty-one percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 67 percent of Democrats want it banned.
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WW BOTTOM LINE:
Nobody’s upset that a grocery store can change a price. They’re upset that the grocery store might change YOUR price — and you may never know the person standing next to you paid less.
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👥 FINAL FLUSH: THE TWO DEGREES CROWD
Last week brought another 9th District debate. Another fellowship hall. By now you could be forgiven for thinking they all blur together. Immigration. Crime. China. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Then somebody threw a punch.
State Rep. Todd Warner came after State Sen. Brent Taylor over special-interest money. Taylor’s funded by the school choice people, Warner claimed. Funded by career politicians across the state. Taylor’s answer was that he never asked anybody to attack Warner, and that Warner ought to quit handing them material. (Ha… Good one.)
There is a reliable tell in Tennessee politics. A man discovers the corrupting influence of money at the exact moment he checks his own bank balance. Taylor: a million-dollar self-loan, $425,300 raised from everybody else, $856,600 sitting there. Warner: $60,800 from donors. $620,000 from Todd Warner.
Ten dollars of Warner for every dollar contributed by anyone else. Money that came from somewhere — presumably the same farm operation that produced the Marshall County pond the neighbors kept calling a quarry.
The special interest funding Todd Warner is... [checks financial disclosure again]... Todd Warner.
But money is the easy part. Money comes from people, and people come with associations. Warner’s entire complaint about Brent Taylor is the company Taylor keeps. Fair enough. That’s a legitimate question to ask about anybody on a ballot.
It is also a mirror, and a man ought to check his reflection before he holds one up.
Warner's campaign communications and social media are handled by Ava Cothren. Her husband is political operative Cade Cothren.
Everybody knows the name. Most wish they didn't. Cothren was Glen Casada's chief of staff until the Speaker's office imploded under the weight of salacious texts, drug allegations, the fictitious "Matthew Phoenix" scheme used to conceal ownership of a company profiting from taxpayer-funded constituent mailers, a federal conviction, and ultimately a Trump pardon. Earlier this year, the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance added another chapter, assessing Cothren an $80,000 civil penalty after concluding he controlled the Faith Family Freedom Fund through what it described as a facade and ignored its subpoena.
Warner wrote the judge on Cothren's behalf before sentencing, attended the trial, and Dixieland Strategies still gets paid.
And Ava Cothren and Cade Cothren are both listed as administrators of Michelle Foreman’s campaign Facebook page.
Yes. Her again. Three days running.
So the point gets made with a hammer one more time: these people work together, travel together, and turn up on each other’s paperwork while spending a remarkable amount of energy talking about grassroots authenticity, dark money, PACs, and backroom deals.
The strangest part is that between the whole crowd there isn't much money to speak of.
The associations, though. Those are abundant. Connie Reguli. Cyndi Miller. Michelle Foreman. Todd Warner.
Same crowd, different letterhead. Six degrees of separation is for strangers.
Around here, two gets it done.
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WW BOTTOM LINE:
When a man who loaned himself $620,000 lectures the room about special interests, readers are entitled to look past the campaign finance report. Money matters. So does the company you keep.
One of these days that observation will stop being necessary. Friends, today is not that day.
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And there we have it. Thanks for spending part of your day with us.
Enjoy this little break from the heat while it lasts. You’ve got about two days before it feels like Satan’s front porch again.
If you haven’t voted yet, today’s a pretty good day to fix that. Then go find yourself a shady patio, order something cold, and enjoy the kind of July afternoon we usually don’t get around here.
We’ll be back next week with another roundup of whatever Williamson County decides to throw our way.
Until then... Stay wrong, Williamson.
