📰 THE DUMP — JUNE 26, 2026

YOUR LOOK AT THE WEIRD, THE WILD AND WILLIAMSON COUNTY

Here we are — the last full weekend before July decides to show off. Grilling season is in full swing, the fireworks tents are popping up, and somewhere in Williamson County, somebody is already arguing about whether it’s too early to light the good stuff.

Friends, this is your weekly look at the weird, the wild, and Williamson County.

This week, the Golden era comes to an abrupt end, a county budget gets balanced with crossed fingers, Franklin BOMA spots a unicorn, and the best burger in town has officially been discovered.

And finally, something that’s been circling the bowl for a while now: a phony report card.

So grab something refreshing and kick your feet up for a spell. Let’s dump it out.

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🎬 END OF THE GOLDEN ERA

Unless you spent the week on a no-WiFi Antarctic cruise with a personal vow to avoid even penguins, you’ve heard the big one: Williamson County Schools Superintendent Jason Golden is out.

Golden announced he’ll leave August 7 to take a finance role at Franklin Special School District.

The timing is the real story here. Just eight days earlier, the Williamson County School Board had voted 9-2-1 to extend his contract through 2029. A $355,853 contract, freshly extended — and it wasn’t worth the paper in eight days.

(Let's get this out of the way one last time.)

Board Chair Josh Brown called the resignation “a loss for WCS” and praised “the legacy of excellence he is leaving behind.” Board member Jay Galbreath argued publicly that a faction on the board wanted Golden gone but wouldn’t cast an honest vote to say so.

And that same faction had already tried to delay the extension. Margie Johnson moved to defer the vote to the incoming board. Donna Clements seconded the motion — then abstained on it. And Tony Bostic cast the only other vote to punt. The motion failed, and the extension passed. Golden left anyway.

As if this school board drama wasn’t enough, District 10 candidate Elliott Franklin generated another. He hasn’t cast a single vote yet, but he already knows what he wants to cut — and how much the next superintendent should be paid. Before the superintendent search has even begun, Franklin published a slick chart arguing Williamson should pay its next leader less than Golden.

The opinion wasn’t the problem. Franklin’s “research” was.

The chart was a mess. Wrong names. Wrong salaries. Superintendents assigned to districts they’d left years earlier — Donna Wright in Wilson County, Del Phillips in Sumner, and a Montgomery County director who wasn’t actually Montgomery County’s director. The comment section handed him his lunch. As one constituent put it: if you’re going to run for school board, learn to check your facts before posting false information. Ouch.

Here’s the embarrassing part. That chart has every fingerprint of AI — slick, official-looking, and populated with bogus data and phantom links. It’s exactly what a chatbot hands back when you ask it to confirm what you already believe — and never bother to verify the result.

Franklin caught none of it; the comments caught all of it. He quietly deleted and reposted a sourced version, confirming the first one had never been vetted at all.

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WW BOTTOM LINE:

Removing a superintendent is the easy part. Finding one who’s actually better — and convincing good people to work under a board that operates like this — is the hard part.

A candidate campaigning on rigor and scholarship who reaches for citations only after posting the conclusion isn’t doing research. It’s confirmation bias with a search bar.

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🃏 HOUSE OF CARDS

Six hours and forty-five minutes. That’s how long the Williamson County Commission spent last Thursday figuring out how not to raise your property taxes three cents.

By the end, they pulled it off.

The original plan would have raised the property tax rate from $1.30 to $1.33. Instead, commissioners spent the better part of a workday stacking a budget one shaky assumption at a time, hoping nothing topples before next June.

The first card came from Commissioner Greg Sanford, who moved to lower the county’s health insurance assumption from $12,500 per employee to $12,000, then kept amending fund after fund until the numbers finally lined up. Finance Director Phoebe Riley was asked if that was essentially a gamble. Short answer: “Yes.”

If claims come in higher? “I will have to come back.” (Points awarded for brevity.)

Then they shifted two pennies from the General Fund to schools, deferred a debt payment, refused to cut another $2.74 million from an already trimmed school budget, crashed the county’s budgeting software trying to recalculate everything, recessed twice, ate lunch, and eventually arrived exactly where they started: $1.30. (Phew!)

But the funniest part wasn’t the computer crash. It was what happened after the vote.

The winners immediately began explaining why the victory might be temporary. The losers began explaining why they believed the next commission would inherit an even bigger problem.

Jennifer Mason voted for the compromise, then warned, “It simply is not sustainable.” Matt Williams, who opposed it, said the commission had “kicked the can down the road two years in a row” before apologizing to the nine incoming commissioners who now inherit the problem. Budget Committee Chairman Chaz Morton opposed eliminating the very tax increase his own committee had recommended. And last, Mary Smith argued the county should find savings in contracts, software, purchasing, and healthcare before ever asking taxpayers for another penny. (That hasn’t been done?)

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WW BOTTOM LINE:

Smith and her coalition got exactly what they wanted: no property tax increase. Maybe they uncovered millions in hidden efficiencies. Maybe they kicked the can. We’ll know next June.

By then, nine new commissioners and a new county mayor will be holding the budget, while many of the people who built it won’t be holding office. That’s the beauty of politics: today’s applause is immediate. Tomorrow’s consequences are someone else’s agenda item.

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🦄 THE UNICORN DISTRICT

You are not going to believe what happened at BOMA Tuesday night.

A 200-acre development—housing, commercial space, preserved open space, and even working farmland—sailed through approval. No fireworks or angry crowd... not even a single marathon speech.

Armistead became the city’s first-ever Infrastructure Development District, the financing tool officials have been cautiously circling for months. An IDD lets the developer borrow money to build roads and utilities now, then repay it later through special assessments attached to the property.

City staff recommended approval with conditions, including 12 deed-restricted homes for buyers earning up to 120% of area median income. They also flagged the financials with classic bureaucratic understatement, calling the value-to-lien ratio “not favorable but acceptable.”

Translation: we’ve seen better, but we’ll allow it.

Even the lone public speaker, Janet Curtis, wasn’t there to oppose the project. She supported the housing but wanted the math to make sense. At the low end, she noted, you’re looking at roughly $600,000 homes, plus about $3,300 in special assessments — costs that could swallow a significant share of a median-income household’s budget before factoring in utilities, groceries, or gas.

Then came Franklin’s favorite pastime: making sure the promises survive the meeting. Alderman Greg Caesar explained why: “People hear developers promise things in front of you guys, but then they never upheld their end of the bargain.” So he moved to lock key financing terms into the official record, where they’re a little harder to walk back later.

The board also cleared up another point of confusion. These weren’t “tiny homes.” They were “tiny lots.” An important distinction for some, it seems.

Then Vice Mayor Patrick Baggett summed up the entire evening, calling Armistead “one of the unicorns of a development” because it drew virtually no opposition.

Several aldermen praised the design, preserved open space, and agricultural elements while warning future developers not to mistake this vote for the new standard. The resolution passed 6–1, with Alderman Ann Petersen casting the lone dissenting vote.

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WW BOTTOM LINE:

Franklin spent the better part of a year debating whether Infrastructure Development Districts were a good idea. Then the first real test of the idea arrived... and almost nobody showed up to argue about it.

Either this project earned an unusual amount of trust, or half the county quietly started its Fourth of July vacation two weeks early.

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🍔 FRANKLIN’S NEW BURGER BOSS

Friends, let the record reflect: the best burger in Franklin now has an address, and it’s The Franklin Butchery, sitting pretty across from the Harpeth Hotel with downtown’s rarest amenity — parking you don’t have to pray for.

Walk in and the first thing that hits you is that somebody here cares. The butcher counter is stacked with steaks that mean business, and the cooler’s running pastas, bone broth, specialty butter, and the kind of provisions that tell you somebody back there is sweating every detail on purpose, for a living.

The whole place started because two Franklin families kept running into each other at the grocery store, both leaving disappointed by the meat counter. Instead of complaining forever, they built the butcher shop they wished already existed.

When your butcher shop grinds its own beef, the burger ought to be the headliner. Here, it is. Straight Angus from Bear Creek, cooked like the meat is the whole reason you came, and properly escorted by tallow fries. This is not drive-through pricing, and it isn’t pretending to be. This is the treat-yourself tier, and it’s worth every nickel.

The beauty of the place is the choose-your-own-adventure of it. Fine Italian wine with your burger? Permitted. Something off the draft list? Encouraged. Cold craft root beer straight from the case? Help yourself. Everything on the menu feels intentional.

Then there’s the service, which is the part nobody can fake. Somebody here studied the Chick-fil-A playbook, learned the lessons, and then cheerfully set the script on fire. You’ll spot the owner, because they come around to check on you. You’ll spot the head chef too — he appears in the window throwing you a thumbs-up, wanting to know if the burger landed. And then there’s the crew behind the counter who’s attentive without the android routine. Real people. Genuinely glad you walked in.

So treat yourself. Skip the window burger a couple of nights — the one that’s been sweating under a heat lamp since somebody forgot what “fresh” means. Bank that money. Then go get a real one.

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WW BOTTOM LINE:

Franklin will sell you a cheap, fast burger on every other corner, and God bless those corners. But if you want the best burger in town — with tallow fries that flirt with felony — The Franklin Butchery is where you point the car.

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🛁 FINAL FLUSH: CIRCLING THE DRAIN

There comes a point when a report card stops measuring the student and starts measuring the teacher. The Tennessee Legislative Report Card is there now. It isn’t going out in a blaze of scandal or a courtroom fight. It’s just quietly dying because people stopped believing it.

At first pass, you won’t catch Tennessee Stands faking the arithmetic. That’s the whole trick. The outcome is decided before anyone reaches for a calculator. Tennessee Stands picks the bills, decides which votes count, and drops the report card right when its favorites need a sticker for the mail. The scores only confirm what the methodology already decided.

A perfect score certifies exactly one thing: a legislator voted the way one advocacy group wanted, on the bills that same group selected. That's real enough to count, but it's not the same thing as being good at the job. The score rewards ideological obedience while leaving actual governing largely beside the point. Campaign mailers do the rest.

Look at who floats to the top. Last year, State Rep. Jody Barrett collected the first-ever perfect score, and it became campaign material almost overnight as he launched his run for Congress. The actual record? An amendment to classify abortion as criminal homicide — which failed in his own party’s subcommittee without a single vote — plus a tidy stack of memorial resolutions. Flawless legislating, indeed.

This year’s gold medalist is none other than dynamite-happy State Rep. Todd Warner — freshly launched into a congressional race while still holding his statehouse seat. He chairs no committee and holds no real sway. His marquee bill? The Tennessee Firearm Protection Act, which aims to block federal gun laws inside Tennessee — something a state cannot actually do. A perfect score sitting on top of legislation with no practical legal effect. Excellent for fundraising emails. Not so excellent in federal court.

The lens is narrow on purpose. State Rep. Gino Bulso carries an A and a lifetime score in the mid-80s. Yet in 2024 he was one of only two House members to vote against banning first-cousin marriage, even proposing an amendment to keep it legal with genetic counseling. That never touches his grade, because that particular kind of vote never makes the test. The report card grades the questions Tennessee Stands chooses to ask — and quietly ignores every question that might make a favorite look bad… or even matter to the casual Republican voter.

Want examples of actual governing? State Rep. Lee Reeves got a law passed forcing county partisan offices into real, voter-facing primaries instead of backroom caucuses and conventions — a structural change in how local power gets handed out. State Rep. Jake McCalmon championed legislation extending the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse and trafficking victims, giving survivors more time to bring civil actions. Both earn almost no scorecard glory, because durable governing doesn’t serve the agenda the scorecard was built to sell.

So here lies the Tennessee Legislative Report Card. Not because anyone proved its math wrong. Because people finally saw what it was measuring: a political operation grading loyalty to itself and selling the result as accountability. Tennessee Stands wrote the grading rubric, picked the winners, and branded it as objective evaluation.

The trick only works if voters pretend they cannot see it. They’re not pretending anymore.

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Yet again, we’ve dumped all worth dumping. Thanks for reading.

Next Friday falls right in the middle of Independence Day weekend, so don’t be surprised if the newsroom is suspiciously quiet.

Go find a porch. Wave at the neighbors. Burn a hot dog. Let the kids stay up too late chasing fireworks and lightning bugs.

If you haven’t tried that burger yet, you’ve got homework.

The stories will still be here when everybody gets back.

Until then...

Stay wrong, Williamson.