🗞️ THE DUMP — MAY 22, 2026
YOUR LOOK AT THE WEIRD, THE WILD AND WILLIAMSON COUNTY
Well gang, we made it — and it’s not just any Friday. Memorial Day weekend Friday. The official gateway to cookouts, badly thrown cornhole bags, and at least one guy insisting he can absolutely still barefoot ski if somebody’ll just hold his beer.
Maybe your weekend already started, or maybe you’re one of the brave holdouts still pretending to answer emails while secretly checking the weather radar every seven minutes, wondering if we’re all about to float downstream toward Alabama.
Either way, welcome back. This week? Oh, we’ve got some things.
Williamson County Schools accidentally wandered into one of the most uncomfortable conversations the district’s had in a while. Tennessee’s execution team gets a do-over, and the Williamson County Commission debates whether anybody actually knows how commercial real estate works.
Meanwhile over in Fairview, the math finally arrived — fashionably late and carrying a property tax increase. And finally, between the rain chances, the cookouts, and the traffic headed toward every lake in Tennessee, we’ll close this week with a quick reminder about the people who made weekends like this possible to begin with.
This, friends, is your look at the weird, the wild, and Williamson County.
You ready? Let’s dump it out.
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🧾 RECEIPTS, PLEASE
Williamson County School Board meetings have not exactly been appointment television lately. Monday night changed that.
Special education advocate Kristee Bailey stood at the podium during public comment and plainly stated the district was repeatedly missing Individualized Education Program services while ignoring warnings about impossible caseloads and overwhelmed staff. She wanted proof.
“Executive staff continue assuring board members that IEP services are being delivered,” she said. “So prove it.”
That line sat over the rest of the meeting like humidity.
The request? Mandatory service delivery logs for speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy — documentation showing when services required under a student’s IEP were actually delivered.
This is a district obsessed with metrics. Which made it all the more awkward when parents started asking whether anybody could reliably confirm a child actually received speech services.
Superintendent Jason Golden responded with the usual inventory of reassurances, sounding like somebody trying to hold together two truths at once: the staff genuinely care about students, and the system itself may not be functioning as cleanly as everyone hoped.
School Board Member Tony Bostic changed the temperature in the room completely. “We heard from constituent Ms. Bailey,” Bostic said. “She referenced a student that had — it was found out in March that they had not received a single one of their speech language services. That was my son.”
Bostic explained the issue allegedly made it all the way through the system and central office before finally being discovered during the next IEP meeting. “It had been missed all the way up to the district and central office,” he said. “This would have caught it like month one, and we would have known.”
But what made the moment land harder was that Bostic never really sounded angry at therapists or teachers. If anything, he sounded like somebody staring at a schedule that no longer made sense. “Some of these speech language pathologists have 50-plus students,” Bostic said. “There’s not enough hours in the week to get a lot of this done… We need to get those people some help.”
The remaining question was obvious: maybe the system itself is stretched so thin that nobody can confidently verify what is happening anymore.
The board advanced the amended policy requiring service delivery logs by a 9-1 margin. Everybody in the room already knew who the one “no” was going to be before a single hand went up.
Eric Welch — the board’s ceremonial speedbump — objected on the grounds that documentation requirements would burden already overwhelmed staff. Which is a little like watching somebody drown and voting against throwing the life ring because it might clutter the deck.
The other nine members seemed less concerned about the paperwork.
WW BOTTOM LINE:
Also, if the system can tell when a third grader spent eleven minutes too long on a Chromebook math app, but nobody notices missing speech therapy for months, folks are eventually going to start asking some uncomfortable questions... except for Eric Welch, of course.
August is coming. So are IEP meetings.
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💉 VEIN TENNESSEE: FAILURE TO EXECUTE
You think you had a rough morning.
Tony Von Carruthers, 57, woke up yesterday in Riverbend Maximum Security with exactly one appointment on the calendar: a 10 a.m. lethal injection. The Supreme Court had denied his stay, and Governor Bill Lee said, on the record, that he would not be intervening. The witnesses were seated, and the needles were uncapped. They swabbed his arm with alcohol — alcohol, on a man about to die.
And then Tennessee fumbled the snap.
For over an hour the execution team poked, probed, and rummaged around the man’s arms hunting for a vein. The primary IV went in fine. The backup line — required by protocol — refused to cooperate. So they tried a central line. Eventually they wheeled him back to his cell for a “medical evaluation,” which is government for “we’ll try again later.”
His attorney, Maria DeLiberato, watched the whole thing through the glass. She said she saw him wincing and groaning, and called it horrible. She was mid-press-conference when the governor’s office quietly issued a one-year reprieve. She burst into tears and said, “That’s amazing. I’m so grateful.”
Carruthers, for the record, is no choirboy. In 1994 he buried three people under somebody else’s casket in a Memphis cemetery — a 21-year-old, his mother, and a 17-year-old high schooler. Nobody’s confusing him for a sympathetic figure.
Still. Yesterday, the Supreme Court, the federal courts, and the governor — all said yes. The protocol was approved, and the appointment was on the books. The State of Tennessee had one job: complete the execution. Instead, it called a timeout.
So now the same governor who told the public he would not intervene has intervened, for one year, on the grounds that his execution team couldn’t complete an execution. Which, if nothing else, is an extremely Tennessee form of non-intervention.
WW BOTTOM LINE:
The state will try again next May. The veins will be a year older. The protocol will be the same. The execution team will likely be the same. Nobody seems to find any of this strange.
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🏛️ COURTHOUSE BLUES: JUDGE, JURY, AND REAL ESTATE
Last week, Williamson County didn’t just hold a commission meeting; it ran a live-action stress test on how long a justice system can wobble before it tips over. The agenda said bonds, due diligence, and site selection. The real question was simpler: how do you admit the courthouse is broken without admitting somebody waited way too long to fix it?
The answer was, of course, several hours of trying.
On one side, the Move Now crowd. Commissioner Jennifer Mason has clearly lost patience with the endless procedural loop. “I don’t really see the point in us continuing to kick this can down the road,” she said — then dropped the real grenade: she doesn’t want to hand the next nine commissioners a smoking crater and say “good luck.” In other words: do your job now, so the freshmen don’t have to govern by archaeological dig.
Across the aisle, the Slow Down camp. Commissioner Brian Clifford doesn’t want to set $175,000 on fire “for a property that the city tells us we shouldn’t use anyways.” Fair point. He’s not saying no courthouse. He’s saying maybe don’t impulse-buy a nine-figure project the City of Franklin already side-eyed in the driveway.
Then there’s Commissioner Greg Sanford, who quietly went full Realtor 101: “Who is tasked with bringing these sites to the task force?” Pause. “That’s concerning to me.”
Then came the line:
“Commercial agents are free until you buy the property.”
Folks.
And lest anyone imagine a deep bench of alternative properties waiting in the wings — there isn’t. The task force has this property. Beyond that, the list gets quiet fast. No backup sites identified. This is how you wind up running a nine-figure courthouse search on what looks a lot like best intentions and informal suggestions.
WW BOTTOM LINE:
Humming in the background: inmates waiting years for trial dates, medical bills exploding, a jail screaming for relief — and a seller somewhere in Williamson County patiently refreshing his email while the buyer keeps debating. When the seller is the patient one in a real-estate deal, your timeline may be upside down.
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🏛️ FAIRVIEW FOLLIES: MATH ARRIVES FASHIONABLY LATE
In a development nobody could have predicted — except anyone who’s ever opened a spreadsheet — the City of Fairview met last night for what was billed as a routine budget discussion. It was not routine.
Just a few weeks ago, Fairview was in full civic mourning. Former City Manager Tom Daugherty had abruptly resigned over what was delicately described as a “nepotism issue.” Citizens packed the chamber and lined up to deliver eulogies for a man who was, awkwardly, still alive. Mayor Lisa Anderson solemnly declared him “the best City manager Fairview has ever had.”
Recalls were threatened. Resignations were demanded. The story then was simple: good man, small mistake, honorable exit.
Then Thursday happened. And Thursday brought a calculator.
It turns out Fairview’s revenue projections are not, in fact, projecting. Officials acknowledged — with the strained expressions of people who were hoping this conversation could wait until some other election cycle — that revenues are underperforming. Reserves are thin. Fleet replacement has been quietly punted somewhere into the future. The city had to borrow in the wake of the ice storm. Now, taxpayers are being gently prepped for a proposed property tax increase.
Not to expand services, mind you. Just to keep the lights on.
What happened?
People have theories, but here’s what is clear: the same residents who, three weeks ago, were told Fairview had just lost its finest public servant are now being asked to write bigger checks to the same city government — minus the gentleman who supposedly had the clearest view of how the money got this sideways.
It’s also worth remembering this is the same Fairview that was recently in a visible sweat over how to pay for a fire truck. A pattern is starting to suggest itself.
WW BOTTOM LINE:
The most generous speeches in small-town government are usually delivered right before the auditors pull into the parking lot.
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🗽 FINAL FLUSH: PERMISSION GRANTED
Roll into Memorial Day and it’s a safe bet that somewhere along the line, somebody’s going to remind you what the day is really about. Maybe more than once. They mean well. And they’re not wrong, either.
But here’s a happier way to honor it — go out and enjoy it.
Live your life as an American. Soak up the freedom. Go to the lake, go to the beach, stand at the kid’s little league fence and yell like it’s Game 7 of the World Series. Fire up the grill. None of that is dodging the point. That is the whole point.
And you can have every bit of it while still keeping Memorial Day in mind. The two have always gone together just fine.
Now, if you’d like a quiet moment of remembrance somewhere in the middle of the weekend, here’s a suggestion: Band of Brothers. Not the HBO series itself, but the outtakes — interviews with men, talking straight to the camera about what they lived through. If you’ve missed it, you’ve missed a lot.
Still have the DVD set? You’re golden — assuming you still know how to operate a DVD player or can even find a port for it on that new TV. If not, you can surely find it streaming somewhere.
These are the kind of guys you’d have over at your cookout. The kind you’d love to have a beer with. And at the very least, the kind whose hand you’d want to shake.
And it was never only them. It’s been generation after generation, right up through the men and women serving today — far from home, far from family, and certainly far from the cookout you’ll be standing around this weekend. They’re the reason there’s a cookout at all.
No sermon. Just gratitude.
We have a good life here — a genuinely good one. This is America, and you get to live in it free. A whole lot of people made sure of that.
And they’d be the first ones to tell you: have a great weekend.
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Well friends, you made it.
Now go enjoy Memorial Day weekend. Keep an eye out for the gully washers rolling through. Maybe we get lucky and squeeze out a little sunshine between the thunderstorms. If not? Fire up a movie. Camp out on the couch with the family. Watch Band of Brothers.
And if the rain gets too heavy, just remember: somewhere in Tennessee, an entire government apparently still can’t locate a vein, a courthouse, or a balanced spreadsheet. Your weekend’s already going better than some folks’.
Stay dry. Stay grateful. And as always…
Stay wrong, Williamson.
