MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WKRN) — In Rutherford County, the fight over where Tennessee’s trash goes is reigniting.
Local leaders said corporate influence is threatening a decades-old law that allows counties to decide what gets built in their own backyards.
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The Jackson Law, passed in 1983, gives local governments the authority to approve or reject new landfills and waste facilities. Organizers fear that power could soon be on the line as out-of-state corporations and lobbyists push state lawmakers to weaken the measure in the upcoming 2026 legislative session.
“We are tired of being dumped on,” Candida Layne, Murfreesboro chairwoman for the group SOCM, said. “We’re the largest growing county in the state, and this is what we get? We are no longer going to be that county. We’re going to be the next Flint, Michigan.”
Layne and other community advocates worry that changes to the law could shift decision-making away from county commissions and toward state-run committees, removing the local oversight Jackson Law was designed to protect.
“It’s at risk to be taken away from us at the local level and given to committees run by the state of the future,” Layne said. “Why would we want to give any power to the state when we’re not seeing accountability here right now?”
That concern runs especially deep in Rutherford County, home to one of Tennessee’s largest landfills.
“That’s where most of Nashville’s waste is going,” State Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) said. “It’s really the dumping ground for this whole Middle Tennessee area.”
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Campbell is sponsoring a bill called the Tennessee Waste to Jobs Act, aimed at investing $300 million in recycling infrastructure and education programs to reduce landfill.
Forty-five of Tennessee’s 95 counties have adopted the Jackson Law, but some of those counties haven’t reaffirmed it in decades, and a fight over whether local communities get to decide what happens in their backyard.
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