By TABITHA EVANS MOORE | Editor-in-Chief

In Moore County, the tension between what was and what must be has never been louder.

We are small – the third smallest county in the state with a population of just 6,400 – and proud of the traditions of whiskey-making, farming, and the multiple state championship appearances by our beloved Raiders and Raiderettes.

On paper, Moore County looks wealthy. Big employers like Jack Daniel’s and Motlow State raise our average income and make us seem like one of the richest counties in Tennessee. But that number is misleading. Most families here don’t make that kind of money, and our small population means we don’t bring in much tax revenue. So, while we look “too rich” to qualify for many state grants, we still struggle with the old, overworked infrastructure usually seen in counties that do get state help.

That paradox has shaped everything from the fire department debate to school maintenance delays to the heated public arguments over sales tax and development. It’s a tale of too much and not enough that’s molded a resilient community but also led to some nasty online and even in-real-life debates.

Two local leaders sit at the focal point of that paradox: Budget Committee Chair Gerald Burnett and Planning Commission Chair Dexter Golden. One is responsible for the math, and the other for the map.

Their perspectives differ in emphasis – Burnett leans on financial realism and proactive opportunity, while Golden emphasizes pacing, infrastructure, and cultural stewardship – but their core message is strikingly aligned: Moore County must choose the future it wants, or a future it didn’t choose will arrive anyway.

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The View from the Budget Committee Chair

Few people understand the math of Moore County better than Burnett, who has spent seven years on the Metro Council and Budget Committee. His perspective is neither ideological nor sentimental. It is pragmatic. It is informed by spreadsheets, statutory obligations, and the lived reality of trying to maintain county services with flat revenue, increased regulatory obligations, and rising costs. His core values revolve around the simple belief that “we have to invest in the community if we want it to thrive.”

Burnett came onto the council at a time when even the budget committee itself had to be rebuilt from scratch under a new administration, which is normal in local government. When he and others were appointed, they inherited little institutional knowledge and a county government functioning without the basics that larger counties enjoy – things like a finance or HR department. There’s also no centralized purchasing – something the state dings Moore County for every year in the yearly audit. But the county simply doesn’t have the personnel or budget to achieve it. Most department heads do their best with what they have while often wearing multiple hats.

During his first budget cycle, Burnett says he and his fellow committee members poured over each department budget line by line more times than he can count looking for ways to trim expenses. In the end, his conclusions were blunt.

“There just isn’t waste in there. People say, ‘tighten your belt,’ but there’s nothing left to tighten,” he says. “This isn’t the U.S. economy we’re talking about. There’s just not that much money there to begin with.”

The rhetoric about waste, fraud, and abuse – usually imported from national talking points rather than rooted in local fact – has become a convenient cudgel to attack any spending, even when the spending is required by law or essential to the county’s long-term health.

Burnett: Delayed spending comes at a cost

But delayed spending comes at a cost, according to Burnett and the facts back him up.

Local officials waited until raw sewage spilled from the Lynchburg Elementary cafeteria onto the heads of kindergarteners below before addressing much-needed improvements at both LES and the high school. The County Building only recently got hot water. Black mold covered the Health Department before the building got demolished and replaced.

“When the school system delayed needed improvements for years, the cost ballooned by $3 million because the county waited too long to act,” Burnett says.

That same deterioration is now true for the county’s aging water infrastructure, which continues to lose up to 40 percent of treated water even after multiple meter replacements. Perhaps, the problem is not the meters at all, Burnett who previously sat on the Metro Utility Board says, and rather it’s the aging pipes buried beneath the county. Time will tell.

Regardless, in Burnett’s view deferred maintenance has become generational mindset in Moore County and it’s not serving us.

Burnett: Growth or higher taxes? Pick your poison.

Metro Moore County, which encompasses both rural Moore County and the more urban former Lynchburg city limits, only has two meaningful sources of revenue: property taxes and sales taxes.

One need look no further than your household budget to realize that prices have continually risen over the past 10 years. The same inflation and cost increases happen on the municipal level as well. Costs of fuel, labor, equipment, software updates, and state-mandated services rise every year. But without new revenue, the budget cannot keep up.

Burnett is direct about the choice: “You’ll either degrade services to keep costs down, or you’ll have to increase property taxes. Bottom line.”

Burnett: Tourism is an untapped potential

A recent sales referendum that would have increased local option sales tax a quarter of a percent to 9.75 percent failed twice at the ballot box despite the fact that the burden would have mainly affected the over 300,000 tourist who visit Jack Daniel’s each year and not locals, who already do the majority of their shopping in surrounding counties whose tax rate is already at 9.75 percent.

It’s a knee-jerk distrust of the word “tax” that happens – regardless of who would pay. Burnett calls those votes examples of decisions made “without knowledge.”

He also believes that tourism is a virtually untapped potential revenue stream in Lynchburg – a name recognized across the globe that still rolls up its sidewalks around 5 p.m.

Burnett believes tourism is one of the least intrusive, most revenue-positive growth opportunities available. Projects like a hotel, agritourism, outdoor recreation, and restaurant expansion could bring in dollars without adding children to the school system or straining the water system.

Local and state officials met earlier the month in a roundtable to discuss the potential for new outdoor recreation tourism in the county something Burnett calls “smart growth” that brings in visitors without overburdening resources.

Burnett: Fear-driven politics is a problem.

Burnett is quick to remind us that he’s not advocating for unchecked growth. In fact, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of guardrails and good planning. But he is clear that the county cannot operate indefinitely on nostalgia alone.

Some residents fear that any growth will transform Moore County into Pigeon Forge or the next Murfreesboro, but Burnett does not buy it.

“Having a great police department or school system isn’t going to change Moore County’s culture. We’re a small town. We can stay a small town,” he says.

Burnett, who grew up in Grundy County, remembers playing the Raiders as a student athlete at Franklin County High School, and says what he remembers most about Moore County was their pride. What is missing today, he argues, is not cultural protection but cultural confidence. He sees too much fear and too little imagination.

“It’s not the roads or the way the way the square is laid out that needs preservation. It’s the mindset,” he says.

To Burnett, moving forward as a community is not about freezing the county in amber, but rather it is about maintaining the character, resilience, and neighborliness that have defined Moore County for decades. What threatens that identity more than growth, he argues, is misinformation and division. The political climate of distrust –national and local – has seeped into county meetings, where fearmongering often drowns out facts.

“People automatically distrust each other … and believe whatever they read on Facebook,” he says.

That culture, he warns, is more damaging than any new development.

The View from the Planning Commission Chair

If Burnett’s work is rooted in the hard math of a small tax base, Golden’s is anchored in something just as concrete: pace, infrastructure capacity, and the limits of a rural county that’s experienced a tremendous amount of growth in just the past couple of years: the largest solar farm in the state of Tennessee along Highway 55, a tiny home community on Main Street, and anerobic digester on Good Branch Road. 

He says his approach has nothing to do with slamming the brakes on development and everything to do with making sure Moore County doesn’t “get out over its skis” as the phrase goes.

Golden first stepped into local politics in 2019, when appointed to the Metro Planning Commission. In 2022, he decided to run for the Third District seat on the Metro Council.

He’s careful to note that the role of Planning Chair isn’t about deciding winners and losers. His view of planning is collaborative, not authoritarian – a job rooted in listening as much as leading.

“It means having open communication with people from all parts of the county, not just the area that’s affected,” he says.

Golden: Preservation vs Growth Is a False Binary

Golden doesn’t oppose growth. In fact, he’s quick to say Moore County has always changed. Just not at this pace.

“There are building that exist on the square that weren’t there when the town founded. Where there used to be five houses on Tanyard Hill, now there’s sixty,” he says. “Moore County stayed Moore County with all those changes.”

He says he believes the county has always evolved – just not all at once – and that the conversation shouldn’t be framed as preservation versus growth but rather what kind of growth best protects the Moore County we love.

That single observation shapes his entire philosophy: it’s not growth itself that unsettles people – it’s the speed of it.

Golden: Slow growth is a philosophy, not a stall tactic.

For Golden, slow growth isn’t a stall tactic; it’s responsible stewardship. It’s the belief that communities absorb change best when they have time to see it coming, understand it, and adjust to it. Moore County’s problem, he argues, isn’t that developers are knocking – it’s that three or four knocked at once. And in a county this size, with this infrastructure, that lands like a tidal wave, not a ripple.

Golden stresses that none of the current developments are fully online yet. To him, that makes pacing essential.

“We need to finish what we start and see how it affects us before we move to the next one,” he says. It’s not resistance; it’s realism, he says.

He points to the hiring of environmental engineer Tony Grow as an example of smart guardrails – someone on site daily, funded through the permit fees rather than local tax dollars.

“None of us have time to be out there every day. He is,” Golden says. “And his services didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime because they were built into the building permit fee and energy siting agreement.”

Golden: Infrastructure limits are real.

Where Burnett sees the financial strain of deferred maintenance, Golden sees the invisible limits under the ground. The aging water lines. The uncertain sewer capacity. The long-ago-engineered systems no one fully knows the boundaries of anymore.

“We don’t actually know how much we can grow comfortably,” he says – not as a warning, but as a factual admission from someone who has spent years studying the issue. In his view, the county cannot promise capacity it hasn’t verified. That uncertainty isn’t theoretical; it’s structural.

He calls growth a “double-edged deal.” You need it to keep taxes low, but if you move too quickly, the infrastructure strains.

“Just because we can provide someone water today doesn’t mean we should if we’re close to capacity,” he says.

Golden: Lynchburg has outgrown the Good-Old-Boy Network

Golden also knows why the county was caught flat-footed. Rural local government, Moore County included, was built on tradition, volunteerism, and the “way we’ve always done it.” That model worked when growth came at a trickle. It doesn’t work when growth arrives in clusters.

None of this is about blame. To Golden, it’s about updating processes for the world we now live in, not the one we used to. Small, part-time boards and handshake-era expectations aren’t built to manage 21st-century development pressure. What Moore County needs, he believes, is not bureaucracy but intentionality: clear guardrails, smarter policies, and a long-range vision resilient enough to withstand change.

He also thinks that local leadership needs more diversity and voices. He values and appreciates the institutional knowledge of the generations that came before him but also sees value of the opinions who will manage the growth moving forward.

“It’s a good thing to have a mix of older and younger generations,” he says.

He says he isn’t dismissing the past – in fact, he credits earlier generations with shaping the community’s identity. But he believes younger and minority voices bring different insights, “a mix we need” to build policies that reflect today’s reality.

“In this position, I don’t believe you can be against growth at all,” he says. “It’s about understanding what the right growth for the town and the future is – what we want Moore County to look like 20 years from now. We will leave this place one day, and our children will inherit what our actions are today.”

No one saw growth coming this fast

Burnett says some of the county’s biggest development controversies – the solar farm, the tiny home community, the anerobic digester – stem from one root problem: the county never believed growth would come.

When it did, without zoning guardrails, planning guidelines, or long-range strategy, county officials did the best job they could to manage those projects – which are intrinsically neither good or bad – under the constraints of local, state, and federal guidelines.

It’s a misconception, both Burnett and Golden say, that counties can just pick and choose what they want and reject projects they don’t like if they meet existing zoning and other guidelines. For example, the controversial solar farm was built on agricultural land where the county had no legal authority to intervene.

Golden notes the solar farm – the largest in the state – was ultimately outside local control.

“We didn’t have guidelines in place that might have changed the outcome,” he says, “but we also had no authority to stop a project the state deemed necessary for regional energy demand.”

Growth is coming whether we like it or not, Golden says, and it’s up to us to imagine what we want Moore County to become over the next five to 10 years – not just react to projects as they pop up.

This is where Burnett and Golden strongly agree: Moore County must build guidelines, not guard stations. Guardrails that shape growth without smothering it – proactive policy, not reactionary panic.

“You have to plan, prepare, and diligently focus on what you want, or you’re not going to get it,”Burnett says.

Just Too Much, Too Fast

It is striking how similarly both men describe the past few years. Burnett talks about the financial jolt; Golden talks about the emotional and infrastructural shock. But they are describing the same event: a rural county that thought it had decades suddenly had months.

According to recent census estimates, Moore County’s population growth has closely tracked Tennessee’s overall trend. Between 2010 and 2023, Tennessee’s population grew by roughly 10–12 percent, while Moore County grew by just under 10 percent over the same period.

In other words, Moore County isn’t exploding so much as it is keeping pace with the state as a whole – what feels like a surge here is largely the impact of a statewide growth rate hitting a very small, very visible community.

Two of the projects, the solar farm and anaerobic digester, exist to ease the state’s ever-growing energy demand.

Across Tennessee, energy demand is rising at a pace not seen in decades, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has been sounding the alarm. TVA projects that electricity use across its seven-state region will grow by roughly 30 percent over the next 20 years – driven by population increases, industrial expansion, and the rapid build-out of data centers and manufacturing facilities.

That demand doesn’t skip small counties. Moore County’s growth may appear modest on paper, but in TVA’s system every new home, business, short-term rental, or agritourism project adds to a cumulative regional load. What feels like a local strain is part of a much larger statewide pattern: Tennessee is growing, and the grid has to grow with it.

In Moore County it’s just that development that normally arrives one project at a time arrived in a cluster. Residents felt blindsided. Leaders felt overwhelmed. Fear filled the vacuum where information should have been. Everyone did the best they could with the tools and information available at the time.

Golden sees the human side of that fear – how quickly it can turn into rumor, suspicion, or reactionary demands. Burnett sees the fiscal side – how it distorts debates about taxes, schools, or infrastructure. And both see the toll it’s taking on public service.

The Price of Local Politics

Neither man will say definitively whether he plans to run again in next year’s County General election. Both cite the same reason: politics has gotten ugly – even in Moore County. The personal attacks. The misinformation. The social media pile-ons. The exhaustion that comes from serving a community in transition.

Their shared concern is not for themselves, but for what it means when good, capable people hesitate to lead. Small counties depend heavily on citizen volunteers, board members, and elected officials who do the work not for a paycheck but for pride in their home. When the climate becomes hostile, the pipeline dries up. What happens then?

In the end, their perspectives differ but many of the takeaways are the same. Moore County didn’t do anything wrong. It just experienced the same growth happening all around the state. But stones in a small pond tend to have a larger ripple effect.

Now that growth is here, Moore County must catch up or leave the next generation holding the bag.

Neither man advocates resistance. Neither man advocates unchecked growth. Both believe Moore County can absolutely remain Moore County – but only if decisions are guided by clarity instead of fear, facts instead of rumor, planning instead of reaction.

In the end, Moore County isn’t choosing between progress and preservation at all. It’s choosing whether to shape the future or be shaped by it. Both Burnett and Golden argue for something quieter and more powerful than any single vote or project: clear-eyed planning, honest math, and the courage to let facts outrun fear. Growth is coming, taxes evolve, infrastructure ages, but the character of this place is determined by the people who care enough to stay engaged. If Moore County wants to remain Moore County, it must do what it has always done best: come together, talk straight, and build a future worthy of the generations who will inherit it. •

About The Lynchburg Times:
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