2022 Recap
We Decide 2022 Annual Review
Since 2020 and throughout 2022, the We Decide Tennessee coalition has allied with local elected officials from across the state – whether from urban, rural, or suburban communities – and driven them to take action against state preemption through public sign-on letters, op-eds, public events/roundtables, outreach to state legislators, and more.
In Spring of 2022, we focused our proactive work on the paid leave preemption repeal bill, which would restore the option for local governments to consider how to best address the need for paid leave in their communities. For that bill, we wrote an open letter signed by 12 local elected officials from across the state. We also worked with City Councilwoman Ellen Smith of Oak Ridge to draft an op-ed in support of the bill that was published in both Nashville and Knoxville. During the committee hearing, we received bipartisan support on the bill for the second year in a row.
On the defensive side, we improved our bill tracking and rapid response capacities, and were successfully able to STOP additional harmful preemption legislation from being passed, including two bills that preempted local control in the area of housing and regulating short-term rentals (HB0645 and HB2434), a discriminatory "library bill" (HB1944) that attempted to ban books depicting LGBTQ+ people and preempt the authority of local school boards. HB1944 even went so far as criminalizing school librarians for making decisions entrusted to them by their own communities and students. We also defeated SB 2440, a bill that would have reversed progress on priority hiring for disadvantaged business enterprises. The bill sponsor admitted publicly that the goal of this bill was to eliminate affirmative action.
We built out our rapid response abilities for the 2022 session, alerting local officials when bad bills were moving and urging them to take action. Doing this, we played a major role in informing local officials about caption bills or late amendments, anti-democratic tools used to slip harmful bills under the radar. Once they found out, they wanted to weigh in and thanked us for being a resource to them.
This success has fueled our plans for the future, as the coalition has begun to center organizing and empowering local elected officials in our theory of change. As we have closed out the year and planned for the 2023 session, we are refreshed and excited to build power amongst local officials and organize them within the We Decide coalition, a novel approach in Tennessee that will shift the balance of power between local communities and corporate lobbyists at the state level.