ARLINGTON, Tenn. — The Shelby County Election Commission has an unusual case on its hands.
Monday evening Lee Mills, a Republican who wants to challenge State Representative Tom Leatherwood has been told he can not run because he lives in Fayette County, not Shelby County where he has paid taxes and voted for years.
The controversy has created a boundary dispute, which has affected potentially hundreds of homeowners who thought they too have lived in Shelby County.
The controversy around the boundary dispute and whether or not Mills can have a smooth run in this year's primaries has not gone anywhere.
"It was a big surprise to me and my neighbors. You've lived there for six, seven, eight, nine years and some of them 10 years, and all of a sudden you wake up the next day and the state says you don't live in Shelby County," Mills said.
It has caught as many as 200 homeowners by a surprise in Mills' neighborhood.
Here's a satellite map that shows his address on Shane Hollow Drive and dozens of others are actually tracked in Fayette County rather than Shelby:
"I've lived in Shelby County as far as we know since 2005 and that residence since 2015, the one in question," Mills expressed.
Also on Monday, Arlington Mayor Mike Wissman wrote an open letter to constituents saying he is now getting involved in the dispute.
"The discrepancy of the location of the Shelby/Fayette county line appears to be a result of United States Census blocks that adjoin the county line being incorrectly located in the 2020 federal census. It is the Town of Arlington's position these census block boundaries are inaccurate as to the location of the Shelby/Fayette county boundary."
The town is asking the county and census bureau to resolve the issue.
"It'll take probably a few months or years to fix the actual map problem," Mills stated.
But the more pressing question for Mills is can he officially run against the current Tennessee House Rep. Tom Leatherwood for District 99 in Shelby County? Well, for now, that too is in the air.
That's because the Shelby County Election Commission voted Monday not to take on the state and let a judge or panel of judges decide instead.
"I think that we need to file chancery court and do exactly what you said we needed to do," a commissioner said.
Mills isn't surprised commissioners decided to kick the decision to the courts but said that he is confident that everything will work out in his favor since the law is the law.
"You know they do their preliminary check of residency. They checked the signatures, the signatures were valid," Mills said. "They're politicians like everybody else, so they're going to pass that onto the chancery court, which is probably the right place for that to happen."
The committee requested that the decision be expedited since this issue is time-sensitive, but we were told it may have to be resolved by a three-judge panel from middle and east Tennessee.