To hold office in Rocky Top — you gotta live there
Council sets residency requirements
Effective immediately, candidates who wish to run for mayor or City Council in Rocky Top must show proof of residency of at least one year before the election under a change in the city charter approved by the council last week.
By a unanimous vote (5-0), the council approved a resolution ratifying a recent change in the charter passed in a special act by the Tennessee General Assembly that sets the residency requirement.
The new charter provision reads, in part:
“No person shall be eligible for the office of mayor or councilperson who has not been a resident of the City of Rocky Top for one year preceding the election.”
The council had voted unanimously last November to ask local representatives to the General Assembly to sponsor the legislation that would amend the city charter to add the minimum residency requirement.
While some on the council thought the residency requirement should be longer than a year, City Manager Michael Foster said courts generally have held that the minimum residency could be no longer than a year.
Foster said the move would end the practice of some people who live outside the city running for mayor or council with the promise that they would move to Rocky Top once they got elected.
The city faced a situation like that in the most-recent council election Nov. 3, 2020, when a woman who lived outside the city limits declared herself a write-in candidate for council, and promised she would move into Rocky Top if she got elected.
The woman, Katie Styles Hurst, led a Facebook campaign seeking to get rid of homeless people in the city. In a Facebook post boosting her write-in candidacy, Hurst called Rocky Top’s homeless residents “wicked people” and pledged to have them removed from the city if she were elected to the council.
After being told she could not serve on the council without being a resident, Hurst claimed to have rented a derelict house on North Main Street just a few weeks before the election, and registered to vote using that address. She has since posted on Facebook that she has bought a house in Jacksboro and now lives there.
There have also been allegations that a previous candidate for the mayor position who lived outside the area had listed his home address as that of his sister in Rocky Top, in order to be eligible to serve as mayor. He did not win the mayor’s race in that election, but had recently suggested that he might try again for the mayor position in this coming November’s city election.
Hurst did not win her write-in effort to gain a council seat, coming in a distant third place in a race for two council positions, garnering only 72 votes. The two candidates who won the council seats were the only ones who were officially on the ballot.
The city’s charter was enacted by the Tennessee General Assembly when Lake City became Rocky Top in 2014.
It includes this provision concerning city elections:
“The mayor and councilpersons shall be citizens of the United States, of the state of Tennessee, and of the City of Rocky Top. No person shall be eligible to the office of mayor or councilperson who does not meet the qualifications for voting in elections in Rocky Top. Continuing residency in the city shall be a requirement for holding of office. Any mayor or councilperson who permanently moves his residency from the city shall vacate his or her office.”
Hurst did present a valid application to become a write-in candidate, based on her last-minute “move” to the city.
So far, no one has announced a run for mayor this year, but the current mayor, Timothy Sharp, is expected to seek re-election.