He Takes the Oath Today. The Interstate Belongs to the State and the Landfill Is With the Courts.
Randy Allen is sworn in as Rutherford County mayor today, and the two problems waiting on his desk are the two that residents complain about most: what the traffic is doing to their mornings, and what the landfill is doing to their air.
Neither is a problem a county mayor gets to solve alone. Both are already in motion without him.
The road he inherits
On August 19, the state announced that its Transportation Modernization Board had approved a private-sector partner for the I-24 Southeast Choice Lanes project — a $9.2 billion undertaking billed as the largest interstate Choice Lanes project in the country. The plan adds optional tolled lanes in each direction along roughly 26 miles of I-24 between Nashville and I-840, with pricing that moves with real-time demand.
Look at where that stretch runs and the local stake is obvious. That is the commute. The consortium selected, operating as DriveTN, is a group of international infrastructure firms that will design, build, finance, operate and maintain the lanes under a long-term concession.
A county mayor does not set state highway policy. What the office does have is a seat at the regional table, and Allen has said supporting regional traffic efforts is where he intends to use it. Anyone hoping the new administration will simply widen the interstate should adjust expectations: the widening is happening, it is being done by the state with private capital, and the question for the county is how the surrounding roads absorb it.
The landfill he inherits
Solid waste is the other headline priority, and Middle Point Landfill is the reason. The operator has sought a vertical expansion — a roughly 70-foot lift on top of the existing landfill, adding an estimated 19 million tons of capacity.
That request is not currently moving forward. In February, a Davidson County Chancery Court order — sought by the City of Murfreesboro — blocked the state environment department from processing the application, on the reasoning that the request needed to go through local regional review, including a public hearing, first. The site has drawn thousands of odor complaints from surrounding residents over the past several years.
Allen campaigned on finding alternatives to the expansion rather than accommodating it. That is a genuinely difficult position to hold, because “alternatives” for a county this size means somewhere else, some other method, or considerably more money — and he also campaigned on no tax increases.
Where he comes from
Allen is not a career politician, and the biography is worth knowing. He graduated from Oakland High School in 1982, worked from the age of twelve in his family's five-and-dime store, and took two bachelor's degrees from MTSU — political science and sociology — in 2001. For the past eight years he has been chief operations officer of Rutherford County Area Habitat for Humanity, where the organization built a 48-home subdivision and completed its 200th house in December 2024.
That is an unusual résumé for the job, and a relevant one. Housing affordability, land use, permitting and the cost of building here are not adjacent to the county's traffic and growth problems — they are the same problem viewed from a different angle.
The rematch behind it
There is history in this transition. Allen ran as an independent for the office in 2022 and lost to Joe Carr, drawing 10,387 votes. He had run before that, in the 2018 primary, taking just over 31 percent. This year he came back and beat the sitting mayor in the Republican primary — a result that does not happen often at the county level, and one that suggests the frustration he campaigned on was widely shared.
He takes office with the county's two most-discussed problems already in someone else's hands: the interstate belongs to the state, and the landfill is, at the moment, with the courts.
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