Deemed approved.

01The 30-second version

Every city in Tennessee is about to be put on a timer. Public Chapter 1044, signed by Governor Bill Lee on May 27, 2026 and effective January 1, 2027, tells local governments how long they may take to review a development application, a development plan, or a site inspection. The deadlines are counted in business days, and the penalty for missing them is the part worth reading twice: the submission is deemed approved.

Nobody has to sign anything. No board has to vote. If the days run out and the city has not acted, the developer has an approval, and Franklin has lost the argument it never got to make.

The law arrived in Franklin's public record on September 8, as item 11 on a Tuesday work session agenda, under the heading "Zoning Ordinance Update: Public Chapter 1044 And Development Review Changes." In a year of published board and planning commission agendas, that is the only time it appears. The city has 112 days and a holiday season to rewrite how it handles the thing Franklin argues about more than anything else.

The sponsors were not backbenchers. The House version, House Bill 2552, was carried by Majority Leader William Lamberth. The Senate companion, Senate Bill 2237, was carried by Majority Leader Jack Johnson, whose 27th District is Williamson County. The law that puts a clock on Franklin's planning department was written, in the Senate, by Franklin's own senator.

02Five clocks, and what each one starts

The act writes a new section into state law, Tennessee Code Annotated 7-51-2204, and adds a new chapter governing the release of performance bonds. Between them they set five deadlines. All of them count business days, which is more generous than it first sounds: 60 business days is about twelve calendar weeks, not two months.

Bars scale to the longest clock. Business days, so weekends are excluded and a day the city is closed under a declared state of emergency does not count. The red bar is the one carrying the automatic-approval penalty. Starting from January 1, 2027, 30 business days runs to February 12, 60 to March 26, and 120 to June 18.

The 60-day clock is the one with teeth, and it has a wide escape hatch. The city can satisfy it either by approving the submittal or by putting it on the next available agenda of the planning commission or the Board of Mayor and Aldermen. Franklin already runs items onto agendas as a matter of course, so on that measure the city is closer to compliant than the headline suggests.

The 30-day clock is where the pressure actually lands. Within 30 business days of a submittal, staff must produce a written report of deficiencies or ask for the information needed to judge compliance, and the act tells them to consolidate every change request into a single document rather than dribbling them out. If an application arrives incomplete, the city has the same 30 business days to say so in writing, and that notice does not count as a deficiency report.

Miss all of it and the submission is deemed approved. The act does not describe an appeal, a cure period, or a way for a city to reclaim a decision it failed to make in time.

03Two rounds of changes, then a refund

Underneath the countdown sits a quieter provision that will change more working days at City Hall than the clock does. A local government reviewing a development application may not issue more than two written reports of deficiencies. Two rounds. That is the budget.

If the problems in that second report are not resolved, the city has exactly two moves left. It can deny the application, but only with written justification citing specific evidence of noncompliance with a statutory or regulatory requirement, and it must hand back 50 percent of every fee the developer paid during the review. Or it can conditionally approve the application, or send it to the planning commission or the board for conditional approval.

Read those together and the incentive is plain. A denial now costs the city half the review fees and obliges staff to build a defensible evidentiary record. A conditional approval costs nothing. For a marginal application that has already burned its two reports, the cheaper path runs toward yes.

The bond provisions work the same way from the other end. Once a professional engineer registered with the state conducts an independent inspection and finds the work complete, the city has 120 business days to approve the release or agenda it, or 20 business days to refuse in writing and specify what is unfinished. The engineer is hired to inspect; the city is on the clock to respond.

None of this touches contracts already in existence on December 31, 2026, which buys Franklin a little room on work already under way.

The version that passed is gentler than the version filed. As introduced, the bill gave cities 30 business days to approve or report deficiencies, with automatic approval if they missed that single deadline. The enacted text split the job into a 30-day duty to respond and a 60-day duty to act. The softening is real. The automatic approval survived it.

04How fast Franklin actually moves

Franklin publishes its agendas as plain text, and every item on them prints its own history: which board heard it, on what date, and how the vote went. That makes it possible to reconstruct, without asking anyone, how long the city has been taking.

We pulled a year of Board of Mayor and Aldermen and planning commission agendas, 61 in all, and traced every development plan that appears on more than one of them. Fourteen qualify. The bars below measure calendar days from the first board date printed on an item to the last.

Fourteen development plans, grouped where several shared a span. Median 47 calendar days. Sixty business days is roughly 84 calendar days, marked in red where an item ran past it. Harlin accounts for four of the fourteen, three of which moved on identical dates and share a row.

The shape of that record is the story. Twelve of the fourteen cleared the boards inside twelve calendar weeks, several of them in under three. Franklin is not a slow city for ordinary work.

The two that ran long were the two that mattered most. Aureum took 153 days. Harlin, the 311-acre annexation on the old dairy farm that the board approved 5 to 3 after a fight over traffic, took 292 days and went back to the planning commission nine months after it first arrived there. The time went into arguing, which is what the time is for.

That is the tension the new law creates, and it is worth being precise about it. These spans measure the journey across public meetings, not the statutory clock, which starts when a developer hands something to staff and can be stopped by putting the item on the next agenda. Franklin will very likely clear the 60-day test on most days of the week.

What the record shows instead is where Franklin spends its time: on the handful of large, contested projects that come back, and back again, until the conditions are right. A two-report cap and a refund penalty press hardest on exactly those. The quick ones were never the problem.

05The calendar problem

Franklin has to change its own rules before the state's rules arrive, and the meeting calendar is tighter than the 112 days imply.

Six regular Board of Mayor and Aldermen meetings remain in 2026: September 22, October 13 and 27, November 10 and 24, and December 8. The planning commission, which has to weigh in on a zoning ordinance change before the board can adopt one, has three dates on the published calendar: September 24, October 22 and December 10.

December 10 falls after December 8. An ordinance that waits for the December planning commission cannot then be read by a board that has already held its last regular meeting of the year. In practice the work has to clear the planning commission in September or October, which leaves the board its November and early December meetings to get an ordinance through its readings.

Franklin did not ask for this and cannot opt out. Neither could it easily budget for it: the General Assembly's own fiscal note on the bill concluded that the effect on local revenue and local spending "cannot be determined with reasonable certainty," while citing the clause of the Tennessee Constitution that bars the state from imposing new costs on cities without sharing them.

The objections on the record came from this county. Fox 17 reported in May that Kristi Dunlap Ransom, Williamson County's attorney for planning and environment, warned the deadline could force approval of projects with unresolved problems, and that Brentwood city manager Jason Gage questioned what a shot clock does to community safety. Janet Curtis of the Mayes Creek Basin watchdog group put it shortest: "I think it's ridiculous."

Builders saw the same bill differently. Grant Wicker of Wicker Construction told the station that permits had been running as long as nine months, and that a fixed window "really, really helps us in the pre-construction process." Both things can be true. A city that takes nine months to answer is a problem; a city that answers badly because a timer ran out is a different one.

06What we are watching

Between now and the new year this is a story with dates attached, which is unusual for anything at City Hall. Here is the state of it.

The question under all of them is the one the act does not answer: what a city does on the day it discovers a project was approved because a calendar ran out. There is no appeal written into the law, and no procedure for undoing it. Franklin will find out the answer in public, probably in the spring.