Expanded school vouchers, a new state immigration enforcement unit, disaster relief and a new office to issue bonds to finance and refinance transportation projects quickly gained passage in a four-day special session of the General Assembly.
Even though lawmakers quickly dispatched big issues in the special session, the regular session is now underway and usually lasts into late April.
Republican Gov. Bill Lee is to outline his goals for the regular session in his annual state of the state message, set for Monday.
Funding for projects approved in the special session has already been committed for the 2026 fiscal year, which runs from July 2025 to June 2026.
Special session funding, as detailed in a special session appropriation bill, totals $917 million.
Of that, $668.4 million will cover nonrecurring expenses, $198.4 million related to the Educational Freedom Act and $470 million related to Hurricane Helene. Also included are recurring expenses totaling $249 million.
Most of that will support the Education Freedom Act, allowing more parents to use what the state pays per public school pupil to educate their own children in private schools.
Some of the funding will go to parents regardless of their incomes.
Lee saw the special session bills as “historic action on pressing issues,” passed quickly with little dissent from a supermajority Republican legislature. Republicans targeted most dissent around expanding school vouchers, which lacked enough votes to pass in a regular legislative session last year.
This year’s special session, in contrast, took 15 days, from Lee’s initial Jan. 15 announcement of intent to call a special session to its conclusion Jan. 30. He praised lawmakers for working with him to “do what we think is best for the people of this state.”
Democratic lawmakers – a small minority of state legislators – could not have disagreed more. They supported only disaster relief for flood-ravaged East Tennessee and said the special session aid bill wasn’t timely and didn’t go far enough.
They opposed expansion of school vouchers as an assault on the state’s public schools and said the immigration bill was likely unconstitutional. Democrats did not break ranks and solidly opposed the education and immigration bills.
Court challenges to the state immigration bill are likely. The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee said in a press release it is preparing to litigate.
“Threatening officials with felony charges and criminal prosecution based solely on how they vote raises significant constitutional concerns,” ACLU-TN Legal Director Stella Yarbrough said. “This authoritarian legislation is incompatible with the bedrock American values of democracy and the rule of law, and we have no choice but to challenge it in court.”
The bill, among other things, created a new immigration enforcement division within the state Department of Safety, but related costs weren’t included in the appropriations bill.
Four people would work for the division, at a cost of just under $500,000 for salaries and benefits in the first year of operation, according to a corrected Jan. 27 fiscal note.
Later years’ salaries and benefits would be in the same range. The state would have to spend another $5 million per year in immigration enforcement expenses, but some of that might be offset by projected revenues from federal enforcement grants to local governments, the fiscal note said.
The special sessions appropriations bill also sheds light on approved spending.
For example, Hurricane Helene relief includes a $100 million fund called the Governor’s Relief and Recovery Fund. The fund could be used not only for Hurricane Helene relief, but also for future emergencies that could include “agricultural recovery, unemployment assistance and business recovery efforts,” according to a press release from the governor’s office.
The special session appropriations bill also routed about $23 million to the state Department of Education.
Each year, the department was to receive $6.2 million to go to local education agencies “related to active tourism development zones.”
The appropriations bill then references a section of the Tennessee code that applies to a county with a population between 98,300 and 98,400, according to the 2020 federal census. That county is Sevier County, according to online census records.
The rest of the $23 million, about $17 million a year, was to go toward incentives for high-performing LEAs in which more than half its schools get an “A” grade under the state’s school grading system law.