Nashville is booming. Walk past the bars on Broadway, the restaurants in the Gulch, or the hole-in-the-walls on Music Row, and you’ll see it. Nashville’s population has grown by nearly half a million new residents in the last 20 years. In 2022 alone, Nashville’s population grew by 30,000—or 86 people a day.

With all this population growth, the need for housing has reached a fever pitch. Despite the real need to encourage more housing growth, in 2023, Nashville’s leaders decided to make it even more expensive to build or renovate homes in the metro area. Fortunately for current and future Nashvillians, the Beacon Center of Tennessee is the ever-vigilant defender of rational, reasonable, and affordable housing policy in the Volunteer State.

In 2023, the Metro Nashville Council passed a “Stormwater Fee” for new home construction and home renovations. The fee would charge builders and owners $0.71 per square foot for all new construction and renovations of existing homes.

While this might sound like a benign, nominal fee, homeowners and developers quickly learned its extremely flawed implementation could easily add up to thousands in additional fees for already expensive construction and renovation projects.

As communities and cities grow, public infrastructure must grow with them. But the costs for that infrastructure must be fairly—and constitutionally—charged. While it’s perfectly legitimate for cities to charge residents for public infrastructure, there were two main problems with Nashville’s stormwater fee. First, instead of homeowners having to pay the stormwater fee solely for their renovation or addition, the city was charging homeowners a stormwater fee for their whole property. For example, if a homeowner had a 500-square-foot house and wanted to add a 200-square-foot garage, they would have to pay a stormwater fee on 700 square feet (the house and garage combined). Second, the city was only charging stormwater fees to developers building new homes or homeowners renovating their properties. Even though all Nashvillians benefited from the city’s stormwater infrastructure, the costs were being levied (unconstitutionally) on certain homeowners only.

As developer Jeremy Seaton explained, “This affected homeowners the most. We hear [city leaders] say affordable housing, affordable housing, affordable housing. And then in the dark of night, we get slipped these fees.”

The Beacon Center has long been the voice of responsible government and defenders of Tennessee taxpayers. So, as the city levied more and more stormwater fees on unsuspecting homeowners and developers, Beacon started hearing pleas for help. One of those pleas came from Peyton Pratt.

Born and raised in Nashville, Pratt purchased his current home in 2019, but with growing children, his family needed more room. After weighing the options, Pratt’s family decided to rebuild a larger house on his current property. Pratt was aware of the stormwater fees but thought Nashville would charge him less than $2,000 based on the additions to his property.

Nashville charged him more than three times that.

Beacon quickly learned that Pratt’s story, unfortunately, wasn’t unique, so they filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the city’s unconstitutional stormwater fee.

There were multiple issues (both logical and legal) that Beacon highlighted with their case. First, the stormwater fee made it harder and more expensive to build in the growing city. And as anyone who’s recently purchased a home can tell you, even a few thousand dollars can make a difference. Second, the fee violated homeowners’ property rights by forcing individual property owners, rather than the public-at-large, to bear all the costs of the city’s stormwater infrastructure. Finally, the city was charging homeowners the fees based on the square footage of their entire homes, not just the areas being renovated or added.

This case represented Beacon’s first ever class-action lawsuit, and to say it was a success would be an understatement.

Almost immediately after Beacon filed their lawsuit, Nashville ceased collecting the stormwater fee and reached out to Beacon to discuss settlement options. The city did this before even filing an answer to the complaint in court. Nashville and Beacon agreed on a settlement which included Nashville favoring repeal of the ordinance as well as paying back over $1.4 million to homeowners who were forced to pay the stormwater fee. Because of this settlement, 361 Tennesseans who were wrongfully charged the stormwater fee are eligible for a full refund for the amount they were forced to pay.

In short, this case represents a complete victory for Beacon and their clients. Because of that fact, the Beacon Center of Tennessee is the winner of SPN’s 2025 Bob Williams Award for Best State-Based Litigation.

“This is a landmark agreement, not just for our client, but for all Tennesseans,” said Wen Fa, Beacon’s vice president of legal affairs.

Nashville is undoubtedly booming. And thanks to Beacon working alongside homeowners, that incredible growth for this incredible city will continue.