Big things coming for Trenton in 2026
Big things coming for Trenton in 2026
Burriss gives ‘State of the City’
By Logan Watson
Trenton Mayor Tony Burriss visited the Trenton Rotary Club last Tuesday to share some of the big changes that will be taking place in 2026 and the years to come.
With only one year left in his term, Mayor Burriss looked back at how far the city has come since he first took office in 2007.
“You never need to be in any kind of an office or take any kind of a job unless you have some sort of vision or reason to be there,” Burriss said. “When I took this job the last time, I had two things that I wanted to do. We had an outdated, dilapidated City Park out there that nobody had put any money into. And I’ll take credit for it, I was in office for seven years and I may have put $100,000 in that park. But we had not put any money in that park for a long, long time.”
During his first stent as Mayor, Burriss said that he sought out three $500,000 grants to help rebuild the Downtown area and took out a loan to revamp City Hall, which he said had not been renovated since 1960.
“When I took office in 2007, Downtown looked like somebody had dropped a bomb on it. It was a warzone down there. There was rubble and buildings falling down. It’s not perfect yet. We still have some problems down there, but it’s a whole lot better than it was.”
After coming back to the Mayor’s office in 2022, Burriss said that he and City Recorder Leigh Ann Reynolds were able to find $250,000 to jump-start park renovations at the baseball fields.
“We’re in Year Three of a 10-year plan,” he said. “We’re going to start in the spring. Matter of fact, they’re already starting to take stuff out there and unload it.”
Burriss said that Shady Acres Park will be getting three new pickleball courts, a new playground and new lighting for the baseball and softball fields.
“The playground we have now is old and worn out, and it’s down in the lowest part of the park, so any time we have a big rain, all the water goes down there,” Burriss said. “We’re going to get the playground up out of the water and on higher ground. Once we get that loan paid off, then the next administration can do basketball courts, splash pads or whatever they want to do.”
Burriss said that the park was “easy to do,” but the lawsuit between the City and District Attorney General Frederick Agee’s office has been a more difficult situation.
“The suit is all about the fact that we supply the courtroom, we supply the judge, we supply all the workers in the courtroom, the police to help with whatever, but the DA wants us to pay for the Assistant DA’s to come and try the cases. We supply everything. They’re already getting paid. We’ve never done that before. We’ve never paid for any of that before and we don’t feel like we should.”
After winning the case in both Chancery Court and the Court of Appeals, the City of Trenton and the City of Milan, which also filed suit against the DAG’s Office, will have to present their cases a third time in front of the Tennessee Supreme Court.
“In the City of Trenton, we have a small court,” Burriss said. “If we had to pay $85,000 or $90,000 a year for an Assistant DA, we’d have to give up our court. We don’t want to do that.”
Burriss added that the Blue Oval City development has not gone as expected, either.
“I told everybody that I wouldn’t run again when I got out the first time,” Mayor Burriss said. “The reason I decided to run again was because of Blue Oval. Blue Oval was going to be ‘the thing’ in 2022. Everything was going to happen by 2025. We were going to have cars coming off of that assembly line, we were going to have houses springing up all over West Tennessee. Retail opportunity was going to be everywhere. We now know all that went to Hell in a handbasket.”
According to Mayor Burriss, production is not expected to begin until 2029.
“They’re switching gears. When I first took office, we thought we were a year or two out from having trucks coming off the line. We had people come in that wanted to speculate building subdivisions. We had people buying land. We had all kinds of stuff going on. Some of that has come to fruition, but some of that has not. It’s just going to be a little bit before that happens.”
Mayor Burriss said that he also thought the pothole patching machine had been a pretty nice win for the city.
“We’ve already got it paid off. It’s great. That’s going to save us money,” Burriss said. “We’ve got a solar farm on the South side of town. We saved $20,000 off our bill from TVA by having that solar farm. Ten thousand of those dollars went back into Trenton Light & Water. We’re going to save $120,000 to $140,000 per year because of the solar farm. We’re in the process of finishing a fiber network all over the city. We’re converting all of our street lights in town over to LED lights and I’ve secured a grant with TDOT to replace all the traffic lights and crosswalk lights on the bypass.”
“One of the things I want to work on this year is our census count,” Burriss said of his goals for 2026. “Our census count says that we’ve got 4,264 people that live in the city limits of Trenton. I don’t believe that. I believe there’s more people that live here than that. I’m trying to find a way to do an unofficial census of this town, because the more people we have, the more money we can get from the state. It’s a thing that I think we need to do.”
Mayor Burriss also said that the city is in need of a hotel or motel and that he would love to find a way for the city to start a recycling center and fix the city’s aging infrastructure.
“I’d like to expand our retail opportunities, but we’ll just have to see how well all that works,” the Mayor said.
While there is still progress to be made in his final year as Mayor, Burriss stated that some of the biggest advantages for the city is its department heads, including TL&W Utility Manager Joe Wamble, Police Chief Bill Cusson, Terry Brown and the rest.
“We just have great people that work for us,” Mayor Burriss said. “The city is in great shape, it really is.”
