Todd Kaestner, a Tennessee healthcare executive and former Williamson County commissioner now running for mayor, says his campaign is focused on “preserving and protecting” the lives of Williamson County residents by bringing his executive experience to local leadership.
Kaestner announced his candidacy for Williamson County mayor last month, kickstarting his campaign with $250,000 of his personal funds.
Incumbent Williamson County Mayor Rogers Anderson previously announced that he will not seek reelection next year.
In addition to having served as a Williamson County Commissioner for five years, Kaestner most recently retired as the executive vice president of Brookdale Senior Living Inc., where he worked for 41 years and helped grow the company from, as he said, “virtually nothing” to a $5.8 billion enterprise value company – the largest senior living operator in the U.S.
Touting his over 40 years of executive experience in finance, operations, and development at Brookdale Senior Living and other notable companies over the course of his career, Kaestner said his executive skills qualify him to run Williamson County when it comes to efficiency and fiscal discipline.
“[My candidacy] is a way to give back and it’s a way to provide some much needed assistance that Williamson County needs, an executive in its executive office. I really think that it’s an administrative function, largely,” Kaestner explained on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
One of Kaestner’s central campaign promises is to avoid tax increases while addressing the needs for infrastructure and education.
He said he supports alternative funding strategies, such as reclaiming a portion of the state’s real estate transfer tax for local use—funds that currently go entirely to the state, despite being generated within the county.
“We need to look for alternative sources of funds…We do not want to raise taxes,” he said. “It’s time for Williamson County to stop subsidizing other counties. We are not the piggy bank for the rest of Tennessee.”
Regarding education, Kaestner noted that education is the largest component of the county budget and deserves better support from the state. By his calculations, Williamson County would receive $130 million more annually if it were funded at the state average.
“Education is our biggest budgetary need in Williamson County. It takes the bulk of our county budget, and I think it’s about $600 million. We get underfunded by the state. If we were to get the average that the state pays the average county, we’d have another $130 million a year. We’ve got some debt out there, and $130 million of debt would amortize our revenue and would amortize our debt very quickly,” Kaestner said.
He pointed to his past work in creating an education impact fee to help fund new school construction, saying it raised hundreds of millions without placing an extra burden on existing taxpayers.
“Back in the day when we were building schools like mad, I would drive down Columbia Highway and I’d see signs that said ‘this subdivision zoned for Centennial High School.’ The developers were wisely touting the quality of our schools, which was wonderful, but that got me looking at the math behind that. And at that time, these numbers are a little bit dated but for a new home to cover the cost of the education cost that it created, you’d have to more than double the taxes. And of course, that wasn’t happening, so it meant that the existing taxpayers were carrying that burden,” Kaestner explained.
“So I got the idea to have an education impact fee. Started out at $10,000 in order to ameliorate that expense for developers, for any house sale and any new construction, so that went to that fund, and it raised a couple hundred million dollars, which I’m told by some commissioners that’s more money than any commissioner has ever raised for the county before,” he added.
Moving forward, Kaestner said he is committing significant time and personal resources to his campaign, including the $250,000 self-funded loan to kickstart his efforts.
He said he plans to run a grassroots campaign focused on door-knocking and direct engagement with residents.
“I’m serious [about my campaign]. I’m going to be knocking on doors a lot and talking to constituents directly,” he said.
The general election for Williamson County mayor will be held on August 6, 2026. The Republican primary is scheduled for May 5.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo ” Todd Kaestner” by Angie Hairrell Brown. Background Photo “Williamson County Courthouse” by Ichabod. CC BY-SA 3.0.
