Even before incumbent Knox County Commissioner Kyle Ward announced that he would not seek a second term, the race for Commission’s 4th District this year was guaranteed to be closely watched and fought. 

One issue in the campaign is who really qualifies as a Republican.

The district, which spreads across West Knoxville from Sequoyah Hills to Northshore Town Center, is one of the most politically divided in the county. Although it has mostly been represented on County Commission by Republicans — including Ward — many of its precincts have trended increasingly Democratic over the past decade. 

In the district’s 2022 school board race, Democrat Katherine Bike upset Republican Will Edwards despite being significantly outspent. With Ward out of the Commission contest, both county Republicans and Democrats are expected to invest heavily in the race.

There are two candidates on the GOP side, who will face off in the March 5 primary: real estate broker Garrett Holt and retired advertising executive Liz Tombras. Whoever wins the primary will face Democrat Shane Jackson, a banker and military veteran, in the Aug. 1 county general election.

Holt and Tombras are separated first of all by age — as Victor Ashe noted in his News Sentinel column, the 30-year-old Holt is the youngest candidate on the entire county ballot, and at 83, Tombras is the oldest.

But the more significant difference is over who is better qualified to represent the Republican voters of the district. Tombras and her supporters have challenged Holt’s GOP bona fides and sought to have him ruled ineligible by the party.

Party leaders were not swayed and allowed Holt to run under the Republican banner — not least because the party already supported him once, in a 2021 race for City Council. Still, one of Tombras’ central arguments is that she is the only real conservative on the ballot in the district. 

If that argument is registering anywhere, it’s not in fundraising. Holt reported raising $19,647 between July 1, 2023, and Jan. 15, 2024, and had $37,559.67 on hand. Tombras, who just joined the race at the end of November, has not yet filed a campaign finance disclosure. (The deadline is Jan. 31.)

We will profile Jackson ahead of the general election, but for now here’s a closer look at the two Republican primary candidates.

Garrett Holt

According to Holt, his interest in public service started early.

“People look at me and assume I was an athlete,” the buff-looking candidate said. “I was not. I was actually voted ‘Most Involved’ in high school and was president of multiple clubs, state president of a community service organization. So I was really, really involved in leadership and service in our local community at that age.”

The Knoxville native graduated from West High School as valedictorian of his class and earned a summa cum laude diploma in accounting and international business from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He worked as an accountant and in medical sales before joining Oliver Smith Realty as an affiliate broker.

After some post-college years away, Holt returned to his hometown four years ago. He now lives in the Rocky Hill area.

“I feel like I’ve come full circle,” he said.

And with that has come a return to that early interest in community service. Holt first ran for office in 2021, as a candidate for the 6th District City Council seat. He was part of a slate of Republican candidates that challenged incumbents in the nonpartisan races that year. They all lost, which in Holt’s case especially was not a surprise — he was running in a heavily Democratic majority-minority district, against a well-known opponent, former Vice Mayor Gwen McKenzie.

The political playing field in the Commission 4th District is more level, and Holt — who calls himself “a fairly moderate guy, at the end of the day” — thinks he is the right candidate to represent a politically mixed area almost evenly split between neighborhoods inside and outside city limits.

“The number one thing people bring up to me is traffic, growth and infrastructure,” he said. “It is a very well developed district, we’re not Hardin Valley or Corryton or Halls where you’re going to pop up a new 800-house development. That being said, the major arteries that we drive on — for instance, Ebenezer, Kingston Pike, Northshore — some of those haven't changed since I was a kid.”

As a commissioner, Holt said, he would advocate for infrastructure investments to try to alleviate the burden on those often-congested roadways. He is supportive of the Advance Knox planning update process and proposed changes to the county’s growth policy. But he said the real challenges will come in its implementation.

“Where the rubber meets the road is where the utility of this comes into play,” he said. “What can we do to incentivize and actualize this? Let’s say we want more ‘middle housing.’ What are incentives does someone that's building that have to do that, over other housing types? And that also comes into what subsequent zoning regulations we put in place.”

Holt said his work in commercial real estate is mostly focused on helping local businesses locate and expand. Conscious that some voters look askance at developers as a group, he emphasized that he’s not a developer and would seek to represent the views and interests of his constituents as a whole.

“What I tell people is we’ve got to be really intelligent,” he said. “Where are we going to allow types of development — where we're going to allow new large-scale commercial, large-scale multifamily, and where we’re going to say, hey, this doesn't actually fit in the character of this neighborhood or this part of the community.”

Holt has faced two different complaints from local interest groups in recent months. Some local Republican Party members, led by Gary Loe of the West Knox Republican Club, have challenged his party credentials. Tombras joined that challenge as well. 

They cite his voting record, which shows he does not meet the party’s requirement of voting in three of the last four statewide Republican primary elections. They also note that in 2016, he voted in the Democratic presidential primary.

But party officials allowed Holt to remain on the ballot, noting that they had already supported him in his 2021 campaign. Holt said that he had only moved back to Knox County in 2020, and his voting record isn’t much different from many people in their 20s. 

“In my opinion, the whole (challenge) has been a little childish,” he said.

He was also a secondary subject of an ethics complaint filed against Ward last fall by a homeowner who was displeased by Ward’s plans to develop a parcel of nearby property. Ward, who is supporting Holt’s campaign, had appointed Holt to serve on the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals, which was set to hear a variance requested by Ward for the property. Ward ended up withdrawing the request, but Holt had moved to approve it. The complaint didn’t specify a quid pro quo between Ward and Holt but suggested that their personal relationship created a conflict.

The county Law Department said nothing in the complaint amounted to a conflict of interest, and the county Ethics Committee dismissed it. Holt stepped down from the BZA shortly afterward to focus on his run for office.

“I don’t really feel like there was an issue there,” he said.

Neither of those issues have dampened support for Holt among establishment Republican donors. His finance disclosure lists contributions from familiar names like developers Nick Cazana and Tim Hill, construction CEO Raja Jubran, auctioneer Sam Furrow, contractor Wes Stowers and Judge Tony Stansberry. He has also received a donation from the local Building Industry PAC.

He has also switched campaign consultants in this race. In 2021, he worked with Erik Wiatr, who helped elect Ward along with commissioners Gina Oster and Rhonda Lee, and state Rep. Elaine Davis. This time around, Holt has turned to Andrew Davis, former policy director for County Mayor Glenn Jacobs. 

Beyond growth issues, Holt said he’s concerned about maintaining good salaries for law enforcement officers and teachers.

“I want us to make investments in our community that are the necessities, the basic core functions,” he said. “The roads we drive on, the community that we plan for, the people that keep us safe when we have an emergency, and the people that educate our children.”

Liz Tombras

Like Holt, Tombras touts her connections to Knoxville and Knox County.

“I’ve lived in every section of town,” she said. “I grew up in East Knoxville. I graduated from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor of science with honors. And I am a lifelong conservative Republican. I’ve voted in all elections since I became my age of voting.”

Tombras is retired after a long and successful career in television advertising. She worked for WBIR, rising to general sales manager. She oversaw both local and national accounts, and in 2004 she was inducted into the Knoxville Advertising Hall of Fame.

“I've managed multi-million dollar budgets over the years, and answering to corporate owners, which is always tough,” she said. “Because no matter what the market says, they always want an increase.”

She was formerly married to Charles Tombras Jr. — another member of the Knoxville Advertising Hall of Fame — who ran the Tombras advertising agency for decades. They had one child, Charles Tombras III.

Liz Tombras has been active in local Republican clubs for decades but had never considered running for office until now. Why enter the arena at an age when most people would be happily retired?

“I have a hard time taking it easy,” she said. “I have a great deal of energy. I don’t think of myself as 83 years old. I’m looking for a new challenge.”

That challenge presented itself when she heard the questions about Holt’s eligibility to run as a Republican.

“He’s on the ballot, but he’s not a Republican,” Tombras said, citing his vote in the 2016 primary. “He’s a liberal Democrat.”

For whatever differences she may have with Holt, like him she names growth and infrastructure as the top issue facing county government. She said she had concerns about the proposed changes to the county’s growth plan, which would convert 14.5 square miles of agricultural land into “planned growth” areas. Tombras said the rural roads in those areas aren’t designed to handle the kind of traffic intense development would create.

“I think one of the things County Commission needs to do is responsible development,” she said. “Not put the cart before the horse, make sure the infrastructure is there.”

Among the types of development that concern her is affordable housing, which she said should more properly be called “low-income housing.” Tombras said it was a mistake to try to force such subsidized housing into areas of the county like the generally affluent 4th District.

“I want to keep the neighborhoods safe and not put in all these houses that would destroy the property values of people that have lived there for a long time,” she said. “They just flood the market with this low-income housing. So I think that is a big problem.”

Other top issues she identified are public safety, the presence of undocumented immigrants, and ever more visible homeless population. 

“I live in West Hills, and there’s been a lot of (homeless people) on Kingston Pike, under the bridges,” Tombras said. “And at Food City, there were people trying to camp out there. We need some kind of mental health facility for people who are homeless because of their mental health.”

She also promised that she would not support any increase in the county tax rate.

“I want to be a watchdog for the taxpayer, make sure that the money is spent properly, correctly, frugally,” she said. “They work hard for their dollars, and somebody needs to treat it as though it were theirs.”

As for the 53-year age gap between her and her opponent, she said that should count in her favor.

“He’s a young guy,” Tombras said. “I’m an old girl. And I have a lot of management experience and a lot of business experience managing hundreds of millions of dollars. He does not have that experience.”