The contest for Knox County’s 4th District County Commission seat has been one of the most closely-watched races by both parties since the start of this election cycle. 

Democrats hold only two of 11 County Commission seats. The 4th District is one of their best chances to add one.

Republican incumbent Commissioner Kyle Ward announced last year that he would not seek a second term, amplifying already high interest in the deeply purple precincts that stretch from Sequoyah Hills along Kingston Pike and Northshore Drive through West Hills and Rocky Hill. 

Ward has endorsed Republican candidate Garrett Holt, who in March easily dispatched with a primary challenge from Liz Tombras. Tombras alleged that Holt was not a real conservative, a charge that found little traction in the affluent and well-educated district.

The seat has been mostly held by Republicans through the years, but the district — and particularly its precincts within the City of Knoxville — has been trending more Democratic recently. In 2022, Democrat Katherine Bike defeated Republican Will Edwards for the district’s school board seat.

Holt, who works in real estate, has been buoyed by support from traditional Republican donors. But he faces an equally well-funded opponent in banker Shane Jackson, who has prior electoral experience as a City Council member in Athens, Tenn.

A Jackson victory would be significant for county Democrats. Although Knox County as a whole tends to vote 35-40 percent for Democrats in presidential elections, the party currently holds only two of 11 seats on County Commission — accounting for just 18 percent of the total. 

Holt raised $25,423 during this election cycle through the end of March, and had $18,869 on hand. His contributors include major GOP donors like Haslam in-law David Colquitt, construction magnates Raja Jubran and Wes Stowers, and developers Tim Hill, HD Patel and Scott Smith. 

Jackson had raised $37,259 and had $22,561 on hand at the end of March. His supporters include Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon and Vice Mayor Tommy Smith, as well as former Mayor Madeline Rogero, philanthropists Phil Lawson and Roy Cockrum, former county Election Administrator Cliff Rodgers (who is also Jackson’s campaign treasurer) and former City Council members Duane Grieve and Finbarr Saunders. And despite Holt’s work in real estate, Jackson has been endorsed by East Tennessee Realtors.

Here’s a look at the two contenders. (The profile of Holt has been updated from our primary coverage.)

Shane Jackson

Jackson was born in Chattanooga and moved as a child to McMinn County, because of his father’s work as an engineer at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear power plant. He grew up in largely rural settings.

“I had a very idyllic Norman Rockwell childhood, you know, building tree houses and riding my Huffy bike and having a good time,” Jackson said. He was a Boy Scout, rising to the rank of Eagle Scout and serving as an Explorer Scout with the local fire department’s rescue squad.

After graduating from McMinn County High School, Jackson stayed close to home and enrolled at Tennessee Wesleyan University in Athens. He initially intended to become a Methodist minister but found that the program didn’t really call to him. What did were numbers — he was proficient in math, and ended up majoring in finance and accounting.

He earned his CPA license and also enlisted in the Tennessee National Guard, “for training and experience,” he said. He served seven years as a guardsman, rising to the rank of sergeant. By then he had found what turned out to be his career, in banking.

First he worked as a federal bank examiner, assigned to banks from Tennessee to Texas to Chicago. Eventually he and his family moved to Manhattan in the mid-2000s, where he was part of a team assigned to assess the risks at the insurance giant AIG (which melted down a few years later during the Great Recession). 

While in New York, he received a call from a bank back in Athens, offering him a position. He happily returned to his hometown, where his young children enrolled in elementary school and Jackson became deeply involved in the community. When an Athens City Council member stepped down in the middle of a term, Jackson was appointed to fill the seat. He was reelected to it two years later.

But then came another call, this time from a bank in Knoxville. Jackson and his family moved again, arriving in 2012. Jackson served as president of the People’s Bank here until 2019, when it was sold. Since then, he has been a commercial lender and area manager for Pinnacle Financial Partners.

Jackson and his wife have three children, two in college and one at West High School. His experiences as a parent are among the things that prompted him to run for office this year.

“Over the last 12 to 18 months, I’ve had three text messages from my son that said, ‘Hey, we're on hard lockdown here at West High School, possible active shooter, we’re all having to be quiet,’” he said. In one case, a gun in a student’s backpack actually discharged during class, causing minor injuries to a teacher.

“That's one of the reasons I'm running to make sure that we keep our children safe, fully fund our public schools, and let’s find ways to keep guns out of school,” Jackson said.

More broadly, he said, he wants to serve the community that has provided support to him and his family when they needed it — particularly during a period five years ago when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to undergo aggressive treatment.

“It was a long period of the toughest period of my life,” he said. “And in the last year and a half, I’ve gotten my feet back under me and I want to give back again.”

He said his approach to issues will be pragmatic rather than political. He cited his experience on Athens City Council getting the city to combine its 911 response center with the county center, which he said led to better communication among emergency responders and better service for residents.

Jackson said he rode along with an AMR ambulance crew to see Knox County’s emergency response system up close — including long wait times for ambulances to transfer patients to hospital care.

“It’s a complex issue that’s going to need complex solutions,” he said. “That’s one of the things that I think county government can do better. You know, put a committee together of these hospital CEOs, high-level executives, and say, ‘Let’s fix this problem.’”

He said he hopes the new growth and land-use plans adopted as a result of the Advance Knox planning process will provide a framework for growth that allows the county to prosper without overwhelming its infrastructure and existing communities.

“Investing in town centers along our major corridors, but also respecting the integrity and culture of our existing neighborhoods,” he said. “I’m not interested in getting rid of single-family residences or anything. We’ll still have plenty of single-family residences in Knox County. We just need to do it in a non-sprawling fashion.”

He said his banking background will be helpful in assessing the county’s financial situation. He said he is not looking to raise taxes, but he added — showing situational awareness of the Republican majority on Commission — “If my Republican colleagues on the Commission choose to motion and second a motion to raise taxes, I would just need to discuss that with my constituents in District 4 and hear the temperature of both sides and weigh their opinions.”

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 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 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. Loe supported Tombras in the Republican primary, to little avail — Holt won it with 68 percent of the vote.

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.

He has 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.”