Norris, Rocky Top candidates unopposed
Rocky Top Mayor Kerry Templin presides over the August City Council meeting on Thursday at City Hall. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
In Norris, five candidates, including four incumbents, qualified to run for the five open seats on the City Council.
And in Rocky Top, only the two incumbents qualified to run for the two open City Council seats, and Mayor Kerry Templin is unopposed in his bid for a second four-year term.
In Norris, Councilmen Bill Grieve, Charles P. “Chuck” Nicholson, Travis Honeycutt and Alex Munro are on the ballot, along with newcomer Zach Cross.
Absent from the race is Mayor Chris Mitchell, who chose not to run for re-election this year after serving nearly 18 years on the council – all of them as mayor.
Mitchell said in early July that he “will not be entering into City Council Election process this cycle.”
Rocky Top Councilmen Jeff Gilliam and Joe Tackett are the only candidates running for the two open council seats there. In Rocky Top, the mayor and council members run separately, and serve four-year terms, with two council positions up for election every two years.
Qualifying deadline was noon Thursday, Aug. 20, for both cities’ municipal elections, which take place on the same day.
All five Norris council members are elected every two years. The mayor is chosen by a majority vote of the new City Council when it meets for the first time, in December following the biennial election.
Grieve has served nearly six terms on the council, and has also served as vice mayor. He grew up in Norris from the first grade on, and later serving in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve for 29 years, seeing duty in Vietnam and later in Operation Desert Storm.
Nicholson, who was first elected to the council four years ago, also now serves as vice-mayor and chair of the Norris Water Commission. He worked for TVA for 40 years, and has been involved in city government since the 1980s with the Tree Commission and other boards and commissions.
Honeycutt was appointed to the council last December to serve the remainder of the term of Will Grinder, who resigned from the post in late October.
Honeycutt, who has lived in Norris for about three years, said in an email to the city before his appointment that he has “led high-stakes federal business operations, worked with lobbyist organizations and worked to have bills passed in Congress.”
Munro, whose birth name is Alexander Hickey, was appointed during the July council meeting to fill out the rest of Loretta Painter’s term on the council. Painter, who served more than 10 years, resigned in May and moved to Virginia.
Munro moved his family to Norris from Tucson, Arizona, about three years ago, and is in his second term as a member of the Norris Planning Commission. He lives on Dairy Pond Road.
Cross, a Norris resident since 2011, had applied along with Munro for Painter’s council seat.
He said at the time that he is a mechanical engineer with experience in “environmental regulation compliance,” “infrastructure planning and development,” and “conflict resolution and mediation.”
As for Rocky Top, Templin is part of a family that has long been involved in business and politics in the city formerly known as Lake City. He garnered more than 82 percent of the vote against former Mayor Timothy Sharp in the 2022 city election.
He is a now-retired compliance training officer for the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, and for 20 years was a firefighter at Y-12.
Gilliam, an investigator with the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, was the top vote-getter in the five-way race for the two open council seats in 2022, collecting 227 votes. In second place, winning the other seat, was Mack Bunch, with 210 votes.
But Bunch resigned his seat in early 2025, and Tackett was appointed by the remaining council members in April 2025 to fill out his unexpired term.
Tackett had served on the council a few years ago, the mayor said.
Templin is a lifelong resident of the area whose father, George Templin, served as mayor and city councilman in the 1980s, and ran Cooper Supply Co., a former local hardware store.