In the middle of Tennessee, there's a place that feels far removed from city living.

It's called Coffee County, and my colleague Cam McWhorter recently traveled there.

It's extremely rural.

There's a lot of farms that are sort of low rolling hills. There's a lot of cattle. There's a lot of

corn being grown. It's a very bucolic setting. But not far from Coffee County, there are urban

centers that are growing quickly. It is on the road between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and north of Huntsville, Alabama,

which is a big booming part of the South as well.

In recent years, that boom has been spilling beyond those city boundaries.

And for a while, it seemed like Coffey County

was poised to take on some of that growth. The mayor, which is the top executive in the county,

a guy named Judd Mathini, had been very pro-growth and was ready to turn the county into a,

lots of subdivisions, lots of development, lots of businesses.

He was ready for that to happen.

I mean, obviously covering the growth in the South, you see development everywhere.

And farms are being converted into subdivisions all the time.

But in Coffey County, the drive for growth took a sudden turn. Last spring, Mathini died

unexpectedly, and with him, the momentum behind development. His death unleashed this political switch

and this political fight now over whether this county can stop that kind of growth, or at least reduce it.

And what was supposed to be a period of steady development turned into a period of open dispute,

one that's forcing the community to confront its priorities and what it means to be conservative.

On one side of the fight,

a continued push for transformation. We could create a larger tax base. We could have better restaurants. We, you know, we started this fight for everybody in the county, not just me.

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