Editor's note, Nov. 8, 2026: At Rick Shepherd's request, his answers to our four questions now appear in full in the "In his own words" section below, exactly as he wrote them. An earlier version of this story condensed them. We're sorry we did not run them in full from the start.

Rick Shepherd, a retired Army command sergeant major running for office for the first time, won Fairview's mayor's race Tuesday by 35 votes, according to the unofficial count from the Williamson County Election Commission.

Shepherd had 1,420 votes, Vice Mayor Chris McDonald had 1,385 and Mayor Lisa Anderson had 1,192. The results are unofficial until the county certifies them, which it must do by Nov. 23. See the full results, including the Board of Commissioners race, on our election results page.

"I didn't run for a title," Shepherd wrote on his campaign Facebook page on election night. "I ran because I love this community and believe in its future."

Who he is

Shepherd grew up on a farm near Athens, in East Tennessee, and graduated from McMinn County High School in 1985, according to his campaign site. He worked as a McMinn County deputy sheriff and as a welder.

His campaign says he served 36 years in the U.S. Army and the Tennessee Army National Guard and retired as a command sergeant major, a rank in the Army's highest enlisted pay grade. He spent 2004 in Iraq, later helped train soldiers in Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania, and worked disaster response in Tennessee and across the Southeast and the Virgin Islands, along with border operations in Arizona, according to his campaign and a 2024 Williamson Herald profile.

He and his wife, Sherry Anderson, who is Williamson County's Register of Deeds, have four children. On election night he thanked Luke and Leah for coming from East Tennessee to work the polls, and Megan, "our Middle Tennessee girl," for doing the same.

On election night he wrote that during the campaign Luke reminded him of what he had always told him mattered most: "God, Country, and Family."

How he got into the race

This was Shepherd's first run for office, and he has not served on a Fairview city board.

He wrote on his campaign page that active-duty rules kept him out of politics while he served. On April 8, 2025, he testified before the state House State and Local Government Committee for a bill that kept party primaries for county races instead of letting parties switch to caucuses. He told lawmakers that soldiers like him often had to vote absentee or early because of deployments and emergencies, the Tennessee Firefly reported. The bill became law that month. Its sponsors, Rep. Lee Reeves and Sen. Jack Johnson, both later endorsed him for mayor.

After that, he wrote, he began helping other candidates' campaigns. Knocking on doors in Fairview, he said, he kept hearing concerns about where the city was headed.