Fairview does less than you would expect a city to do, and that is the first thing worth understanding about living here.

The city runs a police department, a fire department, the streets, the parks and a chipper truck. It does not run your water, your gas, your electricity, your trash, your schools or your library. Every one of those belongs to somebody else, and nobody sends a new resident a letter explaining which is which. This is that letter.

The calls to make in your first week

Water is the Water Authority of Dickson County, on (615) 441-9511, and the same number after hours. Fairview's water is run from the next county over, out of Dickson, which catches people out when they go looking for a city water department that does not exist.

Electricity is Middle Tennessee Electric, a member-owned cooperative based in Franklin. New service and billing is (877) 777-9020. Outages have their own line, (615) 794-3561, and it is worth putting in your phone before the first storm rather than during it.

Gas is Piedmont Natural Gas, on (800) 752-7504, for service, billing and emergencies alike.

Trash is nobody's until you arrange it. There is no city collection and no line on a bill for it. If you have moved in and made no call, nothing is coming to your curb. Most of Fairview is served by Superior Disposal, which took over the customers of Fairview Trash; the paper has a separate guide to how that works and what recycling costs on top.

Sign up for the city's text alerts while you are at it, at fairview-tn.org. It is the fastest way to hear about a water main break, a road closure or a burn ban, and it is the one city service that comes to you rather than waiting to be found.

Who runs what

The dividing line is the county. Williamson County runs the schools, the library and the health clinic. The City of Fairview runs police, fire, streets, codes, parks and the municipal court. When you cannot work out who to call, that split is usually the answer.

City Hall is at 7100 City Center Way, open Monday to Friday, 8am to 4:30pm, on (615) 799-2484. The police department is in the same building on (615) 799-2435 — 911 for an emergency. Public Works, also there, is on (615) 799-0353, and is who you want for a street, a sign, a drain or the brush pile at the end of your driveway.

Fairview is governed by a city commission that meets in public. Agendas, minutes and the budget are posted at fairview-tn.org, and meetings are recorded and put up on the city's video page afterwards. If you ever want to know how a rezoning, a rate or a road actually got decided, that room is where it happened and anybody can sit in it.

The schools

Four public schools sit inside the city, all of them Williamson County schools. Fairview Elementary is at 2640 Fairview Boulevard and Westwood Elementary at 7200 Tiger Trail. Fairview Middle is at 7200 Cumberland Drive and Fairview High at 2595 Fairview Boulevard. Each keeps its own calendar, registration and sports schedule, and the district handles enrollment.

The library

The Fairview Public Library is at 2240 Fairview Boulevard, on (615) 224-6087. It opens Monday to Thursday 9am to 7pm, Friday and Saturday 9am to 5pm, and closes Sunday. It is a branch of the Williamson County system, so a card made here works at every other branch in the county, and the children's programming is the thing most young families find first.

The park

Bowie Nature Park is the piece of Fairview everybody mentions, and it earns it: 722 acres off Bowie Lake Road with about 17 miles of trail through forest, grassland and wetland. The gates are open 5am to 10pm every day. The nature center, which is where the trail maps are, opens Monday to Saturday 8am to 4pm and Sunday 9am to noon. The number is (615) 799-5544.

City recreation programs, ball fields and youth leagues run through Fairview Parks and Recreation at 2714 Fairview Boulevard West, on (615) 799-9331.

The part nobody hands you

Most of what happens in Fairview is not announced by the city. It is posted by a school, a church, a ball team or a business, on a Saturday, on a page you have not found yet. Half of settling in here is finding out where those announcements live.

That is the gap this paper exists to close: one place that gathers what is happening in Fairview, so you do not have to follow twenty pages to keep up. If you run a business, a church or a team, we will list you. If something is happening that people should know about, send it in.

Welcome to Fairview.

Sources: the City of Fairview's utilities guide, department pages and published general data at fairview-tn.org; Bowie Nature Park at bowiepark.org; the Williamson County Public Library system for branch hours; and The Fairviewian's own directory of Fairview places. Phone numbers and hours were checked against the city's own listings when this was written; the city posts changes before we hear about them.