An 18-year-old volunteer firefighter and Cocke County Emergency Management Agency employee has won a seat on the Cocke County Commission, defeating a sitting commissioner in the rural Cosby district near the Great Smoky Mountains. Daniel Reece, a recent Cocke County High School graduate, will represent District 5, Post 2 after an election that upended the status quo on the county's 14-member legislative body.
Reece defeated incumbent commissioner Wilma Ball by 18 points in the August 6 general election, according to WVLT. Ball had served on the Cocke County Legislative Body during the 2022-2026 term, per GoodParty.org, and represented District 5 alongside Post 1 commissioner Dan “Pete” Bright. Reece ran as an unaffiliated independent, unseating an established incumbent rather than winning an open seat.
Reece told the station his interest in public service took root well before he was old enough to run for office, and that becoming a county commissioner was his next goal after finishing high school. “I've always loved my community, and I want to help it,” he said, according to the same report. He credited his parents with supporting him throughout the campaign and said he hopes his win sends a message to other young people watching from the sidelines.
A Candidate Rooted in Cosby
District 5 covers the rural Cosby area along the border of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Reece's campaign there leaned on themes of community service, drawing partly on the example of his great-grandfather, Toy Reece, a WWII veteran who fought in the Pacific theater at Okinawa, according to the East Tennessee Local Election Forum.
Beyond his EMA job, Reece serves as a volunteer firefighter and works as a referee, and he also does some preaching, per the station's report. He completed the Cocke County High School Work-Based Learning program during the 2024-2025 school year, a hands-on vocational track highlighted in the school district's CTE Spotlight newsletter. He has said his long-term goal is to serve as a U.S. congressman, and his advice to other young people is to set their minds to something and pursue it fully.
What the Law Allows — and Requires
Tennessee law sets a low bar for county office: under Tennessee Code Annotated § 8-18-101, any U.S. and Tennessee citizen at least 18 years old who meets local residency requirements and has no disqualifying felony convictions or unpaid public money judgments is legally qualified to serve, according to the Tennessee Secretary of State. Reece will begin representing Cocke County residents in the coming weeks; state law under T.C.A. § 5-5-102 sets the four-year term for county legislative body members to begin September 1 following election, per FindLaw.
His EMA employment also raises a regulatory wrinkle worth watching. Tennessee Code Annotated § 7-51-1501 guarantees local government employees the right to run for office, but restricts them from serving on the governing body that directly employs them without specific legal authorization, according to the Municipal Technical Advisory Service. The dossier does not indicate whether that provision has been addressed for Reece's specific situation with the county's Emergency Management Agency.
Part of a Wider Youth Trend in Tennessee
Reece's win adds to a small but growing list of teenagers stepping into Tennessee county government. In the same August 2026 election cycle, 18-year-old Chandler Chambliss was elected to the Gibson County Commission in West Tennessee, reportedly making him the second-youngest county commissioner elected in state history, according to a Facebook post from Burton Staggs. That post also cites Eli Anderson, who was elected in Morgan County at age 18 back in 2018.
Reece steps onto a commission that just weeks before the election passed its 2025-2026 fiscal year budget while holding the county property tax rate steady, according to Citizen Portal. Cocke County, seated in Newport with roughly 36,000 residents, is governed by that 14-member legislative body, with each of the county's seven voting districts electing two commissioners.
