For a brief time there were two mayors of Greenback, Tennessee.
Now that the power struggle is over, the new mayor says he's facing a legal mess.
Greenback resident Dewayne Birchfield won the mayoral election against 44-year incumbent Tom Peeler.
We first reported in November that Peeler wasn't giving up the seat, even though Birchfield had already been sworn in as mayor.
Now that the torch was finally passed, the new mayor says he inherited a government that needs a total overhaul.
"All this stuff that came before us here, I had to hire an attorney that knew something about government," said Birchfield.
The new mayor says he faced two big problems when he took office last week.
First was to hire for a string of open positions. Birchfield said the city recorder, city attorney, maintenance worker, and one city councilor resigned when the former mayor left.
"I just didn't pick these people right out of the back of my pocket you know, I checked on them to see what they could do," Birchfield says about his new staff.
Their official roles are pending city council approval.
Second, Birchfield confronted a series of governmental missteps.
"We've at least got to go back to 1991," he said.
His new staff found countless ordinances passed illegally.
"When you pass an ordinance you have to give notice of that, you have to post that in the paper, and it was not done," said Birchfield.
The mayor says the old administration failed to have two separate meetings and time for public comment before passing a new ordinance. Take one example from 2007.
"December 12, '07 was the first reading," said new city recorder Deborah Bowman. "The second reading was 12/12/07 a half hour later."
"That can't be done," said Birchfield.
Birchfield and his staff are now tasked with finding out which ordinances were passed legally, and which are void.
“We've just got to find out what’s been done right and what ain’t, and fix what ain’t," he said.
That is just one of dozens of similar questions Birchfield says surrounds a range of ordinances.
He says the old leadership also failed on several occasions to post notice of city council meetings. They pulled records from the News-Herald in Lenoir City and The Daily Times in Maryville, the two papers where they could post meetings and ordinances.
"It's going to take us a little bit of time to get this all done so we can get this town back to what it should be," said Birchfield.
He cancelled the January city council meeting to get this straightened out. Birchfield does plan to have a council meeting in February. It'll be the first in several months, and Bowman expects a big turn out.
They're working to record and stream these meetings for full transparency with the new city government.
Birchfield says given time, they'll get through all these documents, and he's happy to have the support of the city.
"I've got a freight train behind me," he said.