Bill Purcell

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Mayor Bill Purcell

William Paxon Purcell III (born October 25, 1953) is the fifth mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, elected first in 1999 and reelected to a second term in 2003. He is a member of the Democratic Party.

Purcell was born in 1953 in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York where he served as Vice President of the Student Senate and was a columnist for the school newspaper. After graduating from Hamilton, Purcell attended law school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He received his law degree in 1979 and began practicing at the West Tennessee Legal Services agency in Jackson, Tennessee.

In 1986, Purcell was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives where he served for five terms. As House Majority Leader and Chair of the Select Committee on Children and Youth, Purcell's work in the legislature positioned him in the forefront of education, health care, workers compensation, and criminal sentencing reforms. Purcell retired from the General Assembly in 1996 to became director of the Child and Family Policy Center at the Vanderbilt Institute of Public Policy Studies, a nationally-recognized center building a bridge between academic research, politics, and best practices to benefit children and their families.

Although many suspected that he would run for governor in 1998, Purcell instead announced that he would enter the race for Mayor of Metro Nashville after incumbent mayor Phil Bredesen opted not to run for a third term. Purcell won the election against former Mayor Richard Fulton and then Vice Mayor Jay West. In September 1999, Purcell took office as the fifth mayor of Metropolitan Nashville. Purcell was reelected to a second term in 2003 with a record-setting 84.8 percent of the vote. Purcell is the second native Northerner to serve as mayor of Nashville (at least since the merger of Nashville and Davidson County in 1963); the first was Bredesen. With Purcell's decision not to run for a third term, Vice-Mayor Howard Gentry has announced that he will be running for the office in 2007.

Purcell and his wife Debbie Miller live in the historic Lockeland Springs neighborhood of East Nashville.