Pam's Points: Catanzaro sails into the sunset, but city youths still need help

Jim Catanzaro

Catanzaro's sunset

Happy sailing, Jim Catanzaro.

And congratulations for making your retirement announcement on the heels of a closed-door meeting last week among the Tennessee Board of Regents while they discussed the audit of Chattanooga State Community College and your questionable hiring practices -- dubbed "abusive" by members of your faculty in two recent no-confidence votes.

Board of Regents Chancellor John Morgan on Monday tried to give Catanzaro -- president of Chatt State for 25 years -- a soft landing by lauding the doctor's accomplishments, including years of growth and "development of unique workforce programs to serve the Chattanooga community."

Then Morgan added: "I appreciate his recognition that now is the appropriate time for new leadership to step in and allow the college to continue moving forward."

Apparently even Morgan -- a former state comptroller -- knew Catanzaro had waited several years too long to retire to his favorite vacation spot in Barbados.

You could say that Catanzaro's yen for Barbados did him in. When the 70-something-year-old college president muddied one of those "development of unique workforce programs" with an Aug. 8 partnership with the University of West Indies in the tiny island country of Barbados for a student and faculty exchange program, he was abusing his power in his longtime Chatt State fiefdom. He then added insult to injury by creating a six-figure-a-year position for a woman he met there to manage that program and begin efforts to get her a visa even before she and two other finalists interviewed for the job.

Last week, this page took Catanzaro to task for having confused and poor priorities: Barbados beach parties under the guise of work over Chattanooga youths who need the kind of work and trades education that Chattanooga State could provide if it had a president who was plugged in here -- not in the West Indies.

Now we await the results of the Board of Regents audit, which officials had said would be complete at the end of November. That was Sunday. Soft landing or no, the TBR audit should be public record and should be released soon.

We also await the results of an investigation by the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury.

But lest we forget to say it: Thank you, Dr. Catanzaro, for retiring.

Enjoy the beach sunsets -- on your own time and your own dime.

Shots signal urgent need

Far from the beaches of Barbados, the East Chattanooga neighborhood of Ridgedale on Saturday became the site of the city's 102nd shooting of 2014.

Reanita Carter told police she was hosting a birthday party for her 18-year-old godson in a house she had touted as a "safehouse" for children in the neighborhood. About 80 people showed up for the house party that she herself didn't stay home for. But right around midnight Saturday, eight more cars arrived -- four in the front and four in the back.

They didn't bring guests. They brought bullets. And five people were shot in the early moments of Sunday morning.

Carter told television reporters that she thought the shooters were people not invited to the party who wanted to retaliate, but witnesses too afraid to speak on camera told those reporters they thought the incident was gang-related. And neighbors told Times Free Press reporter Shelley Bradbury that after the shooters fired into the house, people emerged from the house firing shotguns back. Police have told Bradbury they were looking into those claims.

Say truthfully: Did you ever in your wildest dreams think Chattanooga streets would have 102 shooting incidents -- one every third day -- and more than 10 dozen victims either wounded or killed? Did you ever think you would be able to equate Chattanooga to the Wild West?

But don't for a moment be derisive, or smugly think that the city's Violence Reduction Initiative isn't working. It may or may not be helping yet -- but it's way too soon to write off this or any other effort.

The thing is that the VRI -- as the initiative to help turn gang members away from crime has been dubbed -- is just not enough all by itself.

Quite frankly, until Chattanooga puts more vocation-learning tools on the table for all of its non-college-bound men and women, crime -- and the shootings crime brings -- will be a hard habit to break. And we've already waited far too long.