In the spirit of the New Year, we offer some resolutions.
For Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke: Keep up the fight for Chattanooga's share of state sales tax revenue. And to our local delegation of the Tennessee General Assembly: Listen to Mayor Berke on this. He's right.
Changing - and short-changing - Chattanooga's share (and other smaller cities' shares) of state sales tax revenues, as County Mayor Jim Coppinger wants, will not be good for the portions of Hamilton County where at least 68 percent of county residents live.
Now, if state lawmakers want to raise their hands to advocate for metro government to merge services and save money, let's hear it. What? No takers?
Berke says Coppinger's proposal would cost Chattanooga (with 49.4 percent of all county residents) $5.4 million in sales tax revenue.
Coppinger wants to change the current sales tax allotment methodology to include people who live outside incorporated areas, counting them as though they were in a city and then giving that share of the sales tax revenues to the county to spend. In effect, he wants to take the sales tax we pay as we spend in the stores of Chattanooga, Red Bank, East Ridge, Soddy-Daisy, Collegedale and Signal Mountain and put it in county coffers rather than the cities and towns that support our shopping.
In 2014, CitiesSpeak.org noted that for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population was living in urban areas, including 80 percent of Americans. As we might expect, that increasing population growth in cities means increased citizen demand on local governments, and it comes at a time when the economy is still fragile after years of recession.
Chattanooga is growing in every way and making strides in meeting peoples' needs.
Hamilton County leaders, on the other hand, would rather give themselves vote-buying "discretionary" money, even as they refuse to adequately fund our schools.
For Ooltewah High School basketball coaches: Resign. Immediately. For Superintendent Rick Smith: If these coaches don't resign, fire them.
All of the young students who went along on the ball team's tournament trip to Gatlinburg in December deserve more than coaches and chaperones who leave them alone long enough for boredom to morph to bullying, bullying to transition to hazing, and hazing to become the sadistic violence and rape of a team member.
Rape with a wooden pool cue is not something that just happens. It is not a spur-of-the-moment occurrence. And there is no way to miss the signs of something like this - especially when one of several bullied players told a coach about concerns earlier. Further, there's no excuse for any coach to put this team on a game court the next day after the Dec. 22 aggravated assault that left a 15-year-old hospitalized for surgery to repair his ruptured colon and bladder. Then these coaches took that same team (some members heard the young man's screams and found him bleeding on the floor) to play three more games.
We agree with school board member Rhonda Thurman, who said this week she believes the rest of Ooltewah's basketball season should be canceled.
"I'm not holding the team responsible for the actions of three," Thurman said. "I'm holding the whole team responsible because somebody did not come to this boy's defense."
For all of us: Let's resolve to stop our infatuation with guns.
The Washington Post's Wonkblog published a very telling chart Monday that shows two nearly identical drawings. In one drawing, 27 guns are red, representing the 27 firearm homicides in the United States on Christmas Day 2015. In the other, 27 guns are gray, representing the 27 firearm homicides in Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland - combined. And over a whole year.