Only in Tennessee
It’s head-shaking time. Only in the Volunteer State do lawmakers think it’s more important to rumble about transgender bathrooms than to promote diversity and sex education at the state’s public university. To stifle the University of Tennessee’s “Sex Week,” our lawmakers stripped next year’s state funding for the Diversity and Inclusion office and diverted an estimated $436,000 on a one-time basis into university engineering scholarships for minority students. At least the diversion still helps with some diversity.
Likewise, only in Tennessee do our leaders rail about a tax on the wealthy as they vote to phase out the Hall Income Tax, but pass a pro-gambling bill for fantasy sports companies. (Even after our state attorney general said the games amount to illegal gambling.)
The Hall Income Tax, enacted in 1929, demands 6 percent of income derived from stock dividends and bond interest. In 2015 it raised $303 million and provided $105 million to cities and counties. Now it will be reduced by 1 percent a year through 2021, leaving Tennessee’s tax revenue almost entirely subject to sales tax. Counties and cities will still have local property taxes. It’s probably a good bet all those things will go up accordingly.
Our nearly all Republican General Assembly is full to the brim with folks who call themselves social conservatives, but apparently that only applies to bathrooms and sex, or preserving Confederate symbols and keeping vetted foreign refugees out. Religious rights are OK but gay rights and student rights are not, so the lawmakers slapped the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s annual Sex Week and the university’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion for daring to suggest students and professors use gender-neutral pronouns and avoid saying “Christmas” in the context of holiday parties. Meanwhile, it’s OK to deny therapy to gay couples?
It’s also OK now, according to our lawmakers, to let full-time public college faculty and workers with handgun carry permits go to work armed. More guns, not private rights.
It’s embarrassing.
The entrance sign for the Chickamauga Lock in 2015.Fits and starts on Chickamauga lock
Finally! Drilling was expected to start Monday to shore up the cofferdam below the long-idle construction site of the Chickamauga lock as work resumed on a new, larger lock to move barge and recreational boat traffic through Chattanooga.
Not much work, however. Just $3 million worth. But it signifies the most significant break-through since 2012 when the $858 million project stalled after Congressional Republicans decided not spending was better than governing.
Soon after he was elected in 2010, U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., said he learned the funding source for dam and lock projects – the Inland Waterways Trust Fund – didn’t have enough money to continue work on the new Chickamauga lock. But not until December 2014 – after Fleischmann years before signed a Grover Norquist no-new-taxes pledge then nearly lost his seat in part over the stalled lock – did Fleischmann come around to help U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander persuade Congress to pass a “user fee” for commercial barge owners to increase the fund. Fleischmann and Alexander also have worked to keep the Chickamauga lock as one of the top four priority projects among new inland waterway dams and locks proposed across the United States.
Right now, that priority for us amounts to $3 million. So far, the Corps of Engineers has spent more than $182 million to reroute roads, install the cofferdam and design the new lock. Nearly a third of the money spent has come from the federal stimulus plan adopted by Congress in 2010. Chickamauga lock is expected to receive $29.9 million this year, and Congress is moving a spending plan that should allocate another $37 million next year.
The current lock built in the 1930s is cracking and crumbling from “concrete growth,” caused when the rock aggregate in the original concrete mixes with the Tennessee River. To prevent more crumbling and cracking, the corps has installed hundreds of anchors and supports and regularly monitors the lock’s condition while the new lock’s completion appears to be years away.
Let’s cross our fingers and hope we don’t have to hold our breath.
Trying new things with gangs
Kudos to Chattanooga Mayor Berke for continuing to try new things to slow and stop Chattanooga gang violence.
The city’s Violence Reduction Initiative has held shootings flat, but not really slowed them: In the year to date, the city has had 38 shootings, compared to 31 in 2015 and 41 in 2013. But last week, things escalated. In seven days there were 12 shootings.
On Friday, Berke announced two new anti-violence measures. He said the city is purchasing a $120,000-$135,000 ballistics system that can be used to match particular shell casings to particular guns, a move he hopes will better equip the police department to build cases, as well as pull illegal guns off the streets.
Berke also said he will create a new group called the Citizen Safety Coalition, led by Olivet Baptist Church Bishop Kevin Adams and Brainerd High School Vice Principal Charles Mitchell. The coalition goes beyond VRI gang-member concentration to offer a broader reach in helping those who want a way out of crime.
“I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do,” the mayor said. He’s right, and he’s taking action. Again.