Moccasin Bend still waiting
The National Park Service recently spent nearly $50,000 to conduct an environmental cleanup assessment for Chattanooga’s and Hamilton County’s police firing range under the assumption that the range would be moved, the soil cleaned, and the land donated to the Park Service for the Moccasin Bend National Archeological District and the benefit of our community.
The environmental assessment indicates the cleanup would cost between $1.2 million and $1.9 million.
But the city and county backed away, announcing that instead of spending $5 million on a new indoor range, they would simply upgrade the existing one and not give up the land to the park.
Now the Friends of Moccasin Bend have offered to raise money for the cleanup, so the ball is again in the court of our local elected leaders who had previously committed to move the range and give the key piece of land to the park.
Let’s hope our leaders see their way to honor that commitment, rather than let local inertia threaten to cheat both our heritage and our tourism revenue potential.
Just this week, the Chattanooga Area Convention and Visitors Bureau announced that this year, for the first time, annual visitor spending in Hamilton County is expected to top $1 billion. Tourism spending is up about 57 percent over the past decade alone, so imagine what adding one more day to visitor stays would bring from people who want to take in a bit more Civil War history and at the same time explore the concept of a sacred Native American place that has 12,000 years of human habitation history?
But there’s one more footnote to the firing range contamination report: The sediment and soil samples collected there have lead concentrations ranging from 1,100 milligrams per kilogram to 210,000 mg/kg. The “safe” EPA screening level for lead in soil is 400 mg/kg in residential settings and 800 mg/kg in industrial settings. The sediment samples were collected from two drainage ditches near the main range that discharge storm water into the nearby Tennessee River. And the surface water in the drainage ditches exceeds EPA’s 0.015 mg/L drinking water maximum contamination level for lead.
That would mean that the firing range is contaminating the river.
Perhaps the city and county should take up the Friends group on its offer — and sooner rather than later.
Jet-set vs. virtual library costs
The library of tomorrow seems pretty expensive, but not because of technology making it a “virtual” read.
Rather, it’s the nearly $40,000 in travel costs for Chattanooga Library Executive Director Corinne Hill and two of her employees who have in two years been on 25 different “professional development” junkets to Seattle, Las Vegas, Miami, Singapore and Denmark, according to probes by City Auditor Stan Sewell.
The trips have prompted multiple complaints of possible fraud from library employees, according to recent stories by Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Joy Lukachick Smith.
The nearly $40,000 cost is more than double the amount of money the library budgets for travel for all employees — $8,828 per year, or $17,656 over two years, according to Sewell.
Corinne Hill’s travel alone tallied $23,000, though only $14,000 came from the library’s general budget. The rest came from an outside endowment fund — the library’s Francis Cole Fund reimbursed the city for an $8,000 trip to Singapore, and records show the same fund reimbursed the city $5,000 for three plane tickets to Denmark.
It is likely that almost $40,000 would buy a lot of books.
Or better still for the “library of the future,” it would probably buy discounted e-tablets for about 150 inner-city youngsters.
Now that’s futuristic.