Getting out in front
Chattanooga City Councilwoman Demetrus Coonrod may believe since she beat Yusuf Hakeem once, she can do it again. So eight months before her Democratic primary race with Hakeem for the District 28 state House seat, she has staked out several bold positions.
In an email to potential supporters, she is advocating the state abolish the sales tax on groceries as a social equity stance “to ease the burden on Tennessee Families and ensure access to essential goods.” She also suggests that a 2023 bill filed in the state legislature that called for a state minimum wage of $12 “won’t suffice” and needs “to bridge the income gap and ensure that honest work yields a LIVING WAGE.”
Further, Coonrod says she stands in solidarity with the United Auto Workers in “advocating for the rights, dignity and well-being of all” at Chattanooga’s Volkswagen manufacturing plant.
Her strategy may be that getting in front of the issues eight months ahead of the primary election in August puts the three-term incumbent on the defensive, and that’s what she did when she knocked off Hakeem after six non-consecutive terms on the City Council in 2017. Although he led her by more than 15 points in the nonpartisan primary, she came back to win by nearly 20 percentage points in the runoff.
If Coonrod were to win, though, she might find her left-wing ideas don’t fit in too well with the current Republican supermajority in the House.
And the children came
Tennessee has received the 10th highest number of unaccompanied alien children of the 50 states since fiscal year 2015, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Through fiscal 2023, that number had climbed to 20,715.
The state’s fiscal 2023 number, 4,568 unaccompanied children, also was 10th highest in the nation. If the state matches its October number of 542 throughout the rest of fiscal 2024, it will have received 6,504 children, which will be far and away a record number for the state. The October number exceeds the 510 who came to Tennessee in all of 2020, which was the year of the COVID pandemic.
The number coming to the Volunteer State nearly doubled from 765 in fiscal year 2015 to 1,354 in 2016, fell to around 1,100 in 2017 and 2018 during the first two years of the presidency of Donald Trump, and jumped to 2,191 in 2019. After COVID and the election of President Joe Biden, who threw open the Southern border, the number jumped to 4,267 in 2021 and hit 4,821 in 2022.
More Bend backups to come
The widening of Interstate 24 around Moccasin Bend, scheduled less than a year ago to begin in 2024, now won’t start until 2027, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Community Relations Office.
The announcement earlier this week of the potential for a “choice lane” project to run along the same stretch “will be addressed in the [traffic and revenue] studies to best leverage funds and maximize congestion relief among I-24,” Rae Anne Bradley wrote in an email to this page.
The widening project, Bradley said, is still in the preliminary engineering stage. It is currently scheduled for right-of-way design in fiscal year 2026 before the start of construction in 2027.
Most Searched Terms
What do Tennesseans look for when they turn to Google? In 2023, so far, according to information compiled by BetTennessee, the most searched term was “Damar Hamlin.” If you don’t follow sports, you may wonder what a “Damar Hamlin” is. He is the Buffalo Bills’ safety who suffered cardiac arrest after a tackle in a National Football League game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Jan. 2, when many people likely were still on holiday breaks. The 25-year-old has no specific relation to the Volunteer State, but his medical emergency and subsequent recovery made searches of his name (actually, the percentage increases in searches) far and away the most for state residents this year.
Searches for artificial intelligence information come in second and fourth with “ChatGPT” and “Character AI.” “Temu,” an Ireland-based Chinese e-commerce company, is third. Fifth is the movie “Oppenheimer,” which was released in July and is getting some Academy Awards mentions.
“Colorado Football,” where former two-sport pro Deion Sanders now coaches, is sixth; “Connections,” a 2023 video word game developed and published by The New York Times, is seventh; “Israel News,” emblematic of the shocking attack by Hamas on the Middle East country Oct. 7 and the ongoing war since, is eighth; “Jimmy Buffett,” the beloved tropical rock musician and singer-songwriter who died Sept. 1, is ninth; and “Taylor Swift,” the pop singer-songwriter, is 10th.