Chancellor backs transparency
“When I tell you this is the most kosher thing that’s ever happened,” the late Chattanooga Councilwoman Carol Berz said of the city’s redistricting process following the 2020 census, “it is.”
It wasn’t.
So said Chancellor Pam Fleenor, who ruled earlier this week that the city’s non-public meetings on redrawing local voting districts following the 2020 census violated open meeting laws.
The Times Free Press had filed suit in December 2022, claiming that state law was broken because redistricting committee meetings were held behind closed doors and a series of calls and emails among council members and city staff were made that reached conclusions about redistricting.
The law is clear that governmental bodies making decisions on public policy, with very few exceptions, must do so in open meetings. It’s why the measure has been known as the Sunshine Law.
The council’s private meetings, in fact, led to map changes that, among other things, shifted entire neighborhoods between districts. This was in spite of Berz telling the newspaper on Nov. 10, 2022, that there would be no drastic changes, that the process would be public and peaceful, and that no actual changes would occur until further data was collected.
Instead, four months later, the changes were presented to the public.
Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, said at the time the process was very likely a violation of the open meetings act and maintains that today.
“The redistricting committee meets the definition of a governing body because it is made up of members of the City Council,” she wrote to this page in 2022. “From what I can tell … all the other City Council committees abide by the open meetings law … . Why would the City Council’s redistricting committee be different from any other City Council committee?”
Sadly, the city’s reaction at the time was not to admit it was wrong in not taking more transparent steps in redistricting but to say the newspaper had partnered with an “activist group” in “a brazen attempt” to restrict City Council members and administration staff members from getting “help for their constituents in a timely manner.”
We hope all the council’s actions in the future will be filled with sunshine.
Not a slam dunk
Only 31% of likely Republican primary voters rate the quality of education in Tennessee as either excellent or good, according to a recent poll by the organization Tennesseans for Putting Students First.
The individuals polled obviously skew the results, but what we found interesting — though not surprising to us — was that expanding Gov. Bill Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship program to more students didn’t have near unanimous approval. Yes, 66% said the program should be expanded, as it is expected to be for the 2026-2027 school year, but it showed a fair number of likely Republican voters apparently have drawbacks about the program, as we have.
Further, the results said 70% of likely Republican primary voters trust parents the most to make choices about their children’s education. Twenty-one percent say they trust teachers the most, and 4% say local administrators and school boards.
On the issue of testing, which some parents consider onerous, 83% of respondents support evaluations from kindergarten to third grade that provide teachers with real-time knowledge about student performance.
The survey also noted that 71% of respondents say the issue of improving education is either extremely or very important to them in deciding for whom to vote in state legislative races.
Civil War treasure
The City of Chattanooga, in partnership with The Trust for Public Land, recently secured permanent preservation of 13 acres of land on or near Missionary Ridge. The parcels include land near Ridgecrest Drive and what Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly called “historic” Billy Goat Hill?
Why is it historic?
Union Gen. William T. Sherman, possessing faulty intelligence, initially attacked the hill on Nov. 24, 1863, believing it was Missionary Ridge, only to find he wasn’t where he expected to be. The miscue only slightly delayed Union troops, who the next day went on to conquer the ridge and eventually open the territory southward toward the rest of the Confederate holdings.
Hart’s opinion
Some readers took great exception to the humor in syndicated satirist Ron Hart’s column in Friday’s edition. Over the decade-plus we have published his columns, we have heard from people who criticize his opinions and language as offensive and distasteful, while others have called his commentaries the best feature in the newspaper.
Satire is often in the eye of the beholder, similar to an editorial cartoon belittling or mocking the president, but such criticism is also speech, and this newspaper supports that.
Our two editorial pages — still, we believe, the only newspaper to have such — offer competing points of view; bias and subjectivity are central to our offerings, whether in the form of a column, editorial, letter to the editor or editorial cartoon.
We appreciate subscriber feedback, because conversation enlarges and benefits the community.