Rep. Favors: Thanks for your service
Chattanooga and Tennessee will miss state Rep. JoAnne Favors when the seven-term Democrat and longtime health and social issues advocate retires at the end of her current term next year.
Favors announced Monday that she won't seek re-election in 2018 and instead will devote more time to taking care of her mother, her great-grandchildren and her writing.
"Now it is time to take a different path which will allow me to devote more time to my five generations of family members, including my 94-year-old mother, my church members and my many friends," she said.
A retired nurse, former Erlanger hospital trustee and once head of the Dodson Avenue and then-Alton Park health care clinics, Favors was described by her fellow lawmakers as a go-to person fon health care issues.
"She was obviously someone who could talk with great authority on health care," said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Stewart.
But she also was a stanch proponent of requiring Tennessee school buses to come equipped with three-point safety harnesses, an effort that followed the Nov. 21, 2016, crash of a Woodmore Elementary School bus in her district that claimed the lives of six children and injured others. She marshaled emergency room physicians on duty the day of the crash to describe in vivid detail to legislative committees the deaths and injuries of the children and explain how the safety harnesses could have prevented many of them.
Critics continued to charge the bill was too expensive, but Favors doggedly refused to give up, revising the bill and substantially paring down costs. The bill made it to the Finance Committee, where it will remain until the 2018 session.
Last spring, she again assailed the photo ID law passed by GOP majority lawmakers, citing the case of her 94-year-old mother who was born at home and was never issued a birth certificate. Such documents are required to get the photo ID necessary to register to vote.
She joined with Hamilton County legislative colleagues and then-Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey in 2007 in a successful push by a number of school systems to spur revisions to Tennessee's Basic Education Program funding formula for local schools.
And in 2015 and 2016, she joined in support of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam's ultimately unsuccessful effort to extend Medicaid health care coverage to several hundred thousand Tennesseans under the governor's proposed Insure Tennessee expansion of Medicaid under the federal Affordable Care Act.
She is the only black representative now serving in the Hamilton County legislative delegation and just the third from the county elected to the General Assembly since the end of the 19th century. She represents the 28th district, including Chattanooga, Harrison and Ridgeside.
She has served us well and honorably, and her shoes will be hard to fill.
TVA: Give customers a bonus
If TVA's math makes your head hurt, you aren't alone.
The federal, ratepayer-funded utility sold less power in fiscal 2017 than in the previous year because of mild weather and consumers' penny- and-power pinching.
But over the past four years, the Tennessee Valley Authority also has cut its annual operating costs by more than $800 million. Last year it cut its air pollution, employee injury rate and overall staff size to record lows. At the same time, TVA electric rates are about 2 percent below where they were in 2013.
It all sounds pretty good until you begin to wonder how much lower our power rates could be if TVA's board hadn't given its CEO a $5.07 million bonus and its other more than 10,000 employees "year-end winning performance" payments averaging $10,970 each.
All together, TVA bonuses tally $112.5 million.
Where's the aspirin?
Clean a park, get a lunch
If you're looking for a way to help your community, consider this opportunity to play outside at the same time while you volunteer to spruce up Sterchi Farm Park and Trailhead on Saturday during Family Volunteer Day.
The cleanup is sponsored by the Chattanooga Parks Division and is part of a national initiative by the Walt Disney Co., which has organized a national Family Volunteer Day on the Saturday before Thanksgiving for 22 years. The volunteer day kicks off Thanksgiving week with a service opportunity, and adults and children can meet new friends and learn about stewardship, according to a city news release.
Volunteers will work from 9 a.m. until noon on projects such as invasive plant removal, litter pick-up, graffiti removal and fence-staining.
Then they'll get a lunch and opportunities to learn about Sterchi Farm and city partners such as the Chattanooga Park Stewards, Trust for Public Land, WildOnes, GreenSteps, GreenTrips and the South Chickamauga Creek Greenway Alliance.