Metro Pulse/Ear to the Ground

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Law Director Lockdown is Over

For the past several years it's been easier to break into the Knox County Jail than the Law Director's office. Visitors announced themselves to a receptionist who sat outside a locked front door and waited in the hall to see if they'd be admitted. Last Thursday, six days after he was sworn in, new Law Director Mike Moyers took the lock off the door. The action is not intended as a criticism of his old boss Richard Beeler, Moyers says. "Just a difference of opinion."

How the Elderly Disabled got Tabled

When Vice Mayor Jack Sharp disposed of the matter of Irene Hood (the disabled widow who wants to be de-annexed because she believes Mayor Victor Ashe deceived her when he invited her to come into the city but failed to let her know that her taxes would double), his major reason was that if he let her out of the city, everybody else would be wanting out, too—"If you start making a hole in the donut, you're looking for real trouble."

So Sharp moved to table the ordinance to de-annex Hood. Ashe, his back to Councilwoman Carlene Malone, who had turned her light on signaling that she wanted to speak, quickly asked Councilwoman Jean Teague if she had seconded the motion. She nodded, Ashe told Malone she was out of order, and then rolled the vote through like a night train through Georgia. Hood rolled her wheelchair out of the room.

Problem was, the whole maneuver was improper. Ashe, who considers himself a master of parliamentary dipsy-doodle, had called for a vote to table a motion that had never been made. The sponsor of the resolution, Nick Pavlis, had never been given the opportunity to speak, let alone make a motion.

Victor as Antagonist? Who Says So?

Negotiations between the city and the county to seek an end to their turf wars have gotten off to a non-start. At a preliminary meeting last week between Mayor Ashe and a hastily formed committee of County Commission members, Ashe proposed that each side name one staff member to explore ways to end the impasse over how much county land the city should be allowed to annex under the state's 1998 Growth Plan law. Letting staffers do the negotiating would shield the meetings from the state's Sunshine Law, which would come into play if elected officials met. Ashe named Deputy Mayor Gene Patterson as his peace envoy. But the county delegation countered by selecting their own most assiduous foe of any expansion of the city's boundaries, Commissioner Frank Leuthold.

"Nothing's happened yet, but we've set a tentative time next week when we'll sit down in earnest," Patterson reports. Leuthold couldn't be reached to see if he's modified his long-standing view that the chances of finding common ground are "somewhere between nil and none."

Just getting Leuthold to the negotiating table was a victory of sorts for Ashe, who had been unsuccessful in doing so for going on a year. When asked why he's absenting himself from the table, the mayor replied, "There's no history of antagonism between Gene and Frank, so there should be a better climate of opinion without me."

Lord Willing and the Lakes Don't Rise...

TVA is going to listen to those who want the TVA lake levels held up to summer pool longer in the year for recreational and commercial purposes. But the agency is going to listen just a little bit. Comments on the hot-button issue are going to be taken Sept. 21 in the TVA office complex in Chattanooga from 11 a.m. to noon, with each speaker limited to five minutes and hand-out materials limited to one page each.

The occasion is a day-long meeting of the Regional Resource Stewardship Council, an independent group that might actually want to recommend changes in TVA's lake management. The group will also be briefed on several outside economic studies which conclude that the positive economic impact of keeping the lakes up longer outweigh the potential navigation and flood-control problems TVA might encounter.

Think TVA will do anything it has already said it can't do? Keep on thinking.