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A Mayoral Confrontation
During a break at a recent County Commission meeting, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam was observed in the lobby in a heated conversation with Hubert Smith, a former member of the Knoxville Area Transportation Board and a member of the KAT Community Advisory Board. Evidently the mayor didn’t appreciate Smith’s recent, very public, criticism at a city council meeting opposing the city’s plan to relocate the bus transfer center to Main Avenue, in front of the City County Building. Particularly upsetting was Smith saying if somebody gets killed the blood “will be on your hands.” Just in time for the shift of the bus transfer center, the City County building has, coincidentally, put security guards and metal detectors at the front door of the building. Three years after 9/11. It makes it very difficult for bus transients to enter the building to stay warm this winter or to use the restrooms just off the street.
MPC Gets the Fix?
Never let it be said that Knox County isn’t serious about planning and orderly development. Given a chance to make a recent appointment to the Metropolitan Planning Commission, county Mayor Mike Ragsdale’s office chose one Mose Lobetti. Lobetti has had a long career in Knoxville, but his expertise has been in the area of election planning. He has been a political fixer, lobbyist, election worker in the half-pint-a-vote era, and fund-raiser, going back to the administration of Mayor John Duncan. (That would be the father of the current Congressman Jimmy Duncan.) Most recently, he has hung his hat in the office of Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols as an investigator.
New Yorker Does Tennessee
In the Sept. 13 edition of The New Yorker, in Talk of the Town, former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson is quoted as calling GOP convention stars Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain “the ticket” for 2008. One wonders how his former Senate colleague from Tennessee, Sen. Bill Frist, felt about that. Frist spent the convention meeting with delegations and preparing himself to be on “the ticket” in 2008. He has also been snuggling up to the right wing of the party of late, pushing a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage. Thompson is a friend of McCain’s and supported him against President Bush in the 2000 primaries. In some versions of the story, coming out of a donor luncheon, he merely said it was conventional (no pun intended) wisdom that Giuliani and McCain would be the hot ticket, not necessarily that they were his ticket. In the same issue of the magazine there is an excellent profile of former Vice-President Al Gore, at home in Nashville. The best unintentional funny in the piece is an account of Al and Tipper driving the reporter to the Grand Ole Opry, with Tipper sitting with a map telling Al how to get from their Belle Meade home to the Opry house. It’s like a Knoxville couple using a map to figure out how to get from Sequoyah Hills to the Tennessee Theatre.
When the Gores last lived in Nashville, Gore was a reporter at the Tennessean, and they didn’t live in Belle Meade, the richest neighborhood in Tennessee.
September 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 38
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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