sheriff’s department bonuses
Sheriff Tom Spangler advanced his case for giving deputies a $1,500 “bonus” which will cost some $1.6 million of taxpayer money. Mayor Jacobs was dubious about spending money the county doesn’t have and offered a more modest $750 and waiting to see how the taxes roll in later on in the year. Sheriff Spangler told county commissioners he was there to fight for the deputies. In light of many county employees being furloughed or giving up part of their salaries, not to mention teachers complaining they didn’t get a raise (yet most will get a step-raise), the commissioners weren’t there to fight for the taxpayers. They practically trampled Big Glenn in their eagerness to hand off the bonus.
Who You Gonna Call? Part Two
Most folks know the City of Knoxville was the victim of a Ransomware attack. What isn’t known is just how bad it was and most of the details and it doesn’t seem like city officials are being that forthcoming. There was an attempted theft at one of my businesses last weekend and evidently the computers still weren’t working properly, as police officers (yes, we still have them for the time being) are having to do most everything by hand. Also, from what I hear, KPD officers aren’t coming to wrecks and doing diagrams unless there is some kind of personal injury.
Now that might not sound too terrible to you, but give it a little bit of thought. All right, someone takes off the front end of your car, you get out to exchange insurance information and they drive off because they don’t have any insurance. Even if they do have insurance, it may not be so good not to have an officer on the scene. It very well might mean reconfiguring auto insurance in Knoxville if things don’t change because much depends upon those diagrams done by police officers as to finding fault and assessing who caused the wreck. Liability does make a difference in what your auto insurance rate is and remains. If this continues to be the City of Knoxville’s policy, lookout! It could mean an insurance rate hike for Knoxvillians.
Readers also want to know the extent of the ransomware attack and just what is happening despite assurances from the Antifa Daily that everything is hunky-dory. Keep watching and reading and we’ll have a story for you.
Geppetto Spanked Pinocchio!!!
Governor Bill Lee is evidently thinking about calling the Tennessee General Assembly back into session. Yeah, they really did just leave Nashville and the powers that be are already contemplating a special session. While folks are going to argue about what the legislature left undone, Governor Lee is unhappy the legislators left town without passing the necessary legislation to hold businesses harmless for the spread of the COVID-19 virus. There is also a dispute between Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally and several GOP legislators on the House side about the legislature’s failure to properly address the issue.
McNally, who represents a portion of Knox County, has more legislative experience than most in the Tennessee House of Representatives. A bit of a stir was caused by McNally suggesting that Rep. Michael Curcio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was not telling the truth about an agreement between the state Senate and the state House. McNally referred to Curcio as “a Pinocchio,” causing Curcio to cry that his Italian heritage had been maligned by the lieutenant governor. McNally replied he had been referring to Curcio’s “veracity,” not his “ethnicity.”
Part of the problem is House Majority Leader William Lamberth of Portland has a nursing home inside his district which apparently was hit hard by the coronavirus and there may be some constituents who want to sue. So do most trial lawyers, many of whom pour literally tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of what few House Democrats remain.
The lieutenant governor says he will support the governor’s call for a special session of the legislature if it is confined to the single issue of passing legislation to hold businesses and venues harmless. If that doesn’t happen, there will probably be some businesses that will never re-open their doors.
Thanks Evelyn!
Outgoing County Commissioner Evelyn Gill, who lost her campaign for renomination in the March Democratic primary, published a post recently that would probably shock a heck of a lot of Knox Countians. A former teacher, Ms. Gill published a chart from Knox County Schools showing the total amount of your tax dollars—local, state and federal—spent by county commission district, as well as each district’s per pupil expenditure. It’s worth reprinting here for our readers.
Those figures will surprise a lot of folks if they pay attention.
No Utopia
The utopia otherwise known as the CHAZ or CHOP zone in Seattle is not quite what it’s supposed to be. As always, the radical leftists and anarchists (and socialists for that matter) all rely on somebody else to pay for their vision of utopia. The downtown area in Seattle occupied by these folks is about to become a ghost town where business is concerned. One hears tales of forty-story buildings at 20% occupancy. And now some businesses, including an auto repair shop, a property management company and a tattoo parlor, are suing the City of Seattle. Business owners complain Mayor Jenny Durkan and the city council abandoned the businesses to anarchist protestors who made them feel unsafe.
According to at least one observer who has spent several nights inside the occupied area, dollars contributed through GoFundMe and other support has poured money into keeping the secessionists stocked with food and necessities. They walk around distributing pizza and other food, always taking pains to stress it’s “free”; no, it’s not, somebody paid for it. Barricades, port-a-potties and other necessities for occupying territory that belongs to the public have been thoughtfully supplied by Mayor Jenny Durkan and the City of Seattle taxpayers.
Some businesses have already said they’ve had enough and left Seattle for good. It looks like they aren’t going to pay for the pipedreams of the protestors. Wow, surrounded by gun-toting domestic terrorists. Who would have thought that it would make anyone uncomfortable?
The fact is, socialists don’t really grasp the facts of life, daily or otherwise, very well. They seem to have glued their rose-colored glasses to their heads and expect everybody to see what they see.
Anything but practical, socialists don’t seem to realize businesses are necessary, not only to provide goods and services to consumers, but also to pay the taxes necessary to support the government and the pubic services government provides. If taxed too much or otherwise hampered, they tend to leave or go out of business, which reduces the tax stream to nothing, leaving the socialists and their cohorts without any money to spend.
School Savings…
Speaking of socialists, there must be a few of them running around loose inside the school system. School officials had declared the recent spate of graduation ceremonies a complete and roaring success. Those ceremonies were supposedly well-loved by everybody… the graduating students, their families, and school employees. Originally, Knox County Schools had announced families were not invited, a plan concocted by the school bureaucracy in light of the COVID-19 virus. Just about anybody, unless they happened to work for the school system, could see that plan was never going to stand up under scrutiny, even during a pandemic. Sure enough, students and parents were outraged, which in turn upset some school board members. Mike McMillan had been the first to say the idea of banning parents and families from the graduation ceremonies was, well, just plain wrong.
Even after declaring the individual graduations a success story, the school system did an estimate for the costs. The graduations at the various schools cost north of $25,000, while the series of graduation ceremonies at Thompson– Boling Arena in the past, cost upwards of $100,000. Should we be surprised that the school system has said the next set of graduations will be held at Thompson–Boling Arena?
“Whatever happened to saving money?” Mike McMillan sputtered. After a pause, McMillan added, “I should have known better. I’ve never known the school system to be interested in saving money.”
