Recent editorials from Tennessee newspapers:
April 14
USA Today Network-Tennessee on TVA’s new CEO:
Welcome to Tennessee, Mr. Lyash.
No doubt you had a busy first week as the new CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And what a responsibility!
You lead the nation’s first and largest regional planning and economic development agency owned and operated by the federal government.
You provide power for some 10 million people, and you employ thousands in our state. You’ve taken over an organization whose history and legacy are revolutionary and inspiring. Few organizations have transformed the lives of so many people, across so many generations. And we know you believe deeply in this mission, a mission derived from decades of service to improving the lives of the people of the Tennessee Valley.
This is what has brought you to Knoxville.
Which is why today we challenge you to be the leader your predecessor was not.
We challenge you to launch a fully independent and transparent investigation of safety and workplace practices that occurred in the aftermath of the massive Kingston coal ash spill and cleanup - not just the TVA’s own practices, but those of every one of the contractors and subcontractors it employs. We’ve reported extensively about the workers who have died, and the hundreds of others who are sick, after their exposure to the toxic ash. Learn from the mistakes of the past and demand accountability.
We challenge you to commit to a top-to-bottom review and overhaul of workplace safety at every power plant you operate. Last week we reported about workers at two Tennessee plants who are exposed to fly ash dust and flue gas without masks or respirators.
We challenge you to review your relationship with Jacobs Engineering. Although the case goes on, a federal jury already found Jacobs breached its contract with the TVA and its duty to ensure the health of cleanup workers. Yet you’re still doing hundreds of millions of dollars of business with the company.
We challenge you to hire an independent consultant to radically remake your internal reporting and whistle-blowing procedures and make sure they are accessible to your contractors as well. Your people are adamant no one should fear workplace retaliation, yet your workers are coming to us because they don’t trust TVA.
We challenge you to rid the agency of double-speak and misdirection - where it’s culturally acceptable to mislead the public, as Bill Johnson did when he said that the EPA, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and OSHA were on site daily during the Kingston cleanup. Today at the TVA it’s acceptable for your official spokesman to recraft this as mere hyperbole.
Finally, we challenge you to visit your employees in the field. Talk to them. Not with an entourage, not with a phalanx of handlers who will hand-select the ones who’ll say the “right” things to you. You need to hear the truth. You need to visit sick men in hospitals and listen to their stories. You need to sit down in the lunchroom with truck drivers who are around fly ash all day. You need to walk through the plant, see things yourself.
And then you need to do the right thing.
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April 13
The Greeneville Sun on the recent wounding of two police officers:
Statistics, no matter how closely watched or hotly debated, usually do not tell the whole story.
The recent wounding of two Greeneville police officers and fatal shooting of an armed assailant puts Greeneville among some of the most closely watched national statistics in recent years: fatal police shootings.
According to The Washington Post, 295 people in have been shot and killed by police in the U.S. thus far in 2019. The Post, which monitors fatal police shootings in near-real time, reports that as of last week the country had seen 57 fewer shootings than it had at the same time in 2018.
Sunday’s shooting of Anthony Orlando Bowers is now one of those 295 tick marks on a ledger.
The two officers shot in the line of duty join an altogether different (and less closely watched) ledger. According to the FBI, in 2017 (the latest year such statistics were available), more than 60,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty nationwide, and more than 17,000 were injured by those assaults.
Numbers on a spreadsheet don’t mean that much, though, until such an event takes place in your own backyard. And static numbers and reports don’t tell the full story.
According to the information released thus far by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, two Greeneville officers were fortunate to walk away with their lives. Though they have not been identified - and won’t be publicly for quite a while, officials indicate - the TBI has said one was shot in the leg and the other shot in the foot.
Greeneville Police Chief Tim Ward said Thursday that both officers are out of the hospital. “They’re recovering,” he said. “They’re home.”
While the TBI has released a basic version of events of what happened Sunday night, it will likely be weeks before the public knows all that occurred. Though The Greeneville Sun is seeking police footage of what happened, nothing will be released until the TBI’s investigation is closed and has been turned over to the district attorney’s office.
According to the TBI, the man killed Sunday night opened fire on police - hitting the two officers - before he was killed. “For reasons still under investigation, the man became combative, pulled a gun on the officers, and fired shots. Two of the officers were struck. The two officers returned fire, hitting the man,” an initial TBI statement said.
We learned later in the week that the man was wanted in Asheville, North Carolina, on a host of charges, including seriously injuring an officer there in a hit-and-run crash.
In the wake of so many reports of police brutality across the country, if an incident like this had happened a few years ago or in a different community, it might be a powder keg waiting to explode: a black man killed by two police officers. We live in an age when people on all sides tend to speak without having all the facts, prone to “hot takes” and half-cocked theories trumpeted as fact.
But all the information we have, at least thus far, points to a much different situation than past national controversies.
Ward said the Greeneville Police Department and the two officers themselves have been touched by the outpouring of support from the Greene County community and even others outside the area. Individuals and businesses have brought the GPD food, coffee, cards and well-wishes. Ward said many of the messages left, including some from folks in other counties, simply say, “I don’t know you, but thank you.”
“It’s been very humbling to know that our community cares about us as much as they do,” he said. “Regardless of what else is going on in our country, we are very, very fortunate to live where we live.”
The two officers are recovering, and others in the Greeneville Police Department for now are focused on helping them do so, assessing what happened Sunday and doing the jobs they show up to do every day, despite the risk of running into exactly what they ran into Sunday: the threat of losing their lives.
“We’re going to do whatever we need to do to safeguard (the officers, as they recover) and safeguard the town,” Ward said Thursday.
Once the TBI’s investigation is over and all the facts regarding Sunday’s shooting are laid bare, the public - and law enforcement itself - can judge whether what happened that night could have unfolded differently.
For now, though, absent of all those facts, the community is doing what it should in expressing thankfulness for the men and women who put their lives on the line each day to protect their neighbors. We join them in saying to the men and women who protect us: Thank you.
Online: https://www.greenevillesun.com
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April 14
Johnson City Press on investing in public schools:
The available details of Gov. Bill Lee’s education savings account bill give a troubling picture of the freshman executive’s plans for the state’s public school system.
Approved last week by lawmakers in the Senate Education Committee and House Finance Subcommittee, the existing legislation provides $7,300 to families of students enrolled in a school district with at least three schools in the bottom 10 percent of statewide academic performance measures.
That savings account, which is really a voucher called by another name to increase palatability, could be used to pay for tuition to another institution, including a private school. In the Senate committee last week, Sen. Delores Gresham, R-Somerville, amended the bill to allow children being homeschooled to use the funds.
The Gresham amendment also increased the scope of the proposed program, from 15,000 students over five years to 30,000.
Adding students being educated at home back into the mix flings wide the potential for the public money to be misused. Gresham’s assurances to her fellow legislators that the debit cards tied to the education accounts could only be used at specific points of purchase do little to calm our concerns that our tax dollars will be improperly applied.
The funding mechanisms for the plan are also suspect.
The voucher proposal will cost taxpayers more money. This is a fact not being disputed by anyone.
According to the state’s estimates before Gresham doubled the size of the program, it could cost an additional $125 million to execute Lee’s school choice plan. That’s double the full budget of all of Johnson City’s schools for a year.
According to proponents of the voucher system, the school districts losing students to the program will not lose any funding. But those public dollars to the districts are being made up using one-time grants, not recurring funding.
At any time after the first five years, those grants could disappear should the General Assembly not include them in the state’s budget.
Instead of allowing what will likely be an exodus of the better performing students from these underperforming districts, why not invest the proposed millions in improving the lagging schools’ outcomes?
Teachers and administrators from all over the state have stood in opposition to this potentially dangerous plan, and we stand with them.
Online: https://www.johnsoncitypress.com
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