As I mentioned in my last article, Vice Mayor and Street Commissioner Alvin Evans has attended a meeting sponsored by the Tennessee Department of Transportation in which future road construction was discussed and priorities assigned - essentially for the next ten years. Included are possible links from the Interstate to the hospital and possibly eventually on to the industrial park. That is very encouraging news.
Evans also informed the Council that plans are progressing for closing of the open ditch on south Main Street. Once that project is completed, attention will then be applied to badly needed repairs and construction of sidewalks.
There's more good news concerning our objective of completely renovating our downtown. John Baird has purchased the old Coca-Cola Bottling Plant that has been allowed to deteriorate for so long. John is like many of us in that he hopes that building can still be saved and restored - considering its historic value and the fact that it has been a Jellico landmark for so many years. (Did you ever have the thrill of standing and looking through the glass from the sidewalk and watching the machine cap those glass bottles? It was a never to be forgotten experience.)
And John plans to clean it out completely, examine the load bearing structure and determine the feasibility of restoration. And let's hope that will be possible. He has sure done a great job on his present buildings and it will be a loss if the former CC building must come down.
Talk about a dedicated public servant! I reported a few issues ago concerning the fact that an elected county commissioner in an East Tennessee county had been denied his request to forego his salary for serving in that position. He later had State Representative Joe McCord to request an opinion from the Tennessee State Attorney General as to whether he could legally refuse his salary or agree to accept only part of the established salary. Accepting the fully authorized salary would cost the commissioner full benefits under Social Security regulations.
In a long history of court challenges and legal opinions, it has been made very clear that rightly or wrongly, authorized compensation for elected positions must be accepted. And in an opinion just issued on January 5th concerning that particular case, the Attorney General indicated that there is no provision in Tennessee law that allows a county commissioner to fail to accept less than full compensation for his or her service than that provided by statute. The opinion says in referring to the statute, "contemplates a uniform level of compensation". But rather than be outdone and to demonstrate his commitment to the job for which he was elected, the commissioner accepted his salary with its reduced SS benefits.
Several of us have followed that situation and other similar situations with interest since we have withheld two salaries for members of Council in the past and are currently withholding one.
As I often mention, I get a lot of interesting e-mail and other contacts from former Jellicoans and folks with ties to Jellico from all across our country. And I recently received one from Karen Harkness, Nashville, that really swelled my head. According to her, "I was thrilled to see your newsletter. After taking the time to read nearly all of your columns, I am interested to know if you are a writer? It is rare to see a Mayor write such a colorful, humorous and heartfelt letter such as yours. Your style and humor bring to mind Jan Karon - one of my favorite writers."
That was a wonderful compliment but I am afraid that I don't live up to all those kudos. However it was good to again see confirmation that so many pick this column up on the Internet. And it became even more interesting correspondence when Karen stated that she is a descendent of the Harkness family that virtually developed Jellico in its early days. (Jellico Electric System, Jellico Telephone Company, Jellico Dairy, Jellico Ice Company, etc.)
Karen stated that she is the granddaughter of Billy Harkness, the Jellico High School football star who went on to captain the University of Tennessee football team during General Robert Reese Neyland's first year as coach on the Hill. Following graduation, he was asked by the General (then Captain) to remain as an assistant coach which harkness did - helping build the Vols into their current status as a national power in that sport.
Karen mentioned her great grandfather, Will Harkness, who gave my very young uncles employment at the Jellico Dairy following the death of their father and my grandfather in a Proctor Hollow coal mine. Will Harkness was almost a saint to my grandmother who had only recently been widowed at that time and she never stopped mentioning his name in an appreciative way virtually until the time of her death.
Karen also said that her family left Jellico well before her birth but upon visiting here several years ago, that amazingly, she clearly recognized all of the sites of her family's history although she had never seen them before. Apparently her folks went into great descriptive details about the "good ole days in Jellico" during her growing up years.
Karen grew up in Florida and attended the University of Florida and - in spite of her grandfather's outstanding accomplishments on the Hill - says that she is a full pledged 'gator fan. But loyalty to one's school is important and besides - nobody's perfect!
A writer in one of our local papers recently quoted the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven". And according to that writer at that time, the weather had turned cold and it certainly is the season for cold weather. But since the time that article was written, it has warmed back up somewhat and temperatures were expected to climb into the mid-50 degrees range. No one that I have talked with can ever remember a winter like this one. Most like me have seen numerous warm periods during past winters going back many years but no one I have talked with can recall anything like what we are experiencing at the present time. I sure don't wish anyone to have to deal with bad driving conditions brought on by snow and ice. And I sure have no desire to pay the higher utilities bills that automatically come with very cold weather. But as I stated last week, it has been so long since we have seen what can really be considered a "snow" that some of us long for one (preferably on a weekend. We would like to stay home, cook up a big pot of stew or chili, turn on the logs in the fireplace and get warm as toast, pop some popcorn oozing with butter and otherwise stuff ourselves as we watch the white stuff fall.
I commented last week on what a disappointment our Vol basketball team had been so far this season. And then they suddenly completely turned things around in the South Carolina and Florida games. (You can never blame a loss on officials but the guys in stripes definitely helped to influence our loss at USC.) Let's just hope that our team continues to play hard and wouldn't it be heaven to Big Orange fans if they should somehow defeat the 'Cats in Knoxville?
Meantime that great football recruiting year seems to be holding steady although we appear to have lost a couple of great in-state prospects.
I guess I might could blame my recent injury to my ankle on cold weather since there was some ice the morning I turned my ankle and suffered a fracture. Or it could have been the chronic inner ear infection that I have had off and on for so long and that recently flared back up. But truthfully, it was probably just pure old clumsiness.
To say that the fracture has limited my mobility is probably the understatement of the year. And talk about requiring an adjustment. I never had any idea just how hard it is to do the most simple movements when wearing a fifty pound protective boot (at least it feels like it weighs that much. And even then it beats the old extremely hard casts that could not be removed for any reason.) I sure hope that I have never been inconsiderate of folks on walkers, crutches or in a wheel chair. But I guarantee that I will be much more considerate in the future.
Since I will be unable to personally completely distribute these articles around town for a few weeks, they will be placed in only a limited number of locations including Ray's Superior market and as usual, published in the Journal Leader Newspaper and placed on the Internet at site www.jellico.com/mayor
E-mail me at: mayor@jellico.tn.us
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Visit the City of Jellico's Web Site at: www.jellico.tn.us