Chattanooga Pulse

Ticketing Anger
I got quite a chuckle out of Alex Teach’s police-themed column in last week’s Pulse [“Parking Fines Now: A True Parody”].  I especially liked the Apocalypse Now theme he had in there. Almost as funny as this parking ticket I got, one minute over. If you want to know why people in the city seem to have such trouble with parking tickets, maybe you should take a gander at the time stamp on this one.  It was issued one minute past the expiration time.  One minute! Now, I’m not that mad; but, the CPD had nothing better to do than to fine me within one minute of the expiration time?
John O’Keefe-Odom

Need More Police
How is Mr. Mayor planning on adding 10 police officers per year with no academy scheduled? It takes over 15 months to get an academy class trained and ready. Littlefield is not even taking turnover into account which is scary. Given CPD’s turnover, if they started a class of 20 recruits tomorrow by the time the class was graduated they would need to have graduated 25 to account for the turnover. Someone please get the mayor to do something about this! They will never grow the department unless they hire 35 to 45 officers per year.
Scott Montgomery

Chattanooga Greenwashing
Come to the Chattanooga Green meetings and see how few regular citizens attend these “citizen” advisory teams, compared to corporate citizens and bureaucrats. I sat in two citizen advisory action team meetings last week that seemed manipulated towards the development community by bureaucrats and corporate citizens working in lockstep.

As usual, I was one of only one or two citizens not working for a development industry agency, and not a bureaucrat.Although some of the teams are full of citizens (I hear the communications team is busy creating promotional slogans for how green the city is), it’s really scary to sit and be outvoted by corporate citizens on so-called “citizen” teams charged with advising the mayor on landscaping ordinances.

I don’t know many of us citizens that really want to be part of the Chattanooga Greenwashing! But when we get tired of the game, and leave the teams, who will be advising the mayor, and declaring: “the citizens have spoken?”
Lana Sutton

Love For Abner Jay
Thanks so much for the review of Abner Jay! He is one of my favorite artists and I listen to him frequently. I got the chance to see him perform in Chattanooga and got to meet him as well. That performance was one of the best I’ve ever been to. In fact, I’d put it right up there with seeing Tom Waits. Thanks for shedding some much needed light on such an obscure and underappreciated artist.
Dave Dowda