Mayor Lusk gets slapped down by TDOT Commissioner

Signal Mountain has had a less than ideal relationship with the state highway department, going back to adamant opposition to TDOT plans to widen the road up the mountain back some 10 or more years ago. When I got on the Town Council, I made it a priority to work to patch up this relationship with some success. I also learned that it is rarely productive to pick fights with state and county officials in the newspaper. Unfortunately, despite many conversations on this subject with Bill Lusk during  my term (including his attacks on WWTA, the sewer authority http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_129533.asp, an attack for which he personally apologized to former WWTA head Henry Hoss), he has not learned this lesson and has now been publicly slapped down by TDOT commissioner John Schroer (http://chattanoogan.com/articles/article_203404.asp). Schroer's letter is also in the Chattanooga TimesFree Press this morning. We were told several years ago by TDOT that a new road up the mountain would cost many millions of dollars and would close the road for up to 2 years and this has now been confirmed once again by Commissioner Schroer. There is a long term plan to build a separate road up the back of the mountain in the Sawyer/Corral Road area, but this is no more than a line on a map on the long-term transportation plan and is also years in the future. I feared this would happen when I read Mayor Lusk's intemperate public comments calling the re-paving of US 127 a "waste of money"  and figured he would get a phone call or letter as we did after a similar incident early in my term. However, I didn't expect such a public calling out. Frankly, it is an embarrassing incident for this town and I hope that a lesson was finally learned.

In other news, apparently the Council has decided against a garbage tax and will plan to raise property taxes in spite of Vice-Mayor Susan Robertson's campaign comments that she "hoped" she wouldn't have to raise taxes for the next 3-4 years. I thought at the time that this showed a clear lack of knowledge about the state of the town's finances and apparently that was the case. It was an unfortunate missed opportunity to use the campaign as a forum to inform the public about the state of the town's finances and to engage the citizens in discussion about ways to deal with these concerns. I'm sure that many of her supporters, including some of our local tea party advocates who promoted her as an anti-tax champion are feeling misled at best.  I still think that, in light of this financial need and a deficit which is now over $300,000, continuing to pay huge extra amounts on the "school bond" is a luxury we cannot afford (we paid an extra $900,000 in 2009 and almost $700,000 in 2010 over and above our minimum annual payment). This money could go along way towards covering the deficit and some of the town's long term maintenance and public works needs.