Story up at The Chronicle of Mt. Juliet website.
Apparently he will hold both positions simultaneously.
Does this seem like a good idea?
June 29, 2009
Mt. Juliet City Judge resigned via email over the weekend
Story up on The Tennessean website.
There have been a series of disputes between the police department, the City Commission, and the City Judge.
Recently, Judge Grauberger had dismissed citations issued to realtors for violating the new sign ordinance. Apparently the sign ordinance says violators must be given 10 days notice before a citation can be issued. The codes department was unable to show that they had provided 10 days notice, so the judge dismissed the citations.
Might or might not be related to the Judge’s resignation.
June 24, 2009
Habemus Budget!
The City Commission passed the budget Monday night by a vote of 3-2 (Elam, Sellers, Floyd voting AYE, Bradshaw & Hagerty voting NAY).
More detail in a story at The Chronicle of Mt. Juliet web site.
One fun note. According to Tomi Wiley’s story, Mayor Elam, at one point, made a motion to amend the budget to increase the estimated fund balance by $75,000.
I had no idea the Mayor had that kind of power.
June 23, 2009
Senator Mae Beavers decides to run for Wilson County Mayor
A few more details at the Lebanon Democrat, and the full text of her announcement at Post Politics.
The election for Wilson County Mayor will be held on the first Thursday in August, 2010 – 14 months from now.In 2006, Bob Dedman ran for re-election and was challenged by Linda Elam. Philip Warren filed as a candidate, but then withdrew and was not on the ballot.
Don Fox has already announced that he is running for Wilson County Mayor.
A.C. Kleinheider discusses who might be running for the open Senate seat currently held by Mae Beavers.
June 16, 2009
City of Mt. Juliet 2009-2010 Budget
It’s posted on the City website, but it takes a bit of digging to find. It was part of the Commissioner’s packet for the June 8th City Commission meeting. But since that packet is an 88 page .pdf (14mb), it takes a little while to load.
RFMJ has extracted the Budget Ordinance from this packet and saved it as a separate 8 page .pdf file (54kb). Should be much faster to download. Click on this link or on the image of page one below to view the full budget.
There is also a much larger document submitted to the commission with the budget, the so-called “budget book.” This book, usually several hundred pages, has the detailed budget by line item amounts for each department. It has NOT been made available on the city website.
Bottom line:
General fund estimated revenues: $10,173,293.94
General fund estimated recurring expenses: $9,916473.43
(but with a transfer to the Debt Service Fund of $800,000 – this appears to be to fund the annual, recurring debt service obligations of the city)
General fund recurring expenses (with debt service): $10,716,473.43
Of particular interest is the separate reporting of the Insurance Benefit Fund for city employees. Total cost of Health Insurance is $1,353,814.68. (This cost is separately reported within the various departments’ expenses in the General Fund budget.
If one knew the total employee count, then it would be relatively simple to compute the cost per employee of health insurance and compare that to other alternatives.
May 14, 2009
MJ Planner resigned due to “misunderstanding” and lack of confidence in her
So reads the headline on a story just posted at the Mt. Juliet News website.
According to the Mt. Juliet News story, Keylon had been out sick for two weeks.
“Keylon on Monday did say she simply had a form of the regular flu and the circumstances surrounding her resignation stemmed in part from possible “mistakes” about how news of her illness was delivered and how it was perceived.”
The editor of the Mt. Juliet News seems to know a great deal more than what she’s reporting in the newspaper:
And while generally the reasons of her resignation are off-record and personal, her resignation letter printed in this issue reveals she “had a role in the outcome” of her resignation, and she apologizes for what she termed a “simple mistake.”
Keylon resigned Monday afternoon via an email message. You can read the full text of her resignation message at the Mt. Juliet News web site.
Then there’s this interesting quote:
Robertson said most cities have three or four planners and now Mt. Juliet “has none.”
May 13, 2009
Mt. Juliet Planner Resigns Suddenly
The Chronicle of Mt. Juliet has it as the lead story on their website. The print edition has a front page headline that reads, “Why did MJ planner Keylon suddenly resign?” with a story on page 9.
The Chronicle story includes this sentence:
“Sources inside City Hall wishing to remain anonymous said Tuesday that Keylon was on the verge of termination when she submitted her resignation Monday.”
There’s obviously more to this story than what has appeared in print.
May 5, 2009
Why Mt. Juliet does not need additional police officers
There have been several newspaper stories over the past few months and a recent editorial in the Mt. Juliet News referred to the “fact” that “the department is woefully undermanned when compared to a nationally recognized recommended average of manpower. “
Problem is, there is no nationally recommended average of manpower.
And comparing the ratio of officers to population in Lebanon and Mt. Juliet is misleading in the extreme.
It assumes that there is some “one size fits all” easy formula to determine the size of a local police force.
There isn’t. And for a very simple, and logical reason. Local communities vary quite widely. The number of police officers per 1,000 population in New York City will be vastly different than the number of police officers per 1,000 population in Brentwood, Tennessee. And neither of them will be wrong.
It takes a bit more research to make sense of the numbers, but not all that much.
Thankfully, for the past eight years the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has been compiling crime statistics for every city and county in Tennessee. And it’s available online here: http://www.tbi.state.tn.us/divisions/isd_csu_sac.htm
There’s also an online statistical center where you can retrieve the data in a variety of interesting ways: http://www.tncrimeonline.com/.
To evaluate a local community’s need for police officers, the first and most important statistic is the crime rate.
According to the TBI, there were 618,998 crimes reported in 2008 in the state of Tennessee. With a population of 6.15 million, the crime rate for the state is 100.54 crimes per 1,000 population. It’s even more interesting if one examines the data for local jurisdictions. You can look at the full report by clicking here: 2008 Crime rate.pdf
The crime rate in Memphis is 191.49, or almost twice the state average.
In Nashville, it’s 148.05, or about 50% above the state average.
Lebanon’s rate is 143.43 crimes per 1,000 pop – almost the same as Nashville.
LaVergne’s rate is 81.03 or about 20% below the state average.
Wilson County’s rate is 77.58.
Brentwood’s rate is 28.38.
Why in the world would anyone assume that Brentwood should have the same number of police officers per 1,000 pop as Memphis? Memphis’ crime rate is more than 6 times higher than Brentwood’s.
And Mt. Juliet?
Mt. Juliet’s crime rate is 65.98 crimes per 1,000 pop. That’s less than half the crime rate in Lebanon. Logically, if both cities have populations of 25,000 Lebanon will need twice the police officers as Mt. Juliet. Which is about the size ratio of the two departments.
Mt. Juliet is NOT “woefully undermanned.” Mt. Juliet does NOT need to add any police officers.
May 1, 2009
City faces public records requests over sign ordinance enforcement
The Chronicle of Mt. Juliet has filed a public records request for the number of signs confiscated and the number of citations issued under the newly amended sign ordinance.
Realtor Monica Doll has filed a public records request for documentation on all citations for violations of the sign ordinance issued over the past 24 months.
Realtor Bob Sorey, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee of the Eastern Middle Tennessee Association of Realtors (EMTAR), has filed an open records request for the number of signs confiscated and the number of citations issued under the newly amended sign ordinance.
The issue is the City’s admission that it is issuing citations to realtors who place signs in the public right-of-way, but is not issuing citations to citizens who place yard sign or similar signs in the public right-of-way.
