News - Friday, January 13, 2017

Inside the South’s oldest title company, two men are mulling a question: Why do sellers in Hamilton County pay for the owner’s title policy?

Charles O. Hon, III, the chairman and CEO of Title Guaranty and Trust, establishes the context. “In most places across the country, the buyer purchases his own policy,” he says. Hon is bellied up to a blackjack-style table he designed and built in the 1970s for closings.

Cumberland Transit owner Allen Doty isn’t sure if a rule requiring major out-of-state retailers to collect Tennessee sales taxes will create more equity for his shop.

But Doty, who has been selling everything from bicycles to kayaks and camping gear for 34 years in Nashville, is definitely tired of people shopping in his store for hours, snapping a picture of shoes they like, then going home and buying them online “just to avoid sales tax.”

Casey Jones’ career at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga nearly ended before it began.

Now, the Mocs’ opponents are wondering if he’s ever going to leave.

Jones, the Mocs’ fifth-year senior forward, is finally enjoying the senior season that was snatched away from him last season due to a grotesque ankle injury.  He’d played, fortunately, in few enough games to earn a fifth-year of eligibility, but it also meant missing out on much of the Mocs’ historic 29-win season under first-year coach Matt McCall.

Publix Super Markets joined forces with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Chattanooga Area on Friday, Jan. 6, to break ground on the company’s first sponsored Habitat for Humanity home.

“Publix Super Markets Charities is proud to support Habitat for Humanity affiliates across the Southeast with a $5.5 million donation,” says Brenda Reid, media and community relations manager for Publix. “Our associates are looking forward to helping build one of the homes in the Chattanooga area.”

The Tennessee Supreme Court has clarified that the criminal offense of stalking, as defined under Tennessee law, contains both an objective element and a subjective element of significant mental suffering or distress that must be met to sustain a conviction. The Court emphasized that the State must present evidence that a victim actually experienced significant mental suffering or distress.

The Tennessee Dangerous Drugs Task Force has released its pill take-back totals for 2016 for the state.

The office of the Hamilton County Sheriff placed third with over 2,700 pounds of expired and unused medical prescriptions collected through its affiliated drug take-back program.

Douglas Elkins is now a member at the Chattanooga office of Miller & Martin.

Elkins is a new member of the law firm’s corporate department. He focuses his practice on corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, securities and general business representation.

In “Hidden Figures,” Al Harrison, director of NASA’s Space Task Group, asks Katherine Johnson, the African-American mathematician who calculated the flight trajectories for John Glenn’s history-making journey into space in 1962, a complex question:

The Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors (GCAR) hosted the first forum for the Chattanooga Mayoral and City Council candidates on Wednesday, Jan. 11 for its members and the local media.

GCAR and its RPAC (Realtor Political Action Committee) hosted the event at its Amnicola Highway office. The morning session was for the mayoral candidates and the afternoon session was for the City Council candidates. Both sessions were moderated by Becky Cope-English, the 2017 Chair of the RPAC Trustees.

As Greater Chattanooga residents ring in a new year, it’s a perfect time to make some personal resolutions that promote positive changes in every aspect of your life – including your home. When you make your own list, you might be surprised to discover you and your home have strikingly similar resolutions!

If you are a “millennial” – a member of the age cohort born anywhere from the early 1980s to the late 1990s – then you’re still in the early chapters of your career, so it may be a stretch for you to envision the end of it.  But since you do have so many years until you retire, you’ve got the luxury of putting time on your side as you save and plan for retirement.

The Chattanooga Hamilton Place Rotary Club last week delivered 180 coats to schools across the city.

Schools included in the club’s Warm Coats for Cool Kids event were Woodmore Elementary, Bess T. Shepherd, Harrison Elementary, East Lake Elementary, Spring Creek Elementary, East Side Elementary, Hillcrest Elementary, Orchard Knob Elementary and East Ridge Elementary.

The City of Chattanooga will clean up the “blighted and dangerous” property on the former Dixie Yarns factory site.

“This is a 12-acre property in the middle of a neighborhood,” says Mayor Andy Berke. “By working together with the neighborhood association and Chattanooga City Councilman Jerry Mitchell, we developed a strategy to clean up this important property so it can return to being a centerpiece of the neighborhood instead of a dangerous eyesore.”

Most people don’t think about American history when they think about glass. But the featured speaker at Houston Museum’s 2017 Antiques Show & Sale says glass production made Pittsburgh the national center of the glass industry.

“At one time, Pennsylvania produced more than 40 percent of the nation’s glass supply, with the first two factories opening in 1797,” says Anne Madarasz, director of the curatorial division and chief historian and director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. “With more than 200 years of production in the region, it’s easy to see the interplay between the glass objects and the larger context of history.”

Chattanooga State Community College has announced that Debbie Adams will serve as interim president of the college.

Current President Flora Tydings leaves Feb. 1 to assume her new role as chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents.

Adams, a 30-year career staffer and administrator at the college, is currently the college’s vice president of student affairs and workforce development. She was appointed by TBR Chancellor David Gregory and will serve from Feb. 1 until the next president is appointed by the Board of Regents and arrives on campus later this year.

MLK Day of Service

East Chattanooga will be the focus of this year’s MLK Day of Service.

On Monday, Jan. 16, volunteers will gather on Glass Street and then fan out into the neighborhoods of East Chattanooga to landscape, clear debris, do trail maintenance, and paint and deep clean.