News - Friday, July 12, 2019

Christi Painter is moving up in real estate. Literally.

Two years after launching Premier Property Group, she’s moved the company from the second to the third floor of One Park Place, an executive office building on Lee Highway, and expanded from a single, small suite into three larger suites.

As a member of the 2019-20 class of Leadership Chattanooga, Miller & Martin attorney Varsha Ghodasra says she hopes to make new friends with people she might not otherwise meet.

Her goals beyond the class extend to collaborating with community leaders to find resolutions to local problems and continue to make Chattanooga a place where businesses want to be based and people want to live.

Maury Nicely is not just a well-known attorney with Evans Harrison Hackett. He’s also a passionate student of local history and an author.

His first book, “Chattanooga Walking Tour & Historic Guide,” is a guidebook to downtown Chattanooga and a compendium of little-known historical facts about many of the sites.

Attorney David Mittelstadt recently formed The Mittelstadt Law Firm LLC, a Chattanooga area-based national practice focusing primarily on transactional business tax issues and other legal services relevant to business clients.

Mittelstadt, who served as the 2018-19 chair of the Tennessee Bar Association’s Tax Section, and who remains on the section’s executive committee, brings more than 35 years of transactional tax experience to his new firm.

Chancellor Pam Fleenor is one of three East Tennessee judges selected to serve on the Tennessee Judicial Conference executive committee for the coming year.

Fleenor was elected to the 11th District Chancery Court in 2014. Before her election, she practiced law with the firm of Duncan, Hatcher, Hixson & Fleenor in Chattanooga.

Tricia Adams has been promoted from pending transaction coordinator for The Robinson Team of Keller Williams Realty to director of operations and client services, the highest management position in the company. Adams will report to CEO and founder Jay Robinson.

I know many people but I don’t know anyone who loves sitting in traffic. Sitting still on the road keeps us from doing what we want to do – and I hate it.

I’m not alone. Commute time is very important to buyers when they’re choosing a home to purchase, an article for Realtor Magazine titled “Homebuyers rank commute time above square footage” reports.

Summertime in the Tennessee Valley is known for vacations, camp and higher-than-usual utility bills. The average U.S. residential customer’s electricity bills will total $412 between June and August this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Dig around in laws much and you turn up some doozies. For example, the book “Planet Cat” asserts that in Natchez, Mississippi, “cats may not drink beer.”

Why the discrimination against our feline companions, you may be wondering. What about dogs and beer? Parakeets? Ferrets?

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has said federal courts won’t rule on cases involving political gerrymandering, voters who don’t like the way their legislative districts are drawn will have to turn to state courts or to the gerrymandered legislatures themselves to change things.

In “Midsommar,” writer and director Ari Aster trades the smothering darkness of “Hereditary” for the sun-dappled fields of a remote Swedish commune without sacrificing any of the disquieting horror that marked his previous film.

Ground is broken on the Chattanooga Red Wolves’ future stadium and the surrounding mixed-use development, signaling the beginning of a $125 million investment in East Ridge and Chattanooga.

The area in East Ridge will feature a soccer-specific stadium, housing, shops, restaurants, a hotel and expansive greenspaces and trails.

Supporting local organizations that address a watershed or source water protection need, Tennessee American Water has awarded East Ridge an environmental grant. The project consists of the removal of debris from the Spring and South Chickamauga creeks and bank stabilization to prevent erosion.

The Chattanooga 2.0 executive search committee has named Molly Blankenship permanent executive director.

Since March 2019, Blankenship has served as Chattanooga 2.0 interim executive director while working as the vice president of talent initiatives at the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce.

Few things are more likely to coax a smile from a Tennessee Aquarium employee than the hatching of a penguin chick. Except when two chicks waddle onto the scene at the same time.

The Aquarium recently welcomed a pair of pudgy, grey-and-white balls of feathery fluff – one penguin gentoo and one penguin macaroni – to the colony at Penguins’ Rock. The chicks finished their hourslong pipping effort (the process of breaking through their eggs) June 9.

You’ll experience many personal and professional milestones through the years. Each can be satisfying but also bring challenges – especially financial. That’s why you may want to seek the guidance of a financial professional. Here are some of the key life events you may encounter, along with the help a financial adviser can provide:

Many families struggle to pay college expenses for one or two children. Certified financial planner Sarah Carlson, mother of two sets of twins, will soon have all four of her children in college at the same time.

The older twins are already there, to be joined soon by the younger two. But years ago, Carlson started teaching her children how to get an affordable education. One of the first steps was making clear what she would contribute.

Get ready to do a lot more talking to your car.

Smartphone personal assistants – Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, for example – can be used for a variety of tasks. And thanks to greater availability of the Android Auto and Apple CarPlay smartphone integration systems – just about every new vehicle you shop for in 2019 will offer them – these features can be used in your vehicle for voice commands and personal assistant tasks.