A TALE OF TWO HOMEOWNERS

WHERE DO THEY LIVE?

The where-does-she-live sagas of Chattanooga Police Chief Celeste Murphy and Chattanooga City Councilwoman Demetrus Coonrod offer some interesting parallels. Both principals are Black women who have fought their way up from hard-scrabble beginnings to achieve professional status and the American Dream of owning a home.

But both own a home in one place and say they live in another, the latter of which is required for the positions they have attained.

In Murphy’s case, home owners in Georgia — the location of the house she owns — may be granted an exemption from paying certain taxes if the home is used as the primary residence by the owner. But Murphy, as police chief, must live in Chattanooga, so the homestead exemptions she has applied for in Georgia are in dispute.

In Coonrod’s case, the Harrison home she owns and, according to public documents, is required to live in for a year is not in her council district. And she says she lives in Eastdale, which is in her district, at the home of her foster mother.

Both disputes ultimately will be adjudicated by higher authorities, Murphy’s by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and Coonrod’s in Hamilton County Circuit Court. Both deserve the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, but both should hope for a speedy resolution, Murphy so the issue is not a drag on the re-election campaign of Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, who picked her for the job, in 2025, and Coonrod for the state House seat she is seeking in the Aug. 1 primary.

CRUCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE STEP

Hamilton County commissioners are expected to vote Wednesday whether to OK the transfer of $5.8 million from the county’s general fund to establish a fund — that could be leveraged to grant matches — dedicated to county road improvement projects.

The transferred money, in turn, would be used for 11 road safety improvement projects, seven of which are in the fastest growing eastern part of the county. Four of the seven are for improvements on Hunter and Snow Hill roads, two roughly parallel roads that run between Harrison and Ooltewah. Both roads need widening, projects that would be massively expensive but ultimately would help alleviate the growing traffic backups in the area.

Since the cost of widening the two roads is probably prohibitive for the upcoming county budget, the safety improvement projects will act as a reprieve, hopefully lightening the traffic in areas where it is needed.

The residential growth in the eastern portion of the county, in our opinion, while important for the county tax base, has been allowed to occur in such a way that the infrastructure that served it could not keep up. Mayor Weston Wamp’s suggestion of the general fund money transfer is a step forward, but it may be years before the infrastructure is adequate.

DIVING INTO THE JURY POOL

We all would like to be judged by a jury of our peers, so we’ll be curious to see what comes out of a motion introduced in Hamilton County Criminal Court earlier this week that alleges the county’s jury selection process is unconstitutional because it doesn’t generate enough jurors of color.

Attorney John Cavett, who filed the motion on behalf of a client, alleges the jury pools include more whites than average because only driver’s license data is used, which is allowed under Tennessee statute. He would have the county also use the likes of tax rolls, public housing lists and utility bills.

Hamilton County Criminal Court Clerk Larry Henry maintains the county’s current process is not prejudicial.

We believe the problem is deeper, involves the transient nature of residency, the responsibility of obtaining a driver’s license and won’t be solved by relying on other lists because of the same reasons.

Further, since attorneys on both sides have the right to exclude jurors for trials, the guarantee of a jury with a percentage of members that correspond to one’s race is rarely possible.

LOCK IT UP

An Associated Press article in this paper Friday noted — based on an analysis of FBI data by gun safety group Everytown — that the rate of guns stolen from cars in the United States has tripled over the past decade. But the article did not include the information from Everytown specific to Tennessee, which was that before 2013 rates of gun thefts from cars in Tennessee and elsewhere were about the same. But when the state passed a law allowing handgun carry permit holders to store their guns in parked vehicles, the rate went up dramatically compared to the rest of the country.

We’re not going to suggest any gun control measures, but two sensible solutions: Lock your car, and if you’re not in the car and you must leave the gun there, lock your gun in a vehicle gun safe, custom storage for which is available for nearly every model.

Closer to home, according to the same article, Chattanooga had the 12th highest rate of gun thefts from cars in the country. Since the guns stolen from cars typically wind up on the streets and are often used in violent acts, we can and must do better.