ELECTION, POLICY CONSEQUENCES

KEEP AN EYE ON THE WAMP WAR

Watch this week to see if our middle-aged-to-elderly Hamilton County commissioners and our new millennial county mayor continue to snip and snipe at each other.

In just a few short weeks we’ve seen Mayor Weston Wamp fire the county attorney, citing what seems reasonable grounds, including Rheubin Taylor’s oversight of public records destruction.

We’ve seen the commission attempt to un-fire the attorney, and pass a resolution to set up a civil service system (which, by the way, would not cover the embroiled attorney or other administrators in county government.)

We’ve seen the mayor announce he’s asking the county’s public records commission to change its policy for retention of county emails. The policy currently preserves those emails for a ridiculous 10 days, rather than a state group’s recommended five years.

Wamp is correct when he says the policy change would promote improved accountability in county government. But which side do we all think our commission will come down on? We’ll make three guesses and you can know the first two don’t count.

Here’s the thing: This commission and mayor have serious issues in front of them. The falling test scores of our students, for one. Nearly $1 billion in deferred maintenance for our school buildings for another. For a third, there’s the serious waste of money our commissioners have supported (along with Chattanooga) to spend nearly $80 million for a minor-league baseball stadium for the wealthy owners of the Chattanooga Lookouts.

Grow up, men. Your antics to cover your fannies and protect your swollen egos are wearing thin on Hamilton County taxpayers and residents. Stop fighting with this new mayor and work with him to find solutions to our problems.

HOSPITAL RANSOMWARE ATTACK DISTRESSING

CHI Memorial Hospital on Friday said the hospital’s electronic health records system is back online and providers are once again able to access their patients’ electronic health records after scrambling for three weeks under a ransomware cyberattack.

Doctors and nurses had to practice medicine the old-fashioned way with paper and pens, and patients’ access to their electronic MyChart pages was shut down. The local CHI Memorial facilities postponed some procedures and briefly diverted some ambulance traffic to other local hospitals.

The health system told the public in early October that some hospital computer systems were offline as their parent company dealt with an “IT security incident.”

“Our facilities are following existing protocols for system outages and taking steps to minimize the disruption. We take our responsibility to ensure the privacy of our patients and IT security very seriously.”

It wasn’t particularly reassuring. And a few days later, it became obvious via newspaper headlines elsewhere that the problem was much bigger, affecting much of the CHI Memorial’s parent company, the Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, the second-largest nonprofit hospital chain in the U.S.

The chain operates 142 hospitals and roughly 2,200 health care locations across 21 states, and similar problems were reported in at least Nebraska, Washington, Iowa and Texas.

CommonSpirit finally confirmed last week the IT shutdowns were due to a ransomware attack. Hospital industry experts have since dubbed the attack one the most significant of its kind in history.

In a “frequently asked questions” box on the commonspirit.org website, the “Was patient information accessed?” question wasn’t really answered. The reply was: “We continue to conduct a thorough forensics investigation and will seek to determine if there are any data impacts as part of that process.”

Again, this is not particularly reassuring.

We’ve heard warnings of things like this. Sadly, now we’ve seen it.

VOTING HARASSMENT NOT ALLOWED

Voting harassment seems to have come to an early voting place near us — and by a Tennessee gubernatorial candidate, nonetheless.

On Monday, police arrested and charged Charles Van Morgan, a Knoxville independent candidate on the ballot, after voters and election officials say he was “getting in people’s faces” and yelling at voters at the Hamilton County Election Commission office on River Terminal Road, according to a sheriff’s department affidavit.

Two commission employees, including the county’s administrator of elections, Scott Allen, as well as a voter who asked not to be identified, told officers Morgan was screaming about politics and harassing voters.

Morgan, charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and interference with another’s rights/election laws, in a later phone call with the Times Free Press said he was simply campaigning.

“This is not a free and fair election. … I was out there campaigning. This is the most corrupt county I have seen in Tennessee. People are worried about Russia when there’s corrupt Hamilton County.”

We don’t think so. We don’t think ours is a corrupt county because our election commissioners don’t choose to stand silently by while voters are frightened to the point they asked responding police to escort them back to their car.

It’s OK to be passionate about politics. It’s not OK to be “in people’s faces” about politics.

Voting is sacred and important. And it’s good to know perceived voting harassment will not be tolerated here.