Thursday at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center.

The primary focus of the event was to kick off registration for the 2023 Annual Statewide Women’s Policy Conference, which will take place at the Westin Chattanooga on Feb. 2-3.

According to Steering Committee member Beverly McKeldin, the mission of the City of Chattanooga Mayor’s Council for Women “is to bring together women from across the state of Tennessee to learn about current legislation affecting women’s lives, and to inspire new policy initiatives that will impact their future and their family’s future.”

McKeldin said those attending the upcoming Women’s Policy Conference will get a chance to collaborate with national experts on the importance of–and further education and involvement in–policies and legislation concerning justice for women; economic self-sufficiency and political engagement; and healthcare and the access to care.

Confirmed conference speakers include: Dr. Jaquelyn Campbell, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing; Dr. Jeannine Carpenter, Chattanooga Area Food Bank; Kimberly Ellis, director of the San Francisco Dept. on the Status of Women; Laurel Graefe, vice president and regional executive at the Nashville Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta; TV personality Judge Glenda Hatchett; “Sonic Essence: Empowerment Thru the Arts” and Dr. Eve Valera, Harvard Medical School. 

McKeldin also released information on the Mayor’s Council for Women’s 2nd Annual Boutique Holiday Extravaganza, which is set for 6 p.m. on Dec. 7, at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Justice Center, 5705 Uptain Rd. The free event will feature food and door prizes. 

The Mayor’s Council for Women was first announced by Mayor Andy Berke at his 2015 State of the City Address. The Council was tasked by Mayor Berke with making policy recommendations about issues affecting women within Chattanooga and across the region.

Mayor Berke named state Rep. JoAnne Favors and Chattanooga City Council Chair Dr. Carol Berz as co-chairs for the inaugural Council. Rep. Favors and Dr. Berz established a framework for the development of the Council to allow women from all walks of life and professions to participate. 

The Council consists of six committees organized around broad categories–economic opportunity, education, health, history, justice and leadership. Each committee has at least two organizers and approximately a dozen members.

For further information, visithttp://councilforwomen.chattanooga.gov.

While many states have made it easier for people convicted of felonies to vote, Tennessee has gone in the other direction. 

By Bianca Fortis

Leola Scott recently decided to become a more active citizen. The 55-year-old resident of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was driven to action after her son was stabbed to death and nobody was charged.

In August, Scott tried to register to vote. That’s when she learned she’s not allowed to cast a ballot because she was convicted of nonviolent felonies nearly 20 years ago.

One in five Black Tennesseans are like Scott: barred from voting because of a prior felony conviction. Indeed, Tennessee appears to disenfranchise a far higher proportion of its Black residents — 21% — than any other state.

The figure comes from a new analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which found that Mississippi ranks a distant second, just under 16% of its Black voting-eligible population. Tennessee also has the highest rate of disenfranchisement among its Latino community — just over 8%.

While states around the country have moved toward giving people convicted of felonies a chance to vote again, Tennessee has gone in the other direction. Over the past two decades, the state has made it more difficult for residents to get their right to vote back. In particular, lawmakers have added requirements that residents first pay any court costs and restitution and that they be current on child support.

Tennessee is now the only state in the country that requires those convicted of felonies be up to date on child support payments before they can vote again.

The state makes little data available about who has lost the right to vote and why. Residents who may qualify to vote again first have to navigate a confusing, opaque bureaucracy.

Scott says she paid off her court costs years ago. But when she brought a voting rights restoration form to the county clerk to affirm that she had paid, the clerk told her she still had an outstanding balance of $2,390.

“It was like the air was knocked out of me,” she said. “I did everything that I was supposed to do. When I got in trouble, I owned it. I paid my debt to society. I took pride in paying off all that.”

Scott does not have receipts to verify her payments because she made them so long ago, she said. And there is no pathway for her to fight what she believes is a clerical error.

She is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee NAACP challenging the state’s voting rights restoration process. In court documents, the state denied allegations that the restoration process is inaccessible.

Overall, according to The Sentencing Project, about 470,000 residents of Tennessee are barred from voting. Roughly 80% have already completed their sentence but are disenfranchised because they have a permanently disqualifying conviction — such as murder or rape — or because they owe court costs or child support or have gotten lost in the system trying to get their vote back.

Over the past two years, about 2,000 Tennesseans have successfully appealed to have their voting rights restored.

Those convicted after 1981 must get a Certification of Restoration of Voting Rights form signed by a probation or parole officer or another incarcerating authority for each conviction. The form then goes to a court clerk, who certifies that the person owes no court costs. Then it is returned to the local election commission, which then sends it to the State Election Commission for final approval. (Rules on voting restoration were revised multiple times, so older convictions are subject to different rules.)

Republican Cameron Sexton, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, said people convicted of felonies should have to pay court costs and child support before voting.

“If someone’s not paying or behind on their child support payment, that’s an issue,” he told ProPublica. “That’s an issue for that child, that’s an issue for that family, not having the things that they agreed to in court to help them for that child.”

When asked about Tennessee being the only state to require that child support payments be up to date before voting rights can be restored, Sexton said, “Maybe Tennessee is doing it correctly and the others are not.”

A 2019 report from the Tennessee Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the requirements for repayment have been especially burdensome to women, the poor and communities of color. The report also noted that Tennessee has increasingly levied court charges “as a means for funding the State’s courts and criminal justice system.”

Georgia previously required payment of restitution and fines in order to restore voting rights. But in 2020, the office of Georgia’s secretary of state clarified that anyone who has completed their sentence may vote, even if they owe court costs or other debts that were not incurred as part of their sentence.

Disenfranchisement does not solely impact the lives of individual voters — it can have consequences for elections, too. This is particularly true for multiracial communities in Tennessee, according to Sekou Franklin, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. He pointed to county-level races that have been decided by a few dozen votes.

“There are real votes that are lost that can shape elections,” Franklin said.

Black Tennesseans, even those who were not enslaved, have been disenfranchised for centuries. In 1835, the new state constitution took away the right to vote from free Black men, who had been able to vote under the previous constitution. It also stipulated that anyone convicted of an “infamous” crime — a list that included robbery, bigamy and horse stealing — would lose their voting rights, often permanently.

The civil rights laws of the 1960s opened up voting again for Tennesseans. But soon lawmakers began adding back in provisions that disenfranchised people convicted of felonies. Legislators updated the statute every few years, adding to the list of crimes that permanently disqualify someone from voting. The result is a convoluted list of eligibility criteria for voting rights restoration that depend on what a person was convicted of and when the conviction took place.

The reality of disenfranchisement in Tennessee received some national attention recently around the case of a Memphis woman, Pamela Moses. Three years ago, she got her probation officer’s signoff to vote again. The next day, the Tennessee Department of Correction asserted the officer had made an error. Prosecutors then charged Moses with lying on an election document. She was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, but a judge later threw out the conviction.

Tennessee lawmakers from both parties have tried, unsuccessfully, to make it easier for residents to get their vote back.

In 2019, two Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill that would have automatically restored voting rights to people upon completion of their sentence. It was supported by a bipartisan coalition of civil rights advocates, including the libertarian group Americans for Prosperity and the Tennessee American Civil Liberties Union. But it never gained traction among legislators.

In 2021, two Democrats sponsored another bill that would have granted automatic vote restoration, but that bill also died. The sponsors said that the Republican supermajority in Tennessee’s legislature simply doesn’t have an appetite to take it on.

“We said we wanted to do criminal justice reform, but all we’ve done is really nibbled around the edges,” state Sen. Brenda Gilmore told ProPublica, referring to a bill she co-sponsored with a fellow Democrat.

Dawn Harrington, the founder of Free Hearts, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated women, also advocated for the 2021 bill. Reforms Falter in Police Department Under Scrutiny for Killings

On a trip to New York City in 2008, Harrington carried a gun that was licensed in Tennessee. Because New York does not recognize permits from other states, she was convicted of a gun possession charge.

After serving a yearlong sentence on Rikers Island, she returned to Tennessee and set out to have her rights restored. Tennessee requires the incarcerating agency to sign the rights restoration form, but Harrington struggled to find someone in New York willing to sign it. After nine years, her rights were finally restored in 2020.

“I don’t know if you know the show ‘The Wiz,’ but I literally eased on down the road,” Harrington said about having her voting rights restored. “I danced. I was so happy I cried. I was feeling all the emotions. You never know how much something means to you until it’s taken away.”

Do you have information about people with felony convictions who are not allowed to vote? Contact Bianca Fortis at bianca.fortis@propublica.org.

Bianca Fortis is an Abrams Reporting Fellow at ProPublica. This story was first published by ProPublica

CHATTANOOGA—Dr. Richard Brown, who provided more than 38 years of service to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University of Tennessee System, is the namesake of the new Richard Brown Inclusive Access Scholarship at UTC.
 
The scholarship—a collaboration of the Division of Diversity and Engagement, the Division of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs in conjunction with the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships—commemorates the contributions of Brown, who began working for the University in 1984 and rose to executive vice chancellor for administration and finance. He then took on a dual role in 2021 as a special advisor to UTC Chancellor Steven R. Angle and UT System President Randy Boyd before retiring at the end of the year.
 
“Richard Brown invested decades of his life helping to build UTC into the university we are all proud of. He worked his way up through the ranks to one of the top jobs on campus,” Angle said. “During those years, he was a tireless advocate for excellence and inclusion, and he has mentored countless students and employees and been a role model for many others. These scholarships are a fitting tribute for Richard’s impact here at UTC.”
 
During the 2022-2023 academic year, 30 UTC students from the Chattanooga region are benefiting from this new scholarship. The students come to UTC from the following Hamilton County high schools: Brainerd, East Ridge, Hixson, The Howard School, Red Bank and Tyner Academy.
 
Brown confessed to being flattered when he was told about a new scholarship program named after him.
 
“My first reaction to it was that I was humbled and honored to have such a prestigious honor and recognition by the University, but after that, I was really excited about it,” he said. “This will create an opportunity for access to some students who are underserved by access to higher education.
 
“Fundamentally, I believe that access to higher education transforms lives for many, many years and generations to come.”
 
Stacy Lightfoot, vice chancellor for the UTC Division of Diversity and Engagement, said Brown was involved in drafting some of the philosophies for the scholarship, suggesting ideas for who the award should be geared toward.
 
“He helped create some of the criteria,” Lightfoot said. “When I talked to him about this, he was touched and added to the criteria. He said, ‘Make sure you think about the adult learner. Make sure you think about the veteran student.’
 
“So he owns some of this process. This isn’t just an award in his honor; this is an award that he helped create. I think that’s what makes this special as well.”
 
During his time at UTC, Brown was a pillar of the campus community, serving as a member of the executive leadership team under five chancellors and playing a vital role in the expansion of the campus across McCallie Avenue.
 
As a result of crossing McCallie, UTC South Campus housing came into existence in the late 1990s, fostering the growth and upward trajectory of the University.

Renowned parks expert Mitchell Silver will headline CIVIQ, the speaker series from the Chattanooga Design Studio. The event will take place from 5:30-7 p.m. on Nov. 10, at the Camp House, 806 East 12th St.

Silver will discuss the evolution of parks from the mid-19th century through the 21st centuries, bringing the critical role of contemporary parks and public space planning into focus. 

“There’s no one better in the country to address how the confluence of public health, resilience and equity initiatives can result in a development of a successful modern-day public realm,” said Eric Myers, executive director of the Chattanooga Design Studio. 

Silver serves as vice president of Urban Planning at McAdams, a land planning and civil engineering design company in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and is former commissioner for the New York City Parks Department. 

In his role at McAdams, Mitchell is responsible for providing advisory services in urban planning, land use, parks and public space planning with an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. 

An award-winning planner with more than 35 years of experience, Mitchell is one of the nation’s most celebrated urban thinkers. He was selected to Planetizen’s list of the 100 Most Influential Urbanists in the world. In addition, he has been honored as one of the top 100 City Innovators in the world by UBM Future Cities, and the Urban Times named him one of the top international thought leaders of the built environment.

In addition to his CIVIQ lecture, Silver will also take part in a panel discussion with Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly and Scott Martin, administrator for the city of Chattanooga’s Department of Parks and Outdoors, on Nov. 9 from 5-7 p.m. at Common House, 1517 Mitchell Ave. 

CIVIQ was started in 2018 as “a quarterly event which introduces and humanizes national and international movements in urban design by showcasing visionary work being done by practitioners in other cities. More than a lecture, each event is intended to equip the city to think differently about challenges faced in our community.” All events are free and open to the public. More information may be found at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/civiq-with-mitch-silver-tickets-440562352857

Longtime County Attorney Rheubin Taylor has filed a lawsuit against County Mayor Weston Wamp. Taylor said the new county mayor is trying to fire him despite his having a four-year contract given by the prior County Commission in 2021.

“By letter, dated October 14, 2022, Weston Wamp, purported to terminate the contract referred to in paragraph 4, effective immediately. Weston Wamp did not have the unilateral authority to terminate the contract and/or Rheubin M. Taylor’s employment with Hamilton County and/or the Hamilton County Commission, nor did he provide notice or seek approval of the County Commission to do so,” the lawsuit reads.

In his lawsuit, Taylor said the contents of his computer were taken, including attorney-client documents.

“At some point on or after October 14, 2022, Weston Wamp caused the IT Department of Hamilton County to confiscate the computer of Rheubin Taylor, the contents of which contained information protected by the attorney-client privilege. In addition, with his computer disconnected from the Hamilton County server, Rheubin M. Taylor was inhibited in the services he was required to perform for the County under his contract. To date, the privileged material has not been returned, nor has the computer been reconnected.”

The lawsuit also said that attorney Taylor’s health insurance benefits were due to end on Oct. 31. The 73-year-old Taylor said the benefits are important because his wife has a heart condition.

“Employee benefits, including health benefits, have been provided to Rheubin M. Taylor and his family, which will cease on October 31, 2022, due to the instructions or directions of Weston Wamp. The benefits referred to in the previous paragraph are crucial to Rheubin Taylor and his family because his wife has a heart condition. Without the benefits, Rheubin M. Taylor will suffer immediate and irreparable harm in the form of a loss of health care for himself and his wife, in addition to the anxiety and insecurity associated with this loss.”

Attorney Taylor’s employment status and the ensuing fallout dominated Wednesday’s regular Hamilton County Commission meeting. During the meeting, commissioners unanimously overrode Wamp’s veto of the resolution which the panel approved two weeks ago in response to the mayor’s attempt to fire the longtime attorney.

“We’ve reached an impasse that we don’t like,” Commission Chairman Chip Baker, R-Signal Mountain, said.

As a result of Wednesday’s override, attorney Taylor’s contract remains in place.

District 4 County Commissioner Dr. Warren Mackey is worried that Mayor Wamp’s actions could end up in court and cost taxpayers.

“You say you don’t want to be litigious, but if we go to court how much money do you think this case will cost us,” Commissioner Mackey asked Wamp.

“Well, I have no idea; there’s no way of knowing,” Wamp answered. 

“Everyone here on this dais has said they are concerned about each and every tax dollar,” Commissioner Mackey told the mayor. “I am not willing to gamble by going to court when none of the lawyers you’ve mentioned will say categorically that contract is void. I don’t want to be personal, but on a certain level I want to ask people personally, would they risk tax money or taxpayers’ money on a gamble?” 

Mayor Wamp countered that under his leadership attorney Taylor has “wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars” for many years.

“So if we are really talking about taxpayer dollars, it is not the most efficiently run part of county government and it’s one of the reasons we pursued a change,”  Wamp said.

Attorney Taylor has a long record of service to the community. When he arrived in Chattanooga in 1973, he was the first African American licensed attorney in the city. In 1978, he and the Rev. Paul McDaniel became the first African-American County Commissioners. In 1993, Taylor became the first African American Hamilton County attorney.

At press time, Chancellor Jeff Atherton has filed a temporary restraining order, keeping Mr. Taylor as the county attorney.