Greene County Mayor Kevin Morrison joined Ron Metcalfe for his monthly update on activities around Greene County.
ETHAN REDNOUR
ROAD DAMAGE
BRIDGE REPAIR
PUBLIC ROAD VS COUNTY ROAD
NEW INDUSTRIES
TAKOMA PROPERTY
COURTHOUSE ISSUES
People call home. It looked at data from 2021 to 2023 and found that 25 million more people are now breathing unhealthy levels of air pollution compared to last year. The study found that for the sixth year in a row, Bakersfield, California had the nation’s most polluted city, and Casper, Wyoming ranked first as the cleanest city in the US. The environmental protection Agency says, since the Clean Air Act was signed into law in 1970, air pollution emissions have gone down 78%. But studies show that it’s been on the rise in recent years. Tanya J. Powers, Fox News. The price of oil this morning is about about a half, close to $63 bucks a barrel of gas unchanged Aple A’s National L Regular Main 37 a gallon. I’m Dave Anthony. This is Fox News. Good morning, it’s 105. I’m Bobby Rer reporting WGRV News. The news this hour brought to you by Jamie Crockett, T.A. Travelter. When you want to celebrate your win with family and friends, I hop at the Davy Crockett T.A. Travel Center has you covered. It’s a slam dunk choice with their meal deals and combos. Score big with their $6 house favaves like French toast breakfast, ham and cheese omelet, and many others. Are they delicious anytime tacos. The new bacon avocado ranch burger is sure to get your mouth watering. Wash it all down with their new caramel apple butter, milkshake your hot chocolate. Put a way to spend the winning season, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, IHOP is always the winning choice the Davy Crockett T Travel Center Exit 36 Come to Bayaton. Agar apparently left abandoned on Britown Road near Davis Valley Road was destroyed by fire early today. Vole Fire Department responded to the 4:46 call after a passer reported the doors were opened and flames coming from the vehicle. According to a report by Deputy Taylor Ward with the Green County Sheriff’s Department, upon arrival, Deputy Zotas the vehicle in the middle of the road with the roof caved in and no one around it. The vehicle had already been fully engulfed and the fired almost burned out. Broken glass along with a boot and floor mats were located about 10 feet behind the vehicle. No V number or license plate was able to be located. The vehicle was able to be identified as a Jeep Grand Cherokee by a Cherokee emblem recovered nearby. Nemansville extinguished the smoldering vehicle, which was later towed from the scene. Emergency personnel were called back Wednesday afternoon to East Wells Hill Lane and Bull’s Gap after a barnfire rekindled. The fire was initially reported on the Kenneth Layman’s property and the 600 block of East Wells Hill Lane Tuesday. Lman sold the Green County Sheriff’s Department and neighbor called to report the barn on fire. According to layman, there was no electricity running to the barn, which was used only to store hay about 200 bales were destroyed. The bar was valued at $30,000. The Moss sign volunteer fire Department was called back to the scene around 130 Wednesday afternoon, when the fire rekindled. The town of Mossim Fire Department was also called shortly afterwards, also responding were firefighters from Midway, United to Busk, Caney Branch, and the St. James Volunteer Fire Departments. The Orre Bank volunteer Fire Department stood by for any calls in the Moss area, while those firefighters were on the scene in Bull’s gap. The local boards of Education meet on this Thursday at the Green Tech Center. The Green County Board of Education meets at 4:30. Richard Morrison, who was the last ever elected superintendent and the first ever appointed director of schools in the Green County School system, has requested to speak to the board. Dr. Daniel Lewis will address both the County school board and the Greenville City Board of Education during their 7:15 p.m. meeting. Dr. Lewis is pushing for co-op lacrosse teams in both systems. As we reported earlier, the city board will also address the voucher Program $2,000, onetime bonus for its teachers. Between the county and city meetings, the Joint Boy Work convene at 6. Another education news graduation, fast approaching. Thursday, May 15th, 7 p.m. North Green will have graduation in the school gym at 8 8:30 South Green, old graduation ceremonies at the football field. On Friday, May 16th, West Green graduation will be held at 7 p.m. at football field with Chuck E Oak at 830 in the school gym. Green High graduation will be Saturday, May 24th, 10 a.m at Burley Stadium. look at all the graduation dates, including area colleges and universities with links to their graduation information, can be found on the graduation story at wgv.com. All right, Mark your calendars, the annual Grievel Green County Library Booksell begins this week. It starts this Friday, the first weekend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Friday’s hours or 10 to 6, Saturdays, hours are 10 to 5, and then we’ll be open on Sunday afternoon from 1 to 5. Our full price weekend, which is the first weekend, hard MacBooks and media, are $2 apiece. paperaperbacks are a dollar. That’s one of the events organizers, Aaron Evans. Rose and Rose and room after room of well organized and categorized books and lots more booksell visitors. Annual booksells the largest fundraising event for the library of the, as well as registering for the library’s colorful and creatively filled 2025 summer reading program. And Radio Gravel welcomes the team’s players, coaches, support staff, and fans, visiting the area for the NAI Women’s Beach volleyball Invitational. The event featuring eight top ranked NAIA teams is being held today through Saturday at Harden Parks Beach Volleyball Courts. The public’s invited to come out, bring a lawn chair and enjoy the weekend. Admission is free. Hey, stay with us this morning, right after the weather, Green County Mayor Kevin Morrison joins Ron Metcalf for it update on the monthly activities around Green County. That’s coming up next. I’m Bobby Rder reporting WGRV News at 10, Brought to you by Davy Crockett, T.A. Travel Center. For further to tell see the Greenville Sun and for look at our news online. Go to wGrv.com. Green County weather Our forecast for today, look for a 70% chance of showers, eye of 72. Tomorrow at 90% chance of rain 75 and Saturday, 80% chance of rain and 72. It’s 70 here at WGRV. W 99.5 FM, WGRV were joined in our studios today with Green County Mayor Kevin Morrison, who comes in each month to share what’s going on in the county and what business the county commission has done, Mayor. Good morning and welcome back again. Good Thursday morning, Ron, Easter week. I know. Glad to have you here. Thank you again for your participation in the sunrise service. It’s good to hear that and good to celebrate the Ren Lord and thank you for contributing. It is one of the greatest days of the year. So a lot going on in the county over the last month. The County Commission. Let’s start with the recognition a celebration, Ethan Redner, a special recognition by the County Commission. Tell us why this young man has done and how our county is expressed their appreciation for that. Ron, this is an extraordinary recognition. Number one, it’s I love doing these things. We have a recognition system for our employees who who go above and beyond and do great things to save life, limb or property type thing. Finances, super efficient, But in 2018, when I came in, we didn’t have anything that really sort of recognized, you know, extraordinary things that are people or residents would do. And the idea came to me when we had a young lady that whose car actually caught on fire at the pilot at Exit 36 with her siblings in the car and due to her sort of calm collective actions, you know, she was able to evacuate the car, alert the staff inside the store, get the pump shut down, and that sort of thing. And in Ethan’s case, Ethan actually not only saved one person with CPR. He actually saved two. It was brought to my attention that Ethan had performed this sort of active bravery and heroism because in a situation like that, you know, we go through first aid training and whatnot and they try to teach you to stay calm and that sort of thing. But, you know, the adrenaline gets to flowing and this happened to be, you know, one of Ethan’s family members. And I can’t imagine what type of courage and collection that that would take. I mean, wisdom and maturity well beyond his 18 years. And he saved this individual, and this was back at the end of March, March 26th. And he actually had saved someone else. And we felt that that was, you know, again, above and beyond an extraordinary act of bravery and heroism, and a young person at that. And so we want to celebrate those things and, you know, if I could start the County commission meeting off with with, you know, some story like that, you know, everything would be right with the oil because it’s good to recognize the great things that our people do. Well, that’s great. Then you all had to start talking about roads. And let’s start first with this wasn’tounting commission exact action, but to kind of back up and talk about the flood, I think it’s kind of interesting that just because the flood happened in October doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be ripple effects and damage down the timeline. And we’re seeing that now on some of the roads where these big, massive trucks are carrying huge loads of wood and debris in the cleanup with those roadways being damaged. It’s a direct effect of the flood. The cleanup of the debris is something that it’s just necessary. It absolutely is. And you couldn’t help but anticipate there were going to be some problems with the roads. You just can’t have that size of trucks on roads that really maybe aren’t designed exactly for that. Manheb Road is not a road designed for tandem trailers yet. That’s what had to be used, and I’ll use that one as the example out. There are others, too. But a lot of damage to those roadways from the trucks and the equipment. But the good news is that’s going to be repaired at a cost not born by the county. Is that correct? That’s correct. We’ll have some type of match in there, but we have money for that. So again, it would be a small percentage. But FEMA did come through with an email and an announcement that that all of our roads that was damaged due to the debris removal would qualify for public assistance, and typically the way that works. You know, it took us five months, for instance. And it shouldn’t be lost on anybody, really. You know, we endured the largest natural disaster in the state of Tennessee’s history. So we’ve been a state since 1796, and this is the largest natural disaster event in our history. And, you know, 1.2 billion worth of damage to Northeast Tennessee Counties. That’s just here. So it’s going to take years, and some places it’ll take decades for them to recover. So, you know, just sort of getting the water back on and getting the lights back on and everything’s honky-dory is, you know, that’s that’s sort of fairy tale. So we’ve got a, this has been a long sort of arduous process. And if you’re one of those people, for instance, that lost everything that they ever worked for, dreamed of, you know, it’s excruciating to sort of see the world sort of continue and go on and, you know, you don’t even have, you know, your children’s classroom picture. So my heart continues to break for those types of folks there. And, you know, we’ve got organizations like ANet and things that a lot of good people working in a concerted effort to put things back together. And that goes along with the roads, too. So it took us five months, for instance, to negotiate with the state, TM, FEMA, going back and forth, as to, you know, when are we going to clean up the river? Who’s going to clean up the river? So the state, team got organized and hired PNJ, and they’ve done an excellent job of cleaning up the river. Anybody, I think, can everybody can agree that they have done a tremendous job cleaning up the river. But a consequence of that is that those heavy loads, those heavy truck tandem trucks with, you know loaded with debris, that has to be pulled out of there and taken somewhere and collected. I initially thought we might be able to sort of burn it in place, but the T deck wasn’t going to allow that. I don’t know sort of what happens on high with EPA and all that sort of thing, but they weren’t going to allow that. So we had to stockpil it in a place to grind it for either lumber or paper or something like that. So our roads have taken a beating and probably, again, you mentioned the most famous example of that around here. You know, we don’t have four-lane roads to the river. I mean, that are designed to carry, you know, those wide loads, those heavy loads, that continuous pounding and beating, and Mount Hebron is, you know, was a decent road before, you know, it wasn’t, again, a four- lane four- lane highway, Kirby and narrow in places. But it was a decent road to travel on. But now it’s like a log road. And but again, if we be patient, then we will get the roads fixed, and we’ve qualified for public assistance, but that’ll take time. I know the highway department has been working very hard in trying to sort of, you know, keep them in a decent shape. But that’s almost become sort of a daily task or chore to monitor all these roads. You’ve got river roads, you’ve got a little Indian Creek, you’ve got Possum Creek, you’ve got Mount Hebron. And that just named three or four, but you’ve got all these roads up and down the river that are being affected by these heavy trucks and so, you know, the officials understand it, and we’re going to get them fixed. So if everybody can just be reassured that we’re going to get them fixed. But it’s not, it’s also not a fixed. They can’t just come through and lay another layer of asphalt. because that will be gone in a day. That’s right. The actual repair kind of has to wait till the trucks are done and then there has to be some excavation. You got to get underneath, replace the foundation of that road. Otherwise, you’re just throwing money away and you’re going to have the same problem. Well, in Mount Heburn’s case, and just continuing to use that as an example, you know, you’re going to have to have reconstruction of that road. I mean, down to the foundation. And there will be some other places like that as well, where these heavy trucks have caused this pumping, this rudding that comes up, sort of a ripple, if you will, where the tires continuously go, and of course it pumps up in the middle, and then any type of low passenger car, you know, drags on this and it can cause damage to the undercarriage and things like that. There’s limited things that, again, the highway department can do. I know they’ve put put large gravel. They put small gravel, they put like Pug mix or Crusher Run in some of these places to try to smooth them out. But again, it’s become a daily chore, to try to make sure that, you know, the dangerous type stuff is mitigated. Kensster Bridge, it’s amazing to see the progress and the work that’s going there. You know what? We’re 60 days, 59 days, right at that from the target date for that to be opened. And I mean, they’re pouring the bridge deck. It looks to me like you could almost drive across it now. You know, it’s just so close to changing I don’t know how many thousands of people’s lives per day. That’s exciting. Well, they are. Kiwit Construction has done an excellent job. They’re building the Kenser Bridge, and they’re also building Taylor Bridge up in Washington County, simultaneously. And yeah, it looks as if you could almost walk out on it. I would advise that you don’t try that. They get very sort of touchy and nervous about that because they are moving and shaking out there and they have assured me and anybody around the administration that they’re going to have that thing open. I know Commissioner Nagy, they’re the spokesperson for TDot, has reassured everybody that that thing’s going to open June 23rd. And the engineers had told me previously that we would have cars and trucks on that bridge, June 25th. So they’re going to make it, and they’re working like they’re going to make it. It’s going to be first. It’s going to be the first one across. I’ll gladly transit that bridge. We’ve waiteded a long time. They are doing an excellent job. I mean, again, people need to be reassured and have confidence that we’ve got a great body of engineers and construction people that know how to build stuff in and when pushed and incentivized, that they can get on with it and do a great job. And just to go out and look at what they’ve done. I mean, it’s almost a great work of art. It really is. On the county side, work continues at Birds Bridge. Summers Taylor, got the contract for that. Is that correct? Yes, sir. And I know they built access roads. They’ve been working on the ends. That’s where the major damage there was. That was’s a shorter term fix, but they got to do what they have to do to get that open to back up. But, you know, hopefully, hopefully before too long, that one can be opened back up too. And that’ll leave Poplar Springs, which will be a longer process, but and I know they’ve replaced some of the railings, some of those concrete barriers on the sides of Ernest Bridge. And I know they’ve done some switching out there. So hopefully hopefully before too long, we’ll see some normalcy and get them from point A to point B in the county. Well, our bridges are the things that, you know, again, took the most damage. And in Ernest Bridge, the engineers and construction folks out there, they have got the downstream side of the bridge prepped to replace the parapet. They’ the guardrail, if you will, the concrete parapet that goes across the downstream side and it was, you know it was damaged the most. They were able to fix the upstream side and open the bridge back in November to one lane traffic. And they’ll fairly be closing in on getting Ernest Bridge back open to two-lane traffic normal two-lane traffic very soon. And then, of course, we talked about Kenser Bridge and then you mentioned Birds Bridge, Summers and Taylor’s doing an excellent job out there. A great, you know, reputation for very quality work. And they’re actually working on some of the foundation peers. So according to, you know, once we got the debris cleared and got the bridge assessed, there were some undermining or scouring around the bottom of the foundation of the piers of the bridge. So they’re repairing those, and I think Birdge Bridge will open very soon too. Now, Poplar Springs, a little different story, that bridge was destroyed. and it’s quite a length for a county bridge, 450 some odd feet, that’ll have to be repaired. Of course, you know, the county, we don’t have the, you know, the funding, for instance, to be able to sort of, you know, extra incentivize a construction company to come in and say, okay, if you get done by this time, you know, you get X amount more. We don’t have that luxury that the state has. So replacing that bridge is going to be sort of a much more slow process. But I want to assure and give the folks in and around the Poplar Springs Easterly Bridge, confidence to know that we’re going to replace that bridge and again, very soon, their community will be reunited on both sides of the river with an excellent bridge to drive on. Now, again, we may be 18, 24 months away. we will replace it. I know the Conway Bridge, which is actually the responsibility. That’s the one that takes you or did take you over to CJ Papa Adopps. It was one of the oldest bridges actually in East Tennessee, I think constructed in 1924. years. And it was actually on the historic register and it sort of broke my heart here a few weeks ago when the state officially acknowledged that the bridge had been removed from the historic registry because it was destroyed. You know, that sort of a moment of reflection there that a good old piece of Green County history, Americana was gone. But they’re going to replace that bridge, too. So and it’ll be something, it’ll be something bigger and better and something we can appreciate. Again, that’s probably going to take some time as well. That’s on We’re completely supportive of Cock County and Ton’s efforts to do that. So, you know, whatever we can do to facilitate that, we will. In the meantime, somebody keeps sneaking in in the middle of the night and building these roads that nobody. It’s just, it’s we talk about, it’s a little amusing. And I’ll let you explain how it happens, that there are roads, there are roads that people drive on every day that are paved and take you from point A to point B or your driveway connects to it and then and this happens, it’s this is not a first time occurrence. It just seems to be a time consuming conversation. Every now and then you come across a road that didn’t officially a road. It’s for some reason 20 years ago. You know, something happened. Well, take, for example, you know, Birds Bridge. When Birds, I’m sorry, Brown’s Bridge was there, you had two roads on to either side that connected. The bridge goes away. You’ve got these little dead ends, you’ve got these spurs, but there’s still houses and property to be accessed that way. All kinds of things can happen over time, but there was a big conversation on whether or not or how to add a couple of short sections of roadways to the, quote, official roadmap, just to make them official. I Explain to me like I’m a 10 year old. I get how it happens, but give me the easy, short way on how a road isn’t actually a road. Well, the two roads that you’re talking about is Richland Road and a section of the old Irwin Highway out in Tus. And essentially, this is sort of part of the growing pains of, you know, becoming accounting and becoming sort of an organized agency or entity. The clearest example I can give for youran is when the interstate came through. Back in the in the ’80s, the state basically said that each county would have to have a uniform county road list. And another words, the officials, the elected officials involved, just couldn’t go out and work on roads that weren’t on this uniform county road list. And it’s later grown into, you, rightways and all this sort of stuff. And we didn’t have that. Houston didn’t have that. Because you’re going back to a time in the 20s, 30s, and 40s when everything was a gravel road. maybe you used a lane between two farms to access two roads and it became so well traveled, it was kind of thought of as a road, and it was on Kevin Morrison’s property, so he called it Morrison Road.. But it wasn’t really a road. That’s right. Because people used it. Well, yes, that’s that’s how right. So it was a public road. Yeah, in the county 90 years ago, may have put some gravel on it because people used it so much. That’s correct. I didn’t. They still didn’t own it. That’s right. And, you know, and that stuff’s not allowed today. Yeah. I mean, you know, the Highway department, the Highway Superintendent, you know, if they’ working off the, quote unquote right away, or they’re working on a road that’s not on the uniform County Road list, you know, that’s illegal. So they take great pains, for instance, to know, you, where the road ends. You know, they’ve got to have a GPS coordinate for where the road ends. They’ve got to have, you know, they can’t just go over and mow somebody’s pasture field if it’s off the right way. They can’t do that. Or clear the right ways or the trees hanging over. or anything like that. Absolutely. And in a lot of cases, you know, they can only maintain from shoulder to shoulder, so they don’t have, you know, 15 feet of right away on each side of the road in a lot of places. And in this case, I was going to use the interstate as an example. When the interstate come through, it severed a lot of, you know, roads that were through roads or connecting. And so that left a lot of dead ends in and around the interstate that so when the Uniform County Road list come in, you know, they did their best to add the ones that they knew about and all the prominent ones specifically got added. But when I came on County commission in 2002, I mean, we were still adding roads to the uniform County Road list because they had inadvertently been left off. And most of them were little dead ends that were, again, next to the interstate, next to the river, hadn’t been been annexed or whatever by any of the municipalities. And that was the case here. with the roads that I mentioned, Richland Road, and then a portion of the Old Eland Highway. When, Tusculum annexed, they can’t annex the road. So that belongs to the county. So in the the plate that was provided Monday night, it showed that these were county roads. And, you know, reasonable people can say, okay, is this space in between these accepted county roads? Do you think that that’s a county road? And yes, it would be. So they were added by the commission Monday night to the uniform County Road list. And so that we don’t have sort of these spaces in no man’s land, that that people live on, that they’re trying to get building permits for, and that sort of thing. And again, it evolved from the fact that, you know, if you think about it, two, years ago, we had postal routes, you know, Re 1, Rout 2, Chuckie, you had, you know, 13 Greenville, whatever the case may be. But now you have a 911 address. So that 911 address is tied to a county road so that we know where to send the first responders. When there’s an emergency. So it’s a much more efficient program that we have now, but there’s still a few growing pains and stuff, you know, stuff gets inadvertently left out. That’s going to happen. But as I look at these on a map, you can see exactly how that would have happened, but what you said about what Jan Kiker said, rings truest to me. If I live, there are houses, there are developments, there are interconnecting roads on these roads that aren’t, quote, official roads. You’ve still been collecting my road taxes all these years and I live here and you’re telling me it can’t be a road? Well, then give me that back, if that’s the case. That’s correct. But the choice of the court was to, yes, let’s make those roads. Roads was much better, much better choice. So that’ll come up again. I think part the concern was, was what precedent do we set? But the president is already been set by years of decisions of here’s what we do when that when that happens. And that’s correct. You know, we certainly don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. There are and have been instances, for instance, where you know, years ago, like you had said, a road or a lane between two farms or whatever, and people would want to come in and they’ll want to subdivide their property, to sell it. And they know that it’s more valuable if it’s has road furnage. And so there’s been a attempts to take old logging roads or old access roads like we mentioned, and petition to make them county roads. And, you know, once again, sort of as a reasonable standard, you know, people will say, well, that you know, that was a county road 50 years ago, or, you know, 60 years ago, when my grandfather, well, was it really? Yeah. Or did people just use it? Or, yeah, did people just use it? You know, on our farm, we’ve got, you know, several lanes and right of ways that we used to get back to pasture fields or, you know, timber groves or whatever, but, you know, they were never counting roads. And, you know, and the road shifted years ago when people were required to spend, you know, a week or two helping to fix the roads, you know, if there was a bad area of the road, they would just routed in different directions. So, you know, there was no sort of uniformity to it. And so, again, it’s just a growing pain, but I think the commission made the right decision, and that allows that allows for that property to be a development. That allows those property owners, those homeowners to have reassurance that their wheel tax, their property tax, is, you know, being used for the services that they desire and demand to have and that the road gets fixed from time to time. To wrap up, we’ll talk about. You said there’s some grading work, getting ready to kick off and movement going on the road or the not the road. The project on Snaps’s Ferry Road for potential industries, talked about that as we wrap up here. That’s probably one of the most exciting things that’s sort of come up in, you know, we’ve spent the last year or two trying to gather up grant money to get this property developed so that we can make it very attractive for a business or industry to locate here. And we’ve done so. We were very successful in that effort to get Grant money from TA, from the Department of Economic and Community Development, we secured about 2.8 million to prepare that site. So that site was recognized by the state as one of the, if not the best, sites for business and industry development. And that was reinforcement the fact that we actually received the largest sum of grant money of any of any project across the state that had applied. And there was about 50 of those. So that made us feel real good about it. And right now, we currently have two industries that are looking to come here. They are very close to making a decision. Now, we can’t pull the trigger because we’ve secured this grant money. We have to. We have to utilize this grant funding to prepare the site before we can switch a chicken and an egg type thing. Before we can sort of offer this as a as a site for the industry to come here. But two very robust industries that would be good and complimentary to Greenville and Green County provide jobs, grow our revenue, our tax base. And with the folks that we have coming here, you know, we’ve got to continue to bring job. People have to have a place to go to work. I mean, one of the things that makes our community so vibrant is to keep the unemployment level low, keep people, you know, employed, and everybody feels better about the economy when they’ve got money to spend and they can pay their bills. And we want to keep that going And we’ve been one of the best communities to do that in East Tennessee, but we’re also growing fast. Yes. So that’s a double-edged sword in a lot of cases. But the contractor, Hommel construction out of Newport was the low bidder for the preparation of the side. And we had a preconstruction meeting here just a few days ago, and they’re going to start on that side out there on May 5th with the completion date of December 1st. So we’re actually, again, very excited about that. The geotechnical reports came back, very favorable. It’s a balanced site. There’s a lot of good things about that. And that will yield grapefruit for us very soon. Very good. Alice Tacoma going, I’ll give you 30 seconds to tell us how that is. We’re expecting to move the county clerk over sometime this summer, the contractor is they’ve done great things over there with getting that facility ready. Everybody that’s been involved that’s going to be a great space for Greenville and Green County for the next hundred years. It’s really cost us pennies to acquire and to renovate in comparison to other construction projects that’s something that we can be proud of. Everything will be in one space, we can reduce our our footprint around town and save money on, you know, light bills and maintenance. And, I mean, you name it. And, but it’s going well, so we expect to start, you know, moving in sometime over there, probably around the beginning of July. And then everything else will will quickly follow. We just want to make sure we’ve got all the bugs worked out so that when we do pull the trigger and jump from one lily pad to the next one, we’re ready to go. I said we were going to wrap it up and then we were the end, but that made me think of something I should ask you much earlier, the courthouse. There’s going to be going to be some rocky roads going for the courthouse on deciding where you can talk about how the decision has already been made or, you know, there were options, located a bathroom outside or closed down the courthouse, redo the whole thing. The issue being that there is asbestos, as you would expect in that. And if you go in to do a lot of repair, you’re going to dislodge some of that. You can’t be in the building when that happens. replacing the plumbing in a building that old is going to mean there’s going to be a lot of dust. So what has been the solution for the courthouse? Well, we had our asbestos expert comeback and basically give us, you know, some guidance, if you will. and some reassurance as to what the asbestos picture looks like inside the courthouse. I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about, oh, we’ve got to close the courthouse. We’ve got to build a new one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve got a tremendous amount more of options than that. The asbestos is largely contained to the flooring. largely the mastic in the flooring or the glue that they used to put down the flooring years ago. In a lot of cases, that flooring has been covered up with other layers of flooring throughout the years. We got reassurance that, you know, it’s not in the plaster, in the walls and that sort of thing. There may be some that is in, you know, some of the old steam pops that, you know, aren’t visible that we can’t see. The asbestos expert, you know, did advise us that if we press ahead with our renovation inside the courthouse, that those spaces can be mitigated, sort of one at a time, that sort of a negative pressure environment can be, put around these particular areas. And in the air quality monitored on a consistent regular basis to make sure that we don’t have any airborne type stuff. He did say that that the type of, you know, the type of asbestos, that we have in the courthouse is not the sprayed on type stuff that’s easily made airborne by disturbance. Again, this is largely in the flooring. We run into a little bit of that over at Tacoma as well, just a few a few square feet of that in the old building. And we mitigated that over there. As far as the courthouse is concerned, the desire of the courthouse officials and the staff was that we renovate the restrooms inside, rather than, you know, adding some addition on to the building of some type of restroom bank type thing. That would have been the most, I should say, that would have been the most efficient and least disruptive to the operation of the core by law, we cannot close the courthouse. So we can’t just say, okay, well, we’re going to take the next three months off and renovate the courthouse. We can’t do that. The clerk and master’s office has to stay open. The circuit court clerk’s office has to stay open. And then, of course, you have a guarantee buying the Constitution to have a, you know, a speedy hearing in trial. So we can’t sort of disrupt that process. I don’t think, you know, it’s a qualification of the Constitution to say, well, we’re renovating the bathroom, so you’ll have to wait three months. So we want to try to keep the operation of the court going to have the least amount of disruption to that process, proceed safely, knowing that there is asbestos concerns. And then, you, renovate so that we can have a good space. Nothing’s been done to that building in well over 50 years, probably closer to 60 or 65 years than anything. And, you know, you’ve got aged plumbing in there that it’s leaking like a sieve. And that in and of itself, to me, is in terms of it immediate danger to the staff, the public, is much more acute than the asbestos problem. And the expert with the asbestos told us that. He said, we’re exposed to asbestos every day. Every building you walk in has probably got some in it, particularly if it’s older. The fact that the matter is, if you don’t disturb it, then that’s where the danger comes in, because then, like you said, it becomes airborne. With the plumbing, it’s the penetrations through the floor to put in the new plumbing that’s the concern. You know, we can peel the paneling off the wall, we can we can repaint, we can move this wall or that wall. But when we start penetrating through the floor, which is where the asbestos is, that’s where the concern comes in. We can even take up the carpet tiles. As long as we don’t disturb the flooring underneath those carpet tiles, you know, with a drill or a saw or anything like that, but renovating the bathrooms, we’ve got to do that in certain places. So we will have to have, you know, air quality monitor, we’ll have to have negative pressure environments built around that so that that dust doesn’t escape. And we’ll do it in a piecemeal fashion rather than sort of, again, because we can’t close the building, then we’ll get it done. And the courthouse will look much better. We’ve got a grant to do a lot of this work. We’ve got approval to do it on an emergency basis so that, you know, a lot of the rules around, you know, waiting and getting different things in line for the work to begin has been mitigated or set aside because of the the danger to the public and the folks that work in there, you know, the facade is going to be going to be fixed, looking at it the other day, Monday evening, when we went up to the county commission hall. You know, we have a very stately building there. The absolute center of our county seat, the government, you know, it should be be a much better shape than it’s in.. And I think you can agree with that. If you’ve been in, you certainly would. It’s not as majestic as it used to be because it’s just needs some work. needs some love. Well, and when people come, you know, the two industries that, you, that we talked about, coming to Snats R Road, when, you know, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression and people are going to get the impression that, well, am I going to bring a business here when they courthouse looks like that? You know, well, how well are they going to you know, honor and take care of me? You’re not taking care of the little. If they’re not taking care of the little things around. They’ taking care of the big things. That’s right. So, you know, again, we want to create a first. It doesn’t need to be opulent. You know, we’re not looking for any type of, you know, Saddam Hussein, Iraqi palaces here. But something that can be a point of pride, that can, again, there’s tremendous history there, and it needs to look good, and we need to project an image that we’re going to take care of the people that move here. We’re a great community, and we need to project that. Very good. Mayor, we do appreciate your time as always. Ron, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Green County, Mayor Kevin Morrison. Joining us here in our Studios at 99.5 FM. W. Don Smith Appliance on the Blue. I don’tely night You may be wondering what the new 25% tariffs on imported cars and parts are going to do to new car prices. Well, they aren’t going down, but a Gateway Ford and Gateway Nissan and Greenville, they aren’t going up either. We’ve stocked up on pre tariff cars, trucks, fans, and SUVs, and with a lot of shady dealers jacking up prices already, Gateway is the safe place to shop, save and continue saving in the future, with three years of complimmentary maintenance and a lifetime power train warranty at Gateway, you never have to worry about engine, transmission, or four-wheel drive repairs, because you are covered for life. How’s that for price and inflation protection? You won’t find that on the motor mile in Johnson City or Morristown. 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