Tag: legislation

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News News Blog

State Law Banning Phone Use While Driving Takes Effect Next Month

It will be against the law to hold your phone while driving in Tennessee beginning next month.

This is the result of a bill that was introduced by Rep. John Holsclaw Jr. (R-Elizabethton) and signed into law by Governor Bill Lee late last month.

Currently, it is illegal to talk on a hand-held device in a school zone and for drivers under 18 to talk on a hand-held at any time while driving.

Now, it will be against the law for all drivers to talk on a hand-held device while driving. The new law also bars drivers under 18 years old from talking on the phone at all even when using a hands-free device.

Specifically, the law prohibits the following while driving:

• Physically holding or supporting a device with any part of the body

• Reaching for a wireless device that requires the driver to move from a seated position or undue their seatbelt

• Watching a video or movie while driving

• Recording or broadcasting

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Some exceptions to the law include activating functions on wireless devices with one tap or swipe while the device is mounted on the windshield, dashboard, or console. This must be done in a way that doesn’t hinder the driver’s view of the road.

However, even when mounted, phones can’t be used for taking pictures or videos, playing games, or any other non-navigational functions.

Police officers, emergency personnel, utility employees, or drivers talking on the phone with emergency services, if there is indeed an emergency, are excluded from the law.

A violation of the law is a Class C misdemeanor and will result in a moving violation citation.

Those who break this law must pay a maximum fine of $200 plus up to $50 in court costs.

On the first two offenses, drivers will pay no more than a $50 fine or complete a driver education class. After the third offense or if the violation results in an accident, the fine raises to a maximum of $100. But, if the violation occurs in a work or school zone, the fine is upped to $200.

The law is set to go into effect on July 1st.


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News News Blog

City Council-Supported Gym Tax Repeal Advances to Governor’s Desk

CREDIT: YMCA

YMCA

A piece of legislation that would eliminate a 10 percent tax on small fitness centers in the state and that is largely supported by local officials passed in the Tennessee Senate Thursday.

The legislation, HB1138, would do away with the 10 percent amusement tax on small fitness centers, those under 15,000 square feet. The tax currently applies to gyms and studios providing exercise, athletics, or other fitness services such as cross-training, ballet barre, yoga, spin, and aerobics classes.

If the proposed legislation becomes law, the tax would still apply to facilities such as country clubs, golf courses, and tennis clubs.

The bill passed with a 28-1 vote in the state Senate Thursday, after moving through the House last week with a 95-0 vote. The legislation has to be signed by Governor Bill Lee to take effect.

The move to eliminate the tax was backed by the Memphis City Council through a resolution last month. The resolution, co-sponsored by council Chairman Kemp Conrad and Councilman Ford Canale, passed unanimously.

Conrad said the council is “thankful for the work of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), the local fitness community, and Representative Mark White (TN-83) who was a champion for this cause.”

“The repeal of this antiquated disincentive for small businesses and those wanting a healthier lifestyle is a win for all Memphians, and all Tennesseans, whether as operators or patrons of local fitness, wellness, and recreation opportunities,” Conrad said. “We appreciate the state legislature having acted in the interests of promoting healthy activity in our communities.”

Canale, who chairs the council’s government affairs committee, applauded the governor for including the repeal in his proposed 2020 budget, saying “healthier outcomes for Memphians is a priority of ours and we seek to encourage wellness for all citizens.”

The move has also been supported by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, Shelby County Commissioner Brandon Morrison, and local small gym owners.

Tennessee’s adult obesity rate was 32.8 in 2017, making Tennessee the 15th-most obese state in the country, according to a report released in 2018. The report, called the “State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America,” also found that 30 percent of Tennessee adult residents are not physically active, 13.1 percent have diabetes, and 38.7 percent have hypertension.

The study, an effort by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, used body mass index and other data from the Centers for Disease Control to identify obesity rates.

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Opinion Viewpoint

It’s Secular

The office of the president is a secular office in a secular government. There is not a word in the Constitution that authorizes the president or anyone else in the federal government to make a religious decision.

Why then are both voters and candidates wasting their time talking about religion? The personal religious beliefs of the candidates should be considered irrelevant. Furthermore, people should not forget that there are a lot more professors of religion than practitioners. What a person claims to believe and how that person leads his or her life are often quite different.

Laws are, in the final analysis, words on paper. They cannot and do not control human behavior. If they could, there would be no crimes. Americans, especially politicians, have developed the bad habit of thinking that there ought to be a law to cover every conceivable human action. Consequently, there are so many laws today that no human being can possibly know what they all are. This defeats one of the useful purposes of laws, which is to educate the public.

As for religion, people should recognize that all the world’s religions have failed to eliminate sin, and therefore no one should expect the government to do that. Christianity in particular is based on the twin concepts of sin and forgiveness. Governments are better at finding sin than at forgiving.

Religion has a legitimate role in our society. George Washington said religion is the best way known to instill virtue in masses of people. That is job enough for religion, and religion should stay out of politics as an organization. Religious individuals, of course, have the same rights and duties as any other citizen.

Religion itself has enough problems to solve. Christian Zionists, for example, are a heretical cult without any biblical foundation and with a political agenda. Other Christians have perverted the religion into a weekly course on how to be rich and happy. Christianity, in fact, teaches that it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Militant Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

If you are trying to find someone actually practicing Christianity, whom would you choose — a preacher with a six-figure salary, a limousine, and a private jet or, say, an actor like Brad Pitt, who has committed $5 million of his own money to build homes for people in New Orleans’ 9th Ward?

In judging human affairs, always look for actions, not words. What a person says tells you nothing reliable; what a person does gives you a better clue as to what kind of a person he or she is. At the same time, don’t forget the dual nature of human beings.

One can find faults with all religions. One should not forget, however, that the same can be said of all secular philosophies, ideologies, and institutions. Nothing human is or ever will be perfect.

As for the presidential candidates, people should be asking not what these people claim to believe about God, but what have they actually done? How do their lives measure up to their speeches? Do they demonstrate a belief in and a concern for the Constitution? Do they have a wide knowledge of the world as it truly is? Are they catering to special interests? Are they independent thinkers or followers?

The presidential race is, after all, a search for a secular leader, not for a pope or ayatollah. The United States is in deep trouble politically, financially, and economically. It will take a smart, sane, and courageous person to get us out. Opportunists and people who sell their souls for campaign contributions may well preside over our national collapse.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

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Politics Politics Feature

Looking Ahead

“The tide is turning.” That’s Jim Kyle‘s confident declaration about the forthcoming election season in state government. Kyle, the Memphis Democrat who leads his party in the Tennessee state Senate, cites a number of precedents for his belief that 2008 will be a triumphant year for long-suffering state Democrats, who have been seeing their legislative numbers recede for a decade or two.

“Democrats just took over the Virginia state Senate, for one thing. And we’ve got more Democrats running in Republican districts, even in East Tennessee, than we ever had before,” Kyle said Tuesday — the very day that his opposite number, GOP Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey, was due in Shelby County for a meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club.

Ramsey, a Blountville Republican, came with Mark Norris, a Shelby Countian who is currently serving as the Senate Republican leader and who, Kyle and most other observers believe, wants to succeed Ramsey as Speaker and lieutenant governor should the GOP regain the tenuous majority it held for most of this year’s session and should Ramsey go on to run for governor in 2010, as all the selfsame observers expect.

“Oh, he’s running. No doubt about it,” said Kyle of his GOP counterpart’s gubernatorial hopes — though Ramsey’s immediate concerns are likely to be the same as Kyle’s: to gain a majority for his party in next year’s statewide legislative races. (For what it’s worth, the Democratic majority in the state House — 53 to 46, at the moment — is unlikely to be overturned, though the Republicans will surely try.)

As things stand now, the two major parties are tied in the Senate at 16-16. There is one “independent,” former Republican Micheal Williams of Maynardville, who was a reliable ally of (and vote for) John Wilder, the venerable Democrat who was deposed as Speaker early this year when Democrat Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville cast a surprise (and decisive) vote for Ramsey during Senate reorganization for the 2007-’08 term.

Kurita thereupon became Senate Speaker pro Tem, displacing Williams, who simmered quietly for a while then announced in mid-session last spring that he was leaving the GOP. Though he didn’t join the Democrats as such, he aligned with them for procedural purposes, giving Kyle’s party a technical majority by the thinnest possible margin.

When Chattanooga’s Ward Crutchfield, a longtime Democratic pillar in the Senate, was forced to resign after copping a guilty plea as a defendant in the Tennessee Waltz scandal, the Republicans nominated Oscar Brock, son of former U.S. senator Bill Brock, to vie for Crutchfield’s seat.

But Brock was beaten by Democrat Andy Berke in this month’s special election and with a percentage of the vote, 63 percent, that Kyle contends is 10 points in excess of the normal Democratic edge in the District 10 seat.

“That’s one more reason why I think the tide is moving our way,” Kyle said.

Of course, the Republicans are not sitting idly by without mounting a strategy of their own to gain control of the state Senate. They, too, evidently intend to compete seat by seat, district by district, as Kyle says the Democrats will, and one obvious GOP target is octogenarian Wilder of Somerville, who has so far given no indication whether he will seek reelection to his District 26 seat.

“Nobody knows. He’ll just have to decide how much he wants to be in the Senate for four more years,” said Kyle, who carefully skirted the issue of whether Wilder, who served as Speaker for 36 years until the narrow January vote that cast him out, might have ambitions of regaining the position. As Kyle noted, several other Democrats — not least, himself — might decide they want to be Speaker when the time comes.

Republican state representative Dolores Grisham, also of Somerville, has signaled her desire to compete for Wilder’s seat, and she expects to be strongly funded for the effort. “I don’t have any worries about John Wilder’s seat in a race against Dolores Grisham,” Kyle said drily.

In any case, the state Senate will be technically, and actually, up for grabs next year, and the two parties will both be making serious efforts. That fact may preclude Kyle’s making waves by recruiting a primary opponent for Kurita, whom he still has not forgiven for her vote on Ramsey’s behalf.

“We don’t,” the Democrats’ Senate leader said simply when asked how he and Kurita were getting along. That’s one thing that probably won’t change in 2008.

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Editorial Opinion

Undoing the Lockbox

When a state legislative committee, spearheaded by Memphis legislator Ulysses Jones, first proposed amending Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act some weeks ago to permit some unattended private discussions among public officials, there was a hue and cry from points

across the political spectrum. With prosecutions and other publicized misdeeds of officeholders still fresh memories and with polls and other indicators showing the prestige of legislators — local, state, and national — to be at an all-time low, how could Tennesseans be expected to stand for shutting the doors on public scrutiny?

Yet when not-much-push came to not-much-shove, the members of the Shelby County Commission backed the proposed liberalization to the hilt. In an 11-0 vote Monday, commissioners endorsed the idea of amending the state law to permit private discussions among members of city councils, county commissions, school boards, and other public bodies, so long as the number of officials participating fell short of an official quorum.

No commissioner — not one — would carry a brief for the current law, which, as unamended, prohibits private discussions among groups of two or more. (As an illustration of the absurdity of so complete and literal a prohibition, one commissioner was prepared to offer another a ride back to his office after Monday’s meeting was over but then thought to suggest, only half-facetiously, that the two would need to ask a reporter to come along for the ride.) Of the two commissioners who did not vote aye for the amendment proposal, one, Mike Ritz, was absent but had previously voted for it in committee, while the other, James Harvey, merely abstained on the ground that he owed it to his constituents to survey their opinions more completely.

Commissioner Steve Mulroy, who usually finds himself walking a tightrope between the views of his fellow Democrats (for whom he has often served as the decisive vote in 7-6 party-line situations) and those of his mixed district’s constituency at large, spoke convincingly for the amendment, and he was joined on this occasion by two voices which, in wholly disparate mode and manner, normally speak for the commission’s Republicans. After noting that he was “not at all in favor of secret government,” Chairman David Lillard said the current law was an obstacle to the needs of constituents because, among other things, it prevented one commissioner from filling in another on pending issues which the latter may have missed on first hearing. More importantly, said Lillard, the law can actually “sideline … the most effective advocates” for constituents who have petitioned their own representatives for specific forms of relief.

Wyatt Bunker, who sees himself as a conservative’s conservative, agreed. The current law “hinders the process,” he said.

So far, so good. But, as Lillard also noted after Monday’s meeting was over, the law, as amended, might require honing by way of further amendment. “I think there are situations, such as the election of officials to fill vacancies, on which it might be desirable to limit contact,” he said.

Hopefully, that doesn’t mean that the lockbox, once loosened, doesn’t turn into a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences.

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News The Fly-By

Dog Day

Bumpus Harley-Davidson on Whitten Road may be known for its motorcycles, but last weekend, it was all about dogs, not hogs.

As part of the fifth annual Dogs Deserve Better Chain Off, a small group of people spent Sunday chained to telephone poles and doghouses in front of the dealership. The event, which is held around July 4th each year nationwide, strives to bring attention to what organizers call the inhumane and unethical practice of chaining dogs.

“We’re trying to bring attention to a national problem,” said Ona Cooper, a representative of Animal World, a free monthly publication. “We want people to start thinking about this.”

The state recently passed an anti-chaining law, which went into effect July 1st. The law states that any person who knowingly ties, tethers, or restrains a dog in a manner that is inhumane, detrimental, or injurious to the dog’s welfare and prevents a dog from getting adequate access to food, water, or shelter commits an offense.

The Memphis City Council will also consider a citywide version of the state law July 10th. If approved, that ordinance will take effect September 4th.

At the protest, one woman tied herself to a telephone pole with a heavy chain used to tow cars. After linking the end of a towing hook to the chain to create a dangerous loop, she attached the chain to a collar around her neck and explained that she’d once found a dog tethered that way.

Overturned food and water bowls surrounded a doghouse and the chained humans. Cooper said this was to re-create situations in which dogs have been found.

Dogs Deserve Better says that chaining is detrimental to the welfare of dogs because they are pack animals. In the absence of other canines, humans become the dog’s pack, but a chained dog is essentially “rejected” from its pack. It then becomes very territorial, and according to Dogs Deserve Better, a chained dog is more than twice as likely to bite someone.

“People are tired of [chaining],” said Cooper. “What we’re doing will bring awareness now and legislation later. It’s time for things to change.”