The Johnson County Board of Commissioners have called to convene a special meeting on Thursday, May 11 to consider and appoint the interim successor for the office of State Representative for District 3.
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General Machine and Tool Company, Inc. officials recently announced that the company will invest $3.7 million to expand manufacturing operations at its headquarters in Elizabethton.
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Tennessee Comptrollers this week announced that government officials in Carter and Greene counties allegedly, in separate cases, stole thousands of dollars for their own personal benefit. According to a Comptrollers’ press release, authorities in Carter County have indicted Joyce Parsons, the former administrative assistant for Carter County’s Head Start program.
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Authorities have accused a Carter County teacher of taking nearly $2,000 of school money and spending it on himself. That teacher, John-Claude Hardin, allegedly misappropriated at least $1,865. Hardin taught at Unaka High School, part of the Carter County School System, the audit said. “The investigation was initiated after school officials identified and reported shortages in cash collections. The results of the investigation were communicated with the Office of the District Attorney General of the 1st Judicial District,” according to an audit Tennessee Comptrollers released this week. “The school’s Career Technical Education (CTE) department operated a meat processing program where customers brought livestock to the school to be slaughtered by students. The customers paid a fee to the school for this service. The school also raised cattle on a farm the CTE department operated.” Comptrollers said that during the period November 13, 2017, through November 20, 2018, Hardin misappropriated CTE funds totaling at least $1,865 from the school using two schemes. Hardin allegedly withheld cash collections from meat processing fees totaling $1,229 and sold a steer from the school farm without authorization and retained the sale proceeds of $636. To conceal his misappropriations, Hardin allegedly altered receipts and created false…
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The United States Constitution does, of course, contain guidelines as to how a territory may enter the Union as a full-fledged state on an equal footing with all previously-existing states. The last time that any new states were added to the United States was in the year 1959 when Alaska became the nation’s 49th state and Hawaii became the country’s 50th state. Specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 — which requires only a simple majority vote — reads: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.” There has been recent chatter about admitting Puerto Rico into the Union as the nation’s 51st state. As the Constitution was not written until 1787 — and, once written, did not take effect until the following year — the procedure outlined within the still-in-force Articles of Confederation would have remained applicable to admission of news states up to…
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