By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project Newsroom

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knox County’s June budget fight began with a familiar argument over governm…

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project Newsroom

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knox County’s June budget fight centered on roughly $4 million shifted to increase county employee raises from 3% to 6%.

But buried inside that larger number was another increase: County commissioners’ own salaries also rose 6%.

Knox County Chief Financial Officer Chris Caldwell told The Redemption Project that $4.02 million was shifted to cover the higher raises. Of that, $21,140.57 covered increased commissioner compensation, including benefits. The remaining $3,998,859.43 was attributable to the broader county workforce.

So the commissioner increase was a small fraction of the money involved in the school-funding dispute. But it exposed a larger question about how Knox County sets pay for elected officials.

County Finance said annual commissioner salaries increased from $28,184.52 in fiscal 2026 to $29,875.56 in fiscal 2027, effective July 1. School board members receive the same salary.

The written amendment did not mention commissioner pay

Former Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs proposed a 3% salary adjustment for county employees. During a June 15 special session, then-Commission Chair Gina Oster offered a substitute motion increasing the adjustment to 6%.

Official minutes say the amendment applied to “general county employees” and shifted 2 cents of property tax revenue from the General Purpose School Fund to help pay for it. The motion passed 7-0-3-1.

The written amendment does not expressly say commissioners or school board members would receive the increase.

That does not establish whether commissioners knew their compensation would change. Meeting minutes do not capture every discussion, and TRP has not completed its review of the full meeting recording.

What the records establish is what happened afterward: Commissioner pay increased 6%.

The mechanism existed before this year

Archived school budgets show this was not a new arrangement.

Knox County Schools’ fiscal 2024 budget initially listed $227,700 for nine school board members. A note beneath that budget said the amount would have to increase another 5% after the countywide budget approved a 5% salary increase for county commissioners.

The school system said board salaries were aligned with Commission salaries under the Knox County Charter.

That means the deeper question is not simply why commissioners received a raise in 2026.

It is how that longstanding county system interacts with a state law enacted six years ago.

Tennessee changed the law in 2020

Tennessee lawmakers added language to state law in 2020 saying an increase in compensation for members of a county legislative body does not take effect until the beginning of the term following the next election of county commissioners. The General Assembly’s fiscal analysis described the provision as preventing an increase from taking effect until election of the subsequent legislative body.

There is older legal authority supporting Knox County’s charter system. A 2015 Tennessee attorney general opinion concluded that Knox County had authority under the law then in effect to set commissioner compensation through its charter.

But that opinion predates the 2020 change.

TRP asked the Knox County Law Department on Sept. 18 how the newer state law interacts with the county charter and its current compensation practice.

As of Sept. 19, the county had not answered that question.

TRP is not concluding that Knox County violated state law. The unanswered legal question is whether the 2020 provision applies to Knox County’s charter system — and, if not, why.

That answer could determine whether the system that produced this year’s 6% increase works the way state law now requires.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Behind the Reporting

This investigation began with the roughly $4 million shifted during Knox County’s budget process. County records showed almost all of that money funded the broader employee raise, not commissioner compensation.

The reporting then moved to the mechanism that increased elected-official pay and the state law governing when commissioner compensation increases can take effect.

TRP is still awaiting the Knox County Law Department’s legal explanation and additional compensation records from Knox County Schools and County Finance. The full June 15 meeting recording also remains under review. The story will be updated if those records or responses materially change what is known.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 19, 2026.

Source Library

Knox County Finance Department — Chief Financial Officer Chris Caldwell, Sept. 14, 2026. Commissioner and school board salary figures and the $4.02 million compensation breakdown.

Knox County Clerk’s Office / Commission Library. June 15 special-session minutes, amendment language, fiscal worksheet and roll-call vote.

Knox County Law Department — Senior Deputy Law Director Michael Moyers. Sept. 14 response concerning Knox County Charter Section 2.04 and commissioner compensation.

Knox County Schools fiscal 2024 General Purpose Budget. Documents the historical Commission-to-school-board salary linkage.

Tennessee General Assembly — HB 1597 / Public Chapter 536 of 2020. Source for the intervening-election compensation provision.

Tennessee Attorney General Opinion 15-60, July 14, 2015. Historical analysis of Knox County’s authority to set legislative-body compensation under the law then in effect.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 19, 2026.

By Brandon Burley

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Ask Tennessee politicians a familiar question about policing and privacy and the answers usually fall into familiar partisan camps.

Automated license-plate readers are complicating that map.

A series of responses obtained by The Redemption Project shows elected Republican lawmakers, a Democratic congressional candidate and an independent candidate expressing overlapping concern about government networks capable of recording when and where ordinary vehicles pass cameras.

They are not members of an organized coalition.

They do not agree on whether plate readers should be banned.

They do not agree on how long data should exist.

They do not even agree on whether a warrant should govern every search.

What they increasingly share is discomfort with the idea that government should continuously collect the movements of people who are not suspected of crimes simply because technology makes it inexpensive to do so.

That is a different political argument from whether police should be allowed to search for a stolen car.

And it is beginning to produce proposals from places that rarely share a policy table.

Reneau’s first choice is a ban

State Rep. Michele Reneau, a Republican representing District 27, used some of the strongest language in responses obtained by TRP. The General Assembly identifies Reneau as a Republican from Signal Mountain.

“Networks like Flock Safety (or other similar companies), don’t just watch suspects — they track every car, every driver, every trip, whether you’re a criminal or a grandmother driving to church,” Reneau wrote. “That’s not law enforcement, that’s mass surveillance.”

Reneau said she would co-sponsor legislation banning the systems, although she expects whatever legislation ultimately advances may instead impose guardrails.

“My first preference is that we do not permit mass surveillance,” she said.

That puts prohibition at one end of the emerging policy spectrum.

Fritts would put a warrant between police and a search

State Rep. Monty Fritts, another Republican, gave TRP a shorter answer.

“Only with a warrant,” Fritts said. “All searches should require a warrant.”

Fritts represents District 32 and is identified by the General Assembly as a Republican.

The apparent simplicity raises implementation questions.

Would a real-time stolen-car alert constitute a “search” requiring a warrant?

What about an Amber Alert?

A missing person with dementia?

A car connected to an active shooting?

Those are the details lawmakers would have to resolve if a warrant rule becomes actual statutory language.

But Fritts’ baseline is clear: location searches should not occur simply because an officer has database access.

Hulsey already tried to put the concept into law

State Rep. Bud Hulsey told TRP he ran legislation last session to impose “4th amendment requirements,” limited retention and restrictions on data sharing.

“We are fast becoming a surveillance State,” Hulsey wrote.

This one can be tested against the legislative record.

Hulsey sponsored HB2608, the Protecting Everyone from Excessive Police Surveillance Act—the PEEPS Act.

The bill would have restricted government access to databases revealing historical location data. Among other provisions, it generally required a search warrant rather than a subpoena for access in a felony investigation, while creating exceptions for consent, stolen vehicles, exigent circumstances and specified administrative uses.

The bill also contemplated short retention periods and access controls.

It did not become law.

The House measure was taken off notice in the Criminal Justice Subcommittee on March 25.

So Hulsey’s characterization that he pursued guardrails is supported.

The General Assembly did not enact them.

Russell wants a system that can still find people in danger

State Rep. Lowell Russell’s response illustrates why the emerging opposition cannot be reduced to “ban versus no ban.”

Russell told TRP he wants legislation protecting “individual liberty, privacy and fiscal responsibility” while preserving the ability to find dementia patients, kidnappers and serious violent criminals.

He said he hopes Tennessee lands on “a closed warrant based system with a traditional law enforcement form of approach.”

The General Assembly identifies Russell as a Republican representing District 21.

That is not an argument that ALPR technology has no legitimate use.

It is an argument that the use should look more like a specific police investigation than an open-ended intelligence database.

Baum’s answer is simpler

State Rep. Charlie Baum, District 37, told TRP:

“I’m opposed to these cameras.”

That position leaves details still to be established—whether Baum means all ALPR deployment, networked fixed systems specifically or particular uses of them.

Those follow-up distinctions should be obtained before converting a one-sentence response into a comprehensive policy platform.

Candidates outside the Republican legislature are raising the same concern differently

Michaela Barnett’s congressional campaign has taken a more categorical position than several of the legislators.

In its response to TRP, the campaign characterized networked ALPR systems as unconstitutional mass surveillance and said it favors a federal ban.

If a ban cannot be enacted, the campaign said retention should be no longer than seven days and searches should require warrants.

Independent candidate Jacob Anders likewise told TRP he does not support deployment of Flock Safety or similar networked ALPR systems.

Anders proposed an even shorter ordinary retention window.

“Retention beyond 48 hours should only be permitted for specific records tied directly to an active criminal investigation supported by documented reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” he wrote in response to TRP’s federal privacy survey.

Those proposals differ substantially.

Seven days is not 48 hours.

A federal ban is not a state warrant rule.

Reasonable suspicion is not identical to probable cause.

But the underlying concern crosses ideological boundaries: passive collection can produce a historical map of ordinary people’s movements before police have any reason to suspect them.

This is not yet a coalition

It would be easy to call this a strange left-right alliance.

That goes too far.

There is no evidence these respondents are organizing together, backing the same bill or even defining the constitutional problem identically.

Reneau’s preferred answer is prohibition.

Fritts emphasizes warrants.

Hulsey’s actual bill allowed specified exceptions and focused heavily on historical location data.

Russell expressly wants police to retain tools for missing people and serious violent crime.

Barnett’s campaign favors a federal ban.

Anders proposes a 48-hour baseline.

The convergence is on the question.

Not yet the answer.

Knox County may have changed the statewide argument

The issue also became less theoretical this week.

Knox County Commission unanimously passed an emergency ordinance prohibiting county-operated fixed ALPRs while preserving deputy-operated mobile readers under narrower conditions.

The ordinance also addresses drones and circumvention through outside data sources.

That gives Tennessee lawmakers something they did not have several months ago:

A local-government model already in force.

Whether legislators copy it, narrow it or reject it will reveal what this emerging skepticism actually means.

The real legislative choices

If the General Assembly takes up ALPR legislation again, the consequential questions are likely to be more specific than whether Tennessee “supports Flock.”

They include:

Should fixed readers continuously collect plates not connected to criminal suspicion?

How quickly should ordinary records disappear?

Should historical searches require a warrant?

What emergency exceptions apply?

May agencies share databases automatically?

Can federal agencies access the data?

May a Tennessee agency ask another jurisdiction to conduct a search Tennessee law would forbid it from performing?

Does a vendor merely log improper searches—or must the software technically prevent them?

Should a private company be able to retain or analyze location information after a government customer deletes it?

Those questions can produce very different laws even among politicians who all say they oppose “mass surveillance.”

And that is why the current agreement across Tennessee’s political lines should not be exaggerated.

It should be watched.

Government surveillance is creating unusual overlap.

The next legislative session will show whether that overlap is strong enough to produce an actual rule.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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BEHIND THE REPORTING

Response matrix

Michele Reneau — elected state representative
Preferred: ban.
Fallback: strong guardrails.

Monty Fritts — elected state representative

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

NEWPORT, Tenn. — Tennessee environmental regulators are considering renewing a permit allowing a commercial bottling company to withdraw water from a tributary of Cosby Creek in Cocke County at a maximum rate of 75 gallons per minute.

The permit itself is not new.

That distinction matters.

Newport Springs Bottling LLC is seeking reissuance of an existing state permit, not permission for a newly announced withdrawal. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation posted the proposal for public comment Sept. 15.

But the state’s notice also contains a detail that makes the renewal worth closer examination.

TDEC classifies the affected waters as Exceptional Tennessee Waters. The agency says the stream is part of a naturally reproducing trout system whose headwaters originate in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

TDEC has preliminarily determined that renewing the withdrawal would cause only de minimis, or minimal, degradation.

The public now has an opportunity to test that conclusion.

The permit sets a ceiling. It does not tell us actual use.

The draft action would authorize withdrawals from an unnamed tributary to Cosby Creek at no more than 75 gallons per minute for bottling.

That figure should not be confused with the company’s actual withdrawal.

The public notice does not state how much water Newport Springs Bottling withdrew last year, during drought conditions or over the life of its existing permit.

That is one of the records TRP has requested.

TDEC told The Redemption Project on Sept. 16 that, because our request included a substantial number of records and questions, the department wants the records portion submitted through Tennessee’s formal public-records process.

The department has not yet provided substantive answers to TRP’s questions about historical withdrawals, minimum-flow protections, drought restrictions, environmental monitoring or compliance history.

The exact intake is legally confidential

TDEC identifies the source only as an unnamed tributary to Cosby Creek near Cosby.

The state says Tennessee law makes the precise intake location confidential and that it will not disclose the exact intake site in the permit or otherwise make it publicly available.

That restriction does not eliminate public participation.

TDEC says the application, supporting documentation, draft permit and agency rationale are available through its Water Resources permit system. Written comments are accepted for 30 days after distribution of the approved public-notice materials.

People who participate in that comment process can also preserve issues for a later permit appeal. A public hearing may be requested if sufficient interest exists around water-quality concerns.

The company has also received state economic-development assistance

Newport Springs Bottling was recruited to Cocke County in 2021.

Tennessee’s FastTrack database lists the project at $11.8 million in planned capital investment, 34 planned new jobs and a $68,000 FastTrack award.

The current state database separately lists 27 “incentivized jobs,” which TNECD defines as the jobs tied specifically to the FastTrack grant, and 34 total new jobs planned for the project.

Those are contractual or projected figures — not proof that all investment or employment commitments were ultimately achieved.

TRP has asked state officials for the project’s performance information and whether the full grant was disbursed.

No substantive response had been received by Thursday morning.

The permit decision should turn on the water record

The existence of a government incentive does not prove a water problem.

Neither does commercial bottling.

The relevant questions are measurable.

How much water is actually being removed? How does that compare with streamflow during ordinary and drought conditions? What minimum flows must remain in the tributary? Has monitoring detected ecological effects? Has the company complied with the existing permit?

TDEC’s preliminary answer is that the renewed withdrawal would produce minimal degradation.

That may prove correct.

But because the water body receives heightened state protection and the permit authorizes commercial removal of a public natural resource, the underlying measurements matter more than the maximum number printed on the permit.

Those are the records TRP is now seeking.

Behind the Reporting

The 75-gallon-per-minute figure is an authorized maximum, not an assertion that Newport Springs Bottling continuously withdraws that amount.

TRP has not yet established the company’s actual annual withdrawal, drought-period withdrawal or historical compliance record.

TDEC’s description of the expected impact as “de minimis” is the agency’s preliminary regulatory determination.

TRP requested comment from TDEC, state economic-development officials and the company. TDEC responded procedurally and requested a formal records filing. No substantive company or state economic-development response had been received as of the reporting cutoff.

Status: HOLD FOR COMMENT / RECORDS before final publication.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 17, 2026.

Source Library

TDEC — Public Notice NRS26.140, Sept. 15, 2026. Primary permit notice establishing the proposed withdrawal rate, purpose, protected-water classification, confidentiality provision and preliminary degradation finding.

Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development — FastTrack Project Database. Primary state record for the 2021 recruitment project, planned investment, job figures and FastTrack award.

Jennifer Donnals, TDEC — response to The Redemption Project, Sept. 16, 2026. TDEC acknowledged TRP’s inquiry and directed the comprehensive records portion to the state’s formal public-records process.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Nashville, Tenn – Campaigns are built to emphasize differences.

…

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — More than 160 East Tennessee clergy and faith leaders are challenging Knox County’s expanded role in federal immigration enforcement.

A video responding to those clergy frames the dispute differently. It invokes Barabbas, points to victims of crimes committed by people unlawfully in the country and argues that Christians are also instructed to respect civil authority.

Underneath both arguments is a harder question:

Should the church involve itself in matters of state?

The answer depends partly on what “involve itself” means.

Religious leaders have the same constitutional rights to speak, assemble and petition government as anyone else. Christianity also places real obligations on believers toward strangers, prisoners, hungry families and people in distress.

But a biblical command to care for a person is not, by itself, an immigration statute.

Government has responsibilities the church does not.

That distinction is at the center of the current Knox County debate.

Knox County Sheriff Brent Gibson signed an agreement Sept. 11 expanding the Sheriff’s Office into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) Task Force Model.

Knox County already used the Jail Enforcement Model, which allows trained personnel to work with ICE on immigration matters involving people already in custody. Under the Task Force Model, selected deputies who complete federal training can exercise limited immigration authority during routine law-enforcement duties.

Tennessee law now requires county sheriffs to enter an available 287(g) program by Jan. 1. But lawmakers gave sheriffs several options, including the Jail Enforcement, Warrant Service Officer and Task Force models. The law did not specifically require Gibson to choose the Task Force Model.

That makes Gibson’s decision both a matter of law and a matter of policy.

The clergy are entitled to challenge the policy.

Gibson is entitled to defend it.

Neither side settles the argument simply by invoking Christianity.

A pastor may criticize a sheriff. A church may advocate changing a law. Religious leaders may tell elected officials that an otherwise lawful policy is unjust.

That is different from saying government must adopt the church’s preferred policy because the church believes Scripture requires compassion.

The institutions have different responsibilities.

The Christian asks how to treat the stranger standing in front of him.

The church asks how to feed, shelter, clothe, visit and care for people in need.

Government must also decide who may lawfully enter or remain in the country, what process applies, how violations are adjudicated and how competing interests in public safety, individual rights and civil order are balanced.

Those obligations overlap.

They are not identical.

That distinction is also central to a review I have been writing of Chris Doran’s Climate Migration: Scripture may create a moral obligation toward displaced people without supplying the details of a modern immigration code.

The same principle applies here.

None of that disappears because a person violated immigration law.

A church can feed the children of someone who has been detained.

It can help a family pay rent after losing a breadwinner.

A priest can seek access to someone in custody.

A congregation can help someone obtain legal counsel.

Those acts do not nullify an immigration order.

They fulfill a different responsibility.

The East Tennessee clergy’s public position is also more nuanced than the argument that churches simply want lawbreakers protected.

The Rev. Peter Iorio, representing the Catholic Diocese of Knoxville, said people involved in gangs, trafficking and other dangerous conduct should be brought to justice. He also argued that government should distinguish those offenders from parents, caregivers and others whose immigration cases do not involve the same public-safety risk. Catholic teaching, he said, recognizes both migration and a nation’s right to regulate its borders justly.

Scripture also takes government seriously.

The state is not the church.

It is also not beyond moral scrutiny.

Victims belong in that analysis, too.

The response video points to Pierce Corcoran, the 22-year-old killed in a 2018 Chapman Highway crash. Police said Franco Cambrany Francisco-Eduardo crossed into oncoming traffic before the collision. He was charged with criminally negligent homicide and later deported. The criminal case remained pending if he returned to the United States.

Corcoran’s death should not be reduced to a political talking point.

Neither should it be excluded from an immigration debate because it complicates an argument centered on compassion.

But individual cases also require precision. Contemporary reporting does not establish the video’s description of Francisco-Eduardo as a drunken driver. Corcoran’s mother publicly raised concerns that no toxicology test had been performed.

One offender cannot define every immigrant.

Compassion for immigrants cannot erase victims.

Both mistakes turn human beings into categories.

The video also points to the federal government’s voluntary-departure program as an alternative to forced removal and suggests people can leave and later return legally.

That possibility depends on the individual case.

Departure after certain periods of unlawful presence can trigger statutory bars on readmission lasting three or 10 years. Leaving the country is therefore not the same as receiving a guarantee of future lawful entry.

That leaves the larger question.

Should the church involve itself in matters of state?

It should speak when it believes government is acting unjustly.

It should care for people affected by government action.

It should defend human dignity, including the dignity of prisoners and people accused of violating the law.

But Christian compassion does not automatically settle what immigration law should require.

Government still has an obligation to govern.

The sheriff may enforce the law.

The pastor may challenge how that authority is used.

The church may care for the person being arrested without obstructing the arrest.

And the officer making the arrest can enforce the law without treating that person as less human.

Those responsibilities can exist at the same time.

The stranger is still our neighbor.

The government is still government.

And the church is still the church.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Behind the Reporting

This article is Faith & Civic Analysis, not a claim that Christianity requires a particular immigration policy.

The user-provided video was reviewed as the source of the arguments addressed here, including its Barabbas comparison, discussion of Romans 13, Pierce Corcoran and voluntary departure.

The article also draws on an unpublished review of Chris Doran’s Climate Migration, particularly its distinction among the obligations of individual Christians, churches and civil government. The review argues that those responsibilities overlap morally without becoming institutionally identical.

Biblical passages considered include Matthew 25:31-46, Luke 10:25-37, James 2:14-17, Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17 and Acts 5:29.

Different Christian traditions can reach different prudential conclusions from those texts. This article distinguishes broad biblical principles from specific civil-policy prescriptions.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 18, 2026.

Source Library

Tennessee General Assembly — SB 2223/HB 2219. State legislative record establishing the county sheriff 287(g) requirement and available participation models.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — 287(g). Federal description of the Jail Enforcement, Task Force and Warrant Service Officer models.

WVLT — Sept. 16, 2026. Reporting on Gibson’s Sept. 11 agreement, the Task Force Model and the Sheriff’s Office response to faith leaders.

Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church / Diocese of Knoxville — Sept. 17, 2026. Transcript of the Rev. Peter Iorio’s remarks and description of the multifaith letter signed by more than 160 East Tennessee clergy and faith leaders.

Congress.gov Constitution Annotated — First Amendment. Constitutional text and analysis of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses and related speech and petition protections.

WVLT — Pierce Corcoran case, 2018-19. Contemporary reporting on the fatal crash, criminal charge, immigration proceedings and deportation.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Federal authority explaining the three- and 10-year unlawful-presence inadmissibility periods that can apply after departure.

About a month later, property-tax bills are supposed to go out.

That leaves little room for a ceremonial transition.

In written answers provided Sept. 10 through Executive Administrator Brad Hair, McBride said his first 100 days will focus on transparency, a review of how the office operates and keeping taxpayer services running while he begins looking for changes that could last beyond the opening months of his term.

The immediate test, McBride said, is whether he can change the office without disrupting the work it already has to do.

“The greatest challenge will probably be balancing change with continuity,” McBride said.

That gives the public a fairly specific scorecard.

Start with the money

McBride said his first priority is to strengthen public trust through greater transparency and accountability.

The Trustee’s Office handles more than $1 billion in public funds each year, McBride said, and he believes taxpayers should be able to see how that money is being managed.

His first measurable commitment is monthly financial reporting.

McBride said he intends to publish financial reports from the Trustee’s Office online each month, similar to a transparency practice he said he followed while serving as Knox County Register of Deeds.

That is a promise the public will be able to check.

The question after 100 days will not simply be whether McBride says the office became more transparent. It will be whether those reports were actually published, what information they contain and whether taxpayers can use them to understand the office’s finances.

Then comes the internal review

McBride’s second priority is aimed inside the office.

He said he plans to examine staffing, expenses, policies and procedures to determine whether the Trustee’s Office can operate more efficiently.

That review, McBride said, will include whether staffing levels are appropriate, whether unnecessary expenses can be eliminated and whether internal expectations are clear for employees responsible for public funds.

McBride also pointed to vehicles used by the office as an example of spending he discussed during the campaign.

But there is an important timing distinction.

McBride said all six leased pickup trucks identified during the previous administration were returned before he took office.

That means the returned trucks should not be counted as an efficiency McBride completed during his first 100 days.

His test begins with what the review produces next.

If McBride identifies additional savings, staffing changes or procedural reforms, those decisions — and the dollars attached to them — will provide a clearer measure of what his efficiency pledge actually means.

Property-tax season arrives first

Before those longer-term changes develop, McBride said the office has an immediate operational responsibility.

Property-tax bills need to go out on time.

McBride said maintaining taxpayer service during that process is one of his three primary first-100-day goals. He said taxpayers should continue to receive assistance and have access to the office’s existing locations and payment options while the transition occurs.

That makes continuity measurable too.

Either the tax-billing cycle works as expected or problems emerge.

McBride said the office will also begin evaluating technology that could make transactions easier for residents and potentially reduce costs.

He did not identify a specific new system that has already been selected.

Instead, McBride described the first 100 days as an evaluation period.

Modernization comes with limits

McBride said technology modernization will extend beyond the initial 100 days.

He said his experience in county government has shown him that technology can streamline work, improve access and increase transparency, and he wants to evaluate whether similar changes could work in the Trustee’s Office.

But McBride also identified limits on how quickly that can happen.

Any new technology, he said, has to be evaluated for cost, security, compatibility with Knox County systems and ease of use for taxpayers.

That turns “modernization” from a broad promise into a series of questions.

What system needs changing? What will a replacement cost? What savings would it produce? How will taxpayer information be protected? And will the new process actually be easier for the people using it?

McBride said his goal during the first 100 days is to establish a plan, not necessarily complete the implementation.

Another clock involves tax sales

McBride also identified tax sales as a longer-term priority.

He said he has committed to holding at least one tax sale each year.

That work cannot be done by the Trustee’s Office alone, McBride said. Tax sales require coordination with the Clerk and Master, attorneys, courts and other parties.

McBride said similar coordination is necessary throughout the Trustee’s responsibilities. The office receives information from the Property Assessor and works with the county Finance Department and other offices.

Those relationships, he said, will affect how quickly some changes can move.

What 100 days will actually measure

McBride’s stated goals include broad ideas: trust, accountability, professionalism, modernization and efficiency.

His own answers also provide more concrete tests.

McBride said he will consider the opening 100 days successful if property-tax bills go out on time, monthly financial reports become publicly available, staffing and spending receive a meaningful review and the office develops a clear plan for technology and taxpayer service.

He also said he wants residents to see the office as accessible and responsible with public money.

Those outcomes will not answer every question about his tenure.

They do provide a starting record.

One hundred days from now, the most useful comparison will not be between McBride’s administration and the language of a campaign.

It will be between what he said would happen and what the public can see actually changed.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

Subscribe now

Source Library

Source Library is excluded from the article word count.

1. Written responses from Knox County Trustee Nick McBride, transmitted by Executive Administrator Brad Hair to Brandon Burley on Sept. 10, 2026 — DIRECT SOURCE CLAIM / PRIMARY SOURCE.

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

CLEVELAND, Tenn. — For weeks, the public debate over Project River has revolved around promises.

Noise would be controlled. Water demands would be limited. Truck traffic would be managed. Existing electric customers would not bear the project’s costs.

Cleveland is now trying to move part of that discussion from promises to law.

The city has published a two-page list of preliminary development requirements for Planned Unit Development 77, the zoning framework being developed for the proposed Project River industrial campus. Cleveland says the final draft ordinance will be released at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, and no formal action is expected before October.

If ultimately adopted, the city says PUD 77 would have the force of law and bind not only the current property owners but future owners and operators.

That is the meaningful change.

The question is no longer simply what Project River’s developers say they intend to do.

It is which promises Cleveland is willing to make enforceable.

Some of the preliminary rules are specific

The city’s preliminary document would impose a 500-foot setback for a data center, a maximum 60-decibel noise level at the property line and continuous noise monitoring.

Twenty percent of the parcel would remain green space. Data-center cooling would have to use a closed-loop system.

For biomass generation, Cleveland proposes requiring Best Available Control Technology for combustion emissions and a continuous emissions-monitoring system.

The proposal also says at least 75% of direct power used would have to be generated onsite, while 90% of process water, excluding initial system priming, would have to be generated onsite. Annual reports detailing water and power use would go to the city.

There would be no direct utility connection to the Hiwassee River.

Those are measurable requirements.

Others need more examination.

Some important language is less absolute

The city proposes requiring log trucks to use state highways rather than city streets or county roads, with several named state routes also excluded.

But when it comes to reducing truck traffic altogether, the proposal says the eventual power-plant operator must make “commercially reasonable efforts” to move at least half of its timber deliveries by transportation other than trucks.

What constitutes a commercially reasonable effort is not defined in the preliminary document.

Neither is the promised Community Benefit Agreement finished.

The preliminary proposal says the parties “shall negotiate” an agreement supporting Cleveland and Bradley County schools, local government projects and infrastructure.

An obligation to negotiate is different from an executed agreement stating how much money will be provided, when it will be paid and what happens if the parties cannot agree.

That is one place where Friday’s final draft matters.

Enforcement may matter more than the promises

The city says data-center operators would have to submit studies addressing noise, lighting, heat, hydrology, traffic, emergency planning, spills and water and wastewater.

Cleveland also proposes retaining authority to test compliance after construction. Failure to meet requirements may result in permit suspension, revocation or other action.

“May” matters.

So do questions about who performs the monitoring, whether the underlying results become public and what level of violation triggers enforcement.

Those mechanics determine whether a standard operates as an enforceable limit or merely a condition the city has discretion to police.

Major questions remain outside the PUD

Land-use restrictions cannot answer every question surrounding Project River.

The developers have described a possible 360-megawatt connection with TVA. TRP has not yet independently established the status of that capacity, the required transmission upgrades or how those costs would be allocated.

Likewise, no publicly reviewed record yet establishes the full package of state and local incentives, if any, that Project River or an eventual customer may receive.

Those questions matter because the project has been promoted as producing a large new tax base without shifting electric-infrastructure costs to existing ratepayers.

That remains a claim to test against the eventual agreements.

Project River’s developers say they have accepted Cleveland’s proposed PUD restrictions, subject to finalization.

Friday will show what “finalization” means.

The strongest promises will not be the ones appearing on a website or spoken at a public meeting.

They will be the ones a future owner cannot walk away from.

Behind the Reporting

TRP compared Cleveland’s preliminary PUD requirements with the unresolved questions identified in our earlier Project River reporting.

The preliminary document is not the final ordinance. Cleveland says the final draft will be published Sept. 18. This article should be updated against that document before any version characterizes a condition as final.

TRP’s earlier reporting already identified enforceability of noise, water, emissions, truck traffic, monitoring and successor obligations as central questions.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 17, 2026.

Source Library

City of Cleveland — Project River Timeline and Proposed Development Requirements. Primary city record establishing the preliminary PUD conditions and Sept. 18 final-draft timeline.

Project River — Sept. 15, 2026. Developer statement accepting the proposed requirements subject to finalization.

TRP Project River reporting packet. Prior reporting framework identifying the difference between developer promises and enforceable zoning or permit conditions.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Simon White’s story does not begin in prison.

It begins in Dillon, South Carolina.

From there, his life moved to Harlem, then Philadelphia, then Florida, then back to Philadelphia. Along the way, there were early warnings, bad decisions, addiction, pressure, family responsibilities, job loss and a world that started pulling him deeper than he realized.

In this episode of The Redemption Project, Brandon Burley talks with Simon about a troubled past and why that past does not have to dictate the future.

Simon does not tell his story like a man trying to polish it.

He tells it plainly.

He talks about growing up around Harlem, drinking, drugging and doing the kind of petty things young men often think they can get away with. He remembers a friend warning him early that drugs and alcohol would take something from him. That friend went on to play professional baseball. Simon went a different direction.

At one point, cocaine nearly killed him. A doctor warned him that if he kept using it, he might not see his next birthday.

Simon says he made a change for a while.

But addiction, as he explains it, is not only about the substance.

It is about the way a person is thinking.

Simon’s story is not just about drugs.

It is about the mindset that kept moving from one thing to the next.

When Simon moved to Philadelphia, he worked in a psychiatric hospital. He was married, helping raise children and carrying more responsibility than he and his wife were ready to handle. Then he lost his job.

That is where he says the real trouble started.

Looking for money and pulled by relationships in the street, Simon began buying firearms and selling them illegally. At first, he hesitated. He knew selling guns could get him locked up. But after losing his job and feeling broke, the hesitation faded.

He bought a cheap gun.

He removed the serial number.

He sold it.

Then he bought more.

What began as one decision became a pattern.

Simon describes driving around to gun shops, buying cheap firearms, removing serial numbers and selling them into the street. He talks about gun dealers who should have known something was wrong, especially when buyers came in repeatedly with cash in small bills. He describes learning that multiple handgun sales triggered reporting requirements, while long guns could be handled differently at the time.

The story is disturbing because Simon does not hide the mechanics.

He explains how easy it became.

How fast it became.

How money changed the way he thought.

How the same addictive mind that had once chased drugs started chasing something else.

That is one of the central lessons of this episode:

Addiction can move.

It can shift from one object to another.

The substance may change, but the thinking can stay the same.

Simon’s first contact with ATF came after he bought a Tech-9 while still having an unresolved case in New York. He says agents stopped him outside a gun shop, took the gun and told him he was considered a fugitive from justice because of that old case.

That encounter eventually led Simon into contact with ATF Agent Robert J. Wescott. Simon describes working with law enforcement for a period of time, setting up drug buys and testifying against people. But after a family situation involving his brother-in-law, resentment built.

Later, after he lost his job and began selling guns, Wescott called him and asked whether he was selling firearms.

Simon says he snapped.

Instead of stopping, he went further.

He describes buying AK-style rifles and handguns, selling them into North Philadelphia and leaving with bags of drug money. He also remembers Wescott asking him why someone did not simply kill him and take the guns.

At the time, Simon did not have an answer.

Looking back, the danger is obvious.

Eventually, the downfall came.

Simon moved to Reading after his wife’s job relocated. He says he sold some firearms there and then shifted into selling marijuana because it felt lucrative and less risky. But ATF and law enforcement were still watching.

He was arrested.

Then ATF arrested him.

Simon says he ultimately did four years in federal prison and six months in state prison. He also reflects on what shocked him about sentencing: the gun case exposed him to roughly five years, while the marijuana case could have exposed him to far more time.

But the deeper part of the episode is not the legal math.

It is what prison made Simon see.

Simon talks about men in prison who had no remorse. He talks about how many men were angry not because of what they had done, but because they got caught. He remembers the constant talk about rats and snitches.

Then he remembers something another incarcerated man told him:

God does not always put you where you want to be.

God puts you where you need to be.

That became one of the spiritual turning points of the story.

Simon’s faith journey was not a straight line. He had church in his background. He had taken children to church. But after a church leader he knew went to prison, Simon pulled back.

In prison, he asked for a Quran.

A man offered him a Bible instead.

Simon started reading it.

He was baptized.

Later, he converted to Islam while incarcerated. But even then, Christian voices kept showing up. A guard asked him why he was dealing with certain groups. Another guard at Camp Hill sat beside him and asked whether anyone had ever talked to him about Jesus Christ.

Simon remembers thinking:

Why do people keep asking me about Jesus?

He describes it as if Jesus was chasing him down.

That is the spiritual center of this episode.

Simon had been running through addiction, illegal guns, resentment, prison, religious searching and guilt. But something kept following him. Something kept interrupting him. Something kept asking him to look deeper than the charge, deeper than the sentence, deeper than the story he had been telling himself.

Then the weight of the guns started to become personal.

Simon talks about conscience.

He says that if a person has a heart and a conscience, selling guns brings depression, anxiety and frustration. He remembers law enforcement telling him that someone he sold a gun to had used it in a murder the same day.

At the time, he had tried to think like a gun shop owner:

I have nothing to do with what that person does.

But deep down, he knew he had put something into the street that could be used to harm someone.

That knowledge does not leave a man easily.

Later, after prison, Simon saw a man who had been shot. He remembers the look of terror on the man’s face. He says gun violence is not like the movies. It is not clean. It is not distant. It is horror.

Then gun violence reached his own family.

His nephew turned 21 on a Friday.

He was killed the next evening.

He was 21 for less than 24 hours.

That is where the available transcript ends, but the meaning of the episode is already clear.

This is not a story about a man asking people to forget what he did.

It is not a story that minimizes harm.

It is not a story that treats prison as either the whole answer or no answer at all.

It is a story about consequences.

It is a story about conscience.

It is a story about the damage done when guns, addiction, money and street life come together.

It is also a story about the God who keeps pursuing a man even when that man is confused, angry, guilty, resistant and lost.

Simon White’s story is hard.

But that is why it matters.

Because redemption does not begin when a man pretends the past was not real.

Redemption begins when he finally stops running from the truth.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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“This is how we do it…”

But Montell’s real story? That came after the fame.

He walked away from the charts to follow a higher calling—becoming a pastor, a marriage counselor, and a voice for Christ.

“My life had become a performance… but God never stopped chasing me.”

— Montell Jordan, Becoming Unfamous

If you’ve never read his story, grab the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/194230661X?tag=burleybooks00-20

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#RedemptionStory #MontellJordan #FaithOverFame #ChristianTestimony #BurleyBooks

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary write for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Nashville, Tenn – Marsha Blackburn, Jerri Green and Lauren Pinkston entered Tennessee’s general election with very different public records. Blackburn has spent decades in elected office, Green has held local office and worked in county government, and Pinkston is a first-time candidate. That difference inevitably produces an asymmetry in the amount of scrutiny available to reporters and voters.

That asymmetry should not be corrected by inventing scandals for candidates who do not have them.

It should be explained.

And the Blackburn record currently contains questions that require careful language.

A Senate ethics investigation happened

NewsChannel 5 reported in July that the Senate Select Committee on Ethics investigated Blackburn’s office in 2025 over allegations that taxpayer-funded Senate staff and resources were being used for political campaign activity. Blackburn’s office confirmed that the committee had reviewed the matter.

The underlying rule is not ambiguous. Senate ethics guidance says members and employees may not use official resources for campaign activity.

But that rule does not establish that Blackburn violated it.

NewsChannel 5 reported that investigators interviewed staff members and examined travel involving Blackburn employees who appeared at Republican Party meetings on days when taxpayers also covered staff travel expenses. The outlet also obtained recordings in which Senate staffers discussed concerns about being pressured to perform campaign-related work.

Those recordings are evidence that employees were concerned.

They are not, by themselves, a Senate Ethics Committee finding that Blackburn committed misconduct.

Blackburn has said the investigation was politically motivated, that there was “no misconduct,” that no disciplinary action was imposed and that the matter was resolved. Her office has not released its correspondence with the Ethics Committee. NewsChannel 5, citing a person briefed on the inquiry, separately reported that the committee planned to request a corrective-action plan from Blackburn’s office. Because the committee’s underlying correspondence remains confidential, voters currently cannot independently reconcile those descriptions.

That makes the most accurate conclusion narrower than either campaign side might prefer:

There was an ethics investigation. Blackburn says it cleared her of misconduct. The complete findings are not public.

A campaign-finance complaint was dismissed — but not on the merits

Blackburn faced another complaint this year involving allegations that money from her federal Senate campaign was improperly used to support her gubernatorial ambitions.

Knoxville Republican activist Gary Loe filed the sworn complaint with the Tennessee Registry of Election Finance. Blackburn’s campaign called the allegations frivolous and wrong.

On March 31, the Registry voted unanimously to take no action because it lacked jurisdiction over the federal campaign account. The official meeting minutes say exactly that: the complaint was disposed of “for lack of jurisdiction.”

That is important.

The state did not find that Blackburn violated campaign-finance law.

It also did not investigate the allegations and determine that they were false.

It said the question belonged to federal regulators.

As of an Aug. 3 Tennessee Lookout review, no complaint had been filed with the Federal Election Commission over the matter.

Calling the state decision an ethics violation would therefore be wrong.

Calling it a full exoneration would also overstate what happened.

Green has been audited — with no findings

Green provides a useful contrast.

Her unsuccessful 2020 campaign for the Tennessee House triggered a state campaign-finance audit because unitemized contributions exceeded statutory thresholds. That audit was required by law based on the amount and percentage of those contributions; being audited was not itself evidence of wrongdoing.

The Tennessee Registry of Election Finance completed the audit this year.

Its conclusion was straightforward: no findings.

Auditors reported no areas of possible noncompliance in Green’s reporting and no violations involving Tennessee campaign-contribution limits.

That is what a documented clean finding looks like.

Pinkston has less to inspect

Pinkston has never held elected office and entered this race as a first-time candidate, leaving voters without years of government spending, staff management or campaign records comparable to Blackburn’s.

That does not establish greater ethical conduct.

It establishes less historical evidence.

The same principle applies throughout this series.

The longer someone holds power, the larger the record becomes.

More votes.

More employees.

More money.

More decisions.

And inevitably, more opportunities for scrutiny.

Accountability journalism fails when an accusation becomes a verdict.

It also fails when the absence of a conviction becomes proof that every underlying concern was meaningless.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

WASHINGTON COUNTY, Tenn. — Nearly two years after Hurricane Helene carried Nancy Tucker away from her East Tennessee home, the search for her has ended.

Authorities have positively identified remains found Sept. 12 along the Nolichucky River as Tucker, 76, the last person in Washington County still missing from the catastrophic September 2024 flooding.

Tucker disappeared with her husband, Jimmy, when floodwaters destroyed their rural Washington County home on Sept. 27, 2024.

His body was recovered within days.

Nancy’s was not.

Searchers eventually narrowed their work to Jackson Island in Cherokee National Forest, more than three miles downstream from the area where she was last believed to have been seen.

They kept looking.

According to reporting by The Associated Press, search crews logged more than 400 miles on foot in the area beginning in February, navigating terrain filled with enormous piles of flood debris.

Some piles reached approximately 40 feet and contained trees, vehicles, propane tanks and other material carried downstream by Helene.

Heavy equipment could not simply be brought in.

Because Jackson Island is federal land and includes areas believed to contain Native American burial sites, local responders had to wait for federal authorization and a debris-removal contract before machinery could be used.

That work began this month.

Four days later, crews found Tucker.

The remains were taken to the William Jenkins Forensics Center at East Tennessee State University, where a medical examiner confirmed the identification Monday.

For the people who had searched for nearly two years, the discovery was not simply the end of an investigation.

It fulfilled a promise.

Washington County Sheriff Keith Sexton had vowed after the flood that searchers would bring every missing person home.

Family spokesperson Risa Buck said the Tucker family can now lay Nancy to rest beside Jim.

Nancy and Jimmy Tucker had been married for 44 years. They met while both were serving in the U.S. Army.

Their son also lived at the home but was working when the flood struck.

Helene devastated communities throughout the southern Appalachians after moving inland in September 2024, producing historic flooding in East Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Eighteen deaths were reported in Tennessee. Entire homes, roads and bridges were swept away.

For the Tucker family, one consequence lasted far beyond the flood itself.

There could be no funeral bringing both Nancy and Jim home.

There was still somewhere to search.

Now there isn’t.

For nearly two years, first responders, volunteers, family members and search crews kept returning to the Nolichucky watershed looking for one person.

This week, Washington County’s final missing resident from Hurricane Helene was found.

Nancy Tucker is coming home.

Behind the Reporting

This is a straight-news East Tennessee story rather than an investigative article.

TRP relied primarily on Washington County information reported through The Associated Press and regional outlets. Authorities have positively identified the remains; earlier reports published before identification should not be used to describe the finding as merely “believed” to be Tucker.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 17, 2026.

Source Library

The Associated Press — Sept. 16–17, 2026. Reporting based on the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, emergency responders and the Tucker family’s spokesperson concerning the recovery, identification and two-year search.

Regional reporting — Sept. 14–15, 2026. Confirmation that Tucker was Washington County’s final missing Helene victim and that her remains were taken to ETSU for identification.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

FARRAGUT, Tenn. — When residents began reporting problems along North Fork Turkey Creek on Friday, May 8, the utility responsible for the damaged sewer line did not yet know there was a spill.

First Utility District says Farragut notified it at approximately 10:30 a.m. the following Monday.

By then, sewage had moved through the creek, fish were dead and a section of the waterway would eventually be assessed as having suffered a complete loss of aquatic life.

Four months later, the Town of Farragut says it has changed how urgent environmental and public-safety complaints move through Town Hall.

The change raises a straightforward accountability question that has outlasted the cleanup:

What happened to the reports residents made before the utility was told there was a problem?

What happened in May

First Utility District says a contractor working on an ongoing sewer-replacement project damaged an underground sewer line near Grigsby Chapel Road and North Campbell Station Road.

Tennessee environmental officials later said heavy equipment used while clearing the easement caused the break. A later state report said ground compaction from the work was believed to have caused the line to fail below the surface on May 6 or 7.

Residents were reporting concerning conditions by Friday, May 8.

FUD’s own published account says Farragut received community concerns beginning that day but did not notify the utility until about 10:30 a.m. Monday, May 11. FUD says it responded immediately after notification and completed repairs by approximately 3 p.m.

The environmental damage was substantial.

A state report later said the spill caused a complete loss of aquatic life along approximately 1.55 miles of North Fork Turkey Creek. Because sewage and public-contact restrictions made a direct count difficult, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency estimated the loss using prior fish-survey data.

Its estimate: 5,032 fish.

FUD later paid TWRA $6,838.44 for the value of the lost wildlife resources. TWRA has said that payment was resource-value recovery, not a punitive fine.

Farragut changed the way calls are routed

Farragut Public Services Director Chris Sheffield said the town reviewed its citizen-call routing in late May and changed the process.

Urgent reports involving public safety or environmental concerns are now supposed to be communicated by telephone or in person rather than relying solely on email. Town Administration also is supposed to be included when complaints involve public safety, environmental risk, potential harm, significant service problems or other sensitive matters.

Changing the system is significant.

It also suggests the existing system was not considered adequate.

What remains unclear publicly is precisely where the May reports went.

The records should show when each complaint arrived, who received it, who it was forwarded to and when someone recognized that the situation required immediate notification of FUD and environmental regulators.

That chronology matters because FUD says it did not know about the broken sewer line until Monday morning.

The regulatory case ended. The communications question did not.

TDEC required continued warning signs and testing after the spill while E. coli readings remained elevated. On May 29, the department released FUD from spill-related sampling after downstream readings returned below the upstream reference level.

TDEC had also said it was preparing a Notice of Violation while waiting on TWRA’s fish-kill assessment.

FUD has since described the environmental matter as closed and says conditions returned to pre-event levels.

That addresses the cleanup.

It does not answer how a report about an apparent environmental emergency moved — or failed to move — through local government before the utility responsible for the damaged line learned about it.

TRP is seeking the citizen complaints, internal routing records, utility notification logs and regulatory records needed to reconstruct that timeline.

A broken sewer line can happen without anyone intending it.

Whether a government learns from the warning signs depends on something more measurable:

Who knew what, when they knew it and how long it took that information to reach the people who could stop the damage.

Behind the Reporting

This article distinguishes the physical cause of the sewer failure from the communications response after residents noticed problems.

The evidence reviewed establishes that residents reported concerns beginning May 8 and that FUD says it was notified by Farragut at approximately 10:30 a.m. May 11. It does not yet establish who inside Farragut received each earlier complaint or why FUD was not notified sooner.

TRP still needs the underlying citizen contacts and internal communications before assigning responsibility for any specific delay.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 17, 2026.

Source Library

First Utility District — North Fork Turkey Creek Sewer Overflow. FUD’s official timeline, response and sampling account. Read the FUD incident page

Farragut Press — Sept. 16, 2026. Reporting on Farragut’s revised emergency call-routing procedure.

Farragut Press — May 27 and Sept. 9, 2026. Reporting containing TDEC and TWRA findings and statements concerning the break, fish kill and resource-value payment.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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By Brandon Burley

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A series of reports to the nation’s clearinghouse for suspected online child exploitation helped Knoxville police identify a suspect, search a Gleason Drive home and make an arrest last week.

But when The Redemption Project asked what happens to the thousands of other CyberTips entering Tennessee’s Internet Crimes Against Children system, Knoxville police disclosed a potentially more consequential number.

There are 190 actionable tips waiting to be assigned.

The oldest dates to October 2025.

“Our current backlog of actionable tips awaiting assignment is 190 with the oldest tip being October 2025,” Knoxville Police Department Communications Manager Scott Erland told TRP in a written response Sept. 1.

There is an important limitation to that disclosure.

KPD has not yet clarified whether those 190 actionable tips are waiting inside the Knoxville ICAC unit, sitting in a statewide Tennessee ICAC queue before assignment to an affiliate agency, or represent another defined workload category.

TRP asked KPD to make that distinction Tuesday. No additional response had been received as of Wednesday morning.

The number also does not mean 190 children are known to be in immediate danger while police wait to respond.

KPD defines an “actionable tip” as one containing information related to an actual crime and enough “solvability factors” for investigators potentially to identify and locate a suspect or victim. Erland said threats involving imminent harm trigger immediate notification and response.

That distinction matters.

A CyberTip is not automatically a crime. It is not necessarily a unique offender. It is not an arrest, and it is not necessarily a child waiting for rescue.

But a lead that police themselves have classified as actionable and that is still awaiting assignment is a different measurement from the millions of raw reports entering the national system.

And some of Tennessee’s oldest actionable work is now old enough that KPD’s description reaches back to last October.

One 2025 number does not reconcile

KPD supplied another figure that TRP is not prepared to publish without qualification.

Erland said the Tennessee ICAC Task Force received 37,755 CyberTips in 2025, with 2,298 unique investigations during the year. He said duplicate CyberTips are not formally tracked but are “exceedingly rare.”

The first number presents an unusual problem.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s official 2025 CyberTipline Reports by State table says 49,541 reports resolved to Tennessee: 35,504 classified as referrals and 14,037 classified as informational reports.

The same NCMEC table lists Indiana at exactly 37,755 reports — 28,000 referrals and 9,755 informational reports.

That does not prove KPD gave TRP the wrong state’s number.

The two organizations may be measuring different stages of the system. NCMEC’s table counts reports that resolved to a state, while KPD may be describing a narrower universe that actually entered or moved through the Tennessee ICAC workflow.

But because the number KPD supplied matches Indiana’s official total exactly, TRP asked the department whether 37,755 was inadvertently transposed from the wrong state or whether it describes a specific operational subset of Tennessee reports.

Until KPD answers that question, 37,755 should not be treated as Tennessee’s definitive 2025 CyberTip total.

Even the word “referral” means different things

There is another reason the numbers cannot simply be placed side by side.

KPD and NCMEC use some of the same words differently.

In its written response, KPD told TRP that a referral is a complaint received from or forwarded by another law-enforcement or government agency rather than NCMEC. A CyberTip, KPD said, is an investigative lead provided through NCMEC.

NCMEC uses “referral” differently in its national reporting.

It calls a CyberTipline report a referral when the submitting company has provided sufficient information for law enforcement potentially to act, usually including information about a user, imagery and a possible location for the child or offender.

NCMEC calls a report informational when the information is insufficient for that purpose or when, among other things, imagery has been widely circulated and repeatedly reported.

Those classifications describe the quality and usability of information reaching NCMEC.

They are not necessarily equivalent to KPD’s definition of an actionable tip, a referral or a unique investigation.

That makes the 2,298 unique investigations KPD reported potentially more useful than a raw CyberTip total — but even that number needs to be understood within KPD’s own case-definition system.

TRP therefore is not calculating a percentage of reports that became investigations. The numerator and denominator have not yet been shown to measure compatible things.

The national volume is enormous — and raw totals can mislead

NCMEC received approximately 21.3 million CyberTipline reports in 2025.

It identified and escalated more than 53,000 reports as urgent or involving a child in imminent danger. More than 2 million reports resolved to the United States, including about 1.9 million that resolved to a specific state.

Those figures sound overwhelming because they are.

They also require context.

Electronic service providers submit the vast majority of CyberTipline reports, and reported files can include imagery that has circulated repeatedly for years. NCMEC uses hash matching and other triage tools in part to reduce duplication at the file level and help investigators prioritize newer or more urgent material.

A report can also be made available to more than one law-enforcement agency if it contains geographic connections to different jurisdictions. NCMEC expressly warns that a single report can have multiple geographic nexuses.

That is why a headline based solely on the largest available CyberTip number can tell readers surprisingly little about the actual investigative workload.

The 190 figure is different.

KPD says those tips have already been classified as actionable and are waiting for assignment.

Tennessee was warned about this problem in 2024

The current disclosure is not the first indication that Tennessee’s child-exploitation investigators have struggled with volume.

An October 2024 Tennessee Comptroller performance audit of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation devoted an entire observation to the issue.

Auditors warned that CyberTips related to internet crimes against children would likely continue to rise, “creating a backlog and overburdening the bureau’s limited investigative resources.”

At TBI, the word “backlog” had a specific meaning.

The agency classified a CyberTip as being on “active hold” until an agent became available to review it. As of April 1, 2024, the TBI ICAC squad had 2,543 cases in that status.

Auditors found that the bureau’s ICAC squad still had the same four agent positions it had when the squad was created in 2007.

From June 2020 through March 2024, TBI opened 3,044 cases related to CyberTips involving child sexual abuse material. Auditors found 84% contributed to the backlog and 90% involved allegations classified as child exploitation.

“The Internet Crimes Against Children Squad’s staffing levels have not kept pace with the growing backlog of cybertips,” auditors wrote.

TBI agreed with the observation and said it would continue seeking additional positions.

That was a TBI backlog, not the current 190-tip queue KPD has disclosed.

The numbers should not be added together or treated as the same measurement.

What they establish is continuity in the systems question: Tennessee auditors documented an investigative-assignment problem in 2024, and KPD is now reporting actionable work still awaiting assignment in 2026.

KPD sits at the front of Tennessee’s routing system

Tennessee’s ICAC structure makes the scope of the 190 especially important.

The 2024 Comptroller audit explains that NCMEC electronically transmits a Tennessee CyberTip to the state ICAC commander based on where NCMEC believes the victim or potential offender is located.

In Tennessee, that commander works at KPD.

KPD then triages the report and routes it to an affiliate law-enforcement agency covering the relevant geography. When no local affiliate covers a jurisdiction, KPD can assign the tip to TBI.

That creates at least two conceptually different places where something could be “awaiting assignment.”

A report could be waiting for routing to the law-enforcement agency that will own it.

Or an affiliate could already have received it and be waiting to assign the matter to an individual investigator.

KPD’s initial response does not distinguish between those possibilities for the 190.

That is why the answer to TRP’s follow-up question could materially change the headline’s statewide significance.

The task-force network has grown

The statewide network itself is larger than KPD’s public webpage suggests.

The department’s current ICAC page still says KPD works with 60 statewide affiliate agencies and lists the KPD unit as one lieutenant, one sergeant, three investigators and two computer forensic examiners.

KPD’s Aug. 28 Gleason Drive release said the task force links 80 state, local and federal agencies.

Erland told TRP the current number is actually 82 affiliated agencies when KPD is included, explaining that the task force has grown since the webpage was updated.

He also supplied an updated KPD staffing configuration: three detectives, three digital forensic analysts and two supervisors assigned to the ICAC unit.

That is eight people.

KPD said the Tennessee task force has approximately 164 members across participating agencies.

Those 164 people should not automatically be treated as 164 full-time ICAC investigators. Participating agencies can assign personnel in different capacities and at different levels of time commitment.

The 2024 audit illustrates that distinction. It calculated designated ICAC staffing in full- and partial-time equivalents rather than simply counting everyone connected with an affiliate.

One queue KPD says is not backed up

KPD’s answers also identify an important place where the department says there is not a backlog.

Asked how many devices were awaiting forensic examination, Erland told TRP:

“We have no forensic exam backlog at KPD. Turnaround time is case-dependent.”

That matters because digital child-exploitation investigations can involve two separate capacity problems.

Investigators first have to receive, triage and work the investigative lead.

After devices are seized, forensic personnel may have to extract and analyze large amounts of digital evidence.

KPD’s current disclosure puts the reported backlog at the actionable-tip assignment stage, not in its local forensic-examination queue.

That is useful operational context — and another reason the 190 should be defined precisely before being compared with other state or federal backlog figures.

The Gleason Drive case shows what happens when a CyberTip becomes a case

The reporting began with an Aug. 28 operation at a residence on Gleason Drive.

KPD said its ICAC detectives received a series of NCMEC CyberTips containing information concerning alleged exchanges of child sexual abuse material and alleged inappropriate communications with children through multiple online platforms.

Investigators identified Yaac Pekle Mendez, 33, searched the residence, recovered evidence and arrested him, according to KPD.

Mendez was booked on three counts of sexual exploitation of a minor.

The investigation remains active. The charges are allegations, and Mendez is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

KPD declined to answer TRP’s case-specific questions about when the underlying reports arrived, whether any related to the same underlying conduct, what investigative steps occurred between receipt of the reports and the residential search warrant, and whether preservation demands, subpoenas, provider warrants or other legal process preceded the search.

Erland cited the continuing investigation.

The department did answer the broader systems questions.

KPD defined a CyberTip as an investigative lead supplied through NCMEC; an investigation as an agency’s investigative response to a complaint or lead; a child identified as a victim whose identity was previously unknown to law enforcement but discovered during an investigation; and a child rescue as locating a child and removing that child from ongoing physical or sexual abuse.

Those definitions help prevent raw activity statistics from becoming something they are not.

A million reports are not a million offenders.

A CyberTip is not an arrest.

A backlog does not establish that imminent-danger reports are sitting unattended.

But the inverse matters, too.

An actionable lead that law enforcement says contains evidence of an actual crime and enough information potentially to identify or locate a suspect or victim — yet remains unassigned — is a public-safety workload measure worth understanding.

KPD says there are 190 of them.

The oldest dates to October 2025.

The remaining question is where, exactly, those 190 cases are sitting — and how long actionable leads ordinarily wait before an investigator takes ownership of them.

TRP has asked KPD to answer that question and will update this report when it does.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Behind the Reporting:

Why We Are Not Turning 190, 37,755 and 49,541 Into One Scary Statistic

Paid subscribers get the source-response ledger, data reconciliation, 2024 audit comparison and the questions needed to determine whether Tennessee has a statewide assignment backlog or a narrower Knoxville workload problem.

The strongest number is 190 — but its denominator is still missing

KPD gave TRP unusually specific language:

“Our current backlog of actionable tips awaiting assignment is 190 with the oldest tip being October 2025.”

Three elements are directly supported:

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That tension sits near the center of Jonathan R. Bailey’s Dwelling in Christ: Discover the Threefold Path of Spiritual Transformation. Bailey begins with his own experience of sincerely wanting to change, repeatedly participating in the kinds of spiritual moments that promised transformation, and eventually confronting the uncomfortable fact that the moments themselves had not produced the person he wanted to become.

He calls the mindset underneath much of that experience transactional Christianity.

Do this, and God will do that.

Pray correctly and receive the outcome.

Make the commitment and experience the transformation.

Try harder and become better.

Bailey’s alternative is not another formula.

It is a path.

Drawing from Scripture and centuries of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant spiritual writing, he organizes that path around what Christian tradition has called the Threefold Way: purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is the slow work of confronting what distorts love. Illumination is the growing awareness and intentionality that develops as a person is formed. Union is increasing intimacy with God that expresses itself in greater love of other people.

Bailey is careful about one important point: these are not three levels in a spiritual video game.

They overlap.

A person experiencing illumination may encounter purgation again. Someone further along the journey can still struggle with old temptations. Moments of union can appear before a person believes they are ready for them. Bailey describes the path as both developmental and cyclical rather than a neat staircase upward.

That distinction is important because one of this book’s strongest arguments is also one of its simplest:

Transformation takes time.

We may be trying to hurry holiness

Bailey’s discussion of spiritual disciplines is particularly useful because he has little patience for the idea that intensity proves maturity.

He describes his own early attempts at fasting, silence, memorization, study, and retreat. Again and again, he tried to begin where more experienced Christians had arrived.

The result was predictable.

Burnout.

The lesson he draws is not that spiritual disciplines do not matter. Quite the opposite. They matter enough that they should be sustainable.

A small practice that becomes part of a life can do more than an heroic practice abandoned a week later.

Bailey repeatedly insists that spiritual practices themselves do not transform anyone. Grace does. Practices position a person to receive and participate in that grace.

That distinction protects the book from becoming the very thing it criticizes.

Otherwise, the Threefold Way could easily become another transaction:

Follow these steps.

Practice these disciplines.

Receive transformation.

Bailey keeps interrupting that interpretation.

Effort matters.

Grace is decisive.

When suffering refuses to become a lesson

The book becomes more difficult, and more substantial, when Bailey turns from voluntary spiritual practices to affliction.

He writes about the premature birth and death of his son, Smith.

This is not presented as inspirational suffering.

Bailey wrestles directly with the theological impulse to explain tragedy by assigning it a divine purpose. He ultimately rejects the idea that God caused his son’s death in order to transform him.

That is an important distinction in the book.

Bailey believes suffering can become an occasion in which grace works. He does not conclude from that that suffering itself is therefore good, divinely engineered, or justified by whatever growth follows it.

There are experiences we can learn from.

That does not mean they happened so we could learn.

Bailey leaves some of the question where grief often leaves it: unresolved. He argues for trust without pretending trust eliminates the “why.”

For a book about spiritual formation, that restraint matters.

A theology of transformation can become cruel very quickly if every wound has to be converted into a lesson.

Bailey refuses to do that.

Your library can grow faster than your character

One of the book’s sharpest observations arrives when Bailey admits that there was a period when he felt most Christian while learning about Christianity.

That distinction may be especially relevant in a moment when Christians have almost unlimited access to sermons, podcasts, books, apps, courses, videos, and theological arguments.

A person can consume Christian content for hours every week without becoming noticeably more patient, generous, truthful, forgiving, or loving.

The library can grow faster than the character.

That is a problem no reading list can solve by itself.

From inspiration to intention

The middle portion of the book shifts from purgation into illumination.

Bailey’s Rule of Life chapter is among the most practically useful.

He describes the danger of building a spiritual life around inspiration: another worship experience, another conference, another teacher, another practice.

Inspiration can begin something.

It cannot necessarily sustain it.

Bailey turns instead toward the ancient practice of a Rule of Life: an intentional framework that helps order practices, relationships, time, ordinary activities, and spiritual commitments.

But again, he introduces an important safeguard.

The Rule cannot become the point.

Bailey describes occasions when his commitment to spiritual practices competed with the people standing directly in front of him: continuing spiritual reading instead of listening to his wife, maintaining a fast rather than meeting a friend, protecting prayer time instead of attending to a child.

If a Rule intended to form love prevents someone from loving, the Rule has become the problem.

The practice is a means.

Love is the test.

Prayer without bargaining

Bailey applies the same framework to prayer.

He describes growing up with prayer that frequently functioned as bargaining: protect me, rescue me, give me this outcome, and I will respond appropriately.

Over time, his understanding moves toward prayer as attention and relationship.

One of the book’s memorable ideas is that distraction in prayer is not necessarily evidence that prayer has failed. The practice is returning.

The mind wanders.

Return.

A discipline is missed.

Return.

Temptation wins.

Get back up.

Bailey describes transformation not as an uninterrupted ascent but as thousands of returns.

That idea may be one of the most accessible in the entire book.

A great deal of spiritual discouragement comes from interpreting recurrence as failure.

Bailey asks whether recurrence may simply be part of formation.

The slow work of becoming honest

By the time he reaches humility, Bailey’s argument has deepened.

The problem is no longer simply bad behavior.

It is the desire to appear further along than we actually are.

He describes three masks.

The Spartan tries harder.

The Researcher learns more.

The Hermit imagines transformation would occur if only life happened somewhere else.

Each can look spiritual.

Each can also become a way of avoiding the person who actually needs to be transformed.

The most mature version of spirituality in this book is therefore not particularly impressive.

It is increasingly honest.

Bailey’s humility is not self-loathing. It is learning to live without exaggerating either one’s virtue or one’s worthlessness.

It is accepting dependence and dignity at the same time.

That fits The Redemption Project particularly well.

Change does not require pretending the past did not happen.

Neither does accountability require believing a person can only ever be what they have been.

Transformation happens somewhere between those two distortions.

The book gets more theologically demanding near the end

Readers should know that Dwelling in Christ does not remain a practical book about prayer habits and spiritual disciplines.

Its later chapters make substantial theological claims.

Bailey argues that deeper union with God should make a person increasingly available to other people, not increasingly isolated from them. He describes spiritual maturity as becoming the kind of person whose presence makes other people feel seen, safe, and capable of growth.

That is one of the book’s best tests of spirituality.

If supposed intimacy with God consistently produces less patience with people, something has gone wrong.

But Bailey goes further.

In his chapter on charity, he directly challenges accounts of salvation centered primarily on legal pardon and substitution. His larger claim is that salvation must include transformation: not merely forgiveness, but becoming the kind of person who increasingly lives in Christlike love.

The final chapter similarly pushes against the idea that death instantly completes a person’s moral and spiritual formation. Bailey instead imagines transformation as an ongoing participation in divine life, one that begins now and continues into eternity.

Those are not minor details.

Some evangelical readers will disagree with Bailey’s framing of atonement, salvation, perfection, or postmortem transformation. Others may find that his retrieval of older Christian traditions gives language to questions their own churches rarely addressed.

Either way, the theological argument deserves to be engaged rather than hidden beneath the book’s more immediately appealing material about prayer and spiritual disciplines.

Where the book occasionally reaches too far

The book’s greatest strength creates one of its risks.

Bailey is a gifted synthesizer.

He pulls from Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholic spirituality, monastic traditions, Protestant writers, Scripture, personal experience, and modern spiritual formation movements and draws them into a surprisingly coherent path.

But synthesis can smooth over differences.

The Christian traditions Bailey draws from do not always understand salvation, sanctification, suffering, the saints, spiritual authority, atonement, or union with God in precisely the same way.

Sometimes the Threefold Way functions as a bridge between traditions.

At other times, it can make those traditions appear more unified than they really are.

Bailey’s personal stories also carry substantial theological weight. They make the book readable and human. They do not, by themselves, prove every theological conclusion drawn from them.

Experience can illuminate an argument.

It cannot settle one.

Readers should keep that distinction in view.

The book’s strongest contribution

Those reservations do not undermine what Dwelling in Christ does particularly well.

It refuses to sell transformation quickly.

That sounds simple.

It is surprisingly countercultural.

Bailey is writing into a religious environment that can easily reward dramatic testimonies, visible platforms, immediate decisions, measurable outcomes, emotional experiences, and spiritual techniques.

His alternative is slower.

Practice.

Fail.

Return.

Pay attention.

Receive grace.

Learn to love.

Repeat.

And then keep going.

The Threefold Way gives Bailey a vocabulary for that process, but the larger insight does not depend on mastering the terminology.

Spiritual transformation may be less like flipping a switch and more like becoming a different kind of person through thousands of choices, failures, relationships, practices, acts of grace, and returns.

There is no dramatic shortcut in that vision.

Maybe that is the point.

The question is not merely whether someone once made a decision to follow Christ.

The deeper question is what kind of person is slowly being formed because they did.

Disclosure: InterVarsity Press provided The Redemption Project with a complimentary review copy of Dwelling in Christ.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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To some, bail is a way to keep dangerous people in jail.

To others, it is a system that punishes poverty.

To judges, bondsmen, defendants, victims, families and communities, it can mean something much more complicated.

In this Season 3 Systems Explained episode of The Redemption Project, Brandon Burley talks with Ken Good, an attorney from Texas who has spent decades working in and around the bail system.

Ken began his legal career representing doctors and hospitals, then developed a practice representing bondsmen and insurance companies across Texas. He has argued bail-related cases before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas, and the Supreme Court of Texas. He has also written extensively on bail reform, criminal justice reform and what he believes works — and does not work — in the pretrial system.

The conversation begins with a basic question:

What is bail for?

Ken’s answer is grounded in the traditional purpose of bail: making sure a defendant returns to court while the case is pending.

That sounds simple.

But the details are where the system gets complicated.

Brandon and Ken discuss one of the central tensions in bail reform: whether people charged with similar crimes should be treated the same or whether judges should consider the individual facts of the person, the charge, the risk and the circumstances.

Brandon raises the example of two people charged with theft.

One person has a long criminal history.

The other has no record and stole groceries to feed a family.

Should they be treated the same?

Ken’s answer is no.

In fact, he pushes the point further. Even two first-time defendants charged with similar offenses may not present the same risk. One may have deep roots in the community, family nearby, stable housing and a job. Another may have no ties, no support and a much greater risk of failing to appear.

That is the heart of the episode.

Fair does not always mean identical.

Ken argues that the justice system has historically relied on individualized discretion because people, cases and risks are different. The reform movement, in his view, often pushes toward treating people the same based on categories, charge lists or automated tools.

But the criminal justice system does not deal with abstractions.

It deals with people.

And people are not identical.

The conversation moves into cashless bail, which Ken describes more broadly as simple release — releasing someone on a promise to return, personal recognizance, zero bail or other similar mechanisms depending on the state.

Ken is critical of these systems when they are used too broadly. He argues that simple release mechanisms often produce higher failure-to-appear rates than private surety bonds and can cause major problems for courts because cases cannot move forward until defendants return.

Brandon compares that to Tennessee’s citation-release system, where a person signs a promise to appear in court. Ken explains that in Texas, citation release is used much less often and generally for low-level offenses.

From there, the conversation turns to what happens when someone commits a new offense while already out on bond. Ken explains a new Texas law requiring that, when a person is out on bond and arrested again for a new felony in the same county, only the judge from the first case can set bail on the second case. He also says the statute requires judges to consider revoking or modifying the first bond.

That part of the conversation shows why bail is not just a release question.

It is a supervision question.

It is a court-management question.

It is a public-safety question.

The episode then moves into ankle monitors.

Ken does not argue that ankle monitors have no use at all. He says they can provide supplemental data and may have a role in high-risk cases.

But he rejects the idea that ankle monitors are a replacement for the bail industry.

His concern is practical. Monitors can generate false alerts, dead-battery notifications, exclusion-zone violations and other reports that desensitize the system. He also argues that defendants learn how to work around them, including cutting off a monitor late on a Friday to gain a head start before a warrant is issued.

Ken also raises the cost issue. If someone is paying daily fees for an ankle monitor over a case that lasts years, that person may end up paying far more than they would have paid through a bondsman.

That is an important Season 3 distinction.

A tool can sound like reform.

But the question is how it works in real life.

Who pays?

Who monitors?

Who responds?

How fast?

What happens when the alert is false?

What happens when it is real?

What happens on Friday afternoon?

What happens when the case lasts four years?

The conversation then moves to the role of bondsmen.

Ken argues that private surety bonds provide more than a financial transaction. He says bondsmen often provide reminders, supervision, family contact and a relationship that can help get someone back into court if they miss a date.

Brandon raises the example of a family member putting something at risk to help a loved one get out. Ken explains that the details vary by state, but he agrees with the broader point: family involvement can matter.

That is another theme running through the episode.

Systems are not only statutes and software.

They are relationships, incentives and accountability.

The conversation then gets into one of the most debated ideas in pretrial justice: risk assessments.

Ken is strongly critical of using risk assessments to replace judicial discretion in bail decisions. He argues that risk assessments may be better at predicting group trends than individual behavior, that they can produce racially distorted outcomes, and that they often make mistakes in the direction of recommending release.

He also raises a key legal concern: if a risk assessment does not consider the seriousness of the pending charge, but state law requires judges to consider the charge when setting bail, then the tool may not comply with the legal framework.

Brandon presses the point with a practical example:

If someone has no criminal history but is accused of shooting multiple people, should a tool treat that person as low risk simply because it is a first offense?

That question captures the problem.

The presumption of innocence matters.

But bail is not the trial.

Ken emphasizes that presumption of innocence applies to the trial itself. Bail is about assurance — what it takes to ensure that a person returns to court and, depending on the jurisdiction, whether there are public-safety concerns while the case is pending.

The episode also covers the political pendulum around criminal justice reform.

Brandon uses the image of Newton’s cradle: when policy swings too hard in one direction, the reaction may swing just as hard the other way. Ken agrees and argues that public safety eventually becomes the demand when crime rises and the public believes the system is failing.

That leads into Tennessee’s proposed constitutional amendment and the broader question of whether reform can swing too far toward release or too far toward detention.

Ken’s position is that the middle ground should involve accountability, private surety bonds and sparing use of simple release mechanisms. He worries that one extreme releases too many people without accountability, while the opposite extreme may hold too many people and create costs the public is not prepared to pay.

The conversation does not stay only on bail.

It also moves into jail overcrowding, incarceration costs and mental health.

Ken argues that part of the problem is that the United States has moved much of its mental-health burden into the criminal justice system. Brandon agrees from his experience in East Tennessee, where the closure of mental-health facilities meant law enforcement and jails became the default place for people who needed very different kinds of care.

That may be one of the most important parts of the episode.

The jail is not just holding people accused of crimes.

In many communities, it is also functioning as the largest mental-health facility.

That creates problems for defendants.

It creates problems for officers.

It creates problems for sheriffs.

It creates problems for courts.

And it creates problems for the people who needed treatment long before they ended up in a cell.

Ken shares a personal example involving his sister, who suffered a severe injury and later dealt with a long struggle involving prescription drugs. He describes the importance of family involvement and says that, in his view, families often provide the best chance for success for people with serious mental-health or substance-related problems.

But Brandon adds the necessary caveat:

Not every family has the means, resources or ability to provide that level of care.

That is the kind of tension this episode keeps returning to.

The easy answer is usually too easy.

Release everyone is too easy.

Hold everyone is too easy.

Trust a computer is too easy.

Blame judges is too easy.

Blame poverty is too easy.

Blame crime alone is too easy.

The real system is harder.

It has defendants, victims, judges, bondsmen, families, mental illness, addiction, money, public safety, constitutional rights, political pressure and imperfect tools.

Ken closes by pointing listeners to pbtx.com and thebailpost.com for more information about his group, their blog and their podcast.

This episode is a reminder that criminal justice policy cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker.

Bail is not only about money.

Ankle monitors are not only about technology.

Risk assessments are not only about data.

And reform is not automatically good just because it is called reform.

The better question is the Season 3 question:

How does the system actually work — and what happens when we change one part without understanding the rest?

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Checkout charity raises hundreds of millions of dollars. The more revealing story is what customers, retailers, nonprofits and intermediaries each get from the transaction — and what happens to the money after the screen disappears.

By Brandon Burley
The Redemption Project Newsroom | Analysis / Systems Explained

The screen appears before the receipt.

Your total is $18.43, and the register asks whether you would like to round up 57 cents for charity. You tap yes, finish the transaction and leave.

Then comes the accusation that has circulated online for years: The corporation collected your donation so it can claim the charitable tax deduction.

That explanation is appealing because it is simple.

It is also largely aimed at the wrong question.

In the programs examined by The Redemption Project Newsroom, customer donations are treated as customer charitable gifts or donations to a charitable intermediary, not magically converted into corporate donations. Taco Bell Foundation says directly that Round Up contributions are not claimed as income by Taco Bell Corp. or its franchise organizations, while Walmart tells customers their Spark Good Round Up donations are tax-deductible to the extent otherwise allowed by law.

So if corporations are not simply taking your 57 cents and claiming it as their own charitable gift, another question becomes more useful.

Why do some of the largest companies in America devote checkout space, software, employee attention and marketing resources to asking for it?

Because charity and business value can exist in the same transaction.

There is a business case for asking

Checkout giving is not a tiny corner of philanthropy.

Engage for Good examined 92 point-of-sale fundraising campaigns conducted in 2024 and found that they raised more than $275 million. Taco Bell, PetSmart, Walmart and Petco campaigns accounted for more than $190 million of that total.

The report included another finding worth noticing.

Twenty-five percent of participating brands reported a sales lift during fundraising periods. Engage for Good itself described that result as reinforcing the business case for checkout fundraising.

That does not prove asking for a donation causes customers to spend more. It does establish that companies involved in the industry are measuring charitable campaigns partly through business outcomes.

The benefits can be less direct, too.

A retailer can associate its brand with children’s hospitals, food banks, schools or another popular cause. Employees can participate in campaigns, local stores build relationships with community institutions, and nonprofits gain access to a fundraising audience that would be extraordinarily expensive to reach donor by donor.

Costco’s longtime partnership with Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals shows the scale. Its 2024 campaign raised about $40 million through checkout donations, volunteering and other participation. For the hospitals, Costco provides enormous fundraising reach; for Costco, the campaign visibly connects its stores, employees and members with children’s hospitals in their own communities.

Both sides can benefit without either benefit making the charity illegitimate.

Customer generosity can be real. Corporate value can be real. Those statements are not opposites.

Then follow the 57 cents

The transaction becomes more interesting after the customer taps yes.

Consider Walmart’s Spark Good Round Up program. Customers shopping online or in the Walmart app can select an eligible nonprofit or school and round up purchases to support that organization. Walmart uses Deed to verify participating organizations and Network for Good, a charitable donor-advised fund, to distribute customer donations.

That means the structure is not simply:

Customer → Walmart → local nonprofit.

The customer completes the donation, and Walmart says that donation is made to Network for Good. The charitable intermediary then distributes the money to the organization the customer selected. Walmart’s FAQ also says no fee is deducted from the donation amount for participating charities.

Network for Good’s donor materials state that money contributed to its donor-advised fund comes under the fund’s legal control, even when the donor recommends the eventual recipient.

That distinction matters because it identifies who controls the charitable dollar between checkout and delivery.

Walmart’s own pages give two different timelines

Here is where a small transparency issue becomes worth reporting.

Walmart’s current Spark Good FAQ says customer Round Up donations are distributed through Network for Good quarterly, approximately 15 to 20 working days after each quarter ends.

Its current Spark Good Round Up guidelines say something different.

Those guidelines say distributions are made monthly, no more than 30 days after the month in which the customer made the donation.

There may be a routine explanation. One page may reflect a newer procedure while another simply has not been updated.

But both pages were publicly available when TRP reviewed them.

And for anyone asking how long checkout donations remain in the system before reaching the intended charity, monthly versus quarterly is not an insignificant distinction.

A customer can decide to donate in two seconds.

Figuring out exactly when the charity receives the money takes considerably longer.

Does somebody earn interest while the money waits?

This is where one viral theory often turns into another.

If millions of small donations are aggregated before charities receive them, people reasonably ask whether somebody earns interest on the money.

The evidence reviewed by TRP does not support one universal answer.

Taco Bell Foundation provides a useful example. Its financial statements show that Round Up generated approximately $50.5 million in 2024, while the foundation separately reported about $3.7 million in net investment return and ended the year with approximately $80.6 million in net assets.

Those figures do not establish that Taco Bell earned $3.7 million by temporarily holding customers’ spare change.

Taco Bell Foundation is a separate nonprofit organization with accumulated assets, contributions and investments. Its statements do not identify that $3.7 million return as interest generated specifically from Round Up money awaiting distribution.

The distinction is critical.

A charitable foundation earning investment income is not evidence that the retailer operating the cash register is pocketing interest from customer donations.

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Panda gives a more direct answer

Panda Cares Foundation provides an unusually transparent example of how investment income can function inside a checkout-charity system.

Its 2024 report lists approximately $34.6 million in in-store donations and about $2.1 million in interest and dividend income. Its IRS filing separately reports roughly $41.4 million in total contributions and $47.7 million in year-end net assets.

But Panda also explains what that investment income does.

The foundation says contributions from Panda Restaurant Group and interest income cover its general and administrative expenses, allowing 100% of in-store donations to go toward its community work.

That is an important answer.

Yes, the charitable institution earns investment income.

No, the evidence does not show Panda Express is pocketing interest from customers’ donations.

Instead, the foundation says that income helps pay the cost of operating the charity so checkout donations can support programs.

That is exactly the kind of disclosure that helps replace suspicion with something measurable.

And another checkout charity reported no investment income at all

Round It Up America provides the counterexample.

The nonprofit reported approximately $9.22 million in contributions for 2024.

Its IRS data reported zero investment income.

That makes a broad claim such as “they all make money from the float” difficult to sustain.

Different programs use different structures.

One corporate foundation may maintain large invested reserves. Another organization may distribute nearly everything it receives. A donor-advised fund may control money between the customer transaction and final grant. A retailer may never receive investment income from the donation at all.

The phrase “round up for charity” describes the prompt.

It does not describe one financial system.

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“We raised $50 million” can also hide an important distinction

There is another accountability question that has nothing to do with taxes or interest.

Who actually supplied the money?

Companies frequently announce that “we” raised millions of dollars for charity. That language can be perfectly accurate when describing a campaign involving a company, employees, customers and business partners.

It can also blur the contribution breakdown.

Taco Bell Foundation’s reporting offers a good example of how to make that clearer.

Its 2025 annual report says customers generated a record $52 million through Round Up. Franchise owners contributed about $2.5 million through the Owners’ Giving Circle, foundation champions and sponsors contributed another $2.25 million in monetary and in-kind support, and events involving partners brought in another $3.4 million.

That disclosure tells readers more than a single combined fundraising number would.

It shows who supplied the money.

There is a meaningful difference between a corporation donating $10 million, customers donating $10 million through that corporation’s registers, employees raising $10 million and a company matching customer gifts dollar for dollar.

All can legitimately be called charitable fundraising.

They are not the same financial contribution.

The false claim can distract from the better questions

This is why the popular tax-write-off accusation is ultimately less interesting than the system behind it.

If people spend all their energy asking whether Walmart or Taco Bell stole their 57-cent tax deduction, they may never ask questions that public documents can actually help answer.

Who receives the donation first? Who legally controls it? How long does that organization hold it? Are donations distributed monthly, quarterly or on another schedule? Does the charitable institution earn investment income? What pays the administrative costs? Are processing fees deducted? How much of the announced fundraising total came from customers, and how much came from the company?

And then there is the business side.

Did the campaign increase sales? Does the company measure customer participation? What marketing or community value does the partnership provide? Does the company match any of the money its customers give?

Those questions do not assume wrongdoing.

They assume transparency matters.

So who benefits?

The answer is not one participant.

The charity can benefit enormously from access to millions of customer transactions. Costco’s 2024 campaign alone generated about $40 million for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, while Taco Bell’s Round Up generated more than $50 million in 2024.

Customers receive a convenient way to make small gifts.

Retailers can receive reputational, community and customer-engagement value — and at least some brands report sales increases during campaigns.

Financial intermediaries make large-scale digital giving possible, while foundations and nonprofits may maintain reserves, earn investment returns and pay the costs required to operate charitable programs.

None of that makes checkout charity a scam.

It makes checkout charity a system.

And systems deserve better questions than rumors.

The person standing at the register is asked only one:

Would you like to round up?

The more important questions begin after the customer taps yes.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary write for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Garrett Holt is not describing his first 100 days on the Knox County Commission as a period for solving Knox County’s largest problems.

He is starting with learning how the county works.

Holt, the new at-large commissioner for Seat 11, told The Redemption Project in a Sept. 9 written response that his early months will focus on understanding county government, examining infrastructure needs and researching public-health initiatives that could produce measurable results.

Some of that agenda is intentionally unfinished.

Holt acknowledged that roads, transportation and public health are not problems that fit neatly inside a 100-day benchmark. Instead, he said he wants the period to establish groundwork for decisions he will make over his four-year term.

That makes the useful accountability test less about how many problems Holt can claim to have solved in 100 days and more about what his stated priorities eventually produce.

First, learn the machinery

Holt said his first priority is becoming as informed and prepared as possible for the job.

He described Knox County as an organization with a budget of more than $1 billion and responsibilities affecting more than half a million residents. During his first months, Holt said he plans to learn county departments, study the budget and operations, and meet with county leaders and constituents before major decisions come before Commission.

Those are primarily process goals.

Learning a government, attending briefings and meeting constituents do not by themselves establish policy results.

But the effects can be tested later.

Does Holt’s study of county operations lead him to identify specific budget priorities? Does it shape how he evaluates capital requests? Does constituent outreach produce identifiable proposals or changes in position?

Those are more concrete measures than whether a commissioner says he understands the job better after 100 days.

Roads and growth come next

Holt’s second priority moves into infrastructure.

He said traffic, roads and growth were among the issues he heard about most during the campaign. Holt said he wants to understand current road and maintenance priorities, identify possible avenues for greater investment and look for what he called strategic and cost-effective ways to improve traffic flow.

His longer-term goal, he said, is for Knox County to become more proactive about infrastructure as population and development increase rather than repeatedly trying to catch up after growth has occurred.

Holt did not identify a specific funding proposal, road project or dollar amount in his response.

That distinction matters.

Greater infrastructure investment is currently a stated priority, not a proposed or funded plan.

The next questions come when Holt begins identifying projects: Which roads or transportation problems does he prioritize? What would the work cost? What level of government controls the project? And where would the money come from?

Those details will determine whether the broad priority becomes an actionable county policy.

Public health could become another policy lane

Holt’s third priority comes from his medical background.

As a medical student, Holt said he wants to research public-health initiatives that could improve the health and well-being of Knox County residents.

His starting point, he said, will be understanding what the Knox County Health Department is already doing and looking for evidence-based opportunities where county government could have a measurable effect.

Again, Holt did not identify a particular program he intends to introduce.

For now, the commitment is to research.

That leaves another future accountability test: Which public-health problems does Holt decide county government can realistically influence? What intervention does he support? What evidence supports it? What would it cost? And how would the county know whether it worked?

Until those questions have answers, public health remains an area Holt intends to study rather than a policy agenda he has put before Commission.

Some problems do not fit a 100-day clock

Holt was explicit that several of his priorities extend well beyond his first 100 days.

Infrastructure projects require years and substantial funding, he said. Some transportation problems require coordination among Knox County, the city of Knoxville and the state. Public-health improvements can require similarly long time horizons.

His own definition of early success is therefore narrower.

By the end of the period, Holt said he wants to understand county government substantially better than when he started, remain accessible and responsive to constituents and identify several concrete opportunities involving infrastructure, traffic, maintenance and public health that can move forward during the remainder of his term.

Not every part of that standard can be measured from the outside.

Whether Holt believes he better understands county government is partly his own judgment.

But several outcomes can be checked.

TRP can examine what opportunities he identifies, what proposals or funding recommendations follow, what constituent-access practices he establishes and whether any public-health or infrastructure ideas move from research into Commission action.

That is where the first-100-days exercise becomes more useful.

The first 100 days can establish what Holt chooses to learn and which problems he decides deserve deeper attention.

The remainder of his term will establish what he does with that information.

Source Library

Source Library is excluded from the article word count.

1. Garrett Holt email response to Brandon Burley, received Sept. 9, 2026, at 11:55 p.m. ET — DIRECT SOURCE CLAIM / PRIMARY SOURCE.

Holt, Knox County commissioner for At-Large Seat 11, provided a written response describing his goals for his first 100 days. The source record reproduces his response verbatim, with only line wrapping and page layout normalized.

Holt identified three primary goals: learning county departments, budget and operations; exploring greater infrastructure and maintenance investment, including traffic and roads; and researching evidence-based public-health initiatives.

Holt also stated that many of those goals will extend beyond 100 days because infrastructure, transportation coordination and public-health improvements require longer time horizons. He defined early success as greater understanding of county government, accessibility to constituents and identification of concrete opportunities to pursue during the remainder of his term.

EVIDENCE BOUNDARY: This article reports Holt’s stated priorities and definition of success. His email does not establish that any infrastructure investment, traffic project, maintenance initiative or public-health program has been proposed, funded, approved or completed.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Earlier this year, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, showed its governing board a straightforward goal: get at least 70% of students t…

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Knox County commissioners approved a 20-year property-tax incentive for a South Knox County housing development even though the resolution authorizing the deal acknowledged that the project did not qualify under the county’s existing incentive criteria.

Eight days later, newly elected Mayor Betsy Henderson vetoed it.

Now a newly constituted County Commission could decide whether the deal survives.

Resolution R-26-8-905 concerns a proposal by DWF John Sevier LLC, connected to Dominion Group, to develop approximately 80 townhomes at 400 W. Gov. John Sevier Highway.

The agreement would authorize the Industrial Development Board of the County of Knox to provide a 50% abatement of county property taxes for 20 years. About half of the units would carry income and rent restrictions for households earning between 80% and 120% of area median income.

Commission approved the resolution 7-4 on Aug. 31, according to contemporaneous local reporting.

Henderson, who took office the next day, vetoed it Sept. 8.

The disagreement is not simply about whether Knox County needs more housing.

It is about how county government should evaluate a tax incentive when the project seeking it does not meet the criteria normally used to award one — and what the public receives in exchange.

The resolution acknowledged the exception

Knox County’s existing PILOT program is primarily structured around manufacturing, distribution and other economic-development projects.

The John Sevier resolution itself stated that the housing development did not qualify under the county’s current tax-incentive criteria.

Commission nevertheless approved the proposal after determining that the project could advance other public purposes.

That does not establish that housing falls outside the legal authority of the county Industrial Development Board.

The board says Tennessee law allows it to support projects involving industry, commerce, tourism, recreation and housing construction.

The narrower distinction is the important one.

This project was not approved because it satisfied Knox County’s existing PILOT criteria.

It was approved despite the resolution’s acknowledgment that it did not.

That makes the terms of the bargain especially important.

What the county would receive

The central public benefit offered in exchange for the incentive is income-restricted housing.

Approximately 40 of the roughly 80 townhomes would be reserved for households earning between 80% and 120% of the Knoxville-area median income, with corresponding rent restrictions.

That range is generally associated with workforce or middle-income housing rather than housing targeted exclusively to households with the lowest incomes.

The developer has also argued that the incentive matters to whether the project is financially feasible.

During a July County Commission meeting, Dominion Group President of Development Craig Cobb was asked whether the company would simply build the project without the PILOT and charge market-rate rents.

“We’d likely not pursue this,” Cobb said, according to Knoxville News Sentinel reporting.

That is consequential because it changes how the tax benefit should be evaluated.

But it remains a developer claim.

It does not, by itself, establish that the development is financially infeasible without the incentive.

Knox County’s PILOT process can require applicants to submit financial information and provide justification for why an incentive is needed. Those records could allow the public to examine the financial case rather than simply accept or reject the developer’s assertion.

The missing comparison

The basic incentive terms are clear:

50% of county property taxes for 20 years.

What is not established in the records reviewed by TRP is a complete 20-year comparison showing the taxes projected under full post-development taxation, the payments projected under the PILOT and the cumulative difference between them.

That difference matters.

But it needs to be described carefully.

A PILOT is not the same thing as Knox County writing the developer a check. It changes the property-tax obligation associated with the development.

And the difference between full projected taxes and PILOT payments is not necessarily money Knox County would otherwise collect.

If the developer is correct that the project would not proceed without the incentive, the relevant alternative could be continued taxation of the property in its existing condition rather than full taxation of a completed 80-unit development.

That is why both comparisons matter.

The public should be able to see:

What would the property generate under the proposed PILOT?

What would the completed development generate under full taxation?

What does the property generate now?

And what assumptions support the developer’s claim that the project would not proceed without the incentive?

Those figures would make it possible to evaluate the cost and benefit of the deal without pretending that one counterfactual has already been proven.

Henderson rejected the bargain

Henderson said she did not believe the proposed PILOT represented a good use of taxpayer resources and criticized government support for what she called “luxury townhomes.”

“Luxury” is the mayor’s characterization, not an independently established classification of the development.

Former Mayor Glenn Jacobs supported the proposal, arguing that it could add needed housing, put vacant land into productive use and increase the county tax base.

Those claims address different pieces of the same calculation.

A developed property receiving an abatement can generate more tax revenue than vacant land while still producing less county revenue than the same completed development would under full taxation.

The developer can also contend that the full-tax scenario is unrealistic if the project would not be built without the incentive.

The records needed to test those positions are therefore the financial projections behind the PILOT.

A new commission gets the question

The original vote occurred Aug. 31, the final day in office for several commissioners.

Three commissioners who supported the PILOT left office that night. Four new commissioners have since joined the 11-member body.

Seven votes are required to override Henderson’s veto.

Four commissioners who supported the proposal remain on the Commission. If their positions do not change, an override would require support from three additional members.

That means an override would not simply recreate the Aug. 31 vote.

A newly constituted Commission would be deciding whether to preserve an incentive approved by its predecessor.

Before that decision, the financial bargain can be made much easier for the public to evaluate.

A complete record would show the projected taxes under the PILOT, the projected taxes under full post-development taxation, the property’s current tax contribution, the estimated value of the 20-year incentive, the exact rent and income restrictions, their enforcement provisions and the financial analysis supporting the claim that the project depends on the incentive.

Those records would not decide whether the PILOT is good policy.

They would establish what the policy choice actually costs, what it buys and which assumptions the choice depends on.

Knox County may conclude that roughly 40 income-restricted townhomes justify an incentive outside its existing criteria.

It may conclude otherwise.

The question before the new Commission is not just whether to override a veto.

It is whether the documented public benefit and financial case justify the exception its predecessor approved.

And that is a question the underlying numbers should help the public answer.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Behind the Reporting

The Redemption Project reviewed Knox County Commission materials, Industrial Development Board PILOT program information, Commission rules, HUD income data and local reporting documenting the Aug. 31 vote and Henderson’s veto.

PILOT eligibility: The county resolution states that the project does not qualify

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