Of the 64 counties in Tennessee that have a single countywide school system, Knox County is one of only four in which school board districts are not aligned with County Commission districts.

The dispute over whether Amazon.com should collect sales tax on its online sales to Tennesseans needs to be resolved. But the solution needs to come from Washington, not Nashville, and it should apply to all online retailers, not just Amazon.

Joe Sullivan: When Metro Pulse started in 1991, I was looking, at age 54, to undertake what amounted to my fourth career.

Amid all the hoopla over developing clean, sustainable alternatives to oil and coal to fuel the nation’s vehicles and power plants, one that tends to get overlooked by many is natural gas.

Mark Padgett’s candidacy for mayor of Knoxville rests heavily on his business experience and accomplishments. Yet questions abound about just how successful Padgett has been in building his business.

At a school board meeting last week, Tim Burchett unveiled a plan for funding construction of the new school without borrowing a nickel. Instead, most of the money would be raised by selling county-owned property and applying the proceeds to ...

According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, Knoxville is the worst city in the nation for allergies. But how did they come to that conclusion? Joe Sullivan tracks down their numbers.

There’s a decennial rite of passage in Knox County’s body politic that occurs after new census population figures are released, as 2010’s were this spring.

For all the disagreement in Washington, there’s broad bipartisan consensus on curtailing an estimated $1.1 trillion annual revenue drain in the form of what are known as tax expenditures. These backdoor outlays encompass the benefits of a myriad of federal ...

The perception abounds that efforts to provide permanent supportive house for the chronically homeless have been put on hold pending the outcome of a public process being conducted by a task force aptly named Compassion Knoxville. But such is not ...

Given all that’s being done to raise the public education bar in Tennessee, it’s hard to fathom why the state Senate has approved a bill to let low-income students use public school funds to pay for private school tuition.

The publicized $384.7 million budget that the school board approved earlier this month doesn’t begin to tell the full story of the money going to Knox County schools in the year ahead.

In adopting a bill purporting to void the federal health-care law’s mandate that individuals be insured or pay a penalty, state legislators have thumbed their nose at the U.S. Constitution.

Charter provisions requiring that the budgets of the county clerk, register of deeds, and trustee be approved by the Knox County mayor and County Commission have been disregarded—an issue which arose at a contentious County Commission workshop on Monday.

The impending federal budget confrontation between the Obama administration and newly empowered congressional Republicans could represent a tipping point for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.