Joe Sullivan

The job of law director is more complicated in Knox County than most places because the director represents not only County Commission and the mayor, but also all of the county’s other independently elected officials including the Board of Education, ...

Mayor Rogero has made changing state law to reduce if not remove obstacles to delinquent-tax sales a top priority.

The initial announcement of state plans to close Lakeshore Mental Health Institute sent shock waves throughout the community. But local mental health advocates and service providers are convinced that the state’s plan will strengthen rather than weaken supports for the ...

The University of Tennessee is pursuing several ventures in assorted commercial realms, primarily in the name of economic development and job creation in the state. Since all of these endeavors come at a time when UT is generally in a ...

The 22-acre hillside on which Fort Stanley once was mounted has been acquired by the Aslan Foundation for a reported $750,000. That brings to more than $3 million the total Aslan has invested in protecting key portions of what’s also ...

Either a Republican victory in next year’s presidential election or an adverse U.S. Supreme Court decision could undermine implementation of the landmark federal health-care law that’s due to take full effect in 2014. But given the long lead-times needed to ...

ORNL and the University of Tennessee are plainly the Knoxville area’s two biggest economic assets. Not only are they among the area’s largest employers of the present, but they’re also the source of inventions and technologies that hold potential for ...

After a protracted process that’s involved a lot of wheel-spinning, the time has come for County Commission and City Council to jointly approve a Hillside and Ridgetop Protection Plan worthy of the name.

Not since 2008, when Green Mountain Coffee started roasting here and Sysco opened its big distribution center, has Knoxville seen a major new employer come to town.

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.

The $100 billion that an axe-wielding new Republican majority chopped from the federal budget in the House of Representatives last week wouldn’t make that big of a dent in the nation’s $1.6 trillion deficit for the current fiscal year. But ...

This past year’s economic recovery has begun to lift state revenues out of the deep hole into which they plunged during the Great Recession of the two preceding years. But even sustained continuation of the 4 percent growth rate experienced ...

Since its completion in 2008, the brick- and marble-clad Howard Baker Center has established an iconic presence on the University of Tennessee campus.

Before he became an outstanding governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen was a highly successful health-care entrepreneur. And I doubt whether anyone else in the land combines his grasp of the nation’s health-care system from the perspective of both public and ...

County Mayor Tim Burchett persists in proclaiming that he’s going to cut off county funding to the Ten-Year Plan for housing the chronically homeless unless its directors impose a ban on alcohol consumption that may well violate the federal Fair ...

Amid all the fanfare over plans for launching a new high school next year with a science, technology, engineering, and math emphasis, another noteworthy new high school program is also due to start at an existing school.

KCDC’s President Alvin Nance envisions a transformation of the Five Points area involving total replacement on a much more dispersed basis of the 500 housing units that are now crammed into Walter P. and its adjoining Dr. Lee Williams Complex ...

On the surface, both of the proposed charter schools embody innovative concepts that would appear worthy of consideration. One is for a grades 7-12 boarding school called the Booker T. Washington Academy to be located on the underutilized Knoxville College ...

Every time I hear the “Not in My Backyard” opposition arise to a prospective site for supportive housing that fulfills the city’s Ten-Year Plan for ending chronic homelessness, I think about my own experience with the homeless in my own ...

As the rest of downtown has flourished over the past decade, the stretch of Jackson Avenue between Gay Street and Broadway has remained dormant. Attempts to jump-start its revitalization through restoration of its most prominent buildings, the McClung Warehouses, went ...

With the city’s $30 million transit center now completed, there are scarcely any new city or county public building projects anywhere in prospect. Hence, it becomes less readily apparent what justifies continuation of the Public Building Authority’s $11 million annual ...

Knox County’s 3,217 high school graduates in 2007 fell more than 10 percent short of the mark, and fewer than half of them scored 21 or better on the ACT, representing an even bigger shortfall to be overcome.

On one of his last forays before being voted out of office, former County Commissioner Paul Pinkston aimed a punitive county ordinance at employers who hire illegal aliens.

Health care reform is by no means something that’s just being imposed from the top down by governmental mandates. It’s also emanating from the bottom up with initiatives on the part of doctors to change the way they practice medicine ...

After years of listening to University of Tennessee officialdom proclaim its resolve to achieve big gains in the university’s graduation rate, it’s disheartening to learn that the percentage of undergraduates earning degrees on the Knoxville campus has scarcely budged over ...

Bill Baxter’s disparagement of Bill Haslam in a recent guest column in the News Sentinel supporting Zach Wamp for governor reeks of peevishness on Baxter’s part.

After having stooped low in recent years, I’m encouraged to believe that Knox County government is on the verge of standing tall and becoming a major source of community strength and pride.

Amid growing concern across the political spectrum over mounting federal deficits, it’s hard to fathom how legislators could countenance the roughly $20 billion revenue loss that would result from letting estates go untaxed this year.

>One of Bill Haslam’s most daunting challenges and crowning accomplishments as mayor of Knoxville was giving birth to the Regal Riviera cinema on Gay Street that has contributed so much to downtown’s vitality

Granted that times are tough all over and granted further that not all of the position cuts would result in layoffs due to attrition. But reducing the number of public school classroom teachers is the last way the county should ...

In their zeal to enact financial regulatory reforms (many of which are needed), Democratic leaders in the Senate have chosen to heap most of the blame on Wall Street for the near collapse of the financial system in 2008 that ...

If Madeline Rogero lacked experience managing a complex organization when she accepted the post of director of the city’s Community Development Department in late 2006, she’s certainly got it now.

When its major provisions take effect in 2014, the health-care legislation that Congress exacted last month will extend coverage to 32 million Americans who are presently uninsured and millions more whose coverage is deficient.Yet, while generating a huge increase in ...

Without a doubt, restoring trust in Knox County government is what voters are most looking for in the new county mayor they will elect this year.

A bright spot amid the gloomy outlook for public school funding in Knox County is the activation of a foundation whose goal is to raise several million dollars a year in private contributions to complement the school system’s public funding.

While landing Urban Outfitters is by no means a done deal, the prospect of doing so is testament to a number of attributes now working in the city’s favor.