Southern Middle TN Today News with Tom Price 3-24-26

WKOM/WKRM Radio

Southern Middle Tennessee Today

News Copy for March 24, 2026

All news stories are aggregated from various sources and modified for time and content. Original sources are cited.

High Winds Spark Fires (MauryCountySource)

Fire crews responded to multiple incidents as strong winds fueled fire activity across the area Friday.

According to the Maury County Fire Department, one fire broke out on Blue Ridge Drive, where crews deployed forestry hose lines to contain a brush fire that was threatening a nearby shed. Firefighters also cut down two trees to help stop the flames from spreading.

As crews were clearing that scene, a second fire was reported on Rippey Lake Road. Officials say a brush pile that was being burned spread to a barn and nearby wooded areas. Additional units, including mutual aid from Mt. Pleasant, responded to bring the fire under control, with firefighters working to contain hotspots and remove burning trees.

Fugus Found at Magnolia Health (WSMV)

Columbia Fire & Rescue released a statement on Monday stating it would not respond to any medical calls from Magnolia Health on Trotwood Avenue due to 'infection control concerns.'

The department sent a letter to Maury Regional EMS on Thursday, in which it explained that its protocol will be active until further notice as Magnolia Health reportedly navigates the spread of Candida auris (C. auris), a fungus that can cause severe infections.

Columbia Fire & Rescue said they are taking precaution to prevent any potential exposure of a 'difficult-to-control organism.'

The station added that while it will not respond to medical calls from Magnolia Health, it will respond to fire-related (fire alarms, structure fires, etc.) calls.

Ultium Switching to Data Battery Production (MSM)

Ultium Cells LLC, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Energy Solution, has announced it will begin producing lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries for Energy Storage Systems (ESS) enabled by a $70 million investment in process retooling to be completed by the second quarter of 2026.

Ultium Cells will deliver the ESS LFP battery cells to LG Energy Solution Vertech, the U.S. energy storage division of LG Energy Solution which offers vertically integrated ESS including proprietary software, lifecycle services, and advanced warranties. The Spring Hill facility will use LG Energy Solution’s technology expertise and customer experience in ESS batteries that were cultivated through its standalone facility in Holland, Michigan. Completed cells will be packaged by LG Energy Solution into large, U.S-made ESS enclosures that support grid-scale and data center projects throughout North America.

LG Energy Solution aims to increase its global ESS battery production capacity to over 60GWh this year, with more than 80 percent of that capacity to be located in North America. Ultium Cells Spring Hill joins LG Energy Solution’s North American ESS network which comprises wholly owned facilities in Holland and Lansing, Mich. and Windsor, Ont., along with its joint venture with Honda, L-H Battery Company. By the end of 2026, all of these facilities will have at least some production capacity dedicated to the company’s JF2 LFP pouch cell, its standard ESS product.

“Spring Hill is becoming a key hub in our North American ESS manufacturing footprint which has helped offset slower than expected EV demand” said Bob Lee, president of LG Energy Solution North America. “The explosive growth in energy storage diversifies our customer base and product portfolio and provides tangible benefits to American competitiveness in this decade and beyond.”

ESS help bolster, modernize and expand the grid to keep up with the electricity needs of natural population growth along with the increasing demand of AI data centers and electrification. They capture and store electricity created by traditional energy sources like oil and gas as well as renewables like wind and solar. Storing grid-scale electricity was previously difficult to achieve outside of specific geographic circumstances, like pumped storage hydropower.

In addition to making the grid more reliable and resilient by stabilizing output and compensating for fluctuations, battery-powered ESS also shorten the lead times for both grid expansion and data center construction.

LFP has become the dominant and preferred chemistry for ESS as it’s much more affordable than the high-nickel chemistries that are more prevalent in EVs. Cost is the primary factor in batteries for ESS deployments which are stationary and thus require less focus on reducing size and weight compared to EV applications.

“This announcement marks Ultium Cells’ first major retooling of the Spring Hill process equipment and reflects the company’s continued evolution as a diversified battery cell manufacturer,” said Injae Pahk, President, CEO of Ultium Cells. “By evolving production to meet changing market demands, Ultium Cells is reinforcing its long-term position as a key employer and technology leader in the U.S. battery cell sector.”

The Ultium Cells Spring Hill cell production equipment is currently being retooled, and the workforce is undergoing retraining to support the specific requirements of ESS LFP cell manufacturing. The 700 employees furloughed in January are in the process of returning to work to support the launch of the new product line. The facility is expected to produce its first ESS LFP cells in Q2 2026.

Ultium Cells’ versatile manufacturing platform supports multiple cell chemistries, helping drive U.S. battery innovation, manufacturing, and consumer choice in the EV market, while also demonstrating the ability to adapt quickly as battery technologies evolve. As part of this flexibility, NCMA GEN1 Cell production has been consolidated to Ultium Cells Warren, Ohio.

For more information about Ultium Cells, please visit ultiumcell.com.

County Commission Talks Current Issues (MSM)

The Maury County Commission’s March meeting was full of resolutions, debate and public comment about how to move forward with critical issues at and above the county level.

The commissioners weighed in on last week’s vote by the House Agricultural Subcommittee to designate the whole Duck River as a Class II Scenic River (HB1510/SB1590). Several Maury County residents, especially members of government bodies and advocacy groups, showed up to the hearing and spoke in favor of the designation, and by the time of the vote, over 6,000 people had sent emails in support of the bill to state legislators on the subcommittee. The State Senate has already passed the bill.

District 73 Rep. Chris Todd proposed an amendment, which failed, in order to allow property owners to establish landfills within two miles of a Scenic River. Todd claimed that the Scenic Rivers act was being “weaponized” against prospective landfills, via extensive lobbying and fundraising, by “a few people from Maury County [who] do not want trash in their backyard.” He argued that rezoning the whole Duck River against landfills was functionally equivalent to “taking people’s property,” a violation of the Fifth Amendment, and he predicted that the state government would pay out “hundreds of millions” if people were to sue.

“Rep. Todd pretty much shamed all Maury County in the [subcommittee] last week,” pointed out County Commissioner Scott Sumners, and he wondered whether the landfill amendment would be brought back.

Maury County Mayor Sheila Butt forecast that those with influence in the State House, in which she served for eight years, would use it to get the bill through the Ag & Natural Resources Committee vote on March 24. She also pointed out that Sen. Ken Yager and Rep. Kelly Keisling have floated SB2172/HB2202, which would ban landfills anywhere in certain counties through which a Scenic River passes.

“That will drive Rep. Todd crazy,” she chuckled.

The other bill discussed at length by the commission was HB2419/SB2311, which would require cities across the state to conduct financial and service studies and seek approval from the county commission before annexing properties of five acres or more.

“The thing we’ve really got to get serious about is… [for] our representatives to sign onto these bills… We want a seat at the table [during annexations, but]… these bills are not even being heard,” said Commissioner Gabe Howard, who also congratulated Commissioner Mike Kuzawinski for spending two days at the Capitol speaking in favor of the bill. “The more that you talk about this… The more the cities will come to the table.”

“It’s going to die in an election year. The city people will go crazy,” Butt avowed. “[But] the more that you talk about it, the more chance you have of bringing the cities to the table.”

“It’s a good starting point even if it does fail,” Sumners said, whose stated goal is to work with the city to find a settlement both can live with — if the county can’t get a “veto” over annexations, he said, authoritative input would be enough for him.

“While this bill probably won’t pass, we started something,” Kuzawinski said, and he agreed with Sumners about reaching an understanding with cities. “The whole point is to cooperate, not dictate.”

This month, the commission and its Administrative Committee will jointly choose the first new county attorney in more than 17 years. Daniel Murphy resigned earlier this month, in protest against a resolution that would have ordered him to stop representing CPWS as they work on a project contested by the county.

The county will hold public interviews for the first round of candidates at 4:30 on March 24, and afterwards the commission will meet to discuss and pick the four best candidates. Those candidates will be brought back for the second round of interviews, which are to be held at the same time on March 30, then the commission will deliberate and vote to hire the final candidate.

While Commissioner Kenny Morrow favored taking longer than two weeks to replace a top official of almost two decades’ experience, Administrative Committee Chair Eric Previti reminded the commission that they agreed the county couldn’t afford to go for any period of time without a permanent or interim attorney.

Some commissioners had high praise for Murphy. Sumners recalled that he got a lot of help from the county attorney as a freshman commissioner in 2014.

“Thank you for your guidance… in the [17] years you’ve guided this county commission,” said former Commission Chair Kevin Markham.

Bill Calls for School Internet Limitation (MSM)

District 64 State Rep. Scott Cepicky and District 28 State Sen. Joey Hensley have introduced a bill that would require districts and schools to create “whitelists” of approved websites and fence off the rest of the Internet on school-issued computers.

HB1886/SB1912 would require school districts to “only allo[w] access to websites that are deemed by the… school as acceptable to access.” On the same principle, the bill would eliminate email and chatroom access from fifth-grade classes and below, allow parents to report instances to the school when their child accesses off-limits content, and require school districts to review their policies twice a year and report bad use to parents within 24 hours. It also expands the existing prohibitions on “pornography, obscenity and materials that are harmful to minors” to include self-harming, frightening and age-inappropriate content.

Elle Benson, the main advocate of the new bill, said that most of the school Internet policies she’s read only disclaim responsibility for how students use their computers, and in practice they shift the burden onto teachers to monitor their students’ Internet use. A teacher from Knox County told Benson that she could either teach her students, or make sure they weren’t goofing off (or worse) on their school laptops; she couldn’t do both in a school day.

The safeguards also seem to be inadequate to actually keep students from pulling up inappropriate or distracting content. Both Benson and Steve Woerner (executive director of the Children’s Advocacy Centers in the state) tell stories of the relatively mild trouble their own children have gotten into with school laptops: Benson learned that her third-grade daughter was able to use hers to watch troubling and violent videos, which deeply disturbed both her daughter and one of her classmates, and Woerner’s second-grade son used his to look up the definitions of bad words he heard on the bus.

“My story is [unfortunate], but once I dug in, my story is pretty minimal compared to some I’ve heard,” Benson said.

While organizing and fact-finding across the state, she “heard horrifying stories:” students with unrestricted access to YouTube, sexual predators trawling open forums in the hope of making contact with middle and high school students.

Some of this is facilitated by the open, public nature of some of the software and apps used in public schools, most notably Google Classroom; but the students are often crafty at accessing off-limits content, and the current Internet safety regime in Tennessee schools is too limited to stop all of it. The most recent version of the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act, Benson says, hasn’t been updated in 12 years, in which time the Internet has changed a great deal and students have found new ways around old safeguards.

“The elementary school students are mostly seeing this accidentally… but the high schoolers are smart,” Benson told Main Street Maury. “They can access content and get around school controls.”

The experts who spoke for the bill presented terrifying statistics and anecdotes about the danger of giving children unlimited Internet access. Pediatric Dr. Nidhi Gupta, Woerner said, testified to the legislature that no peer-reviewed studies have found that children benefit from using digital technology; instead, scientists have found that addiction, bullying, exposure and other harms often come from inside screens, and they pose special harm to younger, developing children.

As an example, Woerner pointed out to Main Street Maury that the average age of first exposure to pornography, usually accidental, is now 11 years old. His Children’s Advocacy Centers also deal with many cases of online grooming, solicitation, scams and extortion of children by adults.

“Sextortion and online threats to kids are the fastest-growing area we see, and it’s just getting worse and worse,” he said. As a result, all of the Children’s Advocacy Centers support the bill.

The “whitelists” would be created by each school or district and would vary by grade and maturity level. Benson noted happily that some larger school districts have already volunteered to share their lists with smaller districts, whose staff will have a lot of work to do just installing and maintaining the safeguards on students’ computers.

“Kindergarteners shouldn’t be seeing the same things as tenth-graders,” Benson said. But advocates say some kind of walled garden is necessary so that students can do classwork and research on acceptable sites and pages, while being banned from the practically infinite possible number of “bad” ones.

“It becomes a balance between safety and workload,” Woerner said. “The response of the [bill] sponsors is that the safety of children is more important than having to send an email to an information team to get a website added.”

“There are so many valuable educational websites out there,” said Benson. “Rather than blocking the harmful ones, let’s open the doors to the safe websites.”

Professional interest groups, Woerner reported, haven’t resisted the bill: advocacy groups for school superintendents and school boards, as well as the state educational authority, have supported the substance of the bill even though some express reservations.

“None are pushing back on it hard,” he said.

Woerner ended the conversation by reporting that the state legislators were interested in the bill; children’s online safety had been a priority of theirs for years, but they hadn’t settled on a specific solution for it.

He’s hopeful that both chambers will pass the final bill “behind the budget.” HB1886 has been passed out of committee in the House and is awaiting a House vote; SB1912 is expected to make it past the Finance, Ways and Means Committee and go up for a Senate vote too.

MRMC Rated Great Place to Work (MauryCountySource)

Maury Regional Health (MRH) has been certified by Great Place To Work® for the third consecutive year, reaffirming the organization’s ongoing commitment to cultivating an inclusive, supportive and collaborative workplace where employees feel valued, respected and empowered to thrive. Based entirely on direct feedback from employees, the Great Place to Work® designation reflects MRH’s strong workplace culture and its dedication to listening to team members and investing in their success.

“Our employees are the heart of Maury Regional Health, and their input continues to guide how our culture evolves,” said CEO Martin Chaney, MD. “Earning Great Place to Work certification for a third consecutive year reflects the strong sense of trust and engagement across our work community. By listening and supporting one another, as well as focusing on the personal and professional growth of our teammates, we create a work experience centered on shared purpose, mutual respect and collaboration that keeps us connected to our mission.”

Great Place To Work is the global authority on workplace culture, employee experience and leadership behaviors proven to drive employee retention, innovation and organizational performance. Certification is determined through the Great Place to Work Trust Index Survey, which measures employee perceptions of credibility, fairness, respect, pride and camaraderie, along with a culture brief completed by the organization.

“Great Place To Work Certification is a highly coveted achievement that requires consistent and intentional dedication to the overall employee experience,” says Sarah Lewis-Kulin, the Vice President of Global Recognition at Great Place To Work. “By successfully earning this recognition, it is evident that Maury Regional Health stands out as one of the top companies to work for, providing a great workplace environment for its employees.”

Maury Regional Health is committed to providing an environment where employees can grow and excel in their chosen profession. In addition to robust professional development opportunities, MRH offers one of the most comprehensive and competitive benefits packages in Middle Tennessee, including medical, dental and vision insurance plans; merit-based pay increases; flexible shift options; an on-site daycare center; education assistance for qualifying candidates; access to earned wages before payday; financial counseling and career navigation support; local discounts; and more.

And now, Your Hometown Memorials, Sponsored by Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home…

Raymond Carmelo Vega, 46, a resident of Columbia, passed away unexpectedly Tuesday, March 17, 2026 doing what he loved.

A memorial service will be held at a later date. Online condolences may be extended at www.oakesandnichols.com.

James “Jim, Jimmy” Jackson Tucker Jr., 79, passed away March 22, at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville following open heart surgery.

Funeral services will be conducted Saturday, March 28, 2026 at 10:00 AM at Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home. Burial will follow in Rose Hill Cemetery. The family will visit with friends Friday from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home.

And now, news from around the state…

Trump in Memphis (Tennessean)

President Donald Trump told a Memphis crowd yesterday he loves Tennessee so much that he may move here.

During a speech in Memphis about the Memphis Safe Task Force's work, the president expressed his appreciation for Tennessee due to the consistent support he receives.

"I love Tennessee," Trump said. "Maybe someday I'll move to Tennessee, I might have to move."

During his speech, the president discussed the drop in crime, the increase in arrests, and the overall shift in the city's perception. Trump also mentioned his love for Tennessee and a possible visit to Graceland following his press event.

Trump made a stop in Memphis on March 23, to promote the victories of the Memphis Safe Task Force, which began working to reduce crime in September 2025, following the president's executive order.

The multi-agency task force, which includes federal, state and local law enforcement organizations, has made 7,240 arrests and seized 1,188 firearms since operations began in September 2025, according to the White House.

The stage included Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel and Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, among other state and federal public officials.

State Reps. Mark White and John Gillespie, both Republicans representing portions of Shelby County, and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti were also in attendance.

Final Story of the Day (Maury County Source)

Centennial Park Conservancy announced that Nashville Earth Day, the city’s only official annual event to celebrate Earth Day, will return to Centennial Park Bandshell on Saturday, April 18 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Nashville Earth Day will feature engaging and educational activities from more than 75 exhibitors and vendors, including local growers and makers, nonprofits, sustainable small businesses, state/metro government agencies, and vendor partners.

The event will also include free live music, dynamic Kidsville activities for all ages, and local food vendors. 

Learn more at www.nashvilleearthday.org.