Southern Middle TN Today News with Tom Price 5-22-25

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Southern Middle Tennessee Today

News Copy for May22, 2025

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

We start with local news…

Budget Committee Discusses School Costs (MSM)

For most of four hours, the Maury County Budget Committee talked to representatives of Maury County Public Schools, sometime contentiously, about requested budget increases. The two most discussed items were how to fund the new $50,000 state-mandated minimum wage for teachers and what to do to ease the overcrowding of county schools.

Teacher LeAnn Simmerman, who works in eight different elementary schools throughout the county, asked the committee to institute the minimums and secure new teaching spaces. Citing National Education Association numbers, she claimed that teacher pay in Tennessee was hardly a few hundred dollars more than the state’s metro-area cost of living.

“Even the most committed teachers cannot stay in this [line of] work if the costs to do so continue to rise, financially and emotionally,” she said.

She testified to teaching in literally any space into which she could fit her students: hallways, storage rooms, administrative offices, even next to the bathrooms.

“Supporting fair, livable teacher pay and committing to new facilities are two of the most urgent, impactful steps you can take.”

School Board Chairman Will Sims spoke first on the board’s requested funding increases. On top of the district’s $154,275,178 annual budget, they asked the Budget Committee for a 4 percent increase, about $6.6 million. $5.3 million of this would go to teacher raises, which are required by the state: this school year a $47,000 minimum kicks in, which rises to $50,000 the next year. Perryman revealed that all of the counties surrounding Maury, several of them with far less concentrated municipal or personal wealth, have already instituted minimum teacher wages of $50,000 or close to it, which could entice teachers away from Maury.

However, at the same time, the state raised Maury County’s Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement or TISA minimum funding requirement, demanding another $900,000 in “maintenance of effort” (on top of the $58 million it currently pays for its own schools) and citing the county’s “ability to pay.”

Sales taxes have been generous to the school district, though they haven’t covered all costs. Though MCPS budgeted a deficit of $7 million this year, the actual shortfall for the year was closer to $2.2 million because of sales tax revenue. The year before, sales taxes made up $8 million of the schools’ projected deficit.

Sims pointed out that they had also had to add Battle Creek High School’s expenses after the year’s budget had been decided, so the deficit could be even further reduced with a little more provision. To make up the difference in the next year, he asked the Budget Committee to allocate them 10.3 cents from the county property tax, totaling $4.64 million. County Finance Director Doug Lukonen reminded the Committee that in the past, MCPS had been able to appropriate up to half the property taxes, but it had shrunk to 38 percent since they set the tax rate at $1.91.

Commissioner Scott Sumners pointed out that 15 cents of the property-tax surplus was already spoken for, leaving only a few cents to move around. He asked what had happened to the $16 million windfall the state gave the district in 2023; Sims replied that most of it went to personnel raises of 8.6 percent. Sumners chided that MCPS should’ve kept more of it and complained about the state requiring the new minimum the same year they yanked almost a million dollars from the county.

Commissioner Gabe Howard came out strongly in favor of the new minimum pay, citing the importance of investing in teachers and in children.

“Eight hours of the day [students are] in a bed, eight hours of the day they’re hopefully with their parents… and eight hours of the day they’re with teachers,” he said.

Commissioner Tommy Wolaver asked whether the county could fund the teacher raises without taking any property-tax pennies. Lukonen suggested that the county could forgive the district’s $2.9 million debt-service payment for the year, but without some kind of new appropriation of funds, the district’s maintaining-effort status with the state would be in danger within a few years.

Sumners and Wolaver were partial to the idea of laying out $2 million in 2025-26, a $3,800 teacher raise across the board to bring them all up to the current minimum of $47,000, and spending another $3 million the next year, to reach the $50,000 minimum when it gained legal force. This year’s raise would only require 4.4 property-tax cents, instead of 10.3. Ultimately they moved to postpone voting on a teacher raise to the May 29 meeting, so that it could be discussed with other capital concerns.

The other, and much more hotly debated question was how to deal with overcrowding in the schools. The school district, represented by Eric Perryman and a few commissioners, revived their demand to build a new elementary school on the $4 million property they’d already bought off of Carters Creek Pike, but most of the commissioners on the Budget Committee wanted to look at all options first, from installing portable buildings to reshuffling school populations, before committing to a new school.

Commissioner Gabe Howard challenged Perryman’s claim that construction costs went up 12 percent over the previous year (from $45 million in 2024 to $53.3 million in 2025), calling it “disingenuous” and “not even factually correct.” Howard also claimed that population pressure on the schools may be great, but it’s not directly proportional to the population growth of the area: with all the people that have moved to Maury County, school populations have still only grown about 3.5 percent. He hypothesized that many people are either withdrawing their children from the public school system or not enrolling them when they move here.

“You said around 10,000 houses are on the books? Well, I’ll just shoot from the hip; been there, done that!” Howard said. “We didn’t see the growth [in schools] that came with that.”

Howard and Commissioner Davis Burkhalter proposed that the district accommodate students in other ways: installing portables, building new wings or rezoning students into different districts. Commissioner Kenny Morrow even floated the idea of sending Spring Hill High’s 650 students to Battle Creek High and converting the high school into the desired elementary school for North Columbia.

Perryman strongly resisted the prospect of rezoning students from one school to another, saying that it would hurt their academic performance. Last year Maury was one of three Tennessee counties that achieved nationwide-high scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP test), an accomplishment recognized by the federal government; he opposed anything that would put those scores in danger and pleaded instead for the commission to consider building an elementary school on the already-purchased property.

“I understand your concerns, the things you like and don’t like, [but] the school board did look at that and [still decided] that this is the best option, so it has come back to you for consideration,” Perryman explained. “I know what it’ll do to my tax bill… [and] the traffic on my road, but you judge a community by how they value their children… Our elementary schools are squeezed. Luckily they’re the cheapest [schools] to build, even though they’re not cheap.”

Motions to fund a school or to bring the issue to the full commission died for lack of a second, and no action was taken by the Budget Committee on school accommodation. Perryman had argued hard during the discussion period, but he took the committee’s final decision very evenly.

“Madam Chairman, thank you for the school buses,” he said. “Thank you temporarily for the million dollars… I do appreciate the conversation [and] your consideration.”

The committee ultimately moved its important items to May 29 for discussion. Balancing the highway, school and other capital funds will require some skill on the committee’s part.

“If these things don’t get funded, it just pushes everything else further down the line,” Sumners warned. “We’re gonna have to look at everything again… We may be in for a long night.”

Veterans’ Court (MSM)

Military veterans often have a hard time readjusting to civilian life, and one of their most common complaints is that it lacks the solidarity and camaraderie they experienced in their units. The trauma they experienced also prompts some of the less stable ones to act out when they return home, and they can get into trouble with the law.

A handful of veterans want to change that for their brothers who get involved with the Maury County court system. Bill Wittpenn, Morley Levine and others are working to create a “veterans’ mental health court” here. It would be an alternative “pipeline” for veterans who end up in front of a judge: instead of being sent away to jail like any other lawbreaker, they would be put in the charge of a group of other veterans, who would mentor them in a group setting and help them adjust to their new life.

Wittpenn, a master’s-certified counselor, works now for the Center for Family Development, a grant-based nonprofit with an office on West Seventh Street in Columbia, which offers counseling programs like Healthy Families, Parents as Teachers, Relative Caregivers and Connecting Generations. He specializes in working with traumatized boys and with Connecting Generations, which helps people to either raise their grandchildren (if the parents are out of the picture for some reason or another) or board grandchildren recovering from addiction or trauma in their own homes.

“I think I have an in-road because I am a veteran and a grandfather,” he chuckled. “All the Vietnam veterans are grandparents by now, and the younger veterans certainly need support. Anything we can do from the standpoint of family development.”

He sees adverse childhood experiences as the real root of bad behavior, including that of adults, and thinks that healing emotional wounds intelligently will help cure the bad behavior even of adults.

Wittpenn has lived in many places across the country, including Billings, Mont., where he encountered his first veterans’ court in that state’s 13th District.

“A judge was telling a young guy, ‘We’re not gonna send you to jail, but there’s a group of men that are sitting in my courtroom who are advocating and volunteering and want to help… You’re accountable to them,'” Wittpenn recalled.

He got involved with the counseling group, which started with coffee meetings, fishing on the Musselshell and Yellowstone rivers and going on retreats in the Bull Mountains.

“In that environment outside, camping with other guys, these young guys were able to open up and share what they needed to share. Cause they weren’t gonna share it with just anybody.”

In 2024 Wittpenn moved to Tennessee, which has 92 “specialty courts” among its 95 counties: 56 for adult recovery, 18 for mental health and 11-12 veteran treatment courts, including one in Williamson County run by Judge J.P. Taylor. Wittpenn met the judge, and Morley Levine, through Williamson’s Post 1140 of the Vietnam Veterans of America, and they started talking about what it would take to bring a similar court to Maury County. Levine serves as a kind of unofficial liaison between Vet2Vet, Operation Stand Down and other veterans’ groups that came to the Post 1140 meeting where Judge Taylor spoke.

“There’s a lot of support for it, I just haven’t seen it ramped up,” Wittpenn said.

Local attorneys like Tom Dubois, an Army Reserve veteran of 18 years, would help a great deal. Dubois was a judge-advocate and general attorney in the Army from 1991-96; now he serves as judge-advocate for Columbia’s American Legion Post 19. He stays in touch with his comrades through Vet2Vet meetings every Monday morning at Puckett’s, to which everyone but especially veterans are invited.

When Dubois ran for a circuit-court judgeship in 2014, the other Vet2Vet members asked him to start a veterans’ court, and he was friendly to the idea, especially after hearing Judge Taylor talk about it at a Post 1140 meeting.

“Being a veteran myself, I would like to explore it. Anything that would help veterans in the court system, I’m all for it,” he stated. “Veterans are a tight-knit group, very mission-oriented, and we like to help each other. It’s as simple as that.”

Like many forms of counseling that reintegrate people into community, it also has a much lower recidivism rate than the state courts. Still, the rest of the judicial system has to come onboard with the thing: the district attorney, public defenders, law enforcement, judges, local officials and the public.

“If they see this as something beneficial for veterans that are struggling or having a tough time or in the court system,” Dubois said, “we’ll see if this is an alternative for them.”

Several veterans are either ready, or are undergoing training, to be mentors alongside Wittpenn. Unlike in some drug and alcohol recovery programs, they don’t have to be especially troubled themselves to mentor troubled veterans, as brotherhood in arms seems to establish their credibility with other vets.

Wittpenn has met veterans everywhere, including in the Bedford County jail where he practices moral reconation therapy. He thinks that even the more rural counties could use a treatment court, or at least leverage the veterans in local churches and civic organizations as mentors for those in the penal system.

“They’re out there, and they’re looking to still serve,” he said. “Hopefully we won’t need to have any more veterans from foreign wars anymore… but we still have the ones that are here now and need help.”

BOMA Approves Airport Extension (CDH)

After months of discussion, the Spring Hill Board of Mayor & Aldermen approved a second and final reading May 19 to extend development plans for what could potentially become a city airport.

Richmond Company, owner of the 499.68-acre property known as Spring Hill Commerce Center just east of Interstate 65 on Jim Warren Road, requested a one-year extension on the project development plans, which were set to expire in January 2026.

The request stemmed from a number of recent delays and changes to the project, including a 1,000 unit reduction to the site's number of residences as well as an airport district consideration.

Richmond Company President Phil Paston also said there have been significant changes on the federal side of things, which has caused certain aspects of the project to go back to square one.

"We worked with the Biden administration, hired a lobbyist, filled out all of the criteria, hired a consultant and spent $55,000 in getting ready, and then we have a new president," Paston said. "New presidents have different agendas."

During the board's May 5 work session, Development Services Director Dara Sanders said if the extension was not granted, the applicant would have less than a year to complete a significant amount of preliminary work, which if not met, would result in the property reverting back to its original I-2 industrial use zoning.

Preliminary work includes "installation of utilities, obtaining a grading permit to install utilities or obtain site plan approval for at least one of the properties in the project boundary," Sanders explained.

Another project delay, Sanders added, can be attributed to a federal funding application to widen the Jim Warren overpass at I-65 to accommodate traffic generated by the project.

"It seems that some of the rules associated with the program for that particular pot of federal money have changed a bit, and it looks like the developer may not be successful in their application, which is sponsored by the City of Spring Hill," Sanders said.

Paston said the Richmond Company plans to fund the bridge privately and is "about 30% through" the bridge's design. Construction will likely begin in early 2026, with an estimated completion date of August or September 2027.

"I feel that, as a developer, I did everything I needed to do, but because of politics, got stuck," Paston said. "That's the biggest reason."

The property falls within the Maury County water district, meaning Spring Hill could not determine utility costs. There is also a need for an updated traffic study.

"We had to find water somewhere else," Paston said. "Maury County said they would be happy to sell us water, but we'd have to pay a big price, a little over half of the improvements we would require, to give you that water. They have the water, but need a system in place, which was $12,500,000."

The board approved the extension on first reading at the May 5 work session ahead of the second and final reading on May 19.

"There are still some things to work through on the development agreement ... but like Mr. Paston said, they have run into a lot of unexpected things on this project and have been a good partner with the city thus far," Vice Mayor Trent Linville said at the May 5 meeting. "It would be a misstep for us not to give them the grace of an extra time frame."

Mayor Matt Fitterer said Richmond Company's willingness to reduce the original plan for residential should be taken into consideration.

"This was zoned for many, many thousands of residential units," Fitterer said. "Did Richmond Company rezone this maybe a little bit early? Maybe, but they did the city a favor in doing that. And none of us want 500-plus acres of I-2 development without a comprehensive plan to it."

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

Nicho Joshua “Joshy” Soliz Jr., 22, resident of Columbia, died Saturday, May 17, 2025 at Maury Regional Medical Center after a lifelong battle with Muscular Dystrophy.

A memorial service will be conducted on Saturday, May 24, 2025 at 1:00 PM at Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home with Don Morrow officiating. The Family will visit with friends on Saturday from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM at Oakes & Nichols Funeral Home.

Sandra Tate Halliday, aged 68 of Columbia, Tennessee passed away peacefully on May 19th .

A visitation will be held in the Parish Hall at St. Peter's Episcopal Church on Friday, May 30 from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Graveside services will be held at St. John’s Churchyard following the visitation at 1:00 PM conducted by The Rev. Theodore Edwards, Jr. Oakes & Nichols Funeral Directors are assisting the family with arrangements.

And now, news from around the state…

Governor Will Not Stop Smith Death Sentence (NewsChannel5)

Gov. Bill Lee said he will not intervene in the execution of Oscar Franklin Smith.

Smith is set to die by lethal injection today, May 22.

"After deliberate consideration of Oscar Franklin Smith’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene."

In 2022, Oscar Franklin Smith was scheduled to receive a lethal injection for the 1989 killings of his estranged wife, Judith Robirds Smith, and her teenage sons — Jason Burnett and Chad Burnett. But an oversight in preparation for the lethal injection caused a delay. The execution method is the state’s preferred means.

Smith was convicted of killing the three in their Woodbine home in 1989. Throughout the years, Judith Smith had filed domestic violence charges against Smith. A relative, 8-years-old, found the family dead.

Smith has been on death row since the 90s. His legal team made numerous attempts to stop the execution, however, a federal judge denied his most recent motion.

His attorney Kelley Henry has been trying to stop Smith's execution by lethal injection.

In early April, Smith and death row inmate Byron Black asked Gov. Bill Lee for a reprieve on death row executions because of the state's lethal injection method.

They asked the governor to halt executions until March 1, 2026, when a trial on the constitutionality of Tennessee's new execution protocol is scheduled. That will happen at the end of the year.

“Governor Lee has, in the past, used his power to prevent Tennessee from making irreparable mistakes," Henry said. "We had hoped he would do so again. There is no principled reason to allow the State to resume executions before the court has an opportunity to hear all of the evidence about whether TDOC is sourcing its lethal chemicals legally, whether those chemicals are uncontaminated, unexpired, and undiluted, and whether the execution team is capable of carrying out its duties competently and constitutionally. Tennessee can do better than this."

Four executions are slated for this year. This is Smith's fourth execution date.

Final Story of the Day (Maury County Source)

FirstBank Amphitheater's 2025 concert season kicks off next week with 12 shows scheduled throughout the summer featuring music from country to metal.

The 7,500-person outdoor venue opened in 2021 inside of a former quarry, and was named as “Best VIP Music Experience” as part of our 2025 Williamson's Best awards.

May 30

Cody Jinks and Tanner Usery

June 19

Riley Green's Damn Country Music Tour with Ella Langley, Lauren Watkins and Preston Cooper

June 25

The Outlaw Music Festival’s 10th anniversary tour will feature Willie Nelson and Family, Bob Dylan, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats, Trampled By Turtles and Tami Neilson