Who Needs TV When We Got East Ridge?

Who Needs TV When We Got East Ridge?  Municipalities Gather For Appreciation Luncheon

By Robin Ford Wallace

            City mayors and councilmen from across the Tri-state area gathered today in Chattanooga for a special “East Ridge Appreciation Luncheon,” featuring dignitaries from that Tennessee municipality as guests of honor.

            “We want the East Ridge city fathers to know how grateful the rest of us are,” said one member of the Chattanooga City Council.  “They make everybody else look like heroes.”

            “Right,” said a council colleague.  “Seems like every time one of our city cops is charged with rape, Tases a nun or beats a cripple to death, East Ridge steps right up to the plate and does something else amusing. ”

            “Takes the heat right off the rest of us,” was the chirpy rejoinder from a northwest Georgia mayor, in whose city a law enforcement officer had recently been charged with supplying his drug habit with evidence from the police evidence room. 

“Who needs us when they got East Ridge?” agreed a municipal maven from Cleveland, Tenn., whose police chief recently resigned after members of his force had their wrists slapped for on-the-clock sex with minors – they wouldn’t have done it if anybody had been sober – and whose personal extramarital trysts, cleverly staged at a storage warehouse fitted up with mattress, brandy and flowers, were captured on security video and featured on local television.  “Remember when they roughed up that fortuneteller lady?”  

He referred to media attention focused on East Ridge in 2010, when the city tried to enforce its ordinance prohibiting use of “supernatural powers” within city limits, shutting down a Tarot-reader’s fortune-telling booth at a local flea market.  The big-earringed practitioner of the Dark Arts fought back, invoking not magic but her First-Amendment rights.  The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against East Ridge and it didn’t take mystical prognostication to predict which way a federal judge called that one.

            Then there was the East Ridge city manager who hired his 19-year lawn boy for a $35,000-per-year municipal administrative position over 70 other candidates, some with master’s degrees, and who disciplined a court clerk for “mishandling” his daughter’s court case.  East Ridge eventually paid the manager $67,000 to go away rather than firing him, which council members feared could make them liable to a lawsuit – an especially troubling prospect since they had recently paid their city attorney a similar sum to take a hike of his own.   

            The attorney had been fired for overcharging the city, improperly squandering taxpayer funds.  Immediately afterward, though, the East Ridge city fathers approved a pay hike for his replacement, who pointed out that East Ridge was, after all, currently being sued by everybody and his brother George for doing one stupid thing or another.  "It's always something coming up,” the attorney was quoted at the time in the Chattanoogan.com.  “We've got 65 lawyers in our firm and 64 of them are working on East Ridge." 

            Most recently, East Ridge made headlines when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation took up the matter of an ordinance (or ordinances) the city may (or may not) have passed regarding towing service providers.  Ordinance no. 1 seems to promise all the car towing business in East Ridge to three companies, with the caveat they must be owned by different proprietors; but ordinance no. 2 “grandfathers in” two of the three companies, which are owned by only one.

            The TBI must determine which ordinance is the one that was actually passed by East Ridge.  “But what the question boils down to,” laughed one East-Ridge watcher at the luncheon, “is whether the East Ridge gummint is embroiled in a sick, fascistic, un-American cabal with three towing companies or just the two.”

            The issue arose when another towing service operator wished for a piece of the East Ridge action.  The municipal ordinance in effect quashes any attempt at competition with the three (or possibly two) favored companies.   “It doesn’t surprise me that this happened in East Ridge,” the would-be competitor is quoted as saying in The Chattanooga Times Free Press. 

            The city leaders gathered at today’s luncheon weren’t surprised, either, but they certainly were tickled.  “Nice to have state law enforcement investigating somebody else’s town,” said the aforementioned Georgia mayor, one of whose city commissioners had been arrested in 2012 after a GBI analysis had identified saliva from a complainant’s left breast as originating from his pie hole.  “Good old East Ridge.”  

            “With the cheerful way those boys shower taxpayer funds on the unworthy,” said a county government colleague who had accompanied him to the luncheon, “who’s going to notice our board of ed just coughed up $45,000 to get rid of the schools superintendent, when we had vigilantes ready to ride him out on a rail for free, no extra charge for tar and feathers?”

            The East Ridge Appreciation luncheon was a glamorous affair at an upscale Chattanooga eatery where East Ridge dignitaries washed down the bitter pill of public censure with the milk of human kindness as supplied by their grateful colleagues from across the region.  The entrée was roast beef au jus.

            “We thought about serving them Cornish game hens,” said a luncheon organizer. “In the end we ruled out birds, though, on the principle these poor slobs eat plenty of crow already.”