This weekend’s batch of Worst of Walker losers winners are the county’s worst places to eat, sleep, and play. (Again, rules for how this all works are available here.)

Traffic through downtown LaFayette was briefly brought to a standstill Friday morning as hundreds of people lined up in front of the Walker County Messenger office and around the block towards Kentucky Fried Chicken. With no parades and no special giveaways at KFC in sight, we quickly investigated and found the cause for all this commotion: a jobs fair-turned-circus at the Bank of LaFayette Community Room. The jobs fair was reportedly sponsored by Roper, all to fill ten open positions there even as other local manufacturers are rumored to be preparing for layoffs.

This isn’t quite a depression-era job line (LU photos were taken after much of the crowd had dissipated), but it’s obvious that the people of LaFayette still care and still greatly depend on Roper even if the city’s leadership doesn’t.

Were you in line for a Roper job? Working for a place threatening to lay people off? Join the discussion below.

The Walker County Board of Elections & Registration has announced plans to reduce the number of voting precincts in the county from 18 to 11, merging seven smaller districts into larger ones. This decision, supposedly made to save the county money, has already been approved by the state and will be implemented as-of the next election unless a court appeal is successful.

Monday evening residents living along Bell Rd. in Noble were run out of their homes for several hours as officers of the Sheriff’s Office dealt with an armed man who had fired a shot (or shots) in the woods after threatening to commit suicide. Traffic through the area was also disrupted by law enforcement officers who apparently felt the man was a danger to himself and others.

Typically a stand-off between deputies and an armed man would be headline news, with the suspect identified almost immediately and the Sheriff appearing on Chattanooga TV at 11:00 to take credit for his disarmament. But in this case there was no TV coverage at all, and only one written report which didn’t come out until 36 hours after the incident ended.

That one news report provided only minimal details, quoting Sheriff Steve Wilson as saying the suspect was “a former Sheriff’s Office employee” who “had an emotional episode” without revealing his name or any specifics about what he had actually done to warrant evacuating an entire neighborhood. This smelled a bit fishy and made us curious about who the suspect actually was and why the SO would go to so much trouble to protect his identity.

In early March residents of Villanow received a letter from the office of Walker commissioner Bebe Heiskell. In the letter, Heiskell details how Villanow will no longer have it’s already minimal trash service due to (she claims) low usage and high costs. We’re going to discuss the letter in detail below, but hope you’ll read the whole thing first in context here (2.2MB PDF file).