Scare on the Square seems to have gone down last night without a hitch.

Halloween’s over, it’s November. Election is in five days and Christmas music will be playing on the radio somewhere today.

Windstream landline phone customers report widespread outages in the LaFayette and Villanow area. Problems don’t seem to be impacting every Windstream customer, and DSL remains functional, but quite a few homes experienced lost service beginning around 4 PM yesterday.

Some AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile mobile phone customers also report loss of connectivity. It’s likely that the same connection problem plaguing Windstream has also taken down a cell tower somewhere.

There have been no statements, so far, from any of the companies involved. Hopefully all issues will be resolved by the time you read this.

Here’s a recent photo of the mansion at Mountain Cove Farms. The county has spent over $2 million on the site so far, but looks like they haven’t spent a penny to replace rotten wood on the site’s most prominent structure. Some who have recently been inside say the building is destroyed inside and likely unsafe.

Ales Campbell said the county has spent about $2.75 million on this; Bebe told the Wall Street Journal she “estimates” it’s only been $2.3 million. So that’s AT LEAST $2.3 million of YOUR road money, money that could have gone to the libraries, to pavement, to fire trucks, to raises for hard-working county employees, to propping up Hutcheson.. that Bebe has spent on her pet project that doesn’t have a clear plan for the future. It just looks like a huge pile of rot and liability.

How many of you have actually seen any part of Mountain Cove Farms with your own eyes? How many people in the county is this thing benefitting?

Walker Messenger reports some 14% of registered voters here already early voted by Saturday evening, with five days left. That’s higher turnout for early voting than we’ve see all together for some recent local elections. Several people have reported waiting in line over an hour to early vote on Saturday.

In Walker County we only had 36% turnout for the entire July primary. That was some 11,808 votes cast. The county has 32,121 registered voters, or did back in July. 14% of that is somewhere around 4,500-4,600 people. And in July only 10,444 (or 30% of registered ) voted for commissioner. We may very well top that by next Tuesday, with only one name on the ballot.

Walker only had 6,121 people vote in the presidential primary in March. Seems like people aren’t as motivated by the presidential race than by the local vote. This may turn out to be an absolute record setting barn-burner of a local race – almost all because of the commissioner election.

The city has formally closed Wardlaw Street (next to Public Safety and Joe Stock Park) to through traffic. You can still use it to get to the park or to the police station but you can’t use it as a shortcut from Duke to Main or vice-versa. This was done because of kids crossing the street to use the restrooms at the PS building.

Over twenty years ago Coca-Cola Bottling Works was located in the Public Safety building and had a metal warehouse building next door where the park is now. They asked the city to close Wardlaw St. because they had trouble getting trucks in and out of their facility. The city refused to close it, and they moved to Fort Oglethorpe shortly afterwards.

LaFayette Coca-Cola would certainly have closed eventually, after moving to Fort O. they sold out to United Coca-Cola Bottling out of Alabama and relocated to the Chattanooga area. They were only bottling for Walker, Dade, Chattooga, and Catoosa – a small operation like that wouldn’t have gone on much longer independently. But we could have held on a little longer – and the street could always be reopened later.

It was never made clear exactly WHY the city wouldn’t close the street back then, but some who were close to things back then say it was politically motivated: the Wardlaw family that owned Coke wasn’t liked by the people in charge at the time. They had once been political leaders and had lost power, and some were mad because they built the city’s first fast-food restaurant nearby. Whatever the reason, the city was unreasonable about it and we lost one of the best businesses LaFayette ever had.

That said, nobody on the council now and few who work for the city at all now were around in 1990-1992. Only the mayor is the same. So don’t blame the current leaders for what happened two decades ago – and Coke isn’t coming back regardless.

Chattanooga Times Free Press takes a look at the Wall Street Journal piece about the Walker Commissioner race. This is now headline news all over the state thanks to WSJ and candidate Campbell.

“The article also describes Walker County as 446 square miles of Appalachian foothills and valleys ‘where Confederate flags, hand-drawn signs for boiled peanuts and men in overalls aren’t uncommon sights along winding roads with names like ‘Straight Gut’ and ‘Hootie Hoo Holler.””

..”‘There’s very few Confederate flags’ in Walker County, Heiskell said. ‘I have never seen Hootie Hoo Holler. We don’t have a street of that name, to my knowledge.'”

Bebe is supposed to be on top of things, but doesn’t know there’s a Hootie Hoo Holler in Walker County? There is, it’s off 136 west of town.

Maybe it’s too much for one person to be in charge of everything and know everything. Five people would be better able to remember every road and street name instead of just one.

The nation’s largest newspaper takes a look at the Sole Commissioner issue and the race between Bebe and Ales. This ran on page A1 of Wednesday’s printed Wall Street Journal:

WSJ has daily circulation of 2.11 million readers, including printed papers and people who pay to read it online. Maybe this will get some attention on the issue now, because sole elected leader anything is ridiculous. (Be sure and listen to the audio version of this on the same page.)

Being on the front page of the Wall Street Journal with one of their trademark dot portraits is considered an honor; those sketches take hours to make – somebody had to look at a photo of Bebe’s face for hours to make that, and she came out looking at least twenty years younger than she really is. Despite that, during last night’s UCTV broadcast Ms. Heiskell was threatening to sue the paper over how it portrayed her.

“The race is as nasty or nastier than any national race this fall, thanks in part to incessant sniping from anonymous sources on local websites.”

WSJ almost mentioned the Underground. Almost.

Walker Co Messenger, 10/24/12: “By Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 23, 1,511 voters had come through the Walker County courthouse, according to elections officials, who said they are averaging more than 200 voters per day.”

It doesn’t seem like very many locals are being motivated to vote by the presidential race or the House District 1 election. This is all about the race for county commissioner. What some call a “nasty” race seems more like a race that people actually care about for the first time in a decade.

Have you early voted yet?

WQCH Radio, 10/22/12: “WELL OVER A THOUSAND WALKER COUNTY CITIZENS TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ADVANCE VOTING IN THE FIRST WEEK. THE VOTER REGISTRATION OFFICE SAYS THAT AS OF 3:45 FRIDAY AFTERNOON, THE WEEK’S TOTAL STOOD AT 1,051 VOTES.”

It’s reported that as-of 8:30 this morning (Tuesday 10/23), 1,279 have early voted in Walker County, along with 966 absentee ballots requested and mailed out.

“VOTING CONTINUES ALL THIS WEEK AT THE COURTHOUSE AND OPENS AT THE SATELLITE OFFICES FOR THE ONLY SATURDAY VOTE, ON OCTOBER 27th. YOU CAN ADVANCE-VOTE THIS SATURDAY FROM 9 ‘TIL 4, AT THE COURTHOUSE, THE ROCK SPRING ATHLETIC BUILDING, THE CHICKAMAUGA CIVIC CENTER, AND CITY HALLS AT ROSSVILLE AND LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.”

The Times Free Press is reporting all those satellite locations are open now, but that’s not true. They’ll be open Saturday the 27th from 9 to 4, then all next week Monday-Friday from 8:30 to 4:30. Next week will be the last chance to early vote. Actual election day will be two weeks from today, November 6th, 7A to 7 P.

If this guy can manage to vote, you can too:

If you’re registered to vote please go vote, either absentee, early, or traditional. We had two races in July that were decided by less than 220 votes, and we may have several next month that come in just as close.

Early this month the county erected stop signs at the McCarter and Gordon Pond Rd. intersection. They caused a dangerous situation, and a week ago the city took them down. Now they’re back, apparently put up by the county again. It’s inside city limits but a county road – this may be the start of a new Civil War. Either way, be careful out there and drive slow through that area, don’t presume to know what anyone will do or what signs you’ll find when you get there.

If you stop you get rear-ended, if you don’t stop you get t-boned. And nobody’s seen a deputy or LPD officer out there yet.

Gordon Pond Rd. is a county road, but it’s not clear if the road is actually inside city limits or not. One LaFayette leader said the city hasn’t had a role in erecting OR removing the signs, which just makes this more and more curious.