JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — It’s a bit of an old saw in Northeast Tennessee: Nashville thinks the state ends at Knoxville.
This year, at least one legislator is singing a different tune after the general assembly showered a veritable cornucopia of one-time appropriations for next fiscal year as it dealt with unprecedented revenue surpluses.
“Northeast Tennessee has done well,” State Rep. David Hawk (R-Greeneville) put it simply Friday, less than 24 hours after the House passed a fiscal 2023 budget for the year that begins July 1.
“Thankfully we’ve got a Northeast Tennessee delegation right now that is not bashful to say, ‘don’t forget about us,'” Hawk said. “We’ve got citizens in our region that deserve every opportunity just like folks across the state, and Nashville has heard us loudly and clearly this year as we formulated this budget document.”
Despite revenue being $3 billion over budget and counting for the year that ends June 30, Hawk said lawmakers took a cautious approach to deploying the extra funds.
“We’re looking at formulating a 2023 budget and realizing these funds are most likely not going to reoccur next year,” Hawk said.
“We decided to put a tremendous amount of funds into non-recurring projects — capital buildings, maintenance efforts across the state of Tennessee, and we’ve done that with this budget document.”
Included among the benefits flowing to the state’s upper right corner are about $130 million for three major building projects at East Tennessee State University, a benefit that was reported last month.
Beyond that, though, Hawk’s own home county of Greene is getting a couple of major building projects. The largest financially is a $60 million complex that will house East Regional offices for the Department of Developmental Disabilities (DIDD) on the former campus of Greene Valley Developmental Center.
That center largely shut down after Tennessee, like all states, began serving even people with serious developmental disabilities in their own homes or smaller settings than the massive institutions at Arlington, Clover Bottom and Greene Valley that were once home to hundreds of people with disabilities.
“It’s going to become a hub for services for families with children who have intellectual and developmental needs,” Hawk said. “And we’re looking to make progress slowly but surely with the Katie Beckett (waiver) families out there, hoping to improve and create services on the campus for those families — possibly respite and day services as well as some occupational health services there, and it should be good.”
Greeneville will also become home to a $25 million satellite campus of the Tennessee Center for Applied Technology at Morristown. That will put a campus roughly halfway between Morristown’s and Elizabethton’s for a part of post-secondary education that has become a greater focus in the state.
TCATs provide job-ready skills in a variety of fields from nursing and phlebotomy to HVAC and welding — along with others to be determined.
“We’ve got some folks that are willing to work, but they just don’t have the skills they need,” Hawk said.
“We’re looking at partnering not only with existing industries but also industries that want to locate to Northeast Tennessee to say, ‘alright, we’ve got training centers within 30 miles of wherever you could land. Tell us what you need as an industry and we will put those training programs together fairly quickly.”
One other large capital project involves the replacement of the Tennessee Highway Patrol office in Fall Branch with a new $50 million building. Hawk said the region should also get about 10-12 new highway patrol officers as part of a budget item allowing for 100 new THP officers to be hired statewide.
