Johnson City officially has a new mayor and vice mayor.
During their final meeting of 2020 on Thursday, city commissioners selected Joe Wise, the owner of Wise Property Solutions, to serve a two-year term as mayor and Todd Fowler, a sports medicine physician at Watauga Orthopedics, to serve as vice mayor.
After the vote, Wise acknowledged the contributions of Commissioner Jenny Brock, who stepped down Thursday from the position of mayor.
Wise said the example set by Brock over the past two years demonstrates what genuine care for the community looks like.
âA city would always be well-served with a mayor whose heart is in a place Mayor Brockâs heart has always been,â he said.
An internal survey of Johnson City police officers found that 78% would be in favor of a policy change allowing them to have exposed tattoos.
Chief Karl Turner presented the results of the poll, which received input from 123 officers, to Johnson City commissioners during an agenda review meeting on Monday.
Additionally, 13% of officers said they would be in favor of allowing tattoos concealed by the uniform, and 9% were in favor of allowing employees to have tattoos as long as they were covered by a sleeve, such as a breathable Under Armour-style material.
Asked if employees thought visible tattoos would negatively affect the professional image of the police department, 12.2% said yes, 11.4% neither agreed nor disagreed and 76.4% said no.
Johnson City has hired a Knoxville attorney to investigate an official complaint against City Manager Pete Peterson by a fire department employee.
Fire prevention officer Roger Davis says Peterson threatened his employment after he looped a state official in on a conversation about housing homeless people with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) at the Ashe Street Courthouse.
In his complaint, which the Johnson City Press obtained through a public records request, Davis said Peterson sent emails âdirectly berating me and threatening my current and future employment with the city.â
âThis is a temporary use meeting an extraordinary circumstance created by the COVID pandemic,â Peterson said in an Aug. 15 email to Davis, Fire Chief James Stables and staff in the planning department. âThere are very limited options for housing homeless positive patients. We need to make this work with minimal changes, if any are needed. We DO NOT NEED TO GET THE STATE FIRE MARSHAL