Tonight at 5:30, Tullahoma's Board of Mayor and Aldermen will pass the city's annual budget. They scheduled it two days ago. They posted it on a website. They're counting on you not knowing.
That's not an oversight. That's the plan.
BOMA was scheduled to meet June 22. They didn't have enough members show up to conduct business. No quorum. So they called a new meeting — two days out, tonight, June 24 — and posted a notice on the city website. The newspaper notice? Either didn't run, or runs today. The day of the vote.
Here's what that meeting actually is. June 22 was the regular scheduled meeting. It failed. June 24 was not previously scheduled by any statute, ordinance, or resolution. Under Tennessee's Open Meetings Act, that makes tonight a special-called meeting — with its own notice requirements. They didn't treat it that way.
And what's on the agenda for this special-called meeting with two days' notice? The third and final reading of the city's annual budget ordinance.
Their Own Code Says Three Readings. Three Different Days.
This isn't a technicality buried in state law. It's in Tullahoma's own municipal code, section 1-208, in plain language:
All ordinances appropriating money or levying taxes shall be approved on three separate readings on three different days.
The budget is exactly that kind of ordinance. The code requires three readings. Three days. That requirement exists so the public has time to engage, object, and show up.
Tonight is the third reading. It's happening at a special-called meeting that was noticed two days ago, on a website most residents never check.
The Tennessee Attorney General has specifically addressed this. Website-only notice, the AG opined, likely does not satisfy the adequate public notice requirement of the Open Meetings Act — unless notice is also posted in locations around the city or through media outlets. A newspaper notice that runs the same morning as the vote doesn't fix that. It confirms it.
This Is Not a Paperwork Problem
This is a board that has learned there are no consequences for cutting corners. Not from the public, who mostly don't show up. And not from the city attorneys — Worsham and Hoskins — who don't just sit at that table. They guide from it.
This is the same Hoskins who, at the May 12 BOMA meeting, attacked residents by name for citing a public statute, called their concerns fear tactics, and then argued that statute by reading only half of it — omitting the second paragraph that directly contradicted her position. The mayor silenced the alderman who asked her to show decorum. Hoskins kept going.
That is the legal counsel advising this board tonight.
The notice failure on the budget did not happen in spite of legal counsel. It happened alongside it.
The Structure of the Dodge
Tennessee courts have been direct on what adequate notice means for a meeting of this importance. Notice must be posted where the public can actually become aware of it. It must describe what's being acted on. And it must be posted far enough in advance to give citizens a real opportunity to show up.
Courts have held that when a matter is of pervasive public importance — the most consequential action a board takes — the adequacy standard goes up, not down. A city's annual budget doesn't get the same notice treatment as a personnel hearing.
This board gave you less than two days. A website post. A newspaper notice that may run this morning, if it runs at all.
The outcome is not in doubt before tonight's meeting starts. The budget is going to pass. The board knows it. The attorneys know it. The only variable was whether anyone would be in that room to watch it happen.
The notice structure made sure the answer was no.
The Pattern
This board has a history of treating procedural requirements as optional when inconvenient. The notice failure on the budget is the latest data point. It is not an outlier.
And every time it happens without consequence — without a public pushback, without an attorney flag, without a single vote that doesn't go the way it was always going to go — the message gets reinforced: the rules are for show.
Worsham and Hoskins work for the city. The city is the residents of Tullahoma. Not the board. Not the mayor. The residents.
When those attorneys sit silent while a board compresses the public's access window to nothing on a final budget vote, they are not serving the city. They are covering for it.
The budget vote is tonight. 5:30. City Hall.
They rescheduled on Monday. They skipped proper notice. They posted to a website and called it done. They did all of that because they have learned — meeting after meeting, vote after vote — that no one shows up to stop them.
Tonight you can prove them wrong. Show up.