In Response

I feel compelled to respond the Alan K Sefton's letter to thousands of Loudon County voters.

Click Here To Read Letter if you haven't yet.

Mr. Sefton has every right to endorse any candidates he wants, but was it really necessary to insult the whole county in the process?

I have no idea if Mr. Sefton coordinated with Eddie Simpson and Mark Matlock when he wrote his letter in their support, but in the last two candidate forums, both Matlock and Simpson talked about the same topics as Mr. Sefton discussed in his letter. I haven't heard either one of them refute or denounce Sefton's letter.

As to his insurance issue, he might want to shop around. He has a Loudon County Fire Rescue station about as close to his home as I do. Our home owners insurance is very affordable.

As a child, our family always made the annual trek down to the Rescue Squad building to get our Christmas tree. It was their fund raiser in those days. There was no chance we would buy a tree anywhere else. My dad said, we would always support the squad. Fast forward sixty years plus later, our family still supports the Rescue Squad, now known as the Loudon County Fire Rescue.

I stand in support of the the Loudon County Fire Rescue as one of the best trained, well equipped volunteer fire departments around, I'd stake my life on it. In fact, the Loudon County budget committee just voted to add additional funding to all the volunteer county fire departments in the next budget.

Then Mr. Sefton had the gall to declare our school system "low achieving?" Get your facts straight Mr. Sefton. Loudon County is one of the highest achieving systems in the state. Loudon County schools have some of the best teachers, administrations and staff of any school system anywhere.

Every time I read the letter, It makes me furious.

There's lots of places in the world to live. If Loudon County is so backward in your opinion, LEAVE.

I'd like to share a verse from an old Merle Haggard song slightly modified.  

  When you're runnin' down our county, man you're walkin' on the fightin' side of me!

Picked this up from social media from a man who knows.

He obviously hasn’t done his research into Loudon County Fire & Rescue before he made many false and uninformed accusations toward the department.

It’s obvious that he has never needed an ambulance response…never, in 20 years, has an ambulance taken over an hour to get anywhere within Loudon County….including Moss Rd (look it up if you don’t know where it is). Even the “basically nonexistent” fire department can get to furthest points in this county in a reasonable amount of time.

The department will also call for Rural Metro prior to arrival if it is determined to be necessary. Oh…I bet he doesn’t know that if any of his building catch on fire, response to his property would be from Loudon County Fire & Rescue, Greenback Fire Department t, Tellico Village Fire Department, Philadelphia Fire Department and if requested, Lenoir City Fire and Loudon Fire will respond….and that goes for anyone that lives in Loudon County outside the city limits of Lenoir City and Loudon.

Not only do Loudon County agencies assist each other, we also assist and ask for assistance from Roane Co, Tri Community, Vonore, Rural Metro and any other department in the area. LCFR has assisted Pittman Center, Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Knox County Rescue and most recently Wears Valley and Seymour.

The department has responded out of state to assist with major disasters and they do this all on limited funds. Instead of complaining and making false statements about the local fire and EMS service, how about educating himself and supporting these departments. Donations go a long way with volunteer departments. More than 3/4 of the fire departments in Tennessee are volunteer with 16% being combination paid/volunteer and only 6% be career paid departments.

Justin Hendrix

 

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4/18/22