Longtime Jacksonville city attorney Grant Parris will be retiring at the end of this month and the Jacksonville city council approved a contract Monday night to hire attorney Richard Rhea as the new city attorney effective June First.  Mayor Johnny Smith says Parris will be missed…  The council Monday night also discussed offering possible tax incentives to lure new business and industry to the city. The council made no decision Monday but are expected to take any requests on a case by case basis. The council refused to act on a request to rezone property on highway 21 north in the city.  Property owner Roy Snead presented his request to the council for the third time Monday only to see it die without a vote. Snead was seeking to have his property rezoned from an R-1 single-family residence to an R-3 multiple family property after a city ordinance limited R-1 residences to no more than two unrelated individuals. The requests died for a lack of a second.  Snead said Monday he will continue to seek changes to rezone the property. Snead will have to wait a year before he can request any further changes to his property.

In just a few weeks Lineville  and Clay county high schools will close their doors forever as the two schools next year will merge into one ne campus to form the central high school of clay county. The consolidation has aready raised community Concerns over racial discrimination after four black students who tried out the first cheer team at Central High School of Clay County didn’t make the cut. School officials say the girls didn’t score well enough to secure a place on the team. Members of the black community say that the selection process was unfair from the beginning. The School board was recently asked by members of the black community to add more black students to the squad. School officials declined the request, saying the process for selecting the cheer team shouldn’t be changed.  Twenty-six girls and two male students tried out for the Clay County Central High School team. The 18-member squad, selected in March, includes 17 white students and one mixed-race student, two of whom are males.

The university of West Georgia in Carrollton Georgia will be holding a blood drive today on behalf of grad student Aimee Copeland who is fighting a flesh eating bacterial for nearly two weeks after falling from a homemade zip line into the little Tallapoosa river near carrollton.  Classmate Laura Findley says the campus is coming together to support Copeland…. finley says friends are still reeling at what has happened to their classmate.  Copeland has already lost part of one leg, and her fingers will have to be removed by doctors at a hospital in Augusta.  Her family says she’s been able to mouth questions for them and they know she will have more questions once her breathing tube is removed. Friends and classmates say they have received support from across the country as Copelands story made national headlines.