Charles Oliver
Don Henderson says Cohutta has “the best of both worlds.”
“We are sitting up here 15 or 20 minutes away from Cleveland (Tenn.), Chattanooga and Dalton. But we can still sit out at night and hear nothing but the crickets and the occasional dog bark,” he said.
Henderson, 75, has served as mayor of Cohutta since 1969, after the city regained its charter. Cohutta already had a thriving volunteer fire department, thanks to the local Ruritan Club, which Henderson has been a member of for 54 years.
The Town Council has since added a number of other services: street lights, police, recreation facilities, a community center, garbage collection, zoning and a volunteer emergency medical service, all on a budget of less than $200,000 a year from taxes and fees. Cohutta has a two-man police department and two maintenance workers, but the other services are manned by volunteers. Members of the Town Council are also unpaid.
“That’s what keeps us running,” Henderson said. “We are building a park on some land that was donated to us (next to the Cohutta School). We’ve got a training center for our fire department. We’ve got a burn building we built ourselves. We do a lot of training in there.”
Henderson and his wife Peggy have two children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and he still owns and operates his family farm.
“I really enjoy what I do,” he said.
Henderson faces National Guard soldier Wesley Mahan in the Nov. 3 election, and he says he still has a number of things he wants to accomplish if he is re-elected to a four-year term.
“I want to finish the park. We have two acres that were donated to us, and we are working on that. We are trying to improve our recreation,” he said. “I want to continue to improve the fire department. We want to go for a lower rating than we already have. We are doing a lot of training and rehabbing of our equipment for that.”
The Cohutta Fire Department currently has an Insurance Service Organization (ISO) rating of 5, the same as Whitfield County, but Henderson says he thinks the city can improve that. The lower the rating the better, and a better rating can pay off in lower insurance rates for property owners.
Henderson says the biggest challenge of being mayor is dealing with all of the various state and federal bureaucracies.
“There are so many reports and so much paperwork, and we aren’t large enough to do like other communities and have a manager to do all those things,” he said.
“Money will be big challenge over the next few years. Unless the economy bounces back, our finances are going to be tight, but I don’t think we are the only government that will tell you that,” he added.
