By Scott Robertson Domtar is celebrating 100 years of operation at its Kingsport paper mill in 2016. The year-long commemoration features monthly events designed to highlight the successful partnership between the company and the city in which it has thrived. Yet while the public is enjoying the celebration of a stable past – a celebration that to date has included the donation and planting of 100 trees by ...

By Jeff Keeling May could be a critical month for long-running efforts to reopen Lee County, Va.’s hospital, which Wellmont Health System closed in September 2013. Those efforts, a source said, have become “entangled with” the proposed merger between Wellmont and Mountain States Health Alliance. The source, who is close to the effort by the Lee County Hospital Authority (LCHA) told The Business Journal Apri ...

By Jeff Keeling Despite strong growth in premium revenues, Mountain States Health Alliance’s foray into offering its own Medicare advantage insurance plan, CrestPoint Health, was far from profitable, MSHA Senior Vice President Tony Keck said after CrestPoint’s pending wind-down was announced. “We were losing money, which is not unusual for a startup plan in insurance in any business,” Keck said April 15. “T ...

By Scott Robertson The tweet Ron Ramsey sent Friday, April 22 read simply, “The @tnsenate of the 109th General Assembly has adjourned sine die.” The Latin term at the end means there is no date set for resumption – the business of the session is finished. With the end of the session, and Ramsey’s prior announcement he would not seek re-election after 20 years in the state senate (plus two terms in the state ...

By Jeff Keeling With institutional knowledge as important as ever given the changes swirling around Wellmont Health System, leaders at Wellmont no longer have a long-solid option when financial questions arise: Go ask Alice. Alice Pope left the system after 16 years to become CFO at HonorHealth, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based not-for-profit hospital system. Her last day at Wellmont, where she had been CFO since ...

By Scott Robertson We’re very honored here at The Business Journal to partner with the city of Kingsport, Tenn., to publish the city’s official centennial publication. It’s something I’ve been working toward since having a conversation with my old boss Ken Maness several months ago. Ken, who gave me my first job out of college, selling radio advertising on what was then Oldies 104.9 WKOS, and whose bio I ha ...

By Jeff Keeling When you deal directly with potholes, pill heads and peoples’ education, political leadership can be difficult. Local and regional leaders haven’t the luxury of layers of lesser governments or bureaucracies between themselves and the citizens they are charged to serve. If they do a poor job, act irresponsibly or lack the fortitude to make hard but necessary decisions, the results are readily ...

By Scott Robertson Travis Cunningham, production manager at Microporous, Inc., has seen good days and he has seen bad days, and he knows the difference. The good days, he says, are finally here. For most of the last decade, Cunningham and his colleagues at the Piney Flats manufacturing facility felt they were working in the dark. “They (new management) have come in and turned on the lights,” he says. The da ...

By Scott Robertson Bristol, Va.-based mining company Alpha Natural Resources hopes to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy by June 30 after a planned auction of assets, which should net the company $500 million or more in cash. The auction is scheduled to take place May 16. Alpha announced March 8 it had filed reorganization plan documents in United States Bankruptcy Court, which, together with the planned auc ...

By Scott Robertson Last month’s news from the King Institute for Regional Economic Studies that Southwest Virginia individuals bring in a shockingly low amount of income from wages and salaries (a little more than half) with government transfer payments (social security, medical programs) making up a rapidly growing piece of the income pie set me thinking. With the tobacco economy gone from the Southwest an ...