Sovereign, Small, and Somebody Else's Decision

Eight days ago, Commissioner David Sharpe got six questions from this newsletter. Whether he knew Urban Story Ventures had publicly named Kessler Cuffman both a Songbirds executive officer and one of the two men spearheading the project. How many meetings he held with the developer before the vote. Whether he knew Songbirds reported $15.7 million in net assets when he directed county benefit money to it. Why the arrangement was structured as a share of net profits with no audit and no floor.

He is on the ballot in eight days. He is the person who negotiated the amendment at the center of Part One, who told the Times Free Press he met privately with Urban Story Ventures for weeks before the vote, and who has built part of his public identity fighting Mayor Wamp over transparency.

He did not answer.

If a response arrives before Thursday, it runs here, in full, the moment it does.

On July 4, the Times Free Press reported that all eleven Hamilton County commissioners belong to a group chat where they regularly discuss both county business and personal matters, based on records the paper obtained. A legal expert told the paper whether that violates the state's open meetings law is a close call. Two days later, the paper's own editorial board laid out the standard: Tennessee's Sunshine Law requires deliberation among members of a governing body to happen where the public can watch. Sharing a meeting reminder in a group text is one thing. Working out a position on a vote before it reaches the dais is another, and the law does not care which app it happens on.

That leaves one specific, answerable question. Was the Jailhouse Studios lease, or Sharpe's amendment, ever discussed in that chat before March 18? Those records are public under the Tennessee Public Records Act. Any citizen can request them.

This is not new for this commission. In 2015, the Times Free Press reported commissioners phoning each other during meetings to discuss business privately, then criticizing the Sunshine Law from the dais afterward. In 2019, a nonprofit director told the paper Sharpe and another commissioner held a week of unannounced meetings with community leaders outside any public session. Sharpe has separately built a public record of pushing for more disclosure, not less. Both things are true.

What we are printing is that Hamilton County has a decade long, documented pattern of decisions taking shape somewhere other than the public meeting, and that pattern is the most plausible explanation for a unanimous vote where nobody in the room raised a single hard question.

That pattern does not stop at the county line. It gets worse the further you follow the money.

Part One ended with a line worth returning to. Urban Story Ventures describes Jailhouse Studios as spreading computing across smaller sites, using 1 to 5 percent of the power a large data center requires. Mayor Wamp called the downtown facility "a very, very small data center." Here is why that matters.

EPB is not optional. There is no second provider to switch to, and because EPB is a public utility with no shareholders, nobody stands between a bad investment and the people who pay the bill. If a bet does not pay off, the cost moves to the rate base, which is every meter in this city. That is not an argument EPB should never take risks, the fiber network was exactly that kind of bet, and it worked. The question is what the public is owed when EPB acts, and whether anyone has ever been given the chance to ask.

Since 2022, EPB has built what it describes as the first commercially available quantum computing network in the country. In 2025 it entered a $22 million partnership with IonQ for a dedicated Quantum Center, and secured a $4 million federal grant for quantum workforce training. Urban Story Ventures' own announcement describes Jailhouse Studios as running on EPB's quantum ready security systems, fiber, and power. In four years and tens of millions of dollars of commitments, we could not find a single instance of EPB's board taking a contested public vote on any of it, an oversight hearing, or one moment where a customer had the chance to ask a question on the record, the way the county, the city, and the legislature all had to on this same project.

Tennessee passed one law this year giving ratepayers any protection from data center costs. It requires large facilities to cover their own grid upgrades and bars utilities from passing those costs to everyone else. It only applies at 50 megawatts of projected demand or more.

If Urban Story Ventures' own estimate is accurate, a facility at 1 to 5 percent of a large center's draw sits nowhere close to that line, and neither, on that math, do the two additional planned sites at The Bend, unless someone adds all three together. Small, in that context, may be the entire design. A facility sized to stay under the threshold is not required to disclose its water use, cover its own grid costs, or answer to the one ratepayer protection state lawmakers passed this year.

We asked EPB what the projected megawatt draw is, whether its quantum ventures sit inside the same division that sets residential rates, and who sits on the board that approved these commitments. None of that accounting exists in public.

Part One closed with a question we did not answer ourselves: what is a sovereign, quantum ready processing facility for? That phrase, from Urban Story Ventures' own announcement, makes no sense next to film studios and artist lofts. The answer sits in a separate announcement, three weeks before Jailhouse Studios was unveiled.

On December 10, 2025, Vanderbilt University and EPB jointly announced the Institute for Quantum Innovation, built around EPB's quantum network. Two sitting federal officials spoke at the launch. Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, who chairs the House subcommittee funding the Y-12 National Security Complex, said the institute would "accelerate breakthroughs that protect critical infrastructure, support national security, and build a world-class workforce right here at home." Senator Bill Hagerty called quantum technology "critical to America's national security." This is not an inference drawn from one suggestive word in a developer's press release. This is two federal officials, on the record, describing EPB's quantum infrastructure as national security infrastructure, weeks before Urban Story Ventures used the word "sovereign" to describe a building running on it.

The framing goes back further than December. EPB's own materials trace the partnership to 2016, when EPB, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons lab, began a joint program. Its name, in EPB's own words, was "QED: Quantum Ensured Defense of the Smart Electric Grid." That collaboration led directly to the Quantum Network Jailhouse Studios now runs on. The word "Defense" was written into this program's founding name nine years before anyone wrote the word "sovereign."

EPB's board is chaired by Vicky Gregg, who presided over the December 10 meeting approving the Vanderbilt partnership. That answers, partially, a question EPB has not answered directly: who sits on the board making these decisions. We do not yet have the rest of the roster, or whether any discussion of the national security framing happened in public.

None of this proves anything specific is happening inside a converted jail on Walnut Street. What it establishes is that the word "sovereign" was not a random marketing choice. The infrastructure underneath Jailhouse Studios had already been described as national security infrastructure, by federal officials, in public, before that building existed. We asked Urban Story Ventures who the facility's intended customers are, and whether any government or defense entity is among them. We asked EPB whether its quantum ventures face any different oversight because of that framing. Neither has answered.

Every announcement in this story uses the same words. Ignite. Position. Accelerate. National hub. None of them consistently attaches a number to a Chattanoogan.

Follow the money since December and it adds up fast. $20 million from the state in February. $4 million more from EPB's federal grant the same day. EPB joins a regional quantum collaborative in March, explicitly framed around national security. Deputy Governor Stuart McWhorter, whose Palantir holding we noted in Part One, announces another $3 million in July, on top of $43 million already in this year's budget. That is more than $70 million in state and federal quantum money committed inside eight months.

Here is what it has produced for an actual resident. The NIST grant funds a Quantum Computing Fellowship: eight fellows, total. A pre-apprenticeship run by the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative takes ten participants per cohort, and it is not for the unemployed or underemployed. It is built for people who already work technical jobs at companies that already employ them, to become that employer's in house quantum expert. Completion earns a $2,500 stipend. Neither the Collaborative nor EPB has published who applied or how they were chosen.

And the piece aimed at children: Hamilton County Schools was named the pilot district for something called Tennessee Quantum Works. The entire public record of what that means is one quote from a deputy superintendent saying quantum "has got to be a part of" student opportunity. No schools named. No student count. No budget.

Eight fellows and ten pre-apprentices are receiving something real. What is missing is any public accounting of who they are, whether by neighborhood, income, or employment status, or any indication a single participant came from the communities closest to the buildings this money keeps naming. Tens of millions of dollars, and no document connects any of it to equity in who gets access.

EPB runs an active newsroom, publishing polished releases on a cadence of roughly one major quantum announcement a month. In November it published its own study claiming $5.3 billion in community benefit since 2010, projected to reach $10 billion by 2035. That number is self reported, produced and released by EPB about EPB. We have found no independent audit of it.

That is the asymmetry worth naming. EPB is fluent, detailed, and fast when the message is its own success. It has been silent, past a full week, on every question about accounting, board votes, and who bears the risk if any of this does not work out. A utility capable of a quarterly economic impact study is capable of answering whether its quantum ventures sit inside the rate base. So far it has chosen to do one and not the other.

While every government office and the developer stayed silent, Songbirds Foundation did not. Executive Director John Dooley wrote back within a day, addressed our questions in order, and did not hide behind a spokesperson. That is the only good faith engagement this series has received.

His letter denied, specifically, that Songbirds or Kessler Cuffman hold any equity stake in Jailhouse Studios: "Zero." He said Cuffman's title carries no board vote under Songbirds' charter, and named, for the first time in this reporting, the source of a 2020 transaction we had flagged: the McKenzie Foundation, run by Songbirds board chair Johnny Smith, who is paid $132,812 a year to lead it.

Read carefully, the letter answers a narrower question than the one that matters. Urban Story Ventures did not describe Cuffman as an advisor. It named him a partner, alongside Jimmy White, as one of two people spearheading the project. A partner ordinarily holds a stake in the thing they are partnering in. Either the developer used the word loosely, or its own public description of Cuffman's role does not match what Songbirds now says. Nobody has reconciled that, not Dooley, not Cuffman, not Urban Story Ventures, which did not answer when we asked directly.

There is a second gap. Songbirds' fiscal 2024 filing reports investment income of roughly $270,000, about 44 percent of that year's revenue, income that typically comes from a liquid, invested portfolio, not from the illiquid donated property Dooley says makes up the bulk of the foundation's $15.7 million in net assets. We have asked Songbirds to reconcile the two, and will print whatever comes back.

Two weeks ago we started with one lease. Everything since has turned out to be the same finding in a new place. A commissioner who negotiated in private what he later called a public win. A commission that keeps a group chat nobody outside it can see. A utility that has committed tens of millions of dollars to national security infrastructure without a single public vote. Workforce programs announced with confident numbers and no accounting of who they actually reach.

One person answered honestly and in full. Every government office we reached, including the man asking you to reelect him in eight days, said nothing. Ten more commissioners have not been asked yet, and that gap is ours to close.

It is a record of who showed up when asked, and who did not, in the exact week it mattered most. What that is worth is for you to decide.

Election day is August 6.

Primary documents and correspondence

On the group chat and open meetings history

On EPB, Vanderbilt, and the quantum institute

On the money and the workforce programs

Still outstanding. EPB. Urban Story Ventures. Commissioner Sharpe and the other ten commissioners. Hamilton County Schools. The Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative. Every response that arrives runs here, in full, the moment it does.

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Nobody voted on any of it. The group chat happened outside any meeting the public could attend. EPB's board approved a quantum institute in the language of national security without a contested vote. A workforce program decided, without a public meeting, who gets access to a $70 million buildout and who does not.

Residents have asked, more than once this year, for the same thing: a chance to be in the room before the decision gets made, not after. County government has not given it to them. The moratorium that eventually passed does not count. It covers unincorporated Hamilton County, and the buildings people have raised concerns about are all downtown, untouched by anything the county has done since.

That request has since grown into two. Hamilton County owes the public an actual hearing on data centers, open, before the next vote. A hearing on EPB's quantum ventures is owed too, held by Chattanooga City Council, with EPB present to answer for tens of millions of dollars committed in our name.

Both are overdue. Neither has been scheduled.

Transparency like that does not arrive because officials decide to give it. People asking for it, in public, and refusing to stop, is what produces it. This is the era we are in whether officials like it or not.

— Marie

Previous Edition: Technically Public, Never Actually Known