Franklin Mayor Ken Moore on Wednesday delivered his State of the City address, highlighting among other things his administration's efforts to keep the city's infrastructure ahead of growth wherever possible. But he also touched on one item where the infrastructure has lagged: In the near future, Moore said he plans to be "addressing the when and how" of building a new City Hall to replace the current facility on the Public Square.

Alex Friedmann continues his scrutiny of Corrections Corp. of America.

Friedmann, president of Nashville-based Private Corrections Institute and a former inmate at a CCA-run facility, on Wednesday issued a press release in which he notes the for-profit prison company used social media to promote a Temple University study that claims financial savings through prison privatization — while failing to note industry members helped fund that study.

According to Friedmann, CCA did not mention that the Temple Center for Competitive Government study was funded by the private corrections industry and by private prison firms. (Note: A quick glance of the study shows no reference to funding.) CCA cited the Temple study in its 2013 investor presentation.

In fairness, CCA might not have known the study researchers' lack of funding source citing. And a Temple University press release dated April 29 and announcing the study does, in fact, note private corrections industry funding. When contacted via phone, Friedmann (pictured) said ID-ing the funding source in a release is not the same as noting it in the study itself. Regardless, he argues, CCA's handling of the matter was clumsy at the least.

In the release, Friedmann — arguably CCA’s most dogged watchdog and a staunch supporter of open records access — quotes Charles Scott, the former director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics.

“An academic paper presents itself as providing objective knowledge. If that paper and research are funded by a for-profit business, then it is an ethical obligation of the authors to reveal that source of funding,” Scott is quoted.

You may recall that last March, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled in favor of CCA, and against Friedmann, on the company’s request to exclude a shareholder resolution (filed by Friedmann, of course) regarding its planned REIT conversion from its proxy materials in advance of the company’s annual meeting in May. (Read more here.)

Had the SEC sided with Friedmann, the resolution would have required CCA’s board of directors to issue a report to stockholders addressing issues related to REIT conversion.

Friedmann, a CCA stockholder, may have failed in that effort but he has bounced back effectively with this strike. In failing (even if by oversight) to cover its bases regarding referencing the study, CCA presented the persistent Friedmann with an easy shot. And he took it.

Read Friedmann's full release here.

The Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development announced today it has collected $15.3 million of fraudulent unemployment insurance benefits as a result of the federal Treasury Offset Program.

The TOP allows garnishment of IRS refunds and other federal payments from those who have collected unemployment benefits fraudulently.

“The ability to reclaim these funds that were fraudulently collected is extremely important to the business community because the health of the Unemployment Trust Fund affects the amount of taxes an employer pays,” Burns Phillips, the labor department’s acting commissioner, said in a release.

The total amount of funds intercepted from the IRS since the beginning of the 2013 tax season is $15,378,715.

Looks like the leaders of Vanguard Health Systems will continue to have the same number of big rivals in Detroit after the Henry Ford and Beaumont hospital systems called off an ambitious merger plan this week. Combined, the two organizations run eight hospitals that posted a 2012 profit of $162 million on $6.6 billion in revenues. Vanguard's Detroit Medical Center organization comprises nine hospitals that posted 2012 revenues of almost $2 billion. Shares of Vanguard (Ticker: VHS) are up about 2 percent this morning and are flat for the year.