Environmental activists were no match for developers in the wetlands fight

Kerry Sprouse sounds like he means it when he says the battle over Turkey Creek wetlands was personally hurtful to him. The developer who founded the limited partnership that bought 410 acres of West Knox County pasture land is a proud conservationist who sits on the boards of both Ijams Nature Center and the Tennessee Conservation League.

"We've been in the conservation business all our lives," he insists, sitting in a wood-paneled conference room at the Papermill Drive office of his First Commercial Real Estate company, a map of the wetlands on the wall across from him. "This is nothing that we just invented for ourselves when we decided to do this project, that all of a sudden we'd be in love with nature. So it was with great disappointment that we became the object of such radical criticism by certain segments of the environmental community."

But while the confrontations with activists—primarily a group called the Turkey Creek Wetlands Alliance—may have left Sprouse feeling ill-treated, he can console himself with the knowledge that his Turkey Creek Land Partners has prevailed in almost every disagreement.

According to files at the Knoxville office of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, local residents and state and federal agencies repeatedly failed in efforts to change the way the project was structured. And they bear at least as much bitterness as Sprouse does toward the way things turned out.

"My feeling is that the whole project has been a classic illustration of the failure of both the planning process and the regulatory process," says John Nolt, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee and a local environmental author and activist.

The fuss over building a road through the middle of a 22-acre wetland was widely reported in local media, generating public hearings packed with angry environmentalists. A fish called the flame chub that inhabits the marsh in the northeast corner of the Turkey Creek development tract became the environmentalists' rallying point. But the activists' two strongest requests—that the road either not go through the core of the wetlands, or that it cross them via a bridge—fell on unresponsive ears.

On the first point, the developers and Mayor Victor Ashe's administration—which firmly supported the project from the start—argued the road had to connect with Parkside Drive to serve its stated purpose: relieving West Knox traffic congestion. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved the developers' wetlands mitigation plan, which involves creating several acres of new wetlands for each one that's removed. But biologists in the Knoxville office of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation—the other agency that has to sign off on wetlands development—recommended against approving the road and suggested the city find another route.

In a memo to their supervisor, the biologists called the city "severely deficient in environmental planning in respect to this project." After the memo was quoted in the media, Ashe intervened by writing the DEC's then-commissioner, Don Dills, to complain about the lack of "cooperation." Dills, a political appointee of Gov. Don Sundquist who has since moved to the state's Board of Paroles, wrote back apologetically, assuring Ashe he wanted to maintain an "excellent working relationship" with the city and promising that he personally would be involved in making a final decision on the road. In the end, the DEC approved the project over the objections of its local scientists.

The approval also came despite the plan to run a road directly through the marsh, rather than over it. In letters to the Army Corps of Engineers, representatives of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency—neither of which has jurisdiction over the project—urged the city to build a bridge over the swamp. EPA wetlands regulator Thomas C. Welborn concluded his letter by saying, "EPA objects to the project as proposed in the public notice."

Wetlands consultants hired by the developers did evaluate the possibility of a bridge over some part of the 850-foot wetlands crossing. According to their report, a 400-foot bridge would have cost $2 million; a 200-foot bridge would have cost $1.6 million. The final plan—the one being put into action by bulldozers at the moment—includes a culvert, but no bridge

Another skirmish involved plans to enclose 1,685 feet of a ditch that runs along the south side of the property. Originally dug by farmers for drainage, it's now a small stream that empties into Turkey Creek. By placing it in a cement culvert, the developers are free to build on top of it.

Again, local DEC biologists objected, noting, "Piping essentially eliminates all designated usages of a stream, and in this particular case a relatively large segment of the stream's total length. ... Therefore, we feel that culverting should be limited to the minimum necessary for access purposes." Again, the state DEC office and the Army Corps of Engineers signed off on the plans.

Sprouse is enthusiastic about the current plans for the wetlands, which involve turning over about 52 acres for permanent management by Ijams. He envisions an educational park that will be the emerald jewel in the development's gold crown, a model of how commercial development and environmental responsibility can go hand in hand.

The activists who were on the losing end of all of the project's battles are less jubilant.

"This is a very powerful group of developers, they're allied with the city, and they have a lot of pull in Nashville," Nolt says. "They pulled the strings."

—J.F.M.

Local officials and a prestigious team of developers love the giant Turkey Creek development in far West Knoxville. Should the rest of us?

by Jack Neely and Jesse Fox Mayshark

In western Knox County just past Lovell Road, along a stretch that has been farmland for as long as anyone remembers, bulldozers are leveling a 2.5-mile length of land to build a wide new road. The cows that until recently grazed the open fields are gone, and the native deer are keeping a low profile in the wake of the earth-moving machines.

Whether this road should have been built—and even the reason it is being built—is a matter of disagreement. But it seems clear that it's being built now because of a commercial development slated to go in here as soon as the road's finished.

As announced in a cheerful front-page story in a Sunday News-Sentinel in June, this development some 15 miles west of downtown will be the largest commercial development in the 205-year history of Knox County, encompassing 410 acres and served by parking space for 10,000 cars. Among the proposed attractions on this expanse will be office buildings, 10 to 12 restaurants, 6 hotels, a 20-screen movie theater, and something called a power retail center. As reported in the salutatory article (with the headline, "West Knox development county's most ambitious"), the $400 million-plus development might generate "millions in tax revenue and countless new jobs."

But if there is indeed much good to anticipate in this project—variously referred to as Westpointe and Turkey Creek—it won't come without costs, many of them to the taxpayer. The road itself is a $5.1 million undertaking, of which the city of Knoxville is putting up $4.1 million and Knox County is paying the rest. Developers and many local officials call it a welcome example of "public-private partnership." Others say it's one of the largest subsidies of private development in county history. And beyond the immediate taxpayer dollars involved, the project raises a lot of questions about what commercial development on this scale means for the entire county.

Coming after years of westward expansion along Kingston Pike—a period that has seen West Knoxville become one of most heavily developed commercial districts in the nation—the Turkey Creek project seems like the apotheosis of a certain philosophy of development. It is the biggest, the newest, the most suburban, the farthest west. (It even comes complete with an environmental controversy that has given East Tennesseans their own variant on the spotted owl—the flame chub, a 3-inch fish that swims through the marshy wetlands in the property's northeastern corner.) It's the kind of development to which Knox Countians have become accustomed, maybe even addicted. But it's also the kind of development that has come under increasing fire for furthering the demise of downtowns, the cannibalization of the retail sector, the autocracy of the automobile. And in a city where those issues have produced a lot of hand-wringing lately, Turkey Creek has its doubters.

Freshly re-elected City Councilwoman Carlene Malone is one of them. As on many other issues, she's been the only Council member to consistently question Mayor Victor Ashe's support of the project. "Let's spend $4.1 million on a project as far from the center of the city as you can go and still be inside Knox County," she says. "Then let's moan and groan about revitalizing downtown. Are we schizophrenic? Are we nuts? Why not just build the convention center out there?"

Road To...Where?

Developer Kerry Sprouse, president of First Commercial Realty, says he liked that June News-Sentinel story. Sprouse is a burly guy, a Lewis-and-Clark enthusiast with a firm handshake and a deep voice. A former chairman of the board of Ijams Nature Center, he proudly calls himself a conservationist. He's dressed casually in his conference room on Papermill Drive, where there's a stuffed prairie chicken and a recent copy of Audubon magazine on the table. Though environmentalist groups have raised objections to various aspects of the Turkey Creek plan, Sprouse says this project will be unusual in that it incorporates a 52-acre nature park (the controversial Turkey Creek wetlands). In addition, he plans to landscape the whole area with carefully selected indigenous trees—throughout the parking lots and in the median of this wide avenue he says he'd rather call a boulevard. Though his "power center" won't be a "mall" in the sense of a covered place with common corridors, Sprouse says this is the sort of place where shoppers will be able to park and get several things done before getting back in the car.

Sprouse has been involved with the property for years, helping a Florida speculator acquire and consolidate the farmland in the '80s to form a continuous tract between Lovell Road and Campbell Station Road. But plans for a major mall there fell apart, and the Florida owners decided to sell. Recognizing the value of 360 acres of undeveloped West Knox land (which has since been augmented by a 50-acre tract in the southeast corner), Sprouse put together an 11-member partnership and bought it in 1995 for about $6.8 million.

"I saw it as an opportunity to keep the ownership in Knoxville and to do a significant planning program for the entire acreage," he says.

To hear Sprouse tell it, the assumption of ownership by a predominantly local group was also a big plus for the city. Since 1988, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which plans road improvements for the region, had included an eventual highway through the property as one of several new roads in its long-range southwest sector plan. The road would be an extension of Parkside Drive, itself an extension of North Peters Road and Truckers Lane, allowing a new east-west artery between Campbell Station Road and Cedar Bluff. Sprouse says the resulting partnership between the city, county, and developers has given everybody what they want: a road that will relieve traffic congestion on Kingston Pike and provide access to the stores and offices in the planned development.

The "partnership" essentially means the developers designed the road and donated the land for it, and the city and county are paying to build it. (It's not Sprouse's first partnership with city leaders—like many local developers, he's contributed to the political campaigns of Ashe and several Council members, all of whom supported the project with their votes.) Although much has been made of the value of the donated land, Sprouse acknowledges all his development plans hinge on having the road in place—without it, the property's not worth nearly as much.

Road boosters like City Councilman Ed Shouse see the unusual $4.1 million city contribution as an investment that will more than pay for itself. Based on property taxes alone, Shouse says, the development will start to pay off for the city within five or six years.

"I think it'll be an economic generator for the area," he says, one that will provide more city revenues to help all of Knoxville.

But in documents on the project, the case for the road is not made primarily on economic grounds. If it were, the road would clearly be an economic incentive to development, which Sprouse flatly says it is not.

Instead, the road's mostly been sold to the city for its traffic benefits. And it's there that the argument gets shaky.

Although city and county officials confidently talk about the need for another road to run parallel to Kingston Pike and Interstate 40, the case for this particular boulevard is anything but clear. A traffic study prepared by consultants to the developers does estimate the Parkside Drive extension could take 5,000 cars a day off the stretch of Kingston Pike between Lovell and Campbell Station roads (out of a total of 32,000). But it also estimates the Turkey Creek development itself will draw 38,000 vehicles daily—which suggests the new road's main function will be to allow access to the development.

County public works director Bill Kervin doesn't expect a traffic problem: "Yes, there's going to be additional traffic, but we have designed Parkside Drive to accommodate that."

But John Nolt, a University of Tennessee associate professor of philosophy who helped lead the environmentalist charge against the project, says, "It seems to me as a lay person that we haven't solved the traffic problems in West Knoxville by building more roads and more developments. They've only gotten worse." Council member Malone is also skeptical.

Among other consequences, the development will increase traffic at the I-40 ramps at Lovell and Campbell Station. Those interchanges are already swamped with cars and big rigs, and while the state plans major improvements to both of them, the work is at best several years away. (Sprouse argues the Parkside extension will be a boon while that work goes on, allowing diverted traffic an escape route.)

An interesting aspect of the road's "partnership" is the partner that's missing: the town of Farragut. Although the commuters who theoretically stand to benefit most from the new road live in Farragut, the town opted out of participation.

Eddy Ford, Farragut's pragmatic mayor, acknowledges County Executive Tommy Schumpert sent him a letter suggesting the town chip in $410,000 toward the road. But he never forwarded the request to the town's Board of Mayor and Aldermen for a simple reason: "I think the majority of the board would probably oppose it, because we've not helped any other developer with doing a development in the town of Farragut."

Ford, who doesn't oppose the development itself, adds it's hard to see why people would use the extension to get from, say, Campbell Station to Cedar Bluff.

"I always questioned that," he says, gesturing at a map on the wall of Farragut's Town Hall assembly room. "If you're going all the way to Cedar Bluff, my inclination would be to just get on the interstate and stay on the interstate."

Tom Rosseel lives in the Stone Crest subdivision adjacent to the development and has represented residents there and in neighboring Powell Acres in dealing with the developers. He says he's "a little suspicious" of claims that the road's needed for traffic purposes. He notes the existing stretch of Parkside is mostly used by people going to businesses along the road itself, not as a thoroughfare to Cedar Bluff and points east.

All of which leaves Malone suspecting the city's been taken for a ride. "We never even negotiated it," she says of the $4.1 million expenditure, which represents 10% of the city's capital improvement budget for 1997, and the most the city has ever spent on a new road. "If you read what we're paying for—and what the developer's paying for—we're paying for a lot," Malone says. "This is a tremendous level of subsidy—the likes of which I have not seen in this town before." (Sprouse says some other commercial projects have received a greater level of public funding than the Turkey Creek project. He mentions the 1982 World's Fair.)

A View From Next Door

But with or without public funds, there's little question somebody would have eventually built the road to improve the value of the property. Sprouse talks exasperatedly about nature-loving activists who imagine that farmland bordered by dense subdivisions and some of the busiest roads in the county could stay farmland forever.

It's a reality the residents who live near the Turkey Creek land accept, some with more reluctance than others.

Ed Glass, a Syracuse, N.Y., retiree who moved to Farragut's Sweet Briar subdivision six years ago, is positively cheerful when he talks about watching the biggest commercial development in the county take root in, literally, his backyard.

"[The developers] have bent over backwards to communicate and work with us and recognize our needs," he says.

He proudly shows off the 100-foot buffer zone that separates his and his neighbors' homes from the edge of the development (the result of a prescient late-'80s agreement hammered out by the town of Farragut with the property's then-owners). It's a forever-wild corridor of high grass, scrub brush, and a long line of recently-planted trees. And while one of his neighbors down the street says she hates to see the bulldozers come and the deer leave, Glass says at least he won't have to worry about cows trampling through his yard anymore.

"They'd break through the fence," he says. "We had them up and down Gates Mill Drive a couple of times."

The other two subdivisions adjacent to the property—Stone Crest and Powell Acres—have had a somewhat rougher time. They had only a 50-foot buffer promised in the agreement, but Rosseel says he and other residents have managed to secure another 50 feet of restricted land beyond that. Rosseel agrees the developers have been relatively easy to work with, but he's wistful about the loss of the idyllic land.

"It was like having a park in your backyard," he says. "It was very pleasant. It was like we were in the heart of Farragut, and yet we were a little isolated."

He's less sanguine than Glass about how well things will turn out for local residents—there are still issues of a fence and noise control to be worked out. He was sorry to see the developers win rezoning this year from C-6 commercial, which requires all development site plans be reviewed by Metropolitan Planning Commission staff, to C-3 commercial, which requires only a city building permit (MPC recommended keeping the C-6 zoning; City Council approved the C-3). Sprouse says the new zoning will give Turkey Creek Land Partners more latitude in enforcing its own restrictions—on landscaping, signs, and other aesthetic concerns—which he promises will be strict.

Still, says Rosseel, "Everybody's a little nervous about it. [The developers] seem to know what they're doing, they've approached it in a businesslike fashion...but the concern people have is, what if something happens with the real estate market and they have to sell to whatever buyers they can find?"

Space: The Final Frontier

Sprouse has a big, multi-panel map of what the Turkey Creek development might look like when it's done. Laced with greenery and small clusters of buildings, it's an attractive illustration, more scenic by far than any commercial stretch of Kingston Pike. It's not hard to see why, both for its design and its location, it would be attractive to stores or office complexes. It's even, Sprouse says, a great site for a corporate headquarters should one come calling.

But it's that 750,000 square feet of projected retail space that's most attention-grabbing. With more than two-thirds of that concentrated in the "power center," a kind of super-plaza of a dozen or so big-name stores, the development will house the biggest retail hub in the county outside of East Towne and West Town malls.

Sprouse is mum about who might be moving into that space, although he says he expects some announcements soon, maybe by January. But national retail trends suggest Knox Countians have plenty of reasons to wonder about those prospective tenants—reasons that go beyond new shopping alternatives.

Knox County already has a lot of retail space. Real estate industry analysts say the average community needs about 14 square feet of retail space per resident. Based on MPC's biannual shopping center index, Knox County currently has more than twice that—something like 35 square feet for each of the county's 360,000 residents. Of course, the county serves as a retail center for much of the surrounding region. But even if you add the populations of Anderson, Blount, Jefferson, Loudon, Sevier, and Union counties—without adding any of those counties' considerable retail space—Knox County still has 19 square feet per capita.

The development is so heavy that the 37919 zip code—which covers much of West Knoxville—qualifies as one of the nation's top 50 zip code areas in number of retail establishments, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (a figure that's even more impressive when you consider that 13 of those zones are in New York City alone; another three are in San Francisco). It's still growing, as the massive new Deane Hill complex attests. All of that might signal an impending glut, but as Sprouse points out, the only thing that really counts is what the market will bear.

"You don't see a lot of vacant space in Knoxville. I think we have a pretty healthy climate," he asserts.

But while Knox County as a whole has a relatively low retail vacancy rate—about 7 percent—that varies widely from one part of the community to another. In West Knoxville, the rate runs around 3 percent; in the Farragut area where Turkey Creek's going in, it's about 1 percent; but in South Knoxville, it's more like 11 percent, and it runs around 17 percent in the central and northern districts of the city and county.

Whether phenomena like the Turkey Creek development are responsible for such patterns quickly becomes a chicken-and-egg question about which comes first, supply or demand. But a 1994 article in the California-based E&Y Kenneth Leventhal Real Estate Journal detailed with foreboding the early '90s boom in suburban power centers, saying they "threaten to further decimate already weakened urban retail centers and place even heretofore successful downtowns at risk."

Sprouse justifies locating this mammoth project on a site 15 miles from downtown Knoxville by quoting the popular truism that Knox County's population has moved deep into West Knoxville.

"We're reacting to the growth of Knoxville, mostly," he says. "We wouldn't be out here building anything if the population center wasn't near to this point."

There's no question southwest Knox County has seen phenomenal residential growth in the last 25 years, unmatched elsewhere in town. However, the population center of a third of a million people doesn't budge very easily. The widely held belief that Knox County's population center has moved several miles to the west is not supported by statistics. The MPC's most recent calculation of Knox County's population center, based on the 1990 census, places that spot less than three miles northwest of downtown. As the crow flies, it's still about 12 miles from Turkey Creek.

Even with perfect siting, power centers themselves have a mixed business record. Ron Pastore, a director of Boston-based real estate investment firm AEW Capital Management, Inc., says the centers have fallen from favor nationally because of high rates of failure. The ones that succeed are the ones that attract high-profile "category killer" stores like Home Depot and Circuit City—stores with a reputation for preying on smaller, locally owned competitors.

Should the city be subsidizing such voracity?

"I don't think the city's helping that," Sprouse replies. "I think the city's allowing free trade. It's not a matter of sponsorship. It's up to the public to visit these places and support them."

Automobile Slums

Chattanooga, Knoxville's cousin to the south, has gotten international attention lately for revitalizing its downtown area. Not coincidentally, its civic leaders talk of the evils of over-extending into the suburbs. Chattanooga city councilmen have threatened to use city funds to pay developers not to build on large tracts far from the city center, because of the long-term expense of such developments. They have a handy example.

In the late '80s, an expansive new suburban mall called Hamilton Place opened with a flourish. Many Chattanoogans saw it as a glorious thing. But soon after Hamilton Place opened, Chattanooga's older suburban mall, East Gate, collapsed. Only 20 years after it was the bold new retail center and the only modern suburban shopping mall in East Tennessee, East Gate was suddenly run down, a largely vacant high-crime area. East Gate remains more than half-empty, a 70-80 acre paved tract unusable as farmland or residential development, and a low-tax-revenue burden for the city.

In answer to voters' concerns, Mayor Kinsey has launched an expensive effort to "revitalize" East Gate. Karen Hundt, Chattanooga's director of comprehensive planning, is heading a rehabilitation effort, attempting to find a new use for the mall. "As a rental mall, it's dead," she says. They're hoping for corporate buyers, but it hasn't been easy.

"Obviously, new commercial development seems to bring in tax revenue," says Hundt. "But one of the things that cities forget is that only so many people can buy so many things. Instead of bringing in new dollars, often you're just shifting them around. A new suburban development drains from the center city, and even from the older suburban areas. When you look at what's left behind, the net result is often zero."

When Chattanoogans talk about their urban renaissance—and their new motto, The Sustainable City—they often quote a non-Chattanoogan, author James Howard Kunstler. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Kunstler has received national attention in recent years for his books about architecture and metropolitan planning, The Geography of Nowhere (1993) and Home from Nowhere (1996). The Saratoga Springs, N.Y., resident has lectured in Chattanooga and impressed politicians there with his observations about urban planning from a fiscally conservative point of view—attacking suburban development in part because it's subsidized by highway construction and repair, and stretches public services like police and fire protection to expensive limits. Kunstler believes the growth in use of private automobiles and ever-expanding highways and parking lots that support them is growing impossibly expensive in both tax dollars and land usage and can't be sustained for long.

When Metro Pulse faxed Kunstler a copy of the News-Sentinel's glowing account of the Turkey Creek project, he responded quickly.

"This is exactly the kind of cancerous development that is going to lead to a spectacular collapse in suburban real-estate values," he says. "This kind of development can be described as part of a social condition—I call it the automobile slum. This is the terminology that people should use when discussing this sort of proposal."

Granted, Kunstler is an uncompromising zealot for the cause of de-suburbanizing American cities. He's been accused of overstatement.

Some fear the government involvement that Kunstler's observations may imply. Warren Neel, dean of UT's College of Business, is no fan of what careless infrastructure and commercial development has wrought in West Knoxville, but adds a caveat: "If we superimpose government decisions on the workings of the marketplace, I'm afraid that we'll end up with a society of micro-monopolies, and the quality of goods and services in our society will go down. A market economy may have its flaws, but the alternatives are worse."

Sprouse is untroubled by the possible impact of his development on other local commerce.

"What typically happens in the retail business is that tenants continuously relocate, primarily because they need more space," he says. "Somebody else will come into the space they left vacant."

For the record, a Chattanooga company called CBL & Associates is slated to develop the power center at Turkey Creek. Among CBL's past projects is Hamilton Place.

Sprouse does not brook failure as an option for Turkey Creek. "We cannot afford to have failure in this park by any tenant," he says. "So we would be foolish to make quick, ill-conceived transactions when we've got a massive property here that we have got such a substantial investment in that we have to recover. The better we control the quality of those developments in every phase, the higher the value of our property will be. We're talking about economic sustainability as being paramount to sustaining every other element of this development."

If confidence and ambition count for something, Sprouse and his group may well succeed. Turkey Creek Partners may buck the mixed record of power centers, the competition of one of the nation's highest-density commercial areas, and a site that is, in spite of residential trends, still a remote location for most Knoxvillians.

How much of the tax revenue generated by the Turkey Creek development—especially sales taxes—will be additional (as opposed to relocated) revenue is anybody's guess. But even if the development succeeds on its own terms, there seems to be reason to wonder whether, in supporting this unusual public-private venture, Knoxvillians may end up paying for more than a $5.1 million-dollar road.