What is the Public Building Authority, and
why is it in charge of everything?
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
The lights went down and the throng of Knox County notables clustered in
the Small Assembly Room of the City County Building on Wednesday morning
quieted. As County Executive Tommy Schumpert stepped to the microphone, a
wide screen at the front of the room displayed a dark blue slide with the
words that explained why everyone was here: "Baseball Stadium Site Analysis
and Evaluation."
The presentation, which ended with five possible sites for a new home for
the Knoxville Smokies, was the culmination of Schumpert's efforts to keep
minor league baseball in town. But after his preamble, when the time came
to actually give the details, the county executive turned not to a member
of his own staff but to a guy sitting inconspicuously behind him, head rested
against the venetian blinds.
"At this point, I'm going to turn over part of the presentation to Mike Edwards,"
Schumpert said. If you haven't heard of Edwards, you're not alone. He's the
CEO/administrator of something called the Public Building Authority, and
he was there Wednesday morning because his agency was the one that supervised
the crucial evaluations of 17 possible stadium sites.
The Public Building Authority, or PBA as just about everyone who's heard
of it calls it, has operated for more than two decades with almost no visibility.
Tucked away in a far eastern corner on the cavernous ground floor of the
City County Building, the agency has gone about its mostly mundane business
with little fanfare. Even its name seems designed to elicit as little interest
as possible—three of the least descriptive words in the English language,
strung together to form a yawningly generic phrase.
But it's a phrase that's showing up more and more these days. In news stories
about the city's proposed convention center, for example, or the county's
new $130 million justice center, the trumpeted Women's Basketball Hall of
Fame, any of a dozen multimillion-dollar Knox County school projects, or,
suddenly, the quest for a new baseball stadium. PBA is everywhere, it seems,
running everything.
As City Councilwoman Carlene Malone muses, "It is a bit of an expanding empire,
isn't it?"
How did it happen? What does it mean? And what exactly is a Public Building
Authority, anyway?
Edwards is at least part of the answer to all of those questions. PBA's
administrator/ CEO is a big 'n' tall sort of guy, with sandy hair going gray
and a mischievous grin that looks like he's waiting for you to discover the
tack he put on your chair. Off the record, he can seem like an overgrown
Tom Sawyer; but in public, he's all Joe Friday efficiency—the facts,
the whole facts, and nothing but the facts. Now 46, he's been part of PBA
since 1983 and has overseen its evolution from a small agency with a narrow
focus to an organization with size and expertise to rival major private-sector
developers. Perennially energetic—during conversations he sometimes
literally can't sit still, moving around his office from desk to couch to
window—he also cherishes PBA's low profile. The notion of an article
devoted solely to the agency doesn't thrill him. On the other hand, he's
clearly proud of its very visible accomplishments.
"One of the benefits of being in the development business is that you actually
get to see end results," Edwards says, seated at his desk in a City County
Building office that looks across South Gay Street to the Andrew Johnson
Building, another PBA property. "It's very tangible."
Tangible indeed. By the time the current government building spree winds
down—assuming all of the planned projects actually come to
fruition—it'll be hard to dance a two-step in downtown Knoxville without
running into something that PBA either built or owns.
A quasi-governmental, quasi-independent organization, PBA reports to an 11-member
board of directors, six appointed by the county and five by the city. The
board's members are kind of a who's who of Knoxville movers and shakers:
developer Bob Talbott, Knoxville Motor Company owner Sam Furrow, SunTrust
Bank vice president Patricia Crumley. And at the head of the table sits the
inescapable Jim Haslam, the Pilot Oil founder who sometimes seems to be the
man behind every curtain in town.
But if that conjures X-Files images of a shadowy group calling the
shots from offstage, Edwards is careful to emphasize the limits of the
authority's authority. PBA doesn't actually decide anything—what to
build, where to build it, how much to spend. It merely takes directions from
its clients, i.e. local government. Essentially, it's a big construction
and real estate management company that happens to be a non-profit government
agency.
It was borne out of the age-old territorial jostling between the respective
governments of Knoxville and Knox County. As plans began to take shape in
the early 1970s for a new municipal building, both the city and county agreed
it would make most sense to house all local government under one roof. But
neither particularly relished living as a tenant in the other one's house.
So, with the assistance of some enabling legislation passed in Nashville,
they jointly created a Public Building Authority that would serve as landlord,
owning the building (which would become the City County Building) and supervising
its maintenance. The agency issued the $25 million in debt and oversaw
construction. When the City County Building officially opened in September
1979, it was the largest single government building in the state.
Over the next decade, PBA's main duties were largely confined to that property:
managing it, keeping the trees trimmed and the flowers watered, providing
security and collecting rent. Its scope broadened a little in the late 1980s
with two county projects: the purchase and renovation of the old Andrew Johnson
Hotel, which now houses the Knox County school administration and a few other
offices, and the construction of the Dwight Kessel Metropolitan Parking Garage
on State Street. PBA oversaw both efforts and owns the buildings. Then, in
the early 1990s, things started happening.
"The construction curve in regard to county projects, including the schools,
started to rise dramatically," Edwards says. "The county had brought in-house
a professional to manage projects, but the volume of those projects really
started to escalate greatly."
The big-ticket item on the county's list was a new justice center that would
combine a large jail with offices for the Sheriff's Department and possibly
the city police department, as well as the county and state court systems.
PBA got the call early on to manage that project along the same lines as
the City County Building. Meanwhile, the school system was looking at the
biggest construction binge in its history, building and renovating dozens
of schools. Although Superintendent Allen Morgan tried to handle the deluge
in-house for a couple of years, the stress began to show. When individual
school projects started running as much as 30 percent over budget, county
commissioners got irritated and demanded change. So in the spring of 1995,
the school board hired PBA to oversee its entire capital program.
"People were already in place [at PBA]," Morgan says. "It made sense to us
just to utilize them."
This was new territory for the agency, which until then only supervised projects
that it actually owned and financed. The original PBA legislation had to
be amended to give Edwards and company the power to serve as contractors.
By and large, school and county officials have been pleased with the results.
"I think what they have been able to accomplish in their school building
programs is far superior to what we experienced previously," says County
Commissioner Wanda Moody, who had been a sharp critic of school construction
management. "They present to us all of the facts with their ramifications."
Edwards is quick to deflect the compliments to his colleagues and staff,
a crew with undeniably impressive credentials. Most come from corporate
development backgrounds of one sort or another, and they're under the supervision
of a duo Edwards spends a lot of time bragging about: Brian Gracey, executive
director of property development, and Darlene Smolik, PBA's chief operating
officer.
Gracey, who bears a striking resemblance to a certain mayor named Victor,
came to town last year from Carter and Carter, a development firm responsible
for major works like Georgia's Fulton County Justice Center and South Central
Bell's Nashville headquarters. "I don't know anyone who's had more experience
operating major shows in the country than he has," Edwards says. Smolik,
who worked for Corning before coming to Knoxville, is a sometimes intimidatingly
methodical thinker who Edwards says had the highest score in the nation on
her CPA exam.
"I think [PBA] just continues to bring on board people with credentials and
expertise that it's very hard for local governments to have available," says
Schumpert. "Most of our departments are not in business to construct things,
and that's kind of what the Public Building Authority has become for us—our
department to construct things."
That level of trust has led to PBA's other recent assignments: evaluating
sites and overseeing construction of the convention center, building the
Women's Basketball Hall of Fame for the Greater Knoxville Sports Corp., sizing
up baseball stadium spots.
Anywhere else in the political arena, all that responsibility, especially
when it comes to crucial issues like recommending sites for major projects,
would raise questions about whether PBA has agendas of its own. But Edwards
insists the agency is nonpolitical, and nobody disputes him.
He also says the agency's board of directors, many of whom carry considerable
political clout on their own, takes a hands-off approach to PBA's day-to-day
operations. "I would not be surprised if a number of the board members had
their own ideas about where the convention center should go," he says. "But
I never heard them." (PBA staff recommended three weeks ago that the center
should go on the World's Fair Park site. The PBA board has yet to vote on
it.)
Councilwoman Malone, a practiced government watchdogger, gives PBA high marks
in general and singles out Edwards for particular praise.
"I think Mike Edwards is an incredibly competent man," she says. "I think
he is compulsive, I think he is deliberate, I think he is careful."
He is also famously well connected. Edwards has close friends throughout
the City County Building, the media, and local business circles. In private,
he is a fount of inside political wisdom. But by his own account, he has
no interest in getting any closer to politics than he already is. His sole
excursion into that realm came in 1996 when he took a few weeks' leave to
help with the effort to unify Knoxville and Knox County governments.
"You cannot sit in my chair and not see an overwhelming benefit to eliminating
two governments occupying the same turf, both figuratively and literally,"
he says. "For me, that was [an issue] that carried a compelling argument,
and I felt compelled to just do what I did."
From the outside, PBA's current workload might look daunting, but Edwards
says he's not concerned. Since it functions more like a business than a
government, he notes, PBA can hire as many people as needed for a particular
project and then reduce staff size just as quickly when needed. (It currently
has a staff of about 55.)
"We're a direct function of how busy the city and county are," he says. "And
they're pretty busy right now."
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