Contending forces pull in many directions in next month's county commission primaries
by Joe Sullivan
Whether it's picking a site for a new jail or a baseball stadium or funding a county budget that's almost certain to exceed $400 million in the year ahead, Knox County Commission can't decide on much of anything without going through convolutions worthy of Rube Goldberg.
Most of the time these convolutions are confined to the assembly room at the City/County Building where the 19 commissioners convene to do their wrangling at marathon monthly meetings. Once every four years, though, the cacophony resonates throughout the county as incumbent and wannabe commissioners square off in electoral combat.
These quadrennial rites are now upon us, with primary contests for all 19 seats looming on May 5, from which the Democrat and Republican winners will battle it out in an Aug. 4 general election. While four veteran incumbents are running unopposed, a near-record field of 44 candidates is vying for the other 15 seats.
Along with demonstrating that democracy still roars in Knoxdom, the outcomes of these races will have a lot to say about the course of county government over the next four years. Demands for more and better schools, roads, parks, and stimulants for economic growth are snowballing into a well nigh irresistible force for augmented county outlays. But aversion to higher taxes poses an all but immovable object against which these forces are colliding.
The last time County Executive Tommy Schumpert recommended a property tax increase in 1995, County Commission spent three meetings spinning its wheels for lack of a 10-vote majority either to approve the 9 percent increase or to make any cuts in Schumpert's budget. Just when matters appeared hopelessly deadlocked, two masters of political games-personship, Ralph Teague and Mary Lou Horner, swung in favor of the increase, and the wheels of county government began to turn again. Schumpert has managed to steer austerely clear of any further tax hikes for the past two years, but he hedges when it comes to what he'll recommend this year or next (assuming he is re-elected).
While any boost in this election year will be minimal at most, one consummate insider predicts that a property tax rate increase of the same magnitude as 1995's will be on the table in 1999. "There are a lot of pent-up needs that have got to be addressed once the elections are behind us," says this anonymity-seeking source. "Our teacher salaries are not competitive, and we're going to need more teachers to satisfy state mandates for reducing classroom sizes. The sheriff's deputies and a lot of other county employees are also underpaid. And before you even get to the new justice center, a new convention center, and a baseball stadium, there are other, more basic capital projects that are going to get stretched out indefinitely if we're not prepared to pay up for them."
Just how these issues get addressed could well depend on the outcome of several key commission races. "A swing of a couple of commission seats into more progressive hands could make an enormous amount of differences," according to this swing-minded source.
Along with fiscal issues, the unrelenting struggle between property developers and homeowners opposed to commercial encroachment on their neighborhoods also looms large in several commission contests. Everyone's for finding the right zoning balance between economic development and residential interests, but different candidates define that balance very differently. And these differences can get emotionally laden with charges of "NIMBYism" on the one hand and "cronyism" on the other.
The personas and predilections of the community's two rival political potentates—Mayor Victor Ashe and Sheriff Tim
Hutchison—are also factors in a number of equations. Neither Ashe nor Hutchison has endorsed any candidates. But more than a few are perceived to be aligned with—if not marching to—the drum of one or the other. Such perceptions can be a two-edged sword. The further outside the city limits a district reaches, the more identification with the mayor can cut against a candidate, as is the case with Richard Bowling in South Knox County. On the other hand, the sheriff's enmity for Commissioner Pat Medley, who has bucked him on several commission votes, doesn't appear to have done much for her little-known challenger Wayne Broome in a district that lies largely within the city.
All these and other contending forces that are coming into play are best conveyed by putting the spotlight on selective contests. All of them happen to be Republican primaries because that's where most of the action is in May. (But Democrats with no primary opposition could well emerge victorious in August in some of them.)
Blue-Blooded Warfare (District 4A)
Ned Matheny is the fourth generation of his family to live in the big Victorian house behind the serpentine wall on Kingston Pike just across from the entrance to Cherokee Boulevard. Operating out of a "war room" in his home, the affable Matheny has been running for County Commission virtually full-time since last August. The green lines on a street map of his district show he's walked nearly all of them in his door-to-door campaigning. And even in the dead of winter, green Matheny yard signs had sprouted at nearly 250 of the homes he's visited.
John Schmid, a generation younger at age 30, rents the small farm house at the entrance to James Haslam II's 60-acre estate on Lyon's Bend Road for his bachelor pad. While there's no trace of elitism in this engaging insurance and real estate agent's manner, Schmid also traces his ancestry all the way back to the beginning of recorded history in East Tennessee. A relative late-comer to the race, he only declared his candidacy in January. But Schmid yard signs are now popping up all over the place as well, including several on the same lawns with Matheny's.
So why are these two scions of prominent Knoxville families doing battle for the seat from which County Commission's matriarch, Bee DeSelm, is retiring?
The answer is that establishment figures encouraged Schmid to get into the fray because—well, they try to say it very gingerly because of their affection for Matheny and his family—but because they don't believe Matheny's very well qualified.
Other than "helping out with family affairs," Matheny hasn't really held a job since 1981. And he candidly acknowledges that up until the time of his arrest for drunken driving in 1994, "I guess I did have a drinking problem." As a condition of a plea bargain that reduced the charge to reckless driving, Matheny entered a month-long treatment program and insists, "I haven't had a drink since then."
Now, at age 53, he's trying to accomplish something more. His primary reason for wanting to be a County Commissioner, he recently told Hallerin Hill on his radio talk show, is to "help people that have problems with county government—and with city government, for that matter...A lot of times people don't know who to call to get something done, whether it be just trash pickup or whether it be problems with cable TV. I think I can be a facilitator." As for issues, getting seat belts installed on school buses and better roads for them to drive on head the list.
Except for roads, none of these matters exactly fall within County Commission's purview.
Does Matheny have ideas for downtown revitalization? "Not really," he initially responds, but then he goes on to say, "Maybe more events. We've got to loosen the laws, allow beer on the sidewalks, and the parking is way too expensive. We've got to have free parking."
When it comes to door-to-door campaigning, though, Matheny doesn't take a back seat to anyone. With his ever-so-engaging manner, he's won the hearts (if not the minds) of a lot of West Knoxvillians. Indeed, if yard signs could vote, he'd surely be the winner.
Schmid acknowledges he's got some catching up to do but says his campaign is shifting into high gear now with mailing pieces and neighborhood-by-neighborhood phone banks to complement his own door-knocking. Without engaging in overt finger-pointing, though, he affirmatively emphasizes that, "I go to work every morning" and "I believe it's important to have people in public office who're in business and are involved in the community. Politics are not my life completely."
He's also more affirmative about the need to spur the county's economic growth in general and downtown revitalization in particular. "We're going to have to spend money in order to make money by building our economic base so that we have more resources to work with...to raise our teacher salaries, better fund our schools, and ensure that Knoxville continues to be a great place to live 10 years, 20 years down the road."
Does that mean he's for raising taxes? "Nobody likes their taxes raised, and we need to look for other ways to increase revenues. I look at a tax increase as a last resort. But if the county executive makes the case for one, I would certainly consider it," Schmid says.
Awaiting the winner of Matheny versus Schmid in the August general election is Democrat Julie Hardin. No old-line Knoxvillian she, the fifty-something Hardin moved here in 1975 when her husband joined the faculty at the UT Law School. But she's made a big mark on the community since she came, serving as director of Big Brothers/Big Sisters and president of the Foothills Land Conservancy, among other posts.
While running as a Democrat, she emphasizes that she's supported many a Republican including DeSelm, Ashe, and Lamar Alexander. DeSelm is believed to favor Hardin, but she has stopped short of crossing party lines to make a public endorsement.
If elected, Hardin says she will make her commission post a full-time job with special emphasis on schools. "Our schools need a stronger fiscal base. There's no reason why we shouldn't have the top system in the state, and I don't want to settle for less."
Homeowners Versus Developers (District 5C)
While county commissioners get disputatious on many matters, one thing they nearly all agree on is that John Griess has been a level-headed, even-handed presiding officer since they elected him as chairman in 1995. But a goodly number of neighborhood activists don't share that sentiment—at least as far as his stance on commercial development adjoining their subdivisions is concerned. And therein lie the seeds of the opposition Griess is facing in his bid for re-election in a far West Knox district that encompasses his hometown of Farragut.
"John Griess has voted time and again against homeowners' interests, and he doesn't believe in planning," asserts his principal opponent, Patra Rule. The perky, blond-haired Rule is president of the neighborhood association in Keller Bend, an upscale enclave where she and her radiologist husband have lived for 13 years. But Griess' support of a shopping center on Westland Drive at its Pellissippi Parkway interchange has drawn her ire far more than any developments in Keller Bend.
"That was the straw that broke the camel's back," Rule says. "Hundreds of people participated in formulating the Southwest Sector plan that was approved by MPC. Then County Commission overturned it. Patra Rule is for orderly development with open citizen participation. But she wants sector plans adhered to, not changed by back-pocket deeds."
Griess bridles at the charge that he favors commercial developers over homeowner interests. "Westland Drive came to us with an MPC acknowledgment that things have changed since the sector plan and that it was probably appropriate to have commercial at an interstate exit. I said I wanted to hear both sides and find a middle ground." But with an arms-up gesture he goes on to say that, "Anytime we vote, we're going to make some people happy and some people mad. To suggest that one vote makes me anti-homeowner fails to take into account my votes for schools, libraries, roads, law enforcement. As a real estate agent, I make my living selling homes in West Knox. So it behooves me to make sure homes here are becoming more desirable, and I believe I have a lot of insight into what it takes to do that."
Just how much have Griess' pro-development votes hurt him? "Anti-Griess sentiment runs very deep in certain quarters, but I'm not sure how broad it is," says a fellow commissioner.
If Griess should be defeated, County Commission will have lost one of its most outspoken champions of aggressive fiscal policies. Indeed, he sticks his neck out so far as to assert that, "I really don't think people care about seeing their taxes go up if they can see the value they are getting."
In addition to the basics, Griess has boldly supported funding for such controversial undertakings as a new justice center, convention center, and baseball stadium. "I like to find a way to do things rather than keep things from happening," he allows. "Five years from now I want more high-tech, white-collar businesses to have Knoxville on their short list, and that has a lot to do with the quality of life...A vibrant downtown is important."
Rule suffers, somewhat unfairly, from the perception that she's a single-issue candidate. In fact, this adjunct instructor of political science at UT who did her doctoral dissertation on public opinion surveys has well-informed and expansive views on—you name the topic. But she's much more guarded than Griess when it comes to big-buck projects like a convention center and a baseball stadium.
"I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. I'm not saying I can't be convinced, but I want to see empirical evidence on what these projects can do for the community as a whole," Rule says.
Three other candidates are in this race, but conventional wisdom doesn't give any of them much of a chance.
Constituents Versus Convictions (District 6B)
Ralph Teague is one of four sitting county commissioners who've held office ever since that body was constituted in its present form in 1980. And he's naturally proud of his accomplishments, including his pivotal vote in 1995 in favor of a property tax increase to fund an augmented county budget.
"Knox County had been dragging its feet for years on roads, and that was the budget that turned it around," Teague says. He ticks off a list of projects now coming to fruition in his Northwest Knox County district that stretches from his hometown of Powell through Karns to Solway.
But while Teague is still hale and hearty at age 53, some of his constituents contend he's gotten stale—or at least inattentive to their concerns—about development issues in this rapidly growing sector of the county.
"Ralph has not always been responsive and on several occasions didn't even return my phone calls," complains Lisa Neal, president of the Broadacres Homeowners Association. With more than 1,000 homes, Broadacres is one of the largest subdivisions in the county, and almost anything that goes up in its environs threatens to aggravate traffic congestion.
Teague has also been caught in a swirl of controversy surrounding the routing of a widened Emory Road, his district's most clogged artery. The Emory Road work is a state and not a county project. But Teague is widely perceived as having favored original state proposals for routing it north of Beaver Creek in ways that were opposed by Broadacres residents, among others, along with the area's two largest employers, DeRoyal Industries and Levi Strauss. While the state has subsequently approved a routing south of Beaver Creek, antagonisms linger.
One of the northerly routings would have cut through the property of Laura Bailey, a dynamo realtor who is the daughter of Allen Gill, president of Hallsdale-Powell Utility District—which Teague has criticized on occasion. Bailey acknowledges that she encouraged Larry Stephens, a popular Powell High School teacher and football coach, to challenge Teague in the Republican primary.
Ruddily handsome with a thick shock of dark brown hair, the 48-year-old Stephens looks many years younger than Teague, whose thinning hair is mostly turning silver. He also professes to have a better pair of ears for listening to constituent concerns and preferences.
"Community involvement is the key," Stephens says in an interview in Bailey's real estate office. He goes on to describe an extensive communications network he's putting in place to ensure he's got his finger on the pulse of constituent views in every community in the sprawling district. One starts to get the sense that he'd like to be wired with a meter that would show him majority sentiment on every issue to come before commission. Then he adds, "I don't mean to say I should just be a follower, but commissioners should represent and inform their constituents."
In a renewal of the classic debate whether elected officials should vote with their constituents or their conscience, Teague takes a different tack.
"People elect you to do a job and to use your best judgment," he asserts. His support for building a new baseball stadium to keep the Knoxville Smokies from moving away evidences his preparedness to go against the grain. "The baseball stadium didn't have a thing to do with my district. But it was time that commission stood up and said that we're for progress, and that vote has implications for a lot of other things where we've got to be progressive."
Northern Exposure (District 7)
Leo Cooper has been a fixture on County Commission for the past 12 years and served as its chairman until Griess replaced him in 1995. His diverse district swoops down from the Union County line through Halls and then encompasses a goodly part of North Knoxville stretching from Fountain City to Holston Hills.
The city part overlaps the district that elects Carlene Malone to City Council, but the two are poles apart in their political orientation. Cooper has the outlook of a commercial property owner, which he is, whereas Malone champions the interests of homeowners. Indeed, she recently led a successful resistance to a zoning change sought by Cooper on the edge of the Adair Gardens neighborhood in Fountain City.
Cooper is also a lot more fiscally conservative. He was one of seven commissioners who ended up opposing the county's last property tax increase in 1995. He was also one of five who voted against both of the sites considered by commission last month for a new baseball stadium (although he later told a meeting of Town Hall East that he favored the one backed by most East Knoxvillians: namely, the present site of Bill Meyer Stadium).
While he's been retired from his 34-year career as a school teacher and principal since 1993, Cooper remains active in several business ventures. He's a part owner of the growing chain of Bel Air Grills. And the opening of two new ones reportedly obliged him to miss a recent meeting of the Better Roads in North Knoxville (BRINK) organization that addressed vexing delays in getting work started on the new I-640/Broadway interchange—a meeting that was attended by most other elected representatives of North Knoxville.
This silver haired, sixty-something educator-turned-entrepreneur maintains a courtly manner on most occasions. But he's also known to have a temper.
"Leo is a cocked gun that can go off at any time," asserts Jamie Rowe, whose son was a student at Gresham Middle School during the latter stages of Cooper's 22-year-tenure as principal there. Rowe claims more than 200 Gresham parents signed a petition seeking Cooper's removal for alleged abusive treatment of students and excessive absenteeism. Nothing came of the petition, which was submitted to then-School-Superintendent Earl Hoffmeister at the same time Cooper was running a losing race against Allen Morgan to succeed Hoffmeister.
A call to Cooper seeking an interview was returned instead by that eminence grise of local politics, Ray Hill. "You're trying to defeat one of my commissioners," Hill told the author of this article who had, in fact, encouraged former Metro Pulse editor Bill Dockery to become a candidate for the seat. Just what Hill meant by "my commissioner" is unclear, but he is known to serve as a campaign strategist and polemist for a bevy of local office-seekers.
Cooper's opponent in the Republican primary, Steve Nash, is making his first bid for public office. But he comes from a politically-minded family and has "been close to politics all my life." His mother, Shirley Nash-Pitts, has close ties to Mayor Ashe and has served on a number of Ashe-appointed advisory boards. Nash baiters, such as Hill, delight in referring to him as "Steve Nash-Pitts" implying that he's still tied to his remarried mother's apron strings.
At age 42, though, the burly reddish-haired father of two teenage sons is clearly his own man. As transportation manager of Ameristeel and as a Holston Hills neighborhood leader, Nash has made a mark both in his business and civic life. And he believes that county government needs to be accomplishing more as well.
"County Commission is a ship at sea without a rudder," he asserts. "It needs vitality and vision and the willingness to take a few risks." Growing more $15-an-hour jobs and getting more schools built are special points of emphasis for Nash.
"Our school building plan is not keeping up with our growth. I know that doing more is a tough political decision. But when you trim the budget, you get further and further behind. We've got to find the means to fund schools like Brickey Elementary and Holston Middle [both in his district] and move on."
Waiting in the wings is Democrat Dockery, who's unopposed in the primary.
Do the Mayor and the Sheriff Have Long Arms?
Enmity between Mayor Ashe and Sheriff Hutchison goes way back but reached a peak four years ago when Ashe all but overtly backed Hutchison's Democrat opponent, then-Deputy Police Chief Rudy Bradley. (The sheriff is unopposed for re-election this year.) The ill will toward Ashe extends to many Republican party regulars and was compounded in 1994 when the mayor made no bones about his aversion to another GOP stalwart, then-County-Executive Dwight Kessel, who was defeated by his mayor-friendly successor, Democrat Schumpert.
How much of a factor are these animosities (and divergencies that contribute to them) in this year's County Commission elections? Conspiracy theorists are quick to point to indications of these hands at work in many of the races. Consider:
* In the North Knoxville district (2A) from which Democrat Madeline Rogero is stepping down, the Republican primary pits the city of Knoxville's architect, David Collins, against the president of the North Knox Republican Club, realtor and auctioneer Earl Hall. (Roy Braden, Knox County's codes administrator, is a third relatively apolitical candidate in this race.)
* When it appeared that Scott Davis would be seeking reelection to his West Knoxville seat (District 4B), establishment types who regard Davis as a renegade actively sought a worthy foe. The candidate they enlisted, insurance agent Phil Guthe, had collaborated with the mayor last year on getting his Kingston Woods neighborhood annexed by the city and thence been named to the city's Board of Zoning Appeals. Only after Davis, who's been even more caustic in his criticisms of Schumpert than the sheriff, made an 11th-hour decision to run for county executive instead did another candidate enter the race for this commission seat. He is Chad Tindell, a youthful lawyer who is also a GOP stalwart and recently lost a bid for the party's county chairmanship.
* Mike Arms, who is running for the far West Knox seat being vacated by Mike Ragsdale (District 5A) is chairman of the Sheriff's Department Merit Board, among other volunteer posts held by this executive of a high-tech Oak Ridge firm. His primary opponent is Jack Hammontree, who took his leave last fall as president of the since-rechristened Greater Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and has the backing of much of the oligarchy of business leaders with whom Ashe is closely aligned.
It would be grossly unfair, however, to portray any of these candidates in simplistic let alone sycophantic terms. And their races all turn on separate axes.
District 2A
Collins is a handsome 41-year-old who exudes sincerity and high-mindedness. "I want to make an impact on the way our community looks, and I feel my experience as an architect gives me a sense of the way to do it right," he says. Preserving the integrity of neighborhoods while at the same time fostering economic growth sounds like a litany, but Collins renders his refreshingly. Ditto for his commitment to "doing everything we can to get, train, and retain good teachers" and to "making downtown healthy in order for the rest of the community to be strong."
Hall, who's also 41, puts economic development at the top of his priority list. "My only disagreement with Madeline [Rogero] was on development," he says. "I see it as a solution and she saw it as a problem. Growth is the way to generate the dollars to pay our teachers more. We can't keep on raising taxes on people time and again because they can't afford it." Hall is a lot less clear than Collins on the justification for a new convention center and baseball stadium, and the two also have different stances on the race for county executive. Collins is staying neutral while Hall backs Davis because "he's full of fire and vinegar whereas Tommy Schumpert hasn't been aggressive."
The winner of this Republican primary will be an underdog in August against Greg Mackay, an unopposed Democrat who's backed by the highly-regarded Rogero.
District 4B
The impetus for Guthe's candidacy arose out of County Commission's rebuff to his efforts to forestall an apartment complex in his Kingston Woods neighborhood of single-family homes. "Commission's failure to act showed me what they were made of. I saw people dug in on one side or the other instead of trying to work together," the 43-year-old Guthe says. While he's grateful to Ashe for engineering a complex annexation that will convert the prospective apartment site into a park, he insists the mayor had no involvement in his decision to run. "I'm a newcomer to politics, but as a businessman as well as a homeowner I've gotten very concerned that Knox County lacks a sense of direction. We're heading toward urban sprawl, and we need to be looking at zoning issues with foresight. Please don't paint me as just a homeowner's candidate, though, because economic growth is very important to me as well. I insure a lot of builders."
While he's only 34, Tindell sounds at times like an old-line politico. "I support Republicans," he says. "I always have and will support the ticket." That includes Davis, although Tindell insists he has a different style. "I don't think you should alienate other commissioners and expect to be effective," he says. But when it comes to fiscal issues, he sounds many of the same notes Davis did in opposing Schumpert's 1995 budget that included a tax increase. "I'm all for education, but before we start asking people to pay more taxes, we have to show we're making the very best use of the funds we've got. We need to make sure we trim some of the fat."
District 5A
In what almost seems like role reversal, Hammontree puts safe neighborhoods at the top of the list of issues in his campaign, while Arms sounds like a Chamber of Commerce type when he stresses, "We need to focus on job creation."
Fears arising from a series of gruesome murders in Farragut, where the 56-year-old Hammontree resides, underlie his law-and-order emphasis—not that he's critical of the sheriff, mind you. "I think the sheriff has done an excellent job, but we need to give him the wherewithal to do more. That comes back to dollars. He probably needs more officers." Hammontree also puts protection of neighborhoods from undesirable development, good schools, and good roads ahead of good jobs on his list of issues. "If you've got all the others and the other ingredients are right, good jobs will follow. They are all interrelated."
Arms isn't content to wait. He's passionate about the "need to attract new employers to Knox County and to focus on the needs of existing businesses and industry and what it takes for them to expand...We've got to stimulate the economy or we're looking at serious tax increases down the line." Hammontree, he says, "has had his chance for eight years [as chamber president] and he hasn't succeeded." Arms is also more emphatic than his opponent in support of a new convention center and urges a more collaborative approach to such undertakings. "We're not operating as a team in Knox County. We can't continue to call a project a Haslam project or a Victor project or a county project. We've got to pull together." As for his relationship with the sheriff, Arms acknowledges that, "A lot of people think I'm Tim's ally, but I'm just a law enforcement ally." And he even takes a jab at Hutchison as a show of independence. "He grandstands some, like on the gas thing when he pulled his patrol cars off the road."
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