Knoxville's empowerment zone designation was hard to come by

When Keith Richardson heard the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was doing another round of empowerment zones, he had some tough questions for the feds.

Richardson, who now works for HUD in Knoxville as something called a "community builder fellow," was at the time the executive director of the Partnership for Neighborhood Improvement. He had helped put together Knoxville's 1994 empowerment zone application, and he knew doing it again would be a lot of work for a lot of people.

"The question I asked, as someone from a highly Republican part of the country, was what can you give me that I can go back to my community to encourage them that we would have a shot at it?" he says.

It was a reasonable question. Knoxville officials had heard that their 1994 application was well reviewed within HUD but doomed by politics. (Laurens Tullock, then Knoxville's director of community development and now the president of the philanthropic Cornerstone Foundation, says he got a call from a U.S. News and World Report reporter who had obtained HUD's confidential rankings of the proposals from each city. "Knoxville's was one of the top-rated plans," he says.) So how did Knoxville prevail in 1998? A combination of a good product and good salesmen, apparently.

If the '94 proposal was impressive, the '98 version was even more so, with detailed programs proposed for the first two years of funding and pages of statistical data and full-color maps of the affected area. By the complicated criteria HUD developed to evaluate the EZ proposals, Knoxville's plan ended up ranked sixth, easily making the top 15 list.

"I was dubious," admits Mayor Victor Ashe, "not because I doubted the worth of our application, but I was suspicious this was really a program for the mega-cities and not for the middle-sized cities."

The final list of 15 second-round EZ winners suggests otherwise; while there are sizable metropolises like Boston and Miami, there are also places like Gary, Indiana, and Huntington, West Virginia.

"I do really believe this time they let the applications speak for themselves," Tullock says.

Of course, it probably didn't hurt that Ashe was close with HUD Deputy Secretary Saul Ramirez, whom he had gotten to know when both of them were active in the Conference of Mayors—"The greatest strength Victor Ashe brings to this city is his contacts," Tullock says of his old boss. Sen. Bill Frist also lobbied HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo about Knoxville's application, taking a copy of it on a plane trip to Latin America with Cuomo.

One person Ashe says wasn't involved in the lobbying—despite rumors to the contrary—was Vice President Al Gore. With heavily Democratic Memphis also in the running, Ashe says Gore was unlikely to lean too heavily to either side of the state. In fact, officials in Memphis—the poorest of Tennessee's major cities—have expressed anger at losing out to Knoxville. But Tullock says Knoxville's relative prosperity was probably a strength.

"Knoxville's best argument is that things haven't deteriorated so much here there's no chance of improving them," he says.

—J.F.M.