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Parking Lot Hell, Part I
Could be a hot time on the riverfront this fall, but Restaurant Raja Mike Chase is uncharacteristically close-lipped about the parking problems looming on the riverfront when the Orange hordes arrive next month.
Chase has battled tooth and toenail for years to hang onto his customer parking at Calhoun's on the River. This year, football season may be even worse with the opening of new establishments like the marina and Regas' Riverside Tavern. When asked to confirm reports that he has bought an interest in a local towing company, Chase said "No comment," but when pressed, had a short elaboration:
"War is close."
Parking Lot Hell, Part II
When Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith said on Wednesday that such future decisions as deploying city streetsweeping machines to hose down customers coming out of nightclubs will be made by "supervisory personnel," perhaps he was mentally demoting Captain Paul Fish.
Contrary to Keith's suggestion that the decision to use the high-powered spray on patrons of the Network (a Western Plaza club that caters to a predominantly black, hip hop crowd on its hardcore rap Saturday nights) was made by lower-level KPD flunkies, Fish, a sector commander, was on the scene, helping to arrest a Network assistant manager for asking why the streetsweeper was there.
Network owner Don Rosen is a technology hound who can sit in his Cherokee Boulevard home and keep up with club action via the 16 video cameras installed there. Last Saturday night he was in his office and grabbed a video cam and caught an image of Fish glaring menacingly into the camera.
Rosen also says he was visited at home a couple of weeks ago by a member of a prominent Kingston Pike-dwelling family who informed him that he was bringing "too many blacks into the area."
(See "Citybeat" for more on KPD's Network crackdown.)
Democracy Inaction
Gov. Don Sundquist got some teeth gnashing around the UT Knoxville campus last week when he more or less vetoed the election of a student representative to the UT Board of Trustees. Flexing gubernatorial muscle, the Don picked third-place vote-getter Brandi Wilson over fellow students Ayappa Biddanda and Erin Schwie. Biddanda, who got 1,034 student votes in the spring election to Wilson's 685, is a little baffled by the choice. He and Wilson are both seniors with the normal selection of student activities on their resumes. Some, shall we say, interesting facets of the situation: Wilson is interning in Sen. Bill Frist's office and had the support of Trustee/political wheeler-dealer Susan Richardson-Williams; Biddanda, a Knoxville native whose parents immigrated from India, was the only non-white student on the list of the three finalists; and he also was an outspoken skeptic of the controversial proposed four-lane bridge to the Ag Campus. John Nolt, a philosophy professor who has led protests against the bridge project, says Biddanda's slighting is "one more instance of the state administration and the university administration ignoring the wishes, democratically expressed, of the people who live and work at this university." Sundquist spokeswoman Alexia Levison says that's just silly: "He felt that Brandi was the most qualified for the post, and that's his prerogative." She couldn't elaborate on which qualifications made the difference. Says Biddanda, "I would feel most comfortable letting students decide who's most qualified."
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