by Joe Sullivan
Shortly after the state legislature enacted Tennessee's controversial growth planning law in May, 1998, a headline in the Washington Post read:
"Curbing Sprawl: Tennessee's Surprise Breakthrough." And the article went on to say that, "Tennessee joins a small group of states willing to consider the idea of curbing a sub-division-hungry home builder, putting forests or meadows off-bounds, or stopping a big box retailer from occupying the cheapest cornfield his cash can buy."
A mandate to "minimize urban sprawl" was among the statutory directives imposed on the Knox County Growth Policy Coordinating Committee that has been struggling for the past year to come up with a plan that satisfies the multi-faceted legislation. Setting boundaries for future annexations by the city of Knoxville has become the most consuming of these facets. Yet even the city, in proposing growth boundaries to the committee that would allow for a doubling of its present 97 square miles of turf, purports to be proceeding under the banner of sprawl curtailment. Indeed, the city's proposal invokes the following litany of horribles drawn from a "Smart Growth Reading File" prepared for the committee by the Metropolitan Planning Commission:
* "Sprawl sucks the life out of older downtowns and neighborhoods;
* "Sprawl destroys community character and countryside;
* "Sprawl forecloses alternatives to the automobile as a means of transport;
* "Sprawl leaves older cities and towns with excessively high concentrations of poor people with social problems."
So what is the committee doing to deal with all of these asserted ills, not to mention the increased air pollution that is often cited as a consequence of more cars driving longer distances? The answer, up to now, is next to nothing. And the likelihood of that answer changing between now and the year-end deadline for completion of the committee's work appears minimal at best.
In fairness to the committee's 12 members, theirs is among the most thankless set of tasks ever imposed on a group of uncompensated citizens. The committee is caught in the middle of a legislatively-concocted turf war between a city bent on expansion and a County Commission majority that's dug in its heels to protect constituents who live outside the present city limits from the threat of becoming subject to city taxes via annexation.
In meeting after meeting and workshop after workshop, the committee has tediously and tendentiously grappled with determining how much more land the city needs to satisfy statutory criteria that are based on population growth projections. Even though the city's population has scarcely grown in more than 30 years, UT planners have somehow concluded that the city is entitled to half of Knox County's projected growth to 432,866 (from 380,000 presently) over the next 20 years. After finally concluding it will take 16 square miles of vacant land outside the city limits to house these figments of some UT planners' imagination, the committee is now engaged in the surreal exercise of selecting a new homeland for them. Because the state law also stipulates that the city's growth boundaries must be "reasonably compact" and "contiguous," it may take up to a total of 50-square miles of annexable land in which to fit the new homeland.
The committee has similarly been engaged in calculating how much presently undeveloped land outside the city's growth boundaries will be needed to accommodate the balance of the county's projected population growth. If it ends up approximating analyses done for County Executive Tommy Schumpert by a Memphis-based consulting firm, another 55 square miles will be allocated to what's termed the county's "Planned Growth Area."
When you add up all these growth allocations, that still leaves half of Knox County's 526 square-mile total that's presently categorized by MPC as Agriculture/Forestry/ Vacant. If minimization of sprawl counts for anything, by all logic, this 267 square miles belongs in the third classification established by the state: namely, "Rural Areas." Under the statute, the most that could be done in these areas is loosely defined as "uses other than high density commercial, industrial or residential development."
One member of the committee, the veteran chairman of Farragut's planning commission, Bob Hill, has taken the lead in trying to conform this statutory definition to county zoning standards. Under Hill's proposal, up to two dwelling units per acre would be permitted. And if a rural area gets sanitary sewers and roads that meet standards to be set by MPC, then up to five dwelling units per acre would be permitted.
By Hill's acknowledgment, "It's not a very strenuous definition." Yet few other members of the committee appear inclined to follow his lead in applying it to all land that doesn't fit the statutory definition of urban or planned growth areas. Instead, the majority appears to share the concerns of developers and home builders that such constraints will artificially inflate property values, and thus the cost of housing, within the growth area. Add to these the concerns of rural land owners that their property values will be impaired.
It will be surprising if the committee designates a rural area any larger than the 135 square miles recommended by Schumpert's consultant. Mostly, this comprises terrain that is topographically or environmentally constrained, leaving a much larger chunk of developable land in the planned growth area. To which Hill laments, "We're legitimizing the kind of sprawl that will occur if we make the planned growth area very large."
For better or worse, however, the committee isn't likely to be the ultimate arbiter of anything. The growth plan which it must adopt by year-end will then be subject to approval by City Council and County Commission. But an impasse is almost certain to arise, given County Commission's aversion to any enlargement of the city's boundaries. And in that event, the whole matter will be handed over to a three-judge panel.
Perhaps the judges will take the statutory mandate to minimize sprawl more seriously than the committee has to date—or than County Commission ever would. Perhaps also the state could back up this mandate with the sort of standards that states such as Maryland and New Jersey have recently set for channeling funds for roads and other infrastructure to areas that are designated for growth and withholding them from areas that aren't.
Knox County isn't going to take any such initiative on its own.
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