by Joe Sullivan
The Knox County Growth Policy Coordinating Committee deserves credit for its efforts to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable clash between the city and the county over territorial claims.
Under the state's 1998 growth plan law, the committee has the thankless task of drawing boundaries that would allow for city expansion over the next 20 years via annexation. For months the panel has been caught between a city claim for an additional 115 square miles that would more than double its present size and a County Commission majority insistent on denying the city any room for expansion. But now a compromise appears imminent that's due in large measure to a spirit of accommodation on the part of Mayor Victor Ashe and County Executive Tommy Schumpert.
Indeed, when the committee converses today, the growth plan that's due to be on the table reflects a collaboration between city and county officials (exclusive of county commissioners). The plan draws an urban growth boundary that would grant the city 47 square miles in which to annex. Its emphasis is not on capturing present county residents but rather on maximizing presently undeveloped land that would allow for future city population growth. However, in the course of doing so while also keeping the city's prospective limits compact and contiguous, the plan would subject somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 county residents to annexation. (The Metropolitan Planning Commission hasn't yet had time to give any more definition to this number.)
Involuntary subjection of anyone to city property taxes is nothing to be taken lightly. And it may be politically difficult for the majority of county commissioners whose districts lie primarily outside the city to support any such subjection. But if County Commission rejects the Coordinating Committee's recommendations, then the entire community will become subject to adoption of a state-mandated growth plan by a three-judge panel.
The commission majority's ever more strident opposition to the growth plan law itself is fomenting hot-headedness at a time when cooler heads should be prevailing. At its December meeting, commission authorized a $100,000 outlay to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Never mind that the county's Law Department had long since concluded that there is no basis for such a challenge. And to hell with the progressive premises on which the law is based.
Patterned after similar laws in Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Oregon, and Washington, the Tennessee statute is aimed at fostering orderly, compact patterns of development and deterring sprawl. In addition to prescribing boundaries for the growth of cities, the law also mandates that the rest of a county be divided between planned growth areas where development would be encouraged and rural areas where it would be discouraged. On that account as well, the Coordinating Committee appears close to a consensus on the designation of about 200 square miles (of Knox County's 526 square mile total) as rural with constraints on both residential and commercial development. But if history is any guide, County Commission will oppose these as well at the behest of developers and builders questing for cheap farmland.
Strident opponents of the law also fail to recognize that it isn't aimed at feathering the city of Knoxville's nest but at preventing its deterioration. If the city remains landlocked, demographic trends that will become much stronger over the next 20 years almost assure that the city's population and its tax base will erode. Aging baby boomers and an aging housing stock will contribute to a population that is increasingly elderly and poor with fewer residents per household. Along with the erosion of property tax revenues, the city will also suffer from cuts in numerous state and federal grant programs whose funding is population based.
"A city needs to increase its housing stock by approximately 10 percent per decade in order to avoid population loss, and once it becomes landlocked as Knoxville virtually has, then it simply can't sustain itself," says the executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, Norman Whitaker.
It would be nice to think that Knoxville could reverse the downtrend by regeneration from within. And certainly growing up rather than out, as the catch phrase goes, should be the city's highest priority. Downtown development plans and redevelopment within the city's Empowerment Zone (assuming it gets funded) are part of the solution. So is the city's recently adopted Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance which facilitates development of compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods within the city.
Yet even cities such as Atlanta and Pittsburgh that have prided themselves on center city revitalization continue to suffer from population erosion to the point where central Atlanta is increasingly referred to as the hole within that metropolitan area's rampantly growing donut.
Schumpert is particularly to be commended for taking a holistic approach to a thorny set of problems that other elected officials are viewing so parochially. "If we'd had a [growth plan] map 10 or 20 years ago like the one we have before us now, I think we as a county would be much better off. A logical, orderly growth plan is far preferable to the alternatives that allowed annexations that were much more detrimental to the county," Schumpert says. (He's referring to the finger annexations of commercial corridors that stripped the county of nearly $20 million a year in sales tax revenues before the 1998 law put a stop to them.)
It's time for county commissioners to stop posturing and start listening to Schumpert's voice of reason.
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