Nine Counties One Vision brings a long overdue public planning process to East Tennessee. But can it fly?
by Jack Neely
The year 2000 was hardly a month old when there came one hint that this century might be different from the ones that came before it. Something happened in the region that had never happened before. Somebody besides the government invited all three-quarters of a million people who live in a nine-county area around Knoxville, and they welcomed them regardless of income level, age, race, class, or even citizenship.
By the hundreds, people arrived at high-school and college auditoriums and sat in folding chairs to hear a brief talk. Then they divided into groups based on numbers they'd been given when they came in, and they sat in classrooms as a leader asked them to picture their community as they'd like to see it, then offer three ideas which the leader wrote down with a permanent marker.
No one was selling Tupperware, no preacher was taking a collection, no politician was asking for votes. All they wanted from these people who came from all corners of a 2,000-square-mile area was ideas. And they got them, about 10,000 of them.
Nine Counties One Vision is a new thing for Knoxville, and for most of America: a volunteer organization whose ostensible purpose is to improve a community through advice from its citizens.
Lynn Fugate, former Vice President for Community Development at First American National Bank, is executive director of Nine Counties One Vision. She works in her sunny carrel on the second floor of an otherwise unoccupied new building on Volunteer Landing. She's obviously proud of the diversity of participation they've gotten so far, which they've plotted on pie charts. They've drawn interest across the region; about 65 percent of the participants hail from counties outside of Knox. She's especially surprised at another figure, showing that nearly two-thirds of the participants have lived in the region more than 20 years. "A lot of people would have thought it would be the johnny-come-latelies," Fugate says of those who would be involved in such a newfangled project. And a good 21 percent are in the 30-44 age group, the parents-of-small-children demographic which is historically slow to volunteer.
The idea, basically, is that this organization will collect ideas for improving the community; that step was finished a month ago. Then, volunteers will sort through the ideas, looking for themes and setting goals. That step is being wrapped up this week. Then, a grand "Vision Fair" will be held May 19-20, outlining the process and recruiting volunteers to work on task forces to link the ideas with means of making them happen. "That's when it ceases to be pie-in-the-sky stuff," says Fugate. "When they'll look at these ideas realistically. And realistically doesn't mean it has to be easy."
Anything so thoroughly different is bound to raise questions, and maybe suspicions. Downtown, Nine Counties One Vision has been the subject of wise-guy jokes. "Nine Counties, One Bearhug," one prominent wag calls it. "One County, 19 Visions," is how another politician characterized Knox County's political reality. But for the time being, thousands seem to be taking it seriously and earnestly, hoping it will bring things to the community that politics and profit-driven private enterprise have not.
Looking at the community as having a reality beyond county lines makes sense, at least in theory. Our current county boundaries were established in the 1790s, when most travel was by horseback, roads of any sort were scarce, and it could be a day-long adventure to journey from one end of the county to the other. Now, on the interstate, we can traverse Knox County in half an hour. Many do so on a daily basis. "The reality is, the region competes with other regions," says Fugate. "What companies look to move here, they move to the area. Our county lines don't matter as much to them as they do to us."
Thinking of what may be a more modern way of looking at a "community" as a much broader area is seductive. These nine counties contain three-quarters of a million residents; if they were to somehow incorporate as a city, it would become suddenly the largest city in Tennessee. Neighborhood vs. neighborhood squabbling would seem much less relevant. We wouldn't have to worry about Maryville capturing corporate headquarters, because Maryville is here. We wouldn't have to worry about Sevier County capturing millions of tourist dollars, because Sevier County is here. Same with the baseball stadium. It didn't move away; it moved here. High-tech businesses moving to Oak Ridge? No problem. Oak Ridge is here, too.
Planning for nine counties at once might seem to make sense. The trouble might be with these nine particular counties. A Blount County farmer reflects on the area's unwieldiness: "To the east you've got farmers. To the north you've got factory workers. To the west you've got Oak Ridge scientists. To the South you've got plain hillbillies. And in Knoxville, everybody's a businessman." He was skeptical, at first, but he's been to three meetings in all, and liked the idea better each time.
What's important to a resident of Oak Ridge, which allegedly hosts America's greatest density of Ph.D.'s, might not seem important to a resident of Pigeon Forge, whose business is based largely on country-music tourism. There's been some marked variance between regions; perhaps the most marked one was a blip at Heritage High in Blount County, where numerous volunteers proposed restoring prayer in schools and posting the Ten Commandments in public places.
There are some other hazards as well. The nine-county area is demographically very different from the city of Knoxville, and that difference may be reflected in the nine-county region's concerns, plans, and sense of identity. Some demographic minorities, like unmarried adults, out-of-state newcomers, and college graduates are strong in Knoxville, but shrink in size when the lens is opened that wide. Knoxville, the city, is 16 percent black, a politically significant bloc. The nine counties region is barely 5 percent black. To be proportionally representative of the nine-county area, a committee of 12 wouldn't necessarily need to include a single black person. So far, though, the Nine Counties organization has drawn members of all races, from co-chair Edye Ellis, perhaps the most conspicuous representative of the effort, on down the ranks.
There's plenty of other sorts of diversity in the region; maybe too much, some think, to give it a coherent identity. What do Oak Ridge and Pigeon Forge and downtown Knoxville and backwoods Appalachia have in common with each other that they don't also have in common with the rest of America?
"Oak Ridge, Knoxville, Pigeon Forge: each has its own personality, its own government," allows Gianni Longo, the consultant called to Knoxville to start the project. But economic aspects like employment cross city and county lines. We also share an environment, a water and air supply.
"Knoxville's destiny is tied to the region," says Longo. "The mountains, the rivers, these things are very important. You've got a piece of the river in Knoxville, but just a small piece of the river. It doesn't just start at the city limit."
Gianni Longo
Though many of his Southern friends call him Gee-onny, his first name is pronounced just like the English "Johnny." He's a bald, round-faced man of 53 who doesn't sit still for long and seems to smile most of the time. Born in southern Italy, he earned his degree in architecture and urban design at the Instituto Superiore di Architettura. He moved to New York in 1971 and became known as an advocate of pedestrian areas and green spaces. After almost 30 years in America, he speaks with a strong Italian accent.
He's personable, but like a politician, he seems most comfortable when he's in front of a crowd. And like a politician, he's canny about accentuating the positive. Maybe it's not surprising that some have referred to his following as a "cult" and Longo himself as a "Svengali" or an Oz-like "man behind the curtain." But eating crackers with him at 9:30 p.m., as he waits for a tardy goal-setting group to finish up at the UT Conference Center, he seems altogether human and well-intentioned, a little ragged at the end of the day.
"One thing I have to say is the response to the call is unprecedented," Longo says emphatically. "Three thousand six hundred people—that's a huge participation." Even a 12-county project Longo oversaw in Birmingham didn't fetch nearly that many on the first go-round. "If we got three, four, 500, that would be the usual suspects. But 3,600? No way! This has obviously struck a chord."
Enthusiastically, he ticks off the concerns he has heard from Nine Counties. Education is high, accounting for about 11 percent of the ideas. Close behind, surprising to some, was transportation, with a strong emphasis on public transit. About 7.5 percent were related to environmental concerns, and 5.2 percent to growth management.
"What really surprised me is how much people took to heart the call to think regionally," he says.
A New Yorker, Longo has been to Knoxville on several occasions before. His 1977 book, For Pedestrians Only: Planning, Design, and Management Of Traffic-Free Zones, includes 70 examples of functional pedestrian spaces around America, and one is a peculiarly clean-looking picture of old Market Square Mall. It made it into this book as an example of an American pedestrian success as, for a while, maybe it was.
More recently, he contributed to a book called A Guide To Great American Public Places, but he's not best known as an author. He's known for an approach to municipal decision-making called the "nominal group process," which invites entire populations to contribute ideas in a non-critical environment, then sorts out those ideas and whenever possible, pairs them with resources that can make them a reality.
It could be done without Gianni Longo, but for some reason it never is, and part of his success has to do with his charisma and a reputation for instantly understanding each community he studies. Ann Florie, executive director of Birmingham's Region 2020 project, says she was concerned about whether Longo, the big-city guy with the Italian accent, could reach rural audiences. "I never saw him fail to connect," she says. She often questioned his decisions about that city he couldn't have known well, but in the end, she says, "Darn, he was always right. He could almost tell us what the numbers were gonna run."
Longo's basic concept has worked with varying degrees of success in several cities: New Haven, Conn., the District of Columbia, and even Kingsport, Tenn. But his first triumph is still his best known.
Like Chattanooga?
Because Longo's idea is unfamiliar and takes a while to explain, supporters in Knoxville often rely on shorthand to describe it. "It's what they did in Chattanooga," they say, counting on every listener to know at least something about the urban marvels downriver. The technique employed by Nine Counties One Vision was originally devised 16 years ago in Chattanooga's Vision 2000 project.
What Chattanooga has done with itself in the last 15 years has become world famous. The Aquarium, the mile-long pedestrian bridge, the electric buses, the converted warehouse outlet mall.
Many of Chattanooga's achievements are routinely credited to the Vision 2000 process that Gianni Longo developed. However, representatives of the Chattanooga foundation RiverValley Partners confirm that several of the city's most prominent projects were already in play before Vision 2000. The Aquarium, for example, had actually come out of a UTK College of Architecture class led by Stroud Watson. Though Vision 2000 did present some new ideas, RiverValley Partners Vice President Jim Bowen says the process was more useful in facilitating old ones. "Vision 2000 put teeth into those ideas," Bowen says. "It gave them some credibility." Vision 2000 suggested the importance of the city's historical and symbolic connection to the river—ergo, boost the aquarium. In some cases, Vision 2000 also spawned committees that led to implementation.
Longo himself says "The Lyndhurst Foundation was committed to Chattanooga very strongly. What Vision did was give them a sense of direction, a good bouquet from which to select."
Lyndhurst is the difference most often cited by Chattanooga-enviers about why the experience of Vision 2000 might turn out to be very different from that of Nine Counties One Vision. The Lyndhurst Foundation, the Coca-Cola legacy which is probably the best-heeled foundation in the East Tennessee region, is known for its almost filial devotion to Chattanooga. Longo admits there's not a foundation in Knoxville that's comparable to Lyndhurst, but says several local foundations, combined, could mount something of similar scope. "Knoxville is not a foundation-poor type of community," he says.
Nine Counties supporters like neighborhood activist Jeff Talman insist that there's more potential money here, because Knoxville's per capita income is considerably greater than Chattanooga's, which is true. "Our community probably has the same amount of revenues," says Fugate. "It's just not one big foundation; there are lots of foundations and corporations that do fund things in the community."
Another reason the Chattanooga experience may be less relevant to Nine Counties is that Vision 2000 was focused entirely on the city of Chattanooga, and tapped into municipal pride—which may be easier to access than pride of belonging to a never-before-defined region. Chattanooga is a much more specific place than the nine counties around Knoxville.
Moreover, many assumed from the beginning that Vision 2000 would be focused on downtown Chattanooga; several major downtown proposals already in the works were validated by the results of Vision 2000. Longo himself had already been involved with downtown Chattanooga's revitalization—he was one of those behind launching the city's annual Riverbend Festival, perhaps the most consistently successful festival in East Tennessee.
It's clear that the Chattanooga process was very different from the one proposed for Knoxville, which attempts to encompass a region about 20 times the size of Chattanooga's Vision 2000, with about five times the population. Longo's experiment there seems like a laser beam. In comparison, Nine Counties One Vision seems more like a sunlamp.
Still, Longo insists it's the right way to go. He adds that if he had Chattanooga to do over again, he'd do it as a region. "In '84, the focus of citizens was inward," he says. "What has been happening since then, we are beginning to look at regions as the cities of today."
Kingsport and Birmingham
Longo has led other visioning efforts around the country: one in D.C. which he describes as successful, having resulted in practical land-use policies. Another in New Haven, Conn., which he admits was less so, due to a failure in local leadership. Besides Chattanooga, Longo may be proudest of another one that's very close to home: his 10-year-old effort in Kingsport, Tenn. Called "Kingsport Tomorrow," the visioning process led to several public-private partnerships, including the successful Meadowview Conference, Resort and Convention Center, as well as Kingsport's first modern transit system, neighborhood improvement projects, and a new public health-care center.
The executive director of Longo's effort there was a former schoolteacher named Jeannette Blazier. Last year, Blazier was elected mayor of Kingsport. She considers her election a vote of confidence in the Kingsport Tomorrow project, which concluded not long before her election. "Just as important as the bricks-and-mortar projects was the new involvement of citizens," she says. "We're still moving toward a grass-roots process."
Knoxville's project is much broader in scale than all those which have been around long enough to yield results. Longo says the nearest comparison might be Birmingham, a larger city than Knoxville, but one that shares some of its character as an industrial city in the non-industrial South. There in 1997 Longo commenced a broad-stroke 12-counties program known as Region 2020. It's an even larger project than Nine Counties, potentially affecting 1.5 million residents.
It might seem a good indicator of what Knoxville could expect. However, after two and a half years of visioning, the Birmingham experiment still has few concrete results to show.
Region 2020 seems to have made somewhat less of a splash than Nine Counties has here. The initial public participation in Birmingham was actually only half of what we've already seen in Knoxville; the per-capita participation was only about one-fourth what we've had here.
Asked what Region 2020 has accomplished in its first 30 months, a tired-sounding newspaper reporter says, "We've had a whole lot of visioning," in the same tone she might have said, "a whole lot of potato salad." It hasn't made the news just lately. Some Birmingham residents we contacted this month say they've never even heard of Region 2020.
Executive Director Ann Florie says 30 projects have come out of the visioning process, and 4-500 people are actively involved with Region 2020 today. And they may be close to commencing the first real result: it's to be a housing project in the low-income neighborhood of Woodlawn. She admits there's been some resentment that this 12-county initiative is, for the moment, concentrating so much effort on one inner-city neighborhood.
Other projects in process include a regional land-use plan, an initiative to promote home rule (county jurisdiction over sales-tax revenue), and a regional studies institute. (Though a few Knoxville supporters have attributed the revival of downtown Birmingham to Region 2020, the organization doesn't take credit for that, which was underway long before the experiment.)
Looking at a region as big as 12 counties, "It is extremely difficult," Florie says. "But this is the right way to do it."
Longo still speaks of Birmingham proudly, explaining that it's in the "implementation" phase. As its title suggests, 2020 A.D. is still the target date; this visioning business can be a long, long process.
Birth of a Vision
Justifying the Nine Counties project and its scope, Longo cites a meeting of 150 invited guests at a lunchtime presentation at Ijams Nature Center last May 11. That meeting comes up frequently as this movement's Fourth of July; some who were there were surprised at how decisive the meeting turned out to be. The audience, made up of "community leaders" from across a multi-county region, was asked whether they wanted to go ahead with Longo's plan; all but two did. Then they were asked how wide to cast the net; the nine-county region came up as the winner, though there had been no discussion of the options; it was just a preference the lunch guests checked on sheets of paper.
Still, with those checkmarks, they made a choice that could affect the lives of thousands, in small ways or large, for years to come.
Inviting Gianni Longo to this city midway between Kingsport and Chattanooga, two of his process's biggest successes, might have seemed inevitable. This "success," which some are already calling it, has lots of parents, all of whom acknowledge each other. From the sound of it, several groups in and out of Knox County began to converge on the vision thing.
Sandy Gillespie was lunching with her friends Jackie Lane and Kathy Key at the Cresent Moon Cafe in the spring of '98. Gillespie, who had been active on Knox County's greenways committee, had been discussing their projects. "We decided what Knoxville needed was more than just a great greenways network," she says. "What we needed was education—well, everything. But there had been so many efforts—even organized situations that never seemed to go anywhere. People just didn't have the confidence that this area could do anything. We'd heard about projects in Nashville and Chattanooga, but there wasn't any sense that the same things could happen here."
They invited veteran planner Annette Anderson, UT professor and former director of the Community Design Center, to join the group. "We thought, 'How can we get this to the grass roots?'" says Gillespie. Anderson suggested approaching Laurens Tullock, former Knoxville director of development, who had recently taken the role of directing a new philanthropic organization, the Cornerstone Foundation.
Tullock, content to watch the process work on its own, politely declines to comment. Though Cornerstone provided seed money for the Nine Counties effort, he says the foundation is now just one of 17 corporate sponsors. (Among the others are Baptist Health System, Clayton, DeRoyal, HGTV, the Haslam Family Foundation, the News-Sentinel, St. Mary's, and TVA.)
They recruited other volunteers, among them Jeff Talman, who had been closing in on the Longo experiment from another direction. Talman had been involved with his neighborhood group, LINC (Linking Inner-City Neighborhoods in the Community), mainly over the baseball-stadium controversy; LINC had sponsored a reconnaissance car trip to Chattanooga in July, 1998, and met with UT architecture professor and Chattanooga guru Stroud Watson. As Talman recalls their meeting, "We said, 'Stroud, Bubba! What are the differences that make the difference?'"
He listened and was impressed with stories of the Longo-designed visioning process. To Talman and his fellow pilgrims, it seemed the most relevant clue for Knoxville's plight. "We came back with the belief that if we did one thing, it would be this vision thing," Talman says. "I really believe it's how you create a culture of expectation."
He explains that phrase with a familiar analogy: "We expect national championships in football; let's expect the same level of ideas in planning the city. We need to expect greater things. Routinely. Some people say, 'We have the best educational system in the state.' Well, that's kind of interesting. But Phil Fulmer wouldn't get far if he said we had the best football team in the state.'"
"We don't have Chattanooga envy," Talman says. "We don't want to live in Chattanooga. We want Knoxville to be all it can be."
Meanwhile, still other groups outside of Knoxville seemed to be moving in similar directions. Gatlinburg restaurateur Geoff Wolpert was working with a group called the Gatlinburg Gateway Foundation. Promoting the region is a revolutionary new approach for Gatlinburg, traditionally jealous of other Smokies gateways. "Sevierville and Pigeon Forge have their own identities; Pigeon Forge has lots of room for malls and amusement parks." He says inter-city rivalry is based on "scarcity logic: if you get more, I'm gonna get less." Wolpert thinks it's more appropriate to develop an "abundance mentality" that if the region is promoted well, they're all better off.
"So many of our concerns overlap; transportation and air quality are big issues in Gatlinburg," he says. One proposal that has come out of Nine Counties is an old one, the elusive passenger rail to the mountains.
Wolpert makes Nine Counties sound like a conservative's dream. "Through the years, citizens, through lack of knowledge or irresponsibility, have encouraged government to do things that government's not supposed to do for us. Government's supposed to keep us safe and keep the roads in good shape." An organization like Nine Counties, he thinks, might handle some of the lifestyle issues more effectively. "The thing that impresses me so much is the sense of community—that we can make the place we live anything that we want it to be."
Tullock invited Longo to meet with the 29 principals, each of whom were asked to recruit several community leaders from within and without Knox County to see Longo's presentation at Ijams a few weeks later.
It led to the three-round process which commences what they call the visioning process. Round 1, conducted from Feb. 1 to Mar. 2, was the 20 meetings that gathered the ideas. Round 2, held last week and this week, attempted to consolidate ideas into goals and strategies. The last of the goal-oriented meetings is tonight (April 13), at Pellissippi State's campus on Magnolia Avenue, on the subject of the environment.
Will It Work?
The grandest single meeting of all will come next month; the Vision Fair, to be held at Volunteer Landing, will set priorities for implementation. After that, task forces will begin looking at ideas realistically. Everyone's invited, regardless of whether they participated in previous meetings. From that meeting will come task forces which will attempt to link goals with means.
Is Nine Counties One Vision a substitute for ineffective government? For some, their participation reflects a frustration with business-as-usual city and county legislation. "So many elected officials have been in there so long," says Talman. "They say, 'You need a vision? What's the matter, you don't like our vision?'"
However, he and most participants see elected government and Nine Counties as complementary. "I think it's best if some things work outside government," he says.
"I don't think it would be politically acceptable to consolidate these nine counties as one city," Longo says. "We're trying to identify areas of commonalities."
"All people are saying is they want cooperation," says Fugate. "Elected leaders have their role. They do things only they can do."
If city and county lines are indeed obsolete, they're still the basis for taxation and legislation, and probably will be for the rest of our lives. Even in a new era of cooperation, when business moves from Knox County to Blount County, Knox County still loses revenue.
Fugate says representatives from most of the governing bodies within the nine-county region are actively involved with the project. Ellen Adcock, with the city, and Molly Pratt, of Knox County, former legislator Bud Gilbert, and State Sen. Ben Atchley are all on the steering committee.
Some who've been involved in the visioning meetings say they're frustrated there's no more involvement from the usual "12 white guys," the phrase often applied to Knoxville's power structure. Some are there, but the absence of others may be deliberate. Though some political leaders, like County Commissioner Dave Collins, are involved in Nine Counties, others say they want the process to invoke the will of the people without the taint of a conventional political leader's involvement. Ellen Adcock, one of Mayor Victor Ashe's most active lieutenants, has been involved in Nine Counties, but the mayor himself has not. She says it's because "We don't want to be looked at as having ownership or driving this."
Fugate cites recent developments as strong evidence that Knoxville may be rousing from its long spell of complacency. She says Nine Counties may empower participants to challenge superannuated power structures through the voting booth.
For now, Fugate and her staff are culling results from the goal-setting meetings. Results have been all over the map, from the Ten Commandments proposals to another which demanded a "saloon and dancehall in every town." Most are more practical, but surprisingly progressive, with strong support for public transportation from several quarters. Improving the environment and general cleanliness of the region has showed strongly. One interesting consistency has been a focus on the use of public schools as after-hours community centers.
Downtowners disappointed to hear the project was not to be focused on city-limits Knoxville, as it was in Chattanooga, have taken heart in the fact that many participants even from outside Knox County have expressed a desire to improve downtown Knoxville; last week's breakout group about downtown Knoxville drew several volunteers from rural counties.
"People from outside of Knoxville care a lot about downtown," says Fugate. "They still see downtown Knoxville as the center of the region. Some are farmers. They say, 'We don't want to be Knoxville. We want Knoxville to be the best Knoxville it can be. But we live here.'"
Some who attended meetings last week said they were frustrated with the vagueness of the lowest-common-denominator goal statements they could agree on; one ended up stating something like "technology should improve our lives." For the record, Birmingham's report, known as "The Book On Region 2020," is full of such platitudes.
A steering committee will review the results late this month before they're all presented at the Vision Fair on May 19. By July, ad-hoc task forces will be formed of volunteers. They'll come up with practical implementation plans; after that, Fugate says, each task force "will just work until they get it done."
Nine Counties comes with a self-imposed term limit; Fugate expects her office to be closed five years from now. "By then, the task forces should be well enough on the way."
It's far too early to project success or failure for Nine Counties One Vision. However, the project has already scored little successes. William VonSchipmann, the mayor of Plainview, a little-known bedroom community in Union County, says the meeting at Union County High School in February was literally the first time many Union Countians had met each other. Nine Counties, he says, has already spawned friendships and alliances there.
A cynic might see Nine Counties as offering only the illusion of democratic consensus. As impressive as the local turnout has been it still represents only one-half of one percent of all the residents in the defined region. In Chattanooga and elsewhere, these processes tend to render the same sorts of urban goals—pedestrian spaces and public transportation—that Longo was touting in the '70s, long before he started his career in counting ideas.
Longo's process may not be as democratic as it tries to seem. In the end, it will depend heavily on already-powerful people approving of the people's choices and helping them realize them. But it's certainly more democratic than most private philanthropic efforts, and in encouraging public dialogue, is more democratic than much democratic government is.
"The best thing that comes out of this may well be the process," says Island Home neighborhood activist Rachel Craig, initially a vocal skeptic of Nine Counties, but now a participant. "This is one of the few efforts I've ever seen around here where anyone can choose to participate. It's not being done behind closed doors or dominated by the usual suspects. Many people are experiencing a whole new model of public participation—and it will be hard to put that genie back in the bottle."
April 13, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 15
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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