Can Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership head Tom Ingram prove his critics wrong?
by Joe Sullivan
When Tom Ingram came to the April 18 City Council meeting to support approval of the city's budget, the president of the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership had no idea of the budgetary surprise that Mayor Victor Ashe had in store for him.
In a last minute amendment to the budget, Ashe recommended and council compliantly approved a $25,000 cut in the $200,000 annual contribution that the city has been making to the chamber.
The cut was just the latest in a succession of setbacks that Ingram and his economic booster organization have sustained during the two years since he took the helm of what was heralded as a synergistic meshing of several predecessor entities. Cumulatively, they raise the question of just how much longer the lanky, bearded Ingram can put up with all the guff he's had to take from many quarters. And while Ingram also has a lot of backers, even most of them acknowledge that the 1998 amalgamation largely remains a work in progress.
Even its name, Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, is both unwieldy and a misnomer. The amalgamation was supposed to bring the erstwhile Greater Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Organization together with the Knoxville Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Knox County Development Corp. under one seamless roof. While this has been accomplished physically, in vintage quarters in the Old City Hall, the relationships among them have been anything but seamless.
Under a management contract between the Chamber and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, for example, Ingram was supposed to give direction to the CVB. But its then-boss, Mike Wilds, found himself caught in the middle between his new boss, Ingram, and continuing accountability to the Knox County Tourist Commission, which retained its own oversight authority over the CVB. When Wilds quit, the Tourist Commission moved to terminate the management contract with the chamber. "This isn't a partnership; it's a dictatorship," fumed one member of the Tourist Commission, hotel proprietor Claude Yow.
Relations between the chamber and the Development Corp. were even more strained. When the DC moved its offices into Old City Hall, it erected a partition that sealed off an elegant, bannistered staircase that had connected the DC's quarters with the chamber's. The partition symbolizes a preposterous schism between two entities that should be working hand-in-glove. The DC is responsible for acquisition and site preparation of Knox County's business parks while the chamber is responsible for recruiting new industry and other businesses to locate in them. However, the DC's executive director, Melissa Ziegler, and her high-powered board of directors were bent on preserving their own turf. Not only did Ziegler have no accountability to Ingram, she didn't even (according to Ingram) return a number of his phone calls.
Ziegler, for her part, insists, "I think it's working well. Everybody's committed to ensuring good communications and focusing on our mission of attracting quality new businesses to the Knoxville area."
Ingram takes a somewhat different view. "We're not close yet to true partnership," he says. Consolidation of the various economic development entities would have been the best way to achieve it, he believes. But absent that, "We've just got to work all the harder at pulling together, at staying in frequent enough communication and having enough trust and confidence in each other to get the job done."
While there's not yet a lot of fruit to show for these labors, progress has clearly been made in broadening the chamber's base of support in the business community and extending its political connections. Its membership roster, which had been declining, has started growing from 1,659 dues-paying firms a year ago to 1,788 presently. Its reconstituted 50-person board of directors is a model of inclusiveness, dispelling notions that the chamber was really being run by a small oligarchy of business leaders. Among the "gang of 50" is Sheriff Tim Hutchison, the oligarchy's political nemesis whom Ingram has also cultivated in the name of community bridge building.
Working relations with the Tourist Commission have vastly improved, in no small part because Ingram and its chairman, former county commissioner Mike Ragsdale, get along famously. The same goes for the new director of the CVB, Mike Carrier. Their collaboration on developing more special events to draw visitors to the downtown area also involves another entity that's been brought under the chamber's umbrella—the Central Business Improvement District. Arranging a new series of live concerts in an Old City courtyard is all that's showing for their efforts to date. But a committee chaired by the chamber's vice president for marketing, Carol Evans, is pursuing numerous other possibilities. Among them is assuming responsibility for some or all of the new programming needed for a rejuvenated Dogwood Arts Festival.
The CBID's chairman, Rod Townsend Jr., is patiently positive about the progress that's being made. "We've got a new organization with new people, and it takes a lot of time to get a handle on what's needed and how to accomplish it with so many players at the table. But Tom has been very diligent, and we have a lot of confidence in Carol, who has a track record of success on special events," says Townsend.
Creation of an East Tennessee Film Commission is also in the works, and Ingram was instrumental in getting $25,000 in start up funding approved by County Commission toward a $170,000 goal for an entity that would promote and facilitate filmmaking in the area.
He also enlisted the support of top mayoral deputies Gene Patterson and Doug Berry for getting a $25,000 contribution from the city added to its budget. But to the dismay of all of them, when City Council convened on the budget, this $25,000 allocation was diverted from funding for the chamber itself.
Mayor Victor Ashe isn't very illuminating as to why he saw fit to take this money out of the chamber's hide. But while Ingram has greatly strengthened the chamber's relationships with county government, his relations with the mayor have seemingly—and perhaps not just coincidentally—deteriorated. Along with his cultivation of Ashe enemies such as Hutchison, Ingram took a swipe at the mayor for lack of vision in a 1999 chamber newsletter. And while Ashe was away trekking in the Himalayas after his re-election last September, Ingram had discussions with Berry about a key economic development post at the chamber. The mayor then went out of his way to point out to the media Ingram's failure to attend a convention center ground-breaking ceremony. The vindictiveness seemingly continues.
A $25,000 cut in city funding doesn't loom all that large in the chamber's $2.4 million budgetary scheme of things. Largely due to its success in growing membership dues, a balanced budget is in prospect for the year ending June 30—a big improvement over the $127,000 deficit incurred in the preceding year.
So Ashe's knifing just may have been intended to hurt Ingram politically more than financially by furnishing Ingram's detractors on the chamber's board of creditors with new ammunition to use against him. Amid all the turmoil that's surrounded the chamber's turf wars with its ostensible partners, it would be surprising if Ingram didn't have detractors.
Just how many knives are out for him isn't clear, but Ingram acknowledges that, "Never before in my career have I had to justify my performance. I've always let the results speak for themselves." Whereupon he pulls out a three-page progress report prepared, he says, "for one of those meetings a month or two ago when some of my detractors were suggesting it was time for me to go because we weren't doing anything."
Along with a list of organization building and financial fortification steps, the report cites the chamber's role in recruiting several new businesses to the Knoxville area and in providing "significant assistance" to help keep several existing ones. Among many other bullet points, leadership in taking what's known as Digital Crossing from concept to reality is also cited. A 40,000 square-foot building leased on the cheap from TVA is now getting high-tech rigging to attract a cluster of information technology-based companies to downtown Knoxville. But while the project's manager claims to have numerous prospects for the space, none of them have been identified, let alone signed up.
Much of the criticism leveled at Ingram isn't so much for lack of accomplishment as for lack of prowess at the economic development role that's traditionally been the chamber's core mission. When he sought and took the job two years ago, Ingram recognized his lack of credentials as an industrial corporate recruiter and his need to get someone with expertise to complement him in this area. But the person he brought on board as his second in command, former Metropolitan Planning Commission director Don Parnell, didn't really know the territory any better than Ingram. Parnell's tempestuous style also contributed to a parting of the ways about a year ago.
"I didn't understand what I was looking for then," Ingram says somewhat ruefully. Partly because of 1999's financial pinch and partly because Ingram believed he could rise to the challenge himself, he didn't immediately start looking for a successor to Parnell who commanded a six-figure salary.
Always insightful and often eloquent, Ingram can hold forth persuasively when he talks about his economic development philosophy. "We still need to be recruiting traditional kinds of businesses. But the economy is changing and we have to redefine economic development," he posits. "I think we're causing people to think (about) what economic development really is. It's clean air in the Smokies, it's parks and greenways and great schools. It's a totality of quality of life issues that get companies to choose Knoxville because they think it's a great place to live. So we've got to pay as much attention to that as we do to jobs per se."
But old-school development types who still hold sway at the Development Corp. put a lot more store in having someone who understands the intricacies of plant location decisions and the courting process that leads up to them. And some of them remain convinced that, for all his talents, Ingram is a square peg in a round hole in the chamber job.
The person who most nearly bridges the gap between the Development Corp. and the chamber is Sharon Miller. Founder and proprietor of a successful investment management firm, The Trust Company, Miller is as much the matriarch of Knoxville's business establishment as Jim Haslam II is the patriarch. A long-time member of the Development Corp. board, she agreed to become the chair of the reconstituted chamber two years ago partly in recognition of the need to show more diversity.
Asked whether she shares the "square peg in a round hole" view of Ingram, Miller responds, "Tom is not a member of the economic development fraternity which is one of the reasons why our board has formed a search committee to find someone who is to be the economic development head." Ingram now concurs with the need for such a person and is spearheading the search.
Asked whether the search committee is looking for someone to complement or to succeed Ingram, Miller's pithy response is "Either."
With expressions of support like that, why does Ingram continue to subject himself to all the crap? Measuring his every word, he says, "I'm going to do this job as long as I think I can make a difference. The only way I can make a difference is to do what I think needs to be done whether it makes everybody happy with me or not."
But there may be a bit of a game akin to chicken going on here. Under the open-ended term of his employment contract, Ingram is free to take his leave at any time, and the board is also free to get rid of him. But if he's terminated, he's entitled to $200,000 in severance pay, commensurate with his $200,000 salary. So a guessing game around the chamber now is who's going to part company with whom.
May 4, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 18
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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