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Seven Days

New Knoxville Brewing Co. announces it will resume production, ending the city's worst beer drought since 1911. President Clinton removes the city's status as a "Beverage Disaster Area."

Friday, July 28
* Hot on the all-American heels of their certification as legal discriminators (the Supreme Court said they could keep out gays), Boy Scouts of all ages flood into Knoxville for a national conference. They're part of an elite group called Order of the Arrow, which likes to dress up in American Indian outfits. Hmm. Grown men and boys in costumes, feathers, and sashes...

Monday, July 31
* Mayor Victor Ashe reveals he is advising his ol' college pal George W. Bush on how to campaign against Al Gore. Which, considering how the Ashe-Gore Senate race turned out, must be happy news for the Gore campaign.

Tuesday, Aug. 1
* Knox County election officials say they expect a 10 percent turnout for the state and county elections this Thursday. (As in today, Aug. 3.) That's about one-fifth the capacity of Neyland Stadium. C'mon, people. Put on orange if it makes you feel more inspired. But for Pete's sake, go vote.

Knoxville Found

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tie! Robert Nix and Marie Alcorn of Knoxville both correctly (and almost simultaneously) identified the obelisk-like monument as one of the Stations of the Cross at Calvary Catholic Cemetery on Martin Luther King Boulevard. As our Grand Prize winners, Mr. Nix will receive a Me, Myself & Irene T-shirt (unused) from the fabulous hit comedy of the same name and Ms. Alcorn will receive a copy of Paper Daughter, a memoir by M. Elaine Mar. Congratulations, Robert and Marie!

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

Mayor's Night In
Monday, Aug. 7 * 5 p.m. * Mayor's Office, 6th floor of the City County Building
Drop by the mayor's office for a friendly chat about local politics. Or international travel, if you prefer.

City Council
Tuesday, Aug. 8 * 7 p.m. * Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
Watch the city grow before your eyes as Council considers another round of annexations.

Mayor's Task Force on Billboards
Wednesday, Aug. 9 * 10 a.m. * City Finance Director's Conference Room, 6th floor of the City County Building
All eyes are focused on banning new billboards.

Metropolitan Planning Commission
Thursday, Aug. 10 * 1:30 p.m. * Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
MPC will consider the proposed NC-1 preservation overlay for Fort Sanders before making recommendations to City Council next month. Once again, however, MPC won't consider the rezoning application for a Home Depot on Northshore Drive; the rezoning hearing has been postponed a second time, until November.

A Failure to Communicate

Why do downtown businesses feel left out of downtown plans?

The calls started coming into Jim Slyman's real estate office on Gay Street sometime last month. They were from property owners on Market Square who wanted to know why Slyman wasn't jumping into the discussions about Worsham Watkins International's proposals for downtown redevelopment.

"I said, 'What do you mean? My property's not in the plan,'" Slyman recalls, sitting behind his semi-circular desk in a basement office of the building he's owned since the late 1970s.

But he was wrong. The WWI plan calls for the city of Knoxville to acquire all property on the Square and the adjacent block of Gay Street—including Slyman's 411 Building, with its 21 commercial and residential tenants. It was part of the splashy presentation WWI made at the Tennessee Theatre at the end of June. But no one bothered to tell Jim Slyman.

"I, as a property owner, have had to depend on listening to my radio or reading the newspaper to find out [about] that," Slyman says. "It's almost bizarre."

His comments were echoed by a dozen or more proprietors and property owners at a public hearing held last week by the Public Building Authority. One after another, they stepped up to the podium in the City County Building's Main Assembly Room to ask variations on a handful of questions: What's going on? Why are you trying to take my property? And most of all, why hasn't anyone talked to us?

Speaking at that hearing, developer Ron Watkins said he and his partners have visited many of the individual properties included in the WWI proposal, which encompasses land all the way from the Victorian houses near the Knoxville Museum of Art to Gay Street in the center of downtown. But conversations with many of the potentially affected businesses belie that contention.

"I have not been contacted," says Tom Hudson, owner of Café Max on Market Square. "I followed it all along. I've tried to keep up with the latest public hearings."

Loretta Roscoe owns and runs the 11th Street Expresso House near Fort Kid. She started it as a 21-year-old entrepreneur with visions of a haven for Fort Sanders residents and museum-goers looking for something more than "just another beer place down on the Strip." Six and a half years later, she has a stable of regulars and an artsy ambiance that she says isn't available anywhere else downtown. It seems to her like the kind of place that would appeal to the visitors the city hopes to attract with its new $160 million convention center. In fact, when plans for the center were announced two years ago, she says she and the businesses and non-profit agencies that occupy the Victorian houses were told "to start getting our business plans ready" for convention traffic.

Now, the WWI proposal shows a cluster of "carriage houses" in Roscoe's block, which would completely displace the historic Victorian houses and all their tenants. (The proposal suggests the old houses could be moved elsewhere in Fort Sanders.)

"You cannot just move a business," Roscoe says with some exasperation. "How can they move me into a residential area?" And yet, asked how much contact she's had from anyone involved in the WWI planning, she says, "Zero."

"[Ron Watkins] could have talked to me," she continues. "He could've sent people over to the Victorian houses. This did not have to be such a closed deal."

Slyman sees things somewhat differently. In his view, Watkins and partner Earl Worsham are businessmen trying to make the best deal they can. He sees communication as the responsibility of the city, which hired the Public Building Authority to put together a development proposal. (PBA in turn gave exclusive development rights to WWI.)

"I don't think anybody ought to stop that project," says Slyman, who likes many of WWI's ideas. "But at the same time, if the city's just taking [the property] to lease it back to Watkins and Worsham, give me a break. I can do that better myself."

Deputy Mayor Gene Patterson understands the frustrations, but contends that the city isn't in a position to talk to anybody until it actually has a proposal to consider from PBA.

"It isn't even in our court yet," he says. "PBA's still looking at it...We're out of the loop on it as much as any of the property owners. It'd be hard for me to go to Jim Slyman and say, 'Jim, here's the deal.' It's not my proposal."

Dale Smith, CEO of the Public Building Authority, says he has directed Watkins and Worsham to talk to property owners. He's also told them to have John Elkington, head of the company Performa (which is the proposed developer for Market Square and Gay Street), contact businesses and residents. As of Tuesday, Metro Pulse wasn't able to find anyone who had heard from Elkington.

Not all the affected parties are so disenchanted. Mahasti Vafaie and Scott Partin, whose Tomato Head and Lula restaurants have made them the most respected of Market Square's revivalists, are generally supportive.

"I think they probably could communicate a little more with people and let them know what's going on," says Vafaie. But, she says, "I've called Ron Watkins several times, and he's been very happy to talk to me. I feel like anybody could do that, because he's really nice."

"We're just hoping for the best," Partin adds. "We really want something to happen down here."

While Smith acknowledges the irony that many of the people who are doing exactly what the proposal calls for—renovating buildings, bringing business and residents downtown—feel excluded and threatened by it, he says it's not necessarily because they've been left out.

"I've spent more time personally talking to people who own buildings on Market Square than I have any other subset of the community," he says. "The fact that the circumstances of that conversation are unsatisfactory to them is different than [saying] there haven't been any conversations at all."

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

Land Grab

What's behind the city's annexation binge?

Trying to get while the getting is still good seems to be the credo driving the city's bodacious annexation binge. The 39 more annexations headed for August City Council action on top of July's 71 pushes the total for the year to date to 201, nearly double the 112 annexations approved in all of 1999. And Mayor Victor Ashe vows there will be no let-up.

"I intend to accelerate the pace between now and next July 1," Ashe says. That's the date by which the state's controversial growth plan law requires that annexation boundaries be set for the next 20 years. And all of the maneuvering revolves around the intricacies of that law.

Within an Urban Growth Boundary that must be established under that law, the city can annex almost at will, and the city has proposed a boundary that would double the size of its present city limits. Knox County Commission, however, is resolved to fight to the last ditch to prevent any further expansion by the city. It rejected the recommendations of a Growth Plan Coordinating Committee that would have allowed the city about half the growth room it sought. The impasse leaves it up to a three-judge panel in Nashville to draw the boundary. While it's a matter for conjecture how the judge will rule, the educated guessing is that the city will gain at least as much new turf as the coordinating committee recommended.

"My guess is that the judge will use the committee's recommendations as a starting point but will lean in favor of giving the city more rather than less," ventures Bob Hill, veteran chairman of the Farragut Planning Commission and one of the committee's mainstays.

From which it would seem to follow that the city should bide its time until the much more favorable terms for annexations kick in. Under the state growth plan law, the burden of proof in a suit challenging an annexation shifts from the city—which has lost every time the issue has gone to court—to a property owner's having to prove that "an annexation ordinance is unreasonable for the overall well being of the communities involved." Lots of luck.

So why isn't Hizzoner biding his time? Well, as it turns out, an estimated 75 percent of the city's annexation ordinances so far this year have been aimed at territory outside the coordinating committee's recommended boundary (though nearly all are within the much larger boundary sought by the city). Thus, they look for all the world like a now-or-never land grab.

Ashe, for his part, insists that, "I have no way of knowing what the three-judge panel will do" and blames County Commission for "its intractable, intransigent attitude that has forced the city to proceed at a much increased pace lest we be stunted."

Since it only costs $50 to file suit against an annexation through the organization Citizens for Home Rule, it's easy enough to stunt the city in court. Attorney David Buuck, who handles most of these filings, reckons that some 80 cases are already on the docket and that the city's recent binge will push the number well over 100. But Ashe claims that about half of the city's annexation ordinances go unopposed and that the law of large numbers will continue working in his favor.

What's turning against the city, though, is the mounting hostility of county commissioners. "People are furious everywhere in the county, and that could chill the climate for any form of cooperation between the two governments," asserts Commissioner John Griess.

One result could be county refusal to participate in a dedication of property tax increases that looms large in plans for financing the Worsham Watkins downtown redevelopment. Under what's known as tax increment financing (TIF), the city and the county have historically dedicated incremental revenues resulting from a major development, such as the Whittle building, to its debt service.

Since city and county property tax rates are just about equal, TIF funding would be cut in half if the county doesn't play ball. But Ashe insists, "The county would be shooting itself in the foot" if it fails to do so. "They will get about $3 in sales tax revenue [from downtown development] dedicated to schools for every $1 the city gets," he says. That reflects the split of local option sales taxes and doesn't take into account the recapture of state sales taxes to which the city is entitled for convention center debt service.

—Joe Sullivan