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Seven Days

Wednesday, Aug. 9
The Metropolitan Planning Commission rejects rezoning for a Home Depot in Bearden and embraces NC-1 historical zoning for Fort Sanders. Knoxville preservationists fall over in a dead faint.

Thursday, Aug. 10
Mayor Victor Ashe offers to pause his annexation binge if the county government will talk nicely about growth plans and such. County commissioners say they'll get back to him once they figure out if there's any land left that hasn't been annexed.
A West Virginia man pleads guilty to having sex with a 14-year-old Knoxville girl he met on the Internet. That's funny; we thought 14-year-olds were a little old for West Virginia men.

Friday, Aug. 11
State officials say the state budget crisis is even worse than they thought. Fortunately, that's not a problem for Tennesseans who don't go to school, visit parks, drive on roads, or go to the doctor.

Monday, Aug. 14
Knox County schools open for the new year with a new dress code: all students must look like either Archie, Jughead, Betty, or Veronica.

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:
This week's winner is man-about-town Michael Haynes. He correctly identified the miniature Statue of Liberty as part of the decor in the lobby of the Slyman apartment building at 411 S. Gay Street. As our Grand Prize winner, Mr. Haynes will receive a '50s wall clock made in the U.S.A. by Lux (winner will have to come by the office to pick it up). Congratulations, Michael!

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

Knoxville City Council
Thursday, Aug. 17 Workshop, 5 p.m.
Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
Special Meeting, 6:30 p.m.
Clinch Avenue Viaduct
Ashe has called this special Council meeting for a vote on reopening the Clinch Avenue bridge—closed since the 1982 World's Fair—to automobile traffic. At the workshop preceding it, Council will discuss proposed changes in city pensions.

Knox County Commission Intergovernmental Committee
Monday, Aug. 21, 4 p.m.
Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
The city/county annexation fight picks up as the county explores the possibility of a lawsuit to revoke past annexations by the city.

Knoxville City Council
Tuesday, Aug. 22, 7 p.m.
Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
The agenda's not available at press time, but you never know what those rascals are going to do.

Giving the 'Finger'

The city-county annexation wars broaden

Knox County may be several years late and several million dollars short in launching a court challenge of past highway "finger" annexations by the city of Knoxville. But Mayor Victor Ashe's offer to declare a moratorium on new involuntary annexations if the county will negotiate with the city on future annexation boundaries isn't likely to deter County Commission from fighting to constrain the city in every way it can.

Court battles are now brewing on three fronts that promise to escalate the turf war between the city and the county to new heights of hostility. For one, an impasse over how much additional territory the city should be able to claim under the state's 1998 Growth Plan law is headed for adjudication by a three-judge panel in Nashville. At the same time, the county is seeking to get the 1998 law declared unconstitutional. And at its August meeting, County Commission is expected to initiate a new thrust aimed at invalidating city annexations of highways and, with them, the adjacent property that the city was able to reach by extending its finger down a road.

This latest thrust poses a sweeping threat to annexations along Kingston Pike, Interstate highways 40 and 75, Alcoa Highway, Asheville Highway, Chapman Highway, Clinton Highway, Pellissippi Parkway and other arteries dating back who knows how far in time. It's based on a 1998 State Supreme Court decision that recognized an exception to the rule that only an affected property owner has standing to challenge an annexation in court. The court ruled that any affected "person" (and a government is a legal person) has standing to void an annexation that doesn't take in private property under the state's Declaratory Judgment Act. Moreover, it held that the 30-day time limit for suing under the state's annexation law doesn't apply to declaratory judgment suits. Indeed, the highway annexation by the city of Bristol that was voided as a result of the decision dated back to 1989.

According to outgoing Law Director Richard Beeler, the county will contend it's been mightily affected by the loss of sales tax revenue diverted to the city from the commercial corridor annexations that have been Mayor Victor Ashe's stock in trade. Just how far back in time the county will go and which corridors will be challenged are still under study, Beeler said.

By waiting until now to file the suit, however, the county may have blunted much of its potential impact. Under the Growth Plan law, an Urban Growth Boundary must be in place by next July 1 within which the city can annex with great freedom. The boundary recommended by the Knox County Growth Policy Coordinating Committee encompasses nearly all of the city's fingers that now stick out in all directions. While both the city and the county have rejected the committee's recommendations, begetting the three judge panel, the panel is widely expected to look to them as a point of departure. Yet if some of the city's fingers had been chopped off before the committee and the panel undertook their work, boundaries might have been drawn differently and the county might have recaptured an estimated $5 million a year in sales tax revenues in the meantime.

"I tried to get Richard to move two years ago. I can't fathom why he didn't act sooner," says County Commission Chairman Leo Cooper. Beeler could not be reached for a response.

The suit might somehow still figure in boundary negotiations between the city and the county, but county commissioners contacted mostly viewed Ashe's call for such negotiations with disdain. The mayor's offer to declare a moratorium on annexations in return comes on the heels of an annexation binge during which the city has claimed more than 200 parcels of property so far this year, double the total in all of 1999.

"He [Ashe] is like the bully who says I'll stop beating you up if you give me your candy," says County Commission's point person on Growth Plan issues, Frank Leuthold. No meeting with Ashe has been scheduled, and Cooper adds that, "even if we were to meet with the mayor, there's no way I could stipulate giving any area of the county to the city."

At the same time, the county's finger annexation challenge seems calculated to stiffen Ashe's resolve to cling to at least the 50 square miles of growth room that the coordinating committee recommended. That's about half the size of the urban growth boundary proposed by the city, which would have doubled its present limits.

If the county should prevail in its suit challenging the constitutionality of the Growth Plan law, then all other bets are off. This suit contends that the Legislature improperly delegated its authority to "provide the exclusive methods by which municipal boundaries may be altered." Leuthold professes to "feel good about our law suit." But city officials are dismissive of its merits.

—Joe Sullivan

Commercial Brakes

East Knox residents protest plans for two business parks

Since December, about 50 East Knox County residents have met with the Metropolitan Planning Commission staff to update MPC's guidelines for development and zoning in the area. Until this summer, residents and community groups were pleased with the plan and their participation in it. But the addition of two proposed business parks has left them feeling excluded and a little angry.

"All of a sudden, at the end, when the maps were printed and the plan was presented, there was an industrial park at Midway Road and one at Ruggles Ferry Pike," says Bob Wolfenbarger, a member of the Eighth District Preservation Association. "There was no discussion of these parks whatsoever, and they're grossly out of place."

The latest draft of the East Knox County Sector Plan has two new areas—at the Midway Road interchange to Interstate 40 and along Ruggles Ferry Pike in the northern reaches of the sector—designated for future business park and light industrial development. At the request of Wolfenbarger and other residents, MPC postponed a hearing scheduled for Aug. 10 on the plan. That gives planners a chance to meet with residents before MPC votes on the plan and submits it to County Commission.

But there seems to be little chance that some sort of business development won't be featured around those two spots in the final plan. According to Ben Kadas, the MPC planner working with residents on the sector plan, representatives from Knox County Development Corporation have identified the Midway interchange and Ruggles Ferry Pike as prime spots for industrial development. Development Corp. executive director Melissa Ziegler could not be reached for comment.

"We had two options to incorporate that into the sector plan," Kadas says. "We could take it back to the community, even though it's late, or we could wait six months to a year and do amendments. We took the plan back to [residents], and offered alternatives."

Those alternatives include: leaving the plan as it is, with the business park designations intact; leaving the areas the same as they were on the 1995 version of the plan, with no development; or limiting business development at Midway and at the Strawberry Plains Pike interstate exit and barring business growth at the Ruggles Ferry site.

Kadas says a business park could prevent the Midway interchange—half of which is already zoned commercial—from developing like the Strawberry Plains Pike interchange, with gas station, truck stops and fast food. "If you jump the gun, you can create something that's different, and that's one way to protect it," he says.

But Wolfenbarger feels there's already enough industrial development in the area—and what's there hasn't been entirely successful. "Those of us who were involved in the process stated clearly that we'd like to see Forks of the River revitalized," he says. "But it's a lot more [cost] efficient to go out and buy 300 acres of rural agricultural land than to revitalize existing industrial development or to market a partially occupied site better."

Kadas and other MPC staff members are tentatively scheduled to meet with concerned residents at Carter High School on Tuesday, Aug. 29. MPC will hold its hearing on the sector plan on Thursday, Sept. 14.

—Matthew T. Everett