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Seven Days

Wednesday, Sept. 13
City Council designates Fort Sanders as a Neighborhood Conservation District to protect its historic houses. The designation might have meant a little more if they'd done it while there were more houses left to protect. On the plus side, anyone who wants to visit those that remain will have plenty of room to park.
Police predict methamphetamine will be Knoxville's next drug craze. Well, the Vols' offense could use it...

Thursday, Sept. 14
Federal Judge James Jarvis grants a retrial in the civil rights case over the death of Andre Stenson, who died during a struggle with Knoxville police officers in 1998. Turns out one of the jurors was a former prison guard who failed to mention that fact during jury selection. "I must presume bias when a juror deliberately conceals information," Jarvis says. Now there's a standard we'd like to see applied to some public officials we know.
School board and County Commission members say they think they can agree on hiring a firm to audit the school system. Uh-huh. See Monday, Sept. 18.

Friday, Sept. 15
The Tennessee Supreme Court strikes down portions of the state's abortion law, which required women to get counseling and wait two days before getting an abortion. Which is heartening for pro-choicers. But it raises a question: if the state's going to require counseling for anyone, how about for the people who continue with the pregnancy? A weekly session for 18 years or so oughta do it.

Saturday, Sept. 16
The Vols lose to Florida. Life somehow goes on.

Monday, Sept. 18
School board members say they can't agree with County Commissioners on an audit after all. Oh well. Did you enjoy the truce while it lasted?
A Nine Counties One Vision committee says Knoxville needs more sidewalks to be pedestrian-friendly. Hey, there's a thought. Maybe they could start with the driveway that leads down to the riverfront. You know, where the Nine Counties One Vision offices are.

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:
Lotsa eagle eyes picked out the Japanese pagoda in Fountain City's Savage Gardens. A few reminisced about playing there as children. The garden was established in 1917 by English industrialist Arthur Savage. The first right answer came from Ann Bennett of the Metropolitan Planning Commission, who obviously knows her territory. In honor of the autumnal equinox, she gets a bar of "LeConte" soap, handmade by the fresh-scrubbed folks at Earth to Old City. The package says its "herbal green notes and rich woods create an aromatic memory of a crisp fall day." Mmm.

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

Public Building Authority
Thursday, Sept. 21
5 p.m.
Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
PBA's executive committee meets at 4 p.m. The Board of Directors meets at 5 p.m.

Friends of Haw Ridge
Thursday, Sept. 21
7 p.m.
Life Development Center on Old Edgemoor Road in Oak Ridge
Supporters of Haw Ridge Park in Oak Ridge hope to come up with recommendations for protection and future management of the park.

Knox County Commission
Monday, Sept. 25
2 p.m.
Main Assembly Room of the City County Building
On the agenda: $7.3 million for addition and renovation to the East Tennessee Historic Center; oversight of the Humane Society's animal shelter; and the East Knox County sector plan.

Clearing the Air

The case against TVA's dirty power plants gets stronger

A federal ruling last Friday reinforced complaints that TVA has been violating the Clean Air Act for years, and it moved the power giant one step closer to what could be billions of dollars of required work at its coal-fired power plants.

"This is huge," says Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a longtime critic of TVA. "This single action could do more for cleaning up the air in Tennessee than any action that's been taken to date, short of the Clean Air Act back in the '70s."

But there are court challenges yet to come, and TVA officials still insist the Environmental Protection Agency is wrong in its judgment that the publicly owned utility is polluting illegally.

The ruling Friday by the Environmental Appeals Board upheld key portions of an EPA order issued last November, which said TVA had failed to install required pollution controls at nine of its 11 coal plants.

The issue is this: When the Clean Air Act was passed in the '70s, power companies lobbied Congress to exempt older power plants from some portions of the new environmental standards. They argued that since the plants would be retired soon anyway, it was a waste of money to outfit them with new technology. They got their way—and kept using the plants. During the last two decades, TVA has modified many of its aging coal burners, keeping them active and actually increasing their output without installing the expensive smokestack "scrubbers" the law would require of a new facility.

The EPA said this amounted to skirting the law and ordered the plants to come into compliance. TVA disagreed, claiming the work at the plants was just routine upkeep and didn't amount to substantial modernization. (The law allows a certain amount of maintenance to keep plants running.)

TVA is the nation's biggest consumer of coal, which accounts for about 60 percent of the agency's power output. It also produces some of the nation's highest levels of nitrogen oxide and sulfur emissions. TVA has already committed to spending $850 million to reduce its nitrogen oxide output, which Smith says leaves its 770,000 tons of annual sulfur emissions as the biggest regional air quality concern.

"This stuff isn't a legal abstraction," he says. "The Great Smoky Mountains are being hit, human health is being affected, and we're chewing up the earth to get the coal."

After attempts to reach a settlement failed this spring, the EPA sent the case to its Appeals Board, an internal review body made up of environmental law judges. TVA, saying the Appeals Board would be biased toward the EPA, filed its own separate appeal with the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta.

The Appeals Board's ruling did back up the substance of EPA's charges, although it exempted one of the nine plants from the order and dropped many minor violations (amounting to about half of the charges EPA originally filed). The panel of judges said that TVA was trying to make an "end run" around the law.

"Given that existing sources necessarily deteriorate in performance over time," the judges wrote, "they ultimately must either shut down or undergo major overhauls to extend their productive life.

"...If TVA can, under cover of routine maintenance, repair, and replacement, undertake significant, emissions-increasing overhauls of its existing facilities without modernizing pollution controls simply because others in the industry have undertaken like projects, then the CAA's grandfathering of TVA's units in 1977 becomes, in effect, a permanent status."

One of the major issues was whether the modifications to the plants allowed TVA to increase its power (and pollution) output. The judges said they did—in one case, a revamped power unit upped its production from less than 400 mega-watts per hour to more than 500.

Moreover, the judges said, TVA evidently knew it was on shaky legal ground. They cited a 1984 internal memo in which a TVA employee wrote, "If modifications proposed are extensive enough to be considered reconstruction, EPA might try to apply the new source performance standards. This could erase one major advantage of life extension over new plant construction."

TVA spokesman John Moulton says that memo was referring to an entirely different section of the Clean Air Act—one dealing with reconstruction rather than modification. He says TVA is considering appealing the EAB ruling, in addition to the EPA appeal already filed in the 11th Circuit.

"The EPA order, in our opinion, is a misinterpretation of rules," he says.

But Smith says the EAB ruling makes the EPA's case much stronger as it moves through the federal courts. "There is now a substantial body of evidence, and it has been reviewed by the environmental law judges," he says. "It should influence the 11th Circuit decision, one would assume, because the 11th Circuit would substantially defer to the more experienced body in this case [i.e. the EAB]."

TVA has estimated full compliance with the EPA order would cost $2 to $3 billion for the already debt-laden company, even as it tries to position itself competitively for utility deregulation. TVA says that could produce a 14 percent rate increase for customers (a figure Smith says would be lower if the cost were spread out over a longer time period).

"This will cost some more," Smith acknowledges. "But then you have to say, what's the cost of not doing this? ...Cleaning up those power plants is much more cost effective than allowing TVA to continue to push those costs on society, in the form of low [power] rates but high societal costs."

He says he hopes the ruling will encourage TVA to return to the bargaining table with EPA. And in the long run, Smith says the best solution is a congressional revisitation of the Clean Air Act that would require all utilities to meet the law's standards.

"The problem is, we've got a congressional delegation that's asleep at the wheel when it comes to air pollution," he says.

—Jesse Fox Mayshark

One Round Won

Fort Sanders preservationists continue the battle

While many people trumpeted the passing of the NC-1 conservation overlay on a portion of Fort Sanders last week, the neighborhood still has a long way to go to recover from decades of bad development and demolition.

"What the NC-1 does is give people a little assurance that their neighbor's not going to do something horrendous," says Randall DeFord, president of the Historic Fort Sanders Neighborhood Association. "Their neighbor may still do apartments...But it's not going to be another shoebox building with balcony hallways that doesn't fit in."

The overlay doesn't cover all of Fort Sanders, but it does protect to a certain extent several blocks in the core.

The new district generally runs along 12th Street from White Avenue to Forest, over Forest to 16th Street, where it zigzags its way southwest to the 1800 block of Highland. The boundary drops south to cover a section of the 1800 block of White and goes east again, generally following Clinch Avenue, but drops south to include three parcels at White and 13th.

In the boundary, anyone who wants a permit to demolish a home, build an addition, or construct a new structure must have the plans approved by the Historic Zoning Commission. The construction guidelines don't prohibit apartment complexes, but they set up standards for setbacks and general building dimensions that are consistent with the neighborhood's historic structures.

"If you were a property owner and had a vacant piece of land in the district, you would be coming before the Historic Zoning Commission with your building plans," says Mike Carberry of the Metropolitan Planning Commission.

The NC-1 Overlay was just one of many of the Fort Sanders Forum's recommendations—which were adopted in concept by the City Council.

Other recommendations involve sidewalk repair, improved lighting, landscaping, more parks, a tree planting program and the possibility of a residential parking permit system. Perhaps the most costly idea was narrowing Cumberland Avenue to three lanes (with a center turn lane) and widening the sidewalks to make it more pedestrian friendly.

Ellen Adcock, director of administration for the mayor, admits that some of these proposals will take time. But she promises the city will keep pushing them. "We've worked too hard to let it drop," she says.

One of the ideas to get attention first will be to create a "portal entry" at Clinch and 11th Street into the neighborhood, which would let people know through signs and landscaping that they've entered an important, historic area.

There's also a proposal to periodically reconvene the Forum—made up of residents, businesses, developers, and officials from UT, Fort Sanders hospital, Children's Hospital, and the city—to monitor progress.

DeFord says the city needs to push the other recommendations, and says, "The biggest difference is really going to be when people invest in property, rather than tear it down."

But the new district is a start, he adds. "It's encouragement. It was really hard fought and probably a miracle that we got it. To me, it means there's some possibility of not only saving but upgrading the neighborhood."

—Joe Tarr