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Seven Days

Wednesday, Nov. 15
Knox County school officials say they have suspended 15 Whittle Springs Middle School girls for passing around some of their parents' prescription drugs. The students could be expelled for a full year. Maybe those drug ads on TV need another warning: "May cause hysteria on the part of school officials."

Thursday, Nov. 16
Grainger County authorities arrest the last of 11 arson suspects who may have been responsible for burning more than 2,500 acres of forest. Officials say the suspects' primary reason for starting the fires was "boredom." Remember, only you can prevent ennui.

Report cards issued by the state Department of Education show Knox County is doing the best of the state's metropolitan school systems in most subjects—even though it spends the least. Expect to hear that line quoted over and over (and over and over) as we move into next year's county budget talks.

Friday, Nov. 17
Three UT underclassmen are hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. They're allegedly part of a group creating a new fraternity chapter on campus. Sounds like they're off to a good start.

Saturday, Nov. 18
Grainger County authorities (making their second appearance in the column this week) arrest 22 people on drug charges at a checkpoint outside an Internet-advertised "Rave in the Cave" organized legally on private property. A group of local churchgoers organize a "peaceful protest" against the party. Gee, and we always thought "Fight for Your Right to Party" was a joke.

Monday, Nov. 20
County Commission votes to spend at least another $50,000 on its lawsuit against the state's growth/annexation law, even though negotiations between the city and county on a growth compromise plan are still under way. In related news, Israel launches rockets into Palestinian territory.

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:
Once again, we not only get an identification, we get a story. These wrought iron gates sit at the entrance to Talahi Park on Cherokee Boulevard in Sequoyah Hills. According to Ruthie Kuhlman and Thomas Stone Jr. of Knoxville, their mother, Mrs. Thomas Stone, was responsible for reclaiming the gates some years after they had been moved to a city swimming pool in Park City. She brought them back to Talahi, where she could look at them from across the street. In any event, the first right answer came from neighborhood development guru Keith Richardson. For his efforts, he gets a portable CD case emblazoned with the logo of the semi-hit film Bedazzled.

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

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
TUESDAY, NOV. 28
6 P.M.
CARTER HIGH SCHOOL
210 CARTER SCHOOL ROAD
MPC officials will meet with local residents to discuss the East Knox County Sector Plan, a proposed set of development guidelines for the eastern end of the county.

KNOXVILLE CITY COUNCIL
TUESDAY, NOV. 28
7 P.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN STREET
City Council's regular meeting.

Capital Ideas

County Commission comes around to back Schumpert's plan

When the Knox County Commission adopted County Executive Tommy Schumpert's five-year, $260 million capital improvement plan for the county this week, the vote was 19-0. That unanimity was, at least on its surface, surprising because his plan includes nearly $55 million in "reserve" for controversial jail improvements that have rent the Commission asunder and were postponed indefinitely by a solid commission majority earlier this month.

On closer examination, the vote is not so odd as it might seem.

Schumpert placed the projected jail improvements, which would include a downtown intake center and a new sheriff's headquarters complex, in the third year of the five-year plan. That dumps it in the next administration's lap, after elections are held two years hence to determine the next county executive, sheriff and Commission makeup.

If there were any doubt the current Commission wanted to shed the issue, Commissioner Wanda Moody, a consistent opponent of a new jail, may have removed it. Before the question was called, Moody said that the plan, as modified, would put the jail question in front of the county's voters, where it belonged. Her implication—that the jail plan will be a major issue in the next campaigns—went unchallenged.

What Schumpert's plan accomplishes, besides deferring the jail question itself, is a reduction of the amount allocated for jail improvement from $89 million to $55 million. The larger figure was included in his previous plan for the doomed State Street justice center. The smaller amount is proposed for the kind of jail that was later, equally unsuccessfully, proposed for a site on the City County Building lawn.

What happens next, and when, could be up to the county electorate, but it could also be ordered, as Commissioner Mike Arms said, by the courts. If jail conditions are at any time deemed unconstitutional by a judge, the county will have to react "immediately, not three years down the road," Arms said in objecting to the inclusion of the jail money in the plan.

The two most vocal opponents of jail funding inclusion have been, ironically enough, South Knox Commissioners Howard Pinkston and Larry Clark, both of whom supported the justice center concept and its lesser substitute. Both have argued that once the original $89 million idea was scrapped, the taxpayers were owed a $34 million tax rebate—the difference between $89 million and $55 million—because the county tax rate was raised to support the bond debt that would be incurred in building the center.

Clark, who had asked for a state attorney general's opinion on whether the tax increase was legally justified once the justice center was scaled back, said, "It's time to move along with this," as he endorsed the Schumpert plan. He also mentioned that the plan included projects in his district that helped him decide to vote for it.

So did Pinkston, who had earlier demanded the tax rollback as "a matter of honesty." When he'd voted for the capital plan, he explained that the South Knox projects he was happy to see in the plan included "well-needed" improvements to Kimberlin Heights Road and South Doyle High School.

Roads and schools will take up some of the slack left in the budget by the jail deferral. Commissioner Frank Leuthold says about $15 million needed to "catch up" on school roofing, heating and air-conditioning maintenance will be moved up in priority. Roads will be repaved with another, unspecified, segment, and several million dollars will be set aside for the Knox County Development Corp. to buy land for industrial and business parks. "Without that, we may come to a screeching halt as far as development land is concerned. We're out of land," Leuthold says.

Leuthold also defends the current county bond picture, including the debt-service tax rate that was to pay for the deferred jail, by explaining that general improvement bond money can be used for any project listed in the five-year plan. "Some things get moved up; some things get moved off. It happens every year," he says. He believes the money will all be needed for capital projects that have already been postponed.

—Barry Henderson

PAC Men

Developers and others organize to influence local politics

For nearly two months now, neighborhood activists, preservationist types and members of homeowners groups have been growing nervous over rumors about the formation of a new organization of business owners whose goal would be to gain sway over local government.

All but one member of City Council are due to be term-limited out of office by 2003, and county elections are coming up in 2002, providing a rare opportunity to infuse fresh blood into the local political process. And talk of a group of fat-cats banding together to select office-holders, quite frankly, has been giving a lot of people the heebie jeebies.

So, the question is, does such a group exist, and if it does, who is in it, and what does it aim to do? Early reports were that the plan is to form a political action committee (PAC) to endorse and fund candidates.

W. Mackey Brownlee, owner of Brownlee Construction, is the designated answer man, and the answers are yes and no, and he's not quite sure. "In the first place, it's not even an organization yet," Brownlee says. "I don't know that this thing will fly, but I think that the business community can join together for the good of the community, and not just beat a bunch of homeowners down."

Not that he holds homeowners' groups in particularly high regard. "Homeowners are against everything," Brownlee says. But he does say that one of the things he is concerned about is diversity. "I don't want this to become another one of those '12 White Guys' things," he says. "Any business owner in the greater area of Knoxville is invited to join. The only rule is it has to be a business owner. We want people [who] sign a payroll, people [who] deal with day-to-day problems of business. I'd like for my phone number—588-0537—to be included in anything that's written about this."

Ironically, perhaps, it was Brownlee's attempt to broaden the group that first started raising eyebrows. In a memo about "membership recruiting" under the heading "The Greater Knoxville Group," dated Sept. 28, Brownlee thanked those who attended an organizational meeting and asked them to speak with business owners "who have similar interests for improving our business climate. Consider the fact that we want to have a diversified group that is represented by businesses other than the real estate industry. At this time, 61 percent of the group are in the real estate industry and almost 100 percent are connected to West Knoxville. We would have more of an impact if the group were from all parts of our community. It would be the 'kiss of death' for a candidate from South Knoxville to be endorsed by a West Knoxville group..."

Brownlee urged an effort to include minorities and women in the group. Thirty-three of the 34 names of potential members to whom the memo is addressed are men, and there are no members of minority groups. Those potential members include former PBA board member Bob Talbott, billboard erectors Robert Bedwell and Gary Douglas, Halls Wal-Mart developers Budd Cullom and Mark Tarver and several attorneys who represent

developers and billboard companies.

Still, it is difficult to doubt Brownlee's intentions. "I hope people will give this thing the benefit of the doubt," he says. "I'd hate, through perception, for this group to be destroyed. But if it's all developers, I won't be a part of it."

—Betty Bean

A Place in the Sun

Actors Co-op's search ends happily in Homberg Place

Since their first show at the Tomato Head about five years ago, the Actors Co-op has been a moving target. Performing about six plays a year, this innovative, energetic troupe of talented and mostly young actors has roamed through much of the county, performing in industrial lofts and downtown storefronts and pastoral fields. "We've tried to match the space with the show," says Actors Co-op founder and president Amy Hubbard. They performed the Appalachian family drama Foxfire in a forest-surrounded field at Ijams Nature Center; they did Translations, a gritty story about industrializing Ireland, in the second floor of an old warehouse by the noisy train tracks; they did the parlor comedy The Importance of Being Earnest in an ornate restaurant space in a Victorian building on Market Square.

Their eclectic productions have earned critical praise and popular acclaim; earlier this year, reader voting earned them the Metro Pulse "best theater group" title, a category once ruled by Clarence Brown.

Beginning this month, though, they're finally settling down to roost. Their new home is a 2,000 square-foot former carpet store they're leasing in Homberg Place, the old commercial eddy off Kingston Pike in the Bearden area.

If you walk by number 5213 Homberg Drive this week, you're likely to hear the sounds of power tools. The Co-op has purchased some seats from the old Tyson Junior High auditorium, and they've lately been working hard building risers, installing a restroom, and painting. They're doing the work themselves.

On Nov. 30, they'll have a barnwarming of sorts with their production of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Hubbard hopes the space will be ready for it. Three more productions are planned for later in the season, including Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

The space will accommodate their own productions, as well as those of some friends. The Tennessee Stage Company, which has produced Shakespeare in the Park every summer for years, won't be able to do it at the Tennessee Amphitheatre in 2001; it'll soon be a hardhat area due to convention-center-related construction. Hubbard says they'll probably host a "Shakespeare in the Box" at their Homberg Place location.

Of their itinerant seasons that always kept their devotees guessing, she admits, "It was exciting at first, but it's ultimately a little exhausting." All their venues were interesting, she says, but "they didn't always have heating or air conditioning. They didn't always have a bathroom. They didn't always have a place to park."

She's happy to be able to offer a venue where she doesn't have to apologize for the accommodations. "I'm grateful to the people who have been kind enough to fit on a folding chair and wear their coats and search the streets for a bathroom," she says, but she has the impression that their audience might be tiring of chasing them around.

"We're semi-professional now, a viable business that pays its employees," she adds. "In order for us to do that, we've got to establish a permanency in the community." Hubbard, co-founder Katie Norwood, accomplished actors Kara Kemp and David Alley, plus nine others, form the core of the company, but some productions draw actors from outside the troupe.

The troupe supplements ticket sales with contributions—whimsically playing on their Co-op moniker, donors are designated as Mules, Cows, Pigs, and Roosters in a crypto-Darwinian barnyard hierarchy—as well as their equally unconventional fundraisers. Their Haunted Pie Social at the 11th Street porch last month was a big hit, raising $5,000. "We still need more, but at least we're on track," says Hubbard.

Number 5213 Homberg Drive was most recently a carpet store. A few years ago it was, briefly, a very peculiar theater called Alexi Studios; for the record, Actors Co-op has no connection to that experiment, and Hubbard says she's only vaguely familiar with it.

Hubbard says the large space, painted in versatile black, will allow them to move seating around to accommodate different sorts of productions, sometimes proscenium-style, sometimes in the round, reassembling the seating and stages in different parts of the big room. "We'll keep the feel of different venues," she says. Maybe like Thoreau, the vagabond troupe will now be doing most of their wandering at home.

—Jack Neely