A slightly better bad deal is still a bad deal
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
"Why, how you talk!" says the king. "We sha'n't rob 'em of nothing at all but jest this money. The people that buys the property is the suff'rers; because as soon 's it's found out 'at we didn't own it—which won't be long after we've slid—the sale won't be valid...
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"
—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 26
Samuel Clemens never got a chance to look at Worsham Watkins International's proposal for downtown Knoxville, and more's the pity. He may have been inspired to add a chapter or two to his story. At least then we could have rightly called the plan "inspirational."
Sadly lacking in satirists, however, we're left to contemplate what Dale Smith of the Public Building Authority has given us—an improved version of the original WW hogwash, with some of the muck gone but the hogs still firmly entrenched at the trough.
To be clear: The first version of the WW plan as it was proposed last year was mostly ridiculous and entirely disrespectful of the heritage, character, and (not least) pocketbooks of the city and citizens of Knoxville. The new one is at least partly reasonable and partly respectful and respectable. That counts as progress, and Smith deserves thanks and a certain amount of praise.
But there are still major problems with the plan on conceptual, practical, and ethical grounds. Not that such caveats will make much difference; with the accumulated weight of big-wig support from our public and private leaders (using that word very loosely) and general shrugs of indifference or incomprehension from the masses who will be paying for most of it, Smith' s proposal is likely to sail through the PBA board at next week's meeting and land squishily in the inviting lap of Mayor Victor Ashe.
Smith is pushing for fast action, with the same artificial sense of emergency that has driven this whole process (as if the city were going to turn into a pumpkin by April). Ashe has already said he'd like to get it done by Council's March 20 meeting, which doesn't leave much time for serious discussion or revisions.
Too bad.
There is hardly adequate room here to go into all the problems with the WW/PBA plan, but here are some highlights:
* Concept—The plan is driven by a need to support the new convention center. This is circular logic of the most insidious sort, since the whole justification for the convention center was the reinvigoration of downtown. But with $160 million in convention center debt looming over us, the "associated private development" has an almost single-minded focus on the bottom line. As Smith says unequivocally, "It's all about money." Never mind the absence of any planning or public consideration of what kind of city we Knoxvillians actually want to live in. (Ashe is peculiarly hostile to the notion of a "master plan" for downtown. He says the city can't afford the $100,000 or so such a public process would cost. That would be about 1/30th of 1 percent of the $300-plus million the city may spend on the convention center and downtown infrastructure.)
And so instead of a downtown plan tailored to the interests and needs of the people who actually live and work here, we get one driven by developers with no proven track record of urban planning, directed mostly toward some mythical convention-goers and tourists. The presence of new housing in the plan is welcome, but it hardly makes up for the overall lack of concern about making Knoxville a nice place to be as opposed to a nice place to visit.
* Execution—As is discussed in more detail on the opposite page, even if you accept that the uninspired, mediocre ideas of Worsham and Watkins represent the best that Knoxville can hope to achieve, the numbers on the project don't add up. In their initial round of trumpet-blowing and flag-waving, WW talked about needing $130 million in public investment to generate $240 million in private investment. At one point, the private figure somehow ballooned to $310 million, a number that was never explained but was quoted repeatedly in the News-Sentinel.
Now, in Smith's undoubtedly more realistic assessment, we have some changes. First of all, the holy grail "destination attraction" (long touted as some sort of Scripps TV interactive studio and theme park) is off the table for the moment, although the city is supposed to be willing to pony up $39 million for assorted incentives if it comes to fruition. Even without that, the public investment is still projected at $121 million, but it generates a private return of just $158 million. That's a big leap in taxpayer spending, and a big drop in the expected returns.
* Greed—Some portion of the so-called "private investment" is actually developer fees paid directly to Worsham and Watkins. Those fees (which also include a percentage of the public construction cost, for management of the projects) have been estimated at anywhere from $10 million to $30 million. When I asked Smith exactly how much personal profit Worsham and Watkins were aiming to leverage out of Knoxville's public investment, he replied, "I don't know. And I don't give a shit." Similarly, in an interview a few months ago, Worsham said it was "none of your business" how much he and Watkins stood to gain.
* Ethics—The original WW plan played exceptionally fast and loose with other people's property. Essentially, WW said they could produce a hotel if the city got rid of the inconvenient Holiday Inn already in place on the World's Fair Park; they could build a cinema if the city relocated the fire station on Summit Hill and cleared the land; and they could rejuvenate Market Square if the city seized the property of all of the Square's private owners and handed it over to WW. Combined with the requested public cash investment in infrastructure, this was a land and money grab of breathtaking proportions. Smith has toned some of that down; the Holiday Inn is still there, pending improvements, and the plan grudgingly says that some Market Square owners might be able to keep some of their businesses or residences. But the city is still supposed to secure control of all the ground level space on the Square, and all current occupants are expected to vacate it for at least a year.
The revamping of Market Square is a real challenge, and Smith's proposal arises from some tough realities. The Square probably does need some sort of central management, and many of the buildings are unquestionably in need of serious rehabilitation. But the proposal is unconscionably punitive to the people who have invested their time, money and passion in a vital space that our city fathers only recently seemed to notice. In fact, WW and PBA throughout the process have treated Knoxville's small but growing group of "urban pioneers" as nuisances—people whose deeds to their land and ideas for its possible uses represent obstacles at best.
And there has been no shortage of ideas, either. Some of them, the more obvious ones (encouraging street-level retail to generate increased sidewalk traffic, not tearing down the Victorian houses on 11th Street, not building an enclosed "flying mall" over Henley Street), have been incorporated in Smith's plan. But mostly, Knoxville's smartest and most experienced urban planners and designers have been dismissed as airy dreamers who don't understand how "the numbers" work. Never mind that none of them ever suggested anything as weird and inane as encasing Market Square in glass (an early WW idea that has thankfully been forsaken).
In the end, we will almost inevitably see some real results from all of it—it would be hard to spend this much money and not achieve something.
So it's possible, though hardly guaranteed, that 10 years from now a new arrival in Knoxville will look at the downtown blocks in question, at the World's Fair Park and Market Square, and say, "Hey, that's pretty nice." I hope so. But what they won't see are the squandered opportunities, the profiteering, the carelessness and cluelessness and damnable arrogance behind it all. They won't see all of the things Knoxville could have and should have been. The only thing we can be sure they'll see, really, is their portion of the gargantuan taxpayer tab. Thanks Dale, but no thanks.
February 15, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 7
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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