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Seven Days

Wednesday, Feb. 14
The Tennessee House of Representatives votes in favor of a statewide referendum on a lottery. It will go to the public in November 2002. And one lucky voter will go home a winner!

Thursday, Feb. 15
County officials give Farmers' Market operator Roger Dotson 30 days to correct 11 alleged health and fire code operations. Um, there weren't any cows situated near gas lanterns, were there?

Monday, Feb. 19
A coalition of grassroots activist groups proposes a new state tax plan, including a graduated income tax and repeal of the sales tax on food. The group says 80 percent of Tennesseans would pay less under the plan. Hmm. But what percentage of state legislators?

Tuesday, Feb. 20
City Council once again delays a vote on banning new billboards; apparently the measure still doesn't have enough votes on Council to pass. Vice Mayor Jack Sharp says they'll have to negotiate a compromise. In case you're keeping track, the two sides here are: in favor of the ban—the mayor, his billboard task force, the biggest billboard company in town, and most of the general public; against the ban—some smaller billboard companies, five or six City Council members.
Signs of the Apocalypse: A local radio station begins a contest pitting seven contestants against each other, Survivor-style, in an SUV in the parking lot of the Turkey Creek Wal-Mart. For this, we lost wetlands?

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

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:

OK, it was a little obscure. This portrait, which hangs in the main reading room at the McClung Collection downtown, may be Knoxville's single most poignant rectangle of canvas. By prominent local artist Samuel Shaver, it depicts Susan Penniman Dickinson, the Massachusetts-born bride of Knoxville business tycoon Perez Dickinson. They married in 1845, and lived downtown. The story goes that Perez quietly built his wife an extravagant first-anniversary gift in the form of a mansion on Main Street, but before it was finished, Mrs. Dickinson took ill and died. Her husband lived another 55 years—he died at 88, in 1901—but never remarried. Shaver's dark portrait, painted for the widower probably after Mrs. Dickinson's death, hung for decades in the Dickinson mansion. The house was torn down to make way for surface parking in the 1950s—it's now the site of the NationsBank building on Main—but it's still visible in the background of Susan Dickinson's portrait, just over her shoulder. Not many responses to this one (partly because the McClung staff graciously recused themselves), but we did get a right answer. Unfortunately, we don't have a name to go with it—just the email address "stonegroove." So, stonegroove, contact us with your info, and we'll send you some exciting feline recreation products, courtesy of the Eukanuba cat food company. Rowr!

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

PUBLIC BUILDING AUTHORITY
THURSDAY, FEB. 22
5 P.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN STREET
PBA CEO Dale Smith will make his recommendations on downtown redevelopment to the PBA board, which is expected to pass the recommendation on to City Council next month. Public comment will be accepted, and comments received via email, voice mail and letter will be entered into the record.

KNOX COUNTY COMMISSION
MONDAY, FEB. 26
2 P.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN STREET
It's likely—based on the agenda from the commission meeting earlier this month—that County Commission will consider the first $3.5 million installment of the total $7 million for brownfield redevelopment promised to the city as part of the growth plan accord reached last year.

LECTURE: "JERUSALEM AND A JUST PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST"
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 28
7:30 P.M.
UNIVERSITY CENTER AUDITORIUM
UT CAMPUS
FREE
Professor Rashid Khalidi, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago, will talk about the difficulties of achieving peace in Israel, particularly in regard to Jerusalem. Sponsored by the UT Issues Committee.

No Sure Bets

Lottery issue still a gamble for Tennessee

Getting a General Assembly vote in favor of a statewide referendum has not been an easy thing to do. Now that it is done, reaching any agreement on a state lottery program to benefit education may be even more difficult.

East Tennessee lawmakers who voted the referendum either up or down see problems inherent in following up on the constitutional amendment if it gains majority voter support when it appears on the ballot in the gubernatorial election in 2002.

State Sen. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, who made the lottery issue a personal crusade for 16 years before achieving passage, is confident that the referendum will pass in Tennessee ("Polls have shown percentages from 60s to the 70s support it") and that it will conclude with a program similar to Georgia's Hope Scholarships, which he describes as "wonderful."

Opponents of a state lottery on policy or morality grounds, such as state Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, are quick to respond that the Georgia lottery's recent shortfalls have resulted in tens of millions of general fund dollars being committed to the scholarship fund to shore it up and keep its promises.

The Georgia program guarantees free tuition to state-supported institutions or assistance with tuition to private colleges in the state to students who maintain a B average in high school and continue that average in college.

It has accomplished the goal that then-Gov. Zell Miller set out in his campaign for it, namely stopping the "brain drain" by keeping the brightest and best students inside the state for their college educations with the lure of free tuition. The program has turned the state's flagship University of Georgia at Athens into something of an elite school, now ranked in the top 20 public universities by some organizations. Its entry-level students are all B-students, with average SAT scores almost 120 points higher than in 1993, before the Hope program was inaugurated. But, although the minority presence in four-year institutions has increased by 24 percent in that time, it has remained at around 6 percent at UGa.

There have been controversial byproducts. Inordinate pressure has been put on high school and college instructors to give grades high enough to keep students eligible for the program. More college students are taking minimal course loads and enrolling in soft courses or majors.

Importantly, it has also been blamed for a shift of wealth from the poor people who play the lottery to the middle-class people who don't, because middle-class students are eligible just by keeping their grades up and do not have to demonstrate financial need.

Tennessee State Sen. Bill Clabough, R-Maryville, who voted for the referendum as he has for the last six years, says the wording of the referendum item bothers him because "I would rather see the money going to higher education in general rather than to the Hope [-style] scholarships."

Clabough says he believes the Georgia experience has been, on balance, a good one in spite of the grade pressures and the dip into the general fund. And he hates to see Tennesseans' lottery dollars in the millions going to Georgia, Kentucky or Virginia to support state programs there.

As to his final disposition on the issue, Clabough defers. "I'll have to see whether the referendum passes and see whether I'm still in Nashville and see how the lottery program is drawn up before I can tell whether I can support it."

Rep. Dunn believes most of those legislators who voted in favor of the referendum will bow to its results. "They all say, 'I'm personally opposed to it, but...'" Dunn says, "and they'll all say, 'The people have spoken,' if it passes."

His main worry is that wording in the amendment that would allow registered nonprofit [501(c)(3)] organizations to conduct an annual gambling event such as a lottery or raffle with a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly would cause a storm of legislation. "I checked with the secretary of state, and he says there are now 15,941 registered 501(c)(3)s in the state," Dunn says. "What if a thousand of them introduced bills for an annual event? How many more will register, and how many will be fraudulent?"

He feels, as do Clabough and many other legislators, that passing the amendment will be much simpler than adjusting the laws to accommodate it. Keeping all interests satisfied while benefiting the intended group of students and nonprofits will be, in their estimation, a good trick.

—Barry Henderson

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

The downtown plan changes, and so does the official story

As the Worsham Watkins proposal for downtown development has changed over the past year, so has some of its rationale. Where it was once asserted, for example, that a "destination attraction" and a retail corridor leading from the World's Fair Park to Market Square were necessary to provide the "critical mass" of shoppers to support the Square, the new version of the plan (which downtown resident Brent Minchey has dubbed "WWII") suggests the Square can draw those masses on its own.

Nowhere is the evolving official line more visible than in the issue of locating a "headquarters hotel" for the new convention center.

In the original PBA proposal presented just over a year ago, the plan called for a new hotel. It also recommended that the city acquire and demolish the existing Holiday Inn on World's Fair Park, on the grounds that the city and/or a new "destination attraction" would need the Holiday Inn site.

It didn't suggest an explicit link between getting rid of the old hotel and attracting a new hotel. It also didn't include any money for acquiring the inn in its proposed $130 million of public infrastructure investment.

Those issues were raised repeatedly some months later, when Mayor Victor Ashe suddenly began condemnation proceedings to seize the Holiday Inn. At the time, Worsham Watkins was negotiating with the Marriott chain about building a hotel just a few blocks from the Holiday Inn and convention center site.

There was widespread speculation that the Marriott's interest was conditional on the Holiday Inn being removed as a local competitor. A study by PBA's hotel consultant firm, PKF, concluded, "If the Holiday Inn Select ceases to exist, PKF believes sufficient demand for a new first class, full service hotel...would occur." But city and PBA officials denied there was any connection—possibly because shutting down one business to make way for another is a legally dubious use of condemnation.

Instead, Ashe and PBA chief Dale Smith explained they needed the Holiday Inn site for a new visitor's center and parking improvement adjacent to the convention center. The city ended up authorizing condemnation of the property, and then dropped it a few months later after negotiations with Holiday Inn owner Franklin Haney got sticky. Haney has said he plans to upgrade the aging hotel to an upscale Crowne Plaza.

But with the current version of the WW plan, which Smith is presenting to the PBA board for approval today (Thursday, Feb. 22), the link between the inn and a new "headquarters hotel" is finally acknowledged. Smith's report says, "If the existing Holiday Inn Select in World's Fair Park remains in operation and is upgraded to a Crowne Plaza, as promised by its owner, the location of a new convention center headquarters hotel at Union Ave. and Walnut St. [the site posited for the Marriott] is not considered viable."

That angers at least one city official—Councilwoman Carlene Malone, one of two Council members who voted against condemning the Holiday Inn. "First of all, I am proud to have voted against the condemnation of that property," she says. "I was not aware and never found it in any report that the Holiday Inn had to go in order for a Marriott to come in...Never, ever did anyone say to me that [the condemnation] was a condition of the Marriott."

She notes that Smith and PBA counsel Tom McAdams testified to Council that the Holiday Inn site was needed entirely for other purposes. "It saddens me greatly that Dale Smith and Tom McAdams, with straight faces, came up with that baloney at a Council meeting," she says. "That really undermines trust...You realize somebody stood before you and told you less than the truth."

Smith says the acquisition of the Holiday Inn was always "assumed" as a precondition for a hotel on the Union Avenue site. "It wasn't spelled out publicly or in any way made clear," he says. "It was obliquely mentioned...Obviously, there was a load of conversation going on, not in public, about what assumptions should be made.

"What WW was told was to assume the [demolition of the] Holiday Inn would be required, and don't deal with it in your budget, and don't deal with it in your proposals."

Accordingly, WW left any estimate for the cost of the buying the property off its proposed public price tag. Smith says it was "assumed" that acquiring the hotel would be a later, additional public outlay. That's exactly contrary to Ashe's assertion just six months ago that the Holiday Inn acquisition money was already included in the $160 million convention center budget.

Frank Cagle, deputy to the mayor, says there aren't necessarily contradictions between the various stated and unstated reasons for removing the Holiday Inn. He says the uses contemplated for the property—particularly the visitor's center—are still part of the long-term convention center plan, even if they're not actually written in it anywhere at the moment.

"You can look at it on two tracks," he says. "The stated reasons [for condemnation] were necessary reasons, but that is not to say it didn't have a subsidiary effect of making way for a new hotel. But that doesn't necessarily say those were false [reasons]."

Meanwhile, Smith has publicly and repeatedly stated that he doesn't think Haney will actually upgrade the Holiday Inn. "Nobody in their right mind believes it can be revitalized to a Crowne Plaza," he says.

A call to Haney's Chattanooga office went unreturned.

—Jesse Fox Mayshark