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Seven Days

Wednesday, May 9
TDOT officials say they'll go ahead with a left-lane ban for big trucks traveling through Knoxville on I-40, starting this summer. Which means, of course, you'll now have to drive 90 mph in the right lane to avoid being squished by a semi.

Thursday, May 10
Mayor Victor Ashe declares "Tina Wesson Day" in tribute to the Survivor survivor. Maybe she can give him some tips on dealing with those pesky Recall people.
A public hearing on the 321 road-widening project in Gatlinburg draws dozens of people curious about why construction started before several needed permits were issued. Hey, if Sevier County waited for every dang piece of paperwork to get done, it wouldn't be the lovely place it is today.

Monday, May 14
Embattled one-time tech wunderco iPix announces a $30 million bail-out by a Memphis investment firm. Which means the company's 360-degree digital photography technology may come full circle.

Tuesday, May 15
As debates roil in Nashville about some form of state income tax, the state Senate Finance Committee passes another proposal: a half-cent increase in the state sales tax. Critics say a sales tax increase would fall disproportionately on the poor. Proponents say, well, um, duh!
A federal judge throws out evidence in a drug case because the police dog who alerted officers to a 560-pound stash of marijuana only has a 35 percent success rate in finding drugs. And besides, the stuff was mostly stems and seeds...

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:
The guesses were literally all over the map on this one, from the 4th and Gill neighborhood to the Confederate Memorial Hall on Kingston Pike. It is, in fact, a rose garden constructed behind the Lucerne Building on King Street by developer Kristopher Kendrick. A plaque identifies it as being a tribute to his close friend Mary Gill. The first right answer came from Aaron Cook and the night crew at City Brew on Gay Street. For their alertness (and also their skilled beerslinging), we're happy to award them a Metro Pulse T-shirt. We only have one, so you'll have to share, folks.

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

HISTORIC ZONING COMMISSION
THURSDAY, MAY 17
8:30 A.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN STREET
The city's Historic Zoning Commission will consider a proposal to enact an H-1 historic preservation zoning for Market Square. If the commission approves the designation, it will be forwarded to the Metropolitan Planning Commission for its June meeting.

KNOX COUNTY COMMISSION
MONDAY, MAY 21
9 A.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN ST.
Commission will hold a special called meeting to discuss the structure of the not-for-profit organization that would oversee Universe Knoxville.

KNOX COUNTY COMMISSION
THURSDAY, MAY 24
1 P.M.
CITY COUNTY BUILDING
400 MAIN ST.
Knox County Executive Tommy Schumpert will present his budget for the 2001-2 year to commissioners.

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION PUBLIC WORKSHOP
THURSDAY, MAY 24
6:30 P.M.
DOGWOOD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
705 TIPTON ST.
This is the first in a series of workshops for input on MPC's update of the South Knox Sector Plan, a guide to development in South Knoxville and southern Knox County. Topics at this meeting: the South Knoxville Boulevard and West Moody Avenue extensions. Call 215-2500 for more information, or visit the MPC web site.

UT's Labor Struggle

A workers' group fears privatization

For some of UT's non-exempt employees, the words "campus master plan" have an ominous ring to them. The massive restructuring of personnel and public space that is now in the works has an employee group called the United Campus Workers concerned about job security, and they've rallied lately to protest layoffs they fear might result from further privatization of departments such as house- and groundskeeping.

Starting in 1991 with the embrace of SSC Service Solutions, a private custodial business, and continuing recently in a contract with the Aramark corporation to run campus food services, UT has outsourced large parts of its labor force in an effort to cut costs during its ongoing fiscal crunch.

The UCW formed last summer in the midst of protests over long hours and low pay. Before the "Sweatshop Summer," as pamphlets and picket signs called it, the UCW was known as the Campus Workers for a Living Wage, and they were primarily concerned with getting just that—the salary defined by both the UTK and Knoxville Living Wage Councils as "providing the minimum level of income required to secure the most basic needs of a family of four." This wage has been estimated at $9.50 per hour with benefits, and around $11 per hour without. In contrast, after a 4.75 percent base salary increase during the past year, UT's hourly workers in all departments were bumped up to a starting wage of $6.25.

But when the conference schedule began last June and custodial and grounds crews were drastically understaffed, two more issues came to the fore of the sometimes strident dialogue between workers and administrators. These were the matters of Hepatitis B shots that UT wasn't providing for its employees who were cleaning dormitories, and the overtime hours required to meet the demands of preparing beds for busloads of Promise Keepers, junior cheerleaders, and, ironically, the occasional meeting of groups like the United Autoworkers Union.

Record low numbers of workers and a high volume of conference visitors resulted in shifts of 12 to 16 hours, with housekeepers at times having to paint walls and help the grounds crew. There were dozens of bemused students who arrived at college in the fall to find their rooms unready (but an ample number of cots arranged in the commons areas).

Members of the UCW called this "forced overtime," while UT Vice President Phil Scheurer and officials in Housing and Human Resources denied any coercion. This became a semantic debate, with workers like senior housekeeper Ernestine Robinson feeling pressured into doing work she says she wanted to help complete, but over which she would have preferred a choice.

"Last summer, we worked our tails off," says Robinson, whose encounter with a dorm-room hypodermic needle while feeling tired and woozy brought the Hep B issue to a head. "The way they booked that conference season and we didn't have enough people to work because the pay was so little, it made me cry to see the way they worked us then. We said something had to be done."

With the support of the student economic justice group Alliance for Hope, the Faculty and Staff Committee for Labor and Human Rights and other community activist groups, the campus workers rallied and marched. They are unaffiliated with a national labor union and as employees of a right-to-work state do not have authorized collective bargaining rights, but the group put enough pressure on UT administration to help secure the 4.75 per cent base pay increase, free Hep B vaccinations, and an effective—if philosophically vague—concession about an "end to forced overtime."

Though housing director Mike West, human resources director Alan Chesney and Scheurer himself have all stated formally that there are no imminent plans to privatize with Service Solutions for dormitory help this summer, some housekeepers worried when their supervisors were told they had to train SSC workers just to be prepared.

That is where the communication between workers and bosses seems to break down, despite the existence of an Employee Relations Council, a weekly forum for feedback and discussion. Scheurer has refused to rule out the possibility of further privatization because of its cost efficiency

The UCW plans to stay vocal throughout the summer. But they still have many unanswered questions, and members like Robinson and her co-chair Sandra Hicks don't feel that past ERC meetings should inspire confidence for a clear response, particularly about the pressing fear that their jobs are insecure within the broad plan.

—Nate Arthur

Planting a Seed

Advocates want an arboretum in East Knoxville

Jim Cortese hops around the stacked stone garden walls of the Joe Howell Nursery in East Knoxville like a seven-year-old on a playground visit to Fort Kid.

"That's a Kentucky Coffee Tree, and so's that, and over there's a Japanese Umbrella Tree, the one under the Southern Red Oak. Some people call that a Turkey Oak," he exclaims. Cortese, a forester by training and a tree-service specialist by profession, loves trees and shows it.

He calls the nursery property, which is up for sale, a "world-class arboretum, already in place," and he wants the land and its trees and walls and greenhouses preserved as an arboretum and botanical gardens that he says could give Knoxville another "destination attraction" relatively cheaply.

Jim McDonough, a residential building contractor, had the same idea, coincidentally. Now both are working to secure grant or donor support to buy, spruce up and open the gardens for multiple purposes—science, tourism, and recreation for area residents.

The property, part of which has been in the Howell family since the 1780s, consists of 20 acres, situated on a stunning hillside north of Boyd's Bridge Pike and straddling Wimpole Avenue. The asking price, Cortese says, is $850,000.

Both Cortese and McDonough were alarmed that the land might be bought for residential development. Jenny Jukes, who is still conducting a nursery business pending sale, says, "We're hoping that doesn't happen." The thought of most of those domestic and exotic trees and shrubs and "17,381 linear feet of almost irreplaceable, stacked limestone walls" going under the bulldozer makes each of them go queasy. The stonework itself would cost more than half-a-million dollars today, Cortese estimates.

It borders the property and separates the nursery tracts into neat rectangles, ideal for plant-life presentation.

"I'm no botanist or arborist, but I fell in love with the place," says McDonough, who says he has had some nibbles on purchase support but is concentrating on finding a funding source for continuing operating expenses, which he estimates at $150,000 a year.

He says an arboretum and gardens would "give a boost to an underserved area" of the city.

Likewise, Jukes, who grew up on the nursery grounds in the Great Depression and helped her grandfather, Cole Howell, and father, Joe Howell, run the nursery before she took it over, says an arboretum open to the public, with walking trails and plant identification information, "would be a lovely enhancement of the property and the neighborhood."

Although many trees and shrubs are still being tended for sale, Cortese says the age of the nursery and the fact that some plantings of saplings outgrew their transplant period means that the assortment of mature trees there is practically without peer in this area. And Knoxville is almost without peer in its variety of trees, Cortese says, making an arboretum a natural concept as both an attraction and a place for study of trees "so Knoxville can better realize a part of what it ought to be."

"Extraordinary" is how McDonough describes the nursery, "and I believe we should keep things that are extraordinary from being destroyed. This is a rare opportunity."

—Barry Henderson

Anyone interested in advancing the arboretum project should contact Jim Cortese at 865-522-0533.