Knoxville's changing political equations
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
A new political calculus is emerging in Knoxville and Knox County.
It is not replacing the old politics exactly—there's still some life in the city/county Republican split, and the courthouse crowd still has clout in the races that matter most to them (because their jobs depend on it). But some broader forces are taking shape too.
In a thoughtful analysis of last year's City Council races, News-Sentinel reporter Scott Barker identified the divide as one between "shopkeepers" and "neighbors"—or, put more broadly, between candidates whose top priority was economic development and candidates whose top priority was community development. As Barker noted at the time, few of the Council races really presented an either/or choice; almost all of the candidates said they were in favor of both protecting neighborhood integrity and creating new jobs and economic opportunities. The differences were a matter of degrees and priorities.
But they clearly matter. In Tuesday night's vote to apply historic zoning protection to the Smith/Coughlin house, over the strenuous objections of the Cherokee Country Club leadership, the Council members who were elected last fall on strong neighborhood platforms all voted in favor of preservation.
Similar fault lines showed up in the recent County Commission primaries. They were most visible in the 7th District race that saw Scott "Scooby" Moore unseat longtime Commission Chairman Leo Cooper. Moore's campaign rhetoric was instructive—he attacked Cooper for standing in the way of development (specifically, the proposed H.T. Hackney warehouse in Ritta and a new Wal-Mart in Halls), and painted himself as staunchly pro-business.
What it all suggests is an ongoing realignment in which local captains of industry (i.e. developers, industrial recruiters, the Chamber) will find themselves repeatedly at odds with neighborhood groups and assorted activist coalitions.
Of course, these skirmishes have been going on for years on a case-by-case basis. Almost every month at City Council or County Commission, you can find some group of neighbors arguing against a proposed commercial or industrial rezoning on their block. But the limited nature of the engagements has in the past made it easy to pretend they're all isolated events.
I think this is changing. The recent skirmishes over historic preservation, along with localized fights from Ritta to South Knoxville, have highlighted the beginnings of a natural coalition of interests—neighborhood organizations, heritage and history groups, downtowners (from residents to business owners to developers), environmentalists, and others. Not all those groups would agree on every issue, but they increasingly find themselves up against manifestations of the same forces.
There is already some neighborhood networking in place: groups and agencies like COIN (the Council of Involved Neighborhoods), Community Forum, the Center for Neighborhood Development. In certain areas, like John Bynon's West Hills, neighborhood groups are potent political forces.
Many of these groups have been written off by critics as simple NIMBYists—people whose concerns and interests don't go much beyond their own street. Sometimes that's true. But as they've gotten better organized, some of them have also started looking much farther afield. In one recent post on the k2k Internet forum about the Knox County school board's proposal to demolish Old South High School, South Knoxville neighborhood activist Diana Conn wrote, "Don't know about y'all, but I'm tired of 'putting out fires'...We need to know well in advance when something is coming down the pike toward a neighborhood or part of town. The media isn't telling us, so we need to dig it out for ourselves...WE NEED A CITY/COUNTY WIDE NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION TO PROTECT OUR NEIGHBORHOODS. Other communities all over the country have such organizations."
Yes, they do. One of the most interesting people I talked to in Nashville when we devoted an issue to the Music City a few months ago was John Stern, head of the Nashville Neighborhood Alliance. The organization has grown over the past two decades to include more than 200 member groups. Its influence on city government has grown commensurably, particularly on issues of zoning, planning and public safety. Nashville's current mayor, Bill Purcell, billed himself as the "neighborhood mayor" in his campaign.
Personally, I'm not sure "neighborhood" is the right word to organize around. It sounds parochial and limited. The issues that many of these groups advocate for go beyond any one locale—they have to do with the quality of life in the community as a whole. "Citizens' groups" or "residents' groups" might be a better way of thinking about it—people who see Knoxville as a place to live, not just a place to make a living.
On the other side, anyone seeking to locate or expand a manufacturing plant, commercial plaza or distribution center—and anyone seeking public support for a private investment—is going to have to get a lot smarter about how they do it. The old assumptions, that any open land is fair game and that working-class, rural or urban neighborhoods are pushovers if you grease the right palms, are not going to hold up. County Executive-elect Mike Ragsdale is clearly making economic development his top priority. That's a good thing, but only if it is approached intelligently and respectfully, weighing costs and benefits at every step.
The next major battleground for these sometimes clashing interests will be the Knoxville mayor's race in 2003. The prospective candidates clearly know it; all of them are busy burnishing their neighborhood credentials (or trying to earn some if they don't have them), while also talking big about economic development. My guess is that the most successful candidate will be the one who best understands how to integrate those forces coherently and intelligently, how to think about the good of the community in its disparate parts and as a whole. In other words, the one who can best calculate Knoxville's new political math.
June 27, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 26
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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