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Seven Days

Wednesday, August 7
BellSouth cuts a deal with small carriers to back off from its opposition to allowing the regional phone giant from entering the long-distance market. We just have one word for that: Ma!
It's reported that in a Nashville hearing with state environmental officials, representatives of the city of Knoxville and two of its contractors on the Coster Shop project refuse to accept blame for dumping waste from the railyards in a South Knoxville sinkhole. It was, um, toxic waste elves! Or maybe African swallows. Or, hey, those mosquitoes carrying the West Nile Virus—you can't trust those darn mosquitoes. Mischievous kids with wagons? A renegade dump truck gang? Help us out here...

Thursday, August 8
TVA officials are trying to convince the federal Office of Management and Budget that restarting its oldest nuclear power generating unit at Brown's Ferry in Alabama will not require exorbitant spending. Exorbitant could surely be considered a relative term for a utility that ran up some $30 billion in debt.

Friday, August 9
A U.S. magistrate sentences a protester to prison for a year for trespassing at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge. The protester calls going to prison a "privilege." Sort of like free speech and assembly and so forth. Not a right but a privilege.
A 37-year-old from Bluff City claims the world's record for the longest scuba dive after spending nearly 72 hours beneath the surface of South Holston Lake. Tennessee lawmakers are prompted to file a claim for a world's record free dive on the basis of the state's budget accomplishments.

Monday, August 12
New UT President John Shumaker asks VIPs, such as legislators and state government officials, who have been getting free UT football tickets, to voluntarily start paying for them. State officials promptly volunteer to start a nationwide search for another UT president.

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:
Wholly cow! And that's no bull. Yes, last week more than a few readers commented on our apparent bovine fixation, noting that we've featured representations of cud-chewing beasties two weeks in a row. What can we say? We're just bullish on Knoxville. (Ouch! Ouch! Okay, okay, we promise: no moo-ore puns.) Actually, we just noticed that these two cows recently appeared outside of Bill Cox Furniture at 615 North Broadway and decided to get a pic quick, because, regrettably, the store is going out of business. Bill Pittman of Knoxville was the first reader to correctly identify the shot. His prize is a Minority Report featurette, which comes in its very own, very heavy, solid-steel container. It will make an excellent paperweight. The catch is, this thing is so heavy we can't afford to mail it, so Bill will have to come pick it up. If he doesn't like that arrangement, all we can say is, don't have a cow, man. (Ouch, ouch, ouch...)

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

CITY COUNCIL WORKSHOP
Thursday, Aug. 15
5 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Pensions will be discussed.

CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, Aug. 20
7 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regularly scheduled meeting.

CITY TREE BOARD
Wednesday, Aug. 21
8:30 a.m.
Ijams Nature Center
Regular meeting.

KNOXVILLE'S COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORP.
Wednesday, Aug. 21
5 p.m.
FIC Building
Corner of Harriet Tubman and MLK
Formal public hearing for the Jackson/Depot Redevelopment & Urban Renewal Plan.

Sanders for Governor?
Nashville minister could possibly swing the election

Ed Sanders is a smooth-talking preacher. That he's the Rev. Ed Sanders, and not just a politician in the offing, makes his preachiness more understandable. That he's the only Independent candidate running for governor on a platform that leans unequivocally on tax reform, with an income tax replacing a substantial part of the state sales tax, makes him a potential factor in the election process.

Republican candidate Van Hilleary has been pressuring Democrat candidate Phil Bredesen to allow inclusion of Sanders in their debates, including a controversial one the evening of Aug. 14 at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the first gubernatorial debate of the season to be televised.

Both Hilleary and Bredesen have taken ghastly pains to distance themselves from the issue of an income tax. Hilleary's position is therefore taken as an indication that conservative Republicans, who are his constituency, believe that the Democrats pose the biggest threat of instituting an income tax.

Never mind that Sanders is a lifelong Republican. He's running on the Independent ticket to give tax reform a forum in this election.

Bredesen's camp has given Sanders little credibility, saying he is "one of 13 [Independents] who gathered the 25 signatures required to get his name on the ballot." The Bredesen people call Sanders "a fine man" but say the election—and by inference the debates—boils down "to the two candidates who earned their positions on the ballot by enduring competitive primary elections."

However, a Mason-Dixon Research poll taken right after the primary gave Sanders 5 percent of the potential vote, compared with 42 percent for Bredesen and 36 percent for Hilleary, with 17 percent undecided.

Even so, UT political science Prof. Bill Lyons says the election is likely to be decided between the two major parties and their candidates. Asked what he thought of Sanders' chances to muster as much as 5 percent of the vote total, Lyons says, "I don't think they're real good. Of course this is very early in the campaign." Lyons says a candidate such as Sanders could swing the election "if it's close enough," and adds that he believes Sanders "could end up hurting Bredesen with disgruntled Democrats...the classic protest vote...more than he could hurt Hilleary."

Lyons dismisses the other 12 Independents as "the usual round of suspects who just get their name on the ballot," but Sanders, Lyons says, "has a policy presence" and should appeal to an unknown number of voters who look favorably on and are riding the single issue of an income tax as part of tax reform.

Bill Haley, Sanders' Middle Tennessee coordinator, says, "The Democrats are paranoid that we're just in there to help the Republicans." He says the Republicans are being coy about Sanders' candidacy, and the Hilleary campaign personnel are "very cordial, very nice to us" when they meet up on the campaign trail.

"He attended many of the debates and forums on the campaign trail, and we found him a very thoughtful and credible person," says Frank Cagle, Hilleary's spokesperson. "He has a lot of good ideas. We don't agree with many of them, but he should be in the debates."

The Hilleary team was trying to persuade the League of Women Voters to include Sanders in the Meharry debate, calling Sanders' campaign's failure to file a required July 25 campaign statement "an honest mistake."

Haley says that is true, and that a report showing Sanders had raised and spent a little more than $50,000 by June's end was sent to the League, and a more detailed report is being prepared to fulfill the state requirement.

Sanders, pastor for the last 21 years of the 700-member Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville, says he has seen his role as providing a "progressive voice" in Republican politics over the years. He says he has "always been pro-choice, and I always raised the question of economic disparity that has not been addressed by conservative Republicans."

He says his ministry led him to involvement in "a conversation among a group of ministers across the state...who decided to field a candidate for governor." Ultimately, the decision was for him to run as an Independent. "The issue of a tax crisis is not on the table [between Bredesen and Hilleary], and that's not right," Sanders says. He says he would push for a graduated income tax with a sales tax rate reduction and the elimination of sales taxes on food and clothing. "I call it tax relief, not reform, because our current system taxes the poor so heavily, compared with the rich," he says.

Sanders is also an advocate for health issues, such as AIDS prevention and treatment of drug abuse, he says. Last March, President Bush appointed him to the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He has been a presenter at the last two World AIDS Conferences in Switzerland and South Africa, and he helped create the First Response Wellness Center in Nashville to serve people struggling with the consequences of HIV/AIDS.

"I'm expecting to win," says Sanders, pointing to the 41 percent of surveyed Tennesseans who supported an income tax, if sales taxes are taken off of food and clothing, in a poll last year. He says he needs only a plurality, which might be only about 34 percent of the vote, to be elected governor.

And though such pollsters and poll watchers as Lyons deem that highly unlikely, Sanders is determined to press on. "Status-quoism is undermining our state," he says.

—Barry Henderson

A Plan for Jackson Ave.?
One property owner has doubts

The C.M. McClung Warehouse appears in the background on the cover of ex-Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman's CD, Anyway the Wind Blows. Until recently, that might have seemed to be the city's policy toward Jackson Avenue.

It's suddenly very different, with the Jackson Avenue Redevelopment District under consideration by Knoxville's Community Development Corp.—a plan that at least one major property owner questions.

Last Wednesday, KCDC hosted a public forum about the project, which includes several blocks of Jackson and Depot avenues at the north end of downtown. KCDC administrator Dan Tiller came up with 10 benign-sounding goals for the neighborhood. They included the usual concerns—parking, infrastructure, and pedestrian linkages—along with a call to "facilitate the redevelopment of the area" and "elimination of conditions of blight and blighting influences." How those phrases are interpreted in the final plan may have enormous consequences for the long-deferred dreams of Mark Saroff.

Saroff owns the C.M. McClung Warehouses, the block of vacant buildings along Jackson that greets anyone driving into downtown from the north or passing by on I-40. Unlike its renovated segment in the Old City, Jackson to the west of Gay Street has remained quiet: an auto-glass company, a couple of craftsman's studios, a couple of modest residences, and the vacant buildings city officials have cited as a "blight."

This cluster of seven adjacent structures was built between 1883 and the 1920s by one of the city's biggest wholesale concerns. Saroff began buying the buildings 11 years ago, and he now owns six of them. They were originally to serve his never-realized Center for the Application of Science and Art.

Several years ago, Saroff announced that he would be renovating the larger buildings for a mixture of affordable and market-rate residences. At the time, it might have seemed a less-likely project than it does now. There were a lot of vacant buildings in this neighborhood separated from the rest of downtown by a steep slope, its main access to town the then half-vacant 100 block of Gay, anchored by the corner homeless shelter.

In the time since, the seemingly isolated neighborhood has come into focus as a likely vital link between the convention center/World's Fair Park area and the nightlife of the Old City. Meanwhile, many expect the removal of the homeless mission at Gay and Jackson (see "Insights," page 4) to make the area more appealing for residents.

Nearby residential projects have been completed as others have been launched and are now fully underway, chief among them Sterchi Lofts, the huge condominium development due to open in November. At least one of the buildings next to Saroff's on West Jackson is being renovated for retail and upscale residential use.

However, Saroff, who once seemed the young stout-hearted pioneer of a forgotten neighborhood, is now owner of the largest undeveloped property in the Jackson Avenue Redevelopment District. By some accounts, the district itself was formed to address frustrations with Saroff's pace. Photographs of Saroff's buildings were waved about at a December City Council meeting by members of Mayor Victor Ashe's administration to emphasize the "emergency" of the situation.

The eight months since have seen little movement from Saroff or the city. Although a defined redevelopment district would theoretically give KCDC the right to condemn buildings that aren't being renovated, KCDC and city officials haven't gotten that far yet. Saroff acknowledges that he has had no personal discussions with KCDC. Tiller says the city has not appropriated any money for the project. That may change as soon as next month, when Tiller expects to put the redevelopment plan before City Council. Though Tiller insists that Saroff is not a target, the would-be developer's wishes may or may not be respected in the plan.

Saroff, a likable guy who tends to ramble, feels he hasn't been treated fairly. "They're blocking me," he says. What's happening with residential development incentives elsewhere in downtown is especially frustrating to Saroff, who in July 2000 made a proposal to the city that seemed to prefigure the deals the city would later make for other projects, like the development of Sterchi Lofts. Saroff imagines their reaction to his residential-incentives proposal: "Great, you're absolutely right, and you're out!"

Doug Berry was this city's director of development at the time of Saroff's proposal. He says it ran into resistance from city officials who were skeptical about Saroff's ability to finance his complicated deal, that there were misunderstandings about the city's role, and that other expensive priorities at the time—notably the convention center and the Renaissance Knoxville plan—put Saroff's project "on the back burner."

Kevin DuBose, of the current director of development's office, says simply that Saroff has not applied for the City Life Incentives package, the residential incentives program the city launched last year. DuBose says if Saroff applies, his project would be considered under the city's criteria for viability.

Saroff has clearly paid some dues. In the '90s, he rebuilt part of the warehouse's foundation; he says the building's structurally sound, and that contractors with the Nashville-based Hardaway company say it's in better shape than the Sterchi was when they started construction work on it. Outside, the building has been roundly vandalized; someone recently smashed the front door. But inside, the hardwood floors, partly rebuilt, are shiny with varnish; the wooden columns are handsome and sturdy.

Some of Saroff's adjacent properties are renovated and occupied. The smallest of the six buildings, at the end, is a residence for three. Another building in the block is home to a successful woodworking firm. Saroff says he's gotten commitments from major financing companies, and has earned tough-to-get federal tax credits for the affordable-housing aspect of his original plan (though they're reportedly now expired), and a national-register nomination for his property.

"I think Mark deserves an opportunity to see his buildings through to development," says Berry. "He's got 10 years of sweat equity in the project. Mark could make it happen. The difficulty appears to be in pulling together a team that understands their roles."

In describing his strategy for the buildings, Saroff is careful to avoid the word waiting, but he repeatedly refers to the necessity of incentives for proceeding with such a huge project. With incentives comparable to those on Gay Street, he says, "This building would go."

He's skeptical of the redevelopment district plan, with its powers to condemn, but defers judgment. "We haven't seen the plan," he says. "They're going to produce a plan after only one meeting? There needs to be a depth of discussion on this. With incentives, who needs a redevelopment area?"

KCDC's public meeting on the Jackson Avenue Redevelopment Plan will be on Wednesday, Aug. 21, at the FIC building, the corner of MLK and Harriet Tubman.

—Jack Neely