Metro Pulse/Citybeat

Comment
on this story

Seven Days

Wednesday, October 9
A great gnashing of teeth arises in Knox County over the potential implications of a state Supreme Court decision that could be used to reduce state funding of large school districts in favor of smaller districts. Not to worry. Both leading gubernatorial candidates say they can manage their way out of the state's plethora of fiscal woes.

Thursday, October 10
When contacted about former city law director Tom Varlan's nomination for a federal judgeship here, former News-Sentinel editor Harry Moskos is quoted as supporting the nomination by saying, "Tom can see all sides of an issue, and he doesn't get rattled." So that's why Moskos could never have been a candidate for judge.

Friday, October 11
It's disclosed that the downtown Marriott Hotel (formerly the Hyatt) will be closed for 10 days to replace its fritzed electrical transformer. Probably needed a bigger one anyway to power mini-cameras in its guest rooms.

Saturday, October 12
UT loses to Georgia for the third straight year. The loss, however, allows thousands of Vol fans to learn for the first time what a clavicle is. A hairline fracture in Casey Claussen's shoulder blade kept him off the field.

Sunday, October 13
An Alabama minister preaches against a Tennessee state lottery as part of a statewide tour to convince voters not to vote yes in the lottery referendum next month. That's easy for him to say. Alabama went to the dogs years ago (by legalizing dogtrack betting).

Tuesday, October 15
Sheriff Tim Hutchison is accused by a convicted drug dealer of sneaking six sheriff's helicopters onto an airstrip the convict owns. The convict testifies in a contempt of court hearing against Hutchison that he agreed to an inflated rent to cover up the use of the airstrip and improvements to it so that County Commission wouldn't find out about it. Maybe Hutchison should have been accused of contempt of County Commission.

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:
Last week's Knoxville Found was of a stock, the sort used a couple of centuries ago to publicly chasten wrongdoers. Apparently another in a series of "Things Found Around the James White Fort" photos, it was identified by quite a few readers. Although not first, among their number was Craig Griffith, deputy to the mayor, who warned in his message that "This electronic mail may be a public record and subject to inspection under the Tennessee Public Records Act." If any members of the public choose the inspect the message, they will discover that the message helpfully informed us that "This was Briscoe Kuhlman's Eagle Scout project in 2001.... Briscoe's mother, Ruthie Kuhlman, denies claims that it is an old family tradition."

Jack Neely, also being helpful, informs us that he thinks the stock is anachronistic, because such devices were probably no longer being used to punish lawbreakers by the time the fort was built. Anyway, David Moon of Knoxville was first to correctly identify the photo, so he gets a copy of the Tennessee Blue Book, 1995-96, Bicentennial Edition, with hopes it will help him avoid ending up in the stock.

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

CITY COUNCIL WORKSHOP: JACKSON AVE. REDEVELOPMENT PLAN
Thursday, Oct. 17,
5 p.m.
Large Assembly Room
City County Bldg.
400 Main St.
Public hearing on the proposed redevelopment plan.

POLICE ADVISORY & REVIEW COMMITTEE
Thursday, Oct. 17
6 p.m.
Mt. Olive Baptist Church
1601 Dandridge Ave.
Regular meeting.

PARTNERSHIP FOR NEIGHBORHOOD IMPROVEMENT
Thursday, Oct. 17
6:30 p.m.
Family Investment Center
400 Harriet Tubman St.
A meeting to provide updates on projects and an overview of a proposed funding strategy for concerned individuals and groups within the Empowerment Zone.

SPECIAL CITY COUNCIL MEETING
Monday, Oct. 21
10 a.m.
In Front of the Old Downtown Post Office
501 Main St.
Funding facade improvements to the building will be considered.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING ORGANIZATION
Wednesday, Oct. 23
9 a.m.
City County Bldg.
Small Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regular meeting of the executive board.

Destination Management
Ray says key to conventions is stop obsessing on shortcomings

There is no shortcut to Knoxville's making strides as a tourist and convention city, according to the president of the new Tourism and Sports Development Corp. Gloria Ray says that the answer is not a planetarium, or a stadium, or any other big-ticket item. The focus needs to be, Ray says, on "destination management" rather than a "destination attraction."

"We need to stop being fixated on the idea of building a destination attraction," she says. "The people at Dollywood will be the first to tell you that Dollywood isn't a destination attraction—the mountains are the destination attraction.

"Don't get me wrong—we could use a new anchor tenant in Knoxville, and I'm not sure what that needs to be. But we are not going to build a Disney World here. I'm not sure that the city of Chattanooga gets any more conventions because it has an aquarium. And I don't think that we have either lost or not gotten a single convention here because we didn't have Universe Knoxville."

In a long interview, Ray talked about Knoxville's need to recognize what it already has rather than obsess on what it doesn't have. She explained the lengths to which the predecessor Sports Corp. organization went to land the recent Junior Olympic Games and the American Bowling Congress championship tournament, which runs from February through June of next year. She argued that those events were worth the investment that Knoxville and Knox County made to get them. And she said that she intends to go after conventions using the same strategy that she used to go after amateur sporting events—offering potential groups of conventioneers packages of extra goodies that are largely financed by corporate sponsorships.

"I'm eager about the idea of a new hotel and would love to see expanded air service, because those things would increase the pool of groups that we could get to come to Knoxville," she said. "But for now, we need to remember that those things didn't prevent us from getting the largest youth sporting event in the country and the largest adult sporting event in the country. And I don't think we should use those things as an excuse."

The Tourism and Sports Development Corp. has taken on the missions of the former Greater Knoxville Sports Corp., the former Knox County Tourist Commission, and the former Convention and Visitors Bureau. Under current government allotments, the new entity has a budget of $2.9 million and will be based in the former Wendy's building at 301 Gay Street. (Lease negotiations for that building are still underway.) The TSDC's 30-member staff will mostly consist of former Sports Corp. and CVB employees. Its 21-member board consists of many former directors of the former Sports Corp. and former Tourist Commission—most notably TSDC chairman Bill Stokely (who was chairman of the Sports Corp.) and TSDC vice-chairman David Duncan (who was vice chairman of the Tourist Commission). And, although the CVB is being folded into the TSDC, it will keep its name for marketing purposes.

City and county officials decided to form the TSDC several months ago because of a general feeling that the previous arrangement wasn't working. Until a few months ago, Knoxville-area hotel occupancy levels had been sagging (they have improved since April). Meanwhile, despite the best of efforts of the CVB to this point, paid bookings have not poured into the new $93 million Convention Center at the pace that many had hoped.

Ray is highly regarded by many Knoxville officials and power brokers for her role as president of the Sports Corp., the organization that lured the Junior Olympics and the upcoming bowling convention. The new TSDC organization is unusual; some have even argued that it was set up with Gloria Ray in mind. "This organization is unique to Knoxville and is probably not transferable to other cities," says Knoxville Community Development Corp. chairman Bill Lyons. "It is tribute to Gloria Ray's reputation."

However, Ray—who was once the Women's Athletic Director at the University of Tennessee—is not without her detractors. Some point out that she has little background in luring the industry-specific events that make up the bulk of the convention business. Others argue that the Sports Corp. did not do everything it could to get participants in the recent Junior Olympic games out into the community. The Knoxville Museum of Art, for example, says it did not get a single Junior Olympian through its doors during the two-week event. The Sports Corp.'s web page (www.sportscorp.com)—to which Junior Olympians were directed before the August event—had a link titled "Why bring your athletes to Knoxville." People who clicked on the link were shown a page that read like the Sports Corp.'s resume, listing several of the sporting events that have taken place in Knoxville during the last decade (including a preseason NFL game in 1995). The page made no mention, and had no link, to local attractions such as the Knoxville Zoo, the Blount Mansion, and the KMA.

"There is a lot more to Knoxville than what the Junior Olympians were shown," says Jeff Talman, a mortgage banker and former Tourist Commissioner who, meanwhile, says he admires Gloria Ray and says she is a "terrific salesperson" for Knoxville.

To her critics, Ray responds by saying that the Junior Olympics had a $50 million impact on the local economy, a figure that the Sports Corp. came up with based on tourist industry multipliers. As far as individual businesses and attractions that may have been disappointed during the games, she says that has a lot to do with the nature of the event, and she says that some venues may do better with the bowlers. "I would not expect a young athlete to spend a lot of time and money in the Old City, but I would have expected them to spend a lot of time and money at a place like Celebration Station in West Knoxville," Ray says. "But I would think that the bowler would go to the Old City."

Regarding hotel statistics, some data supports Ray's claim that the Junior Olympics helped the economy. According to Smith Travel Research—a highly regarded research firm in the hospitality industry—hotel occupancy in the Knoxville area rose nearly 13 percent in August 2002 over the same month a year earlier. Room revenue rose from $11.7 million to $13.8 million. It is safe to say that the Junior Olympics had something to do with those increases.

The new TSDC is charged with both increasing tourist traffic and booking long-term conventions. (Under the current blueprint, SMG will continue to book short-term conventions, meaning conventions that are booked less than 14 months in advance.) On the tourist side, Ray says the new organization will try to do a better job of packaging things in the area. "I don't think that what is here has fully been appreciated," she says. "For science buffs, we have Oak Ridge. Some people might want to go to the Museum of Appalachia. Some might want to stay right here and study the history we have right here. Others might want to go to Dollywood. But the point is that we are right in the center of all these things, if we could just package it better."

When asked whether she will go after traditional conventions using the same tactics that she used to go after sporting events, Ray answers with an emphatic "yes."

"Meeting planners and sporting event planners are similar in that they need a place to conduct their event or their show or their meeting," Ray says. "We have those places just like other cities. But whether you are in the pharmaceutical business or a sporting event participant, you are also concerned about what your people will be doing when they are not conducting business or playing sports. You want them to feel special, and you want them to have a good experience. And I think we can do a better job of making people feel special than other cities."

Ray realizes that the notion of making people feel "special" may make some folks roll their eyes. But to illustrate what she means, she explains some of the things the Sports Corp. agreed to do for the American Bowling Congress. The ABC will bring an estimated 180,000 people to Knoxville, each of whom will stay for four days. According to Ray, every city that bid on the ABC event offered free use of its convention center and at least a million dollars in cash. Knoxville also offered free use of its convention center, but only $600,000 in cash. The reason Knoxville got the event was all the "extras" that went with it. "We told them that we would take care of their people," she says. The Sports Corp. offered to donate $300 to a local charity for every perfect game that is bowled; the use of several billboards in Knox County to get people excited about the event; advertising in local newspapers and local radio stations; to provide a list of area physicians for bowlers to go see if they need to for any reason. It even offered to give every participant a coffee cup that can be used to get free coffee at a number of locations.

"This type of thing gave us an advantage over the other cities when it came to getting sporting events, and this type of thing will also give us an advantage over other cities when it comes to going after conventions. Most other convention cities just take care of your hotel reservations and your rental cars. We can, we will, do more than that."

—Bill Carey

Duncan as Hamlet
To be hawkish or true to his conscience?

President Bush is a good man, who I'm confident will do what's right. But there are some people in his administration who are a little too eager to go to war."

That may sound like the statement of some California or Massachusetts liberal of the kind East Tennessee Republicans love to hate. In fact, it was U.S. Rep. Jimmy Duncan explaining his position on Iraq. For the second time in less than three months, Duncan voted against the president and nearly all of his Republican colleagues in Congress. Those votes show he won't be stampeded by any mood to "do something, even if it's wrong," in the nation's year-old war on terrorism.

Not too much sand was raised in late July when Duncan voted against the Homeland Security Act. Duncan's explanation that we didn't need another federal bureaucracy was in character with his fiscal conservatism, even though President Bush clearly and dearly wanted the GOP to be unanimous in its backing of the new cabinet-level department.

However, Duncan's vote last week against the resolution authorizing the president to use military force, if necessary, against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, stirred up the whole sandbox. It was especially stormy at home in Tennessee and in his 2nd District, where he's running for reelection to a eighth term. Statewide, no other congressman or senator voted no.

Beth Harwell, the state's Republican Party Chairwoman, says Duncan's position is "different" from that of the former vice president, former senator, and former congressman, Al Gore, whose criticism late last month of the administration's strategy and tactics in the terrorism war she called "shameless," as well as "shameful...irresponsible," and "unsubstantiated."

"There's clearly a difference between an elected official casting a vote...representing his constituency and a person who doesn't hold office exploiting the issue for political gain," Harwell said. She then slipped into the rhetorical argument (against Gore) that it is a time when the nation needs to line up behind its president, before she countered in Duncan's favor that "a congressman voting, doing what he thinks is right, and a person making a political speech are completely different." Asked if Gore is running for president, as he did in 2000 against Bush, Harwell said, "I don't know. Ask him."

Duncan says his telephone calls were "overwhelmingly positive" in response to his vote on the Iraq issue, but he concedes that some of the negative callers were "a little upset." That's an understatement, according to staff members, but Duncan remains unmoved.

War, he says, is not a step the nation should take "unless we're absolutely forced to." He cites a recent CIA report suggesting that Iraq was not in a position to go to war with any of its neighbors, since its weaponry is down to 40 percent of what it was during the Gulf War 11 years ago and concluding that Iraq poses no threat to the U.S. at the moment.

"We changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department a long time ago, and we did that for a reason," Duncan says.

On the Homeland Security Department and its billions of dollars of new funding, Duncan says the Defense Department, the CIA, the FBI, and the other agencies in place to combat terrorism should be able to handle the task adequately if they were well-managed and cooperative with one another. "We spend more on defense, almost, than all the other countries in the world put together, and we spend more on intelligence [gathering and analysis] than all the other countries in the world put together," without the extra cabinet office, he says.

Duncan adds that he and some other members of Congress were invited to a briefing two weeks before the vote on the Iraq question. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet supplied the briefing material, which advocated the anti-Hussein resolution. On his way out, a colleague asked him why he thought they'd been called in for the briefing. "I think we're on a troublemakers' list," Duncan says he replied.

Regardless of administration efforts and those of his friends and family members, he made what he calls "my toughest vote ever" (out of more than 7,500 he's cast in Congress). "I tried my best to convince myself to vote for it, and I just couldn't," Duncan says.

"I voted for the Gulf War, and I voted in 1998 to give $100 million to Hussein's opposition," Duncan says, "I know it would take more than that today to influence his opposition in the region to depose him, but I'd vote for it now, rather than set us up...[to pay] for an invasion and occupation where American lives would be lost and where innocent Iraqis, women and children, would be killed.

"I just don't see it," Duncan says.

—Barry Henderson

Squaring Off
Kinsey offers up a new Market Square owners' group

M arket Square developer Jon Kinsey unveiled a process, if not a plan, to set standards for commercial activity on the square through adoption of bylaws, covenants, and restrictions at a meeting of Market Square property owners Tuesday night.

Kinsey proposed formation of a new property owners' association that would develop and enforce these standards. With the approval of a majority of the owners, the association would be formed at a meeting Oct. 29, and a seven-member interim board of directors would be selected. Under Kinsey's proposal, the interim board "will be charged with the task of formalizing Covenants, Restrictions, and By-laws for the Associations."

Kinsey's local partners in the Market Square redevelopment project, Brian Conley and David Dewhirst, anticipate that all but two or three of the owners of the more than 30 parcels adjoining the square will join the new association. Initially, membership would be for a three-month period until the interim board makes its recommendations. At that time, owners would decide whether to adopt them and make the organization permanent.

Kinsey won't be drawn out as to what sort of covenants and restrictions he envisions. But he has previously stated that "there needs to be a certain level of quality and standards that everybody lives up to."

Another reason for forming the association is to make it clear that a majority of the Square's owners don't subscribe to the views of a dissident faction known as the Historic Market Square Association. HMSA was formed to oppose previous redevelopment plans for the square that contemplated awarding singular control over the property on the Square to developers Worsham Watkins. Since the Worsham Watkins plan was nixed and Kinsey was selected, he has brought a much more participative approach to formulating plans for the square's commercial revitalization. And the Kinsey team believes that HMSA now speaks for only two or three owners.

One of them, Susan Key, has been outspokenly critical of Kinsey's plans for a makeover of the square's public space and has asserted a lack of a marketing strategy for attracting retail tenants to the square. Construction work on $6.1 million in city-funded improvement's to the square's public space and its environs is due to start Nov. 1. But on Tuesday, Key released a report from an HMSA consultant, Will Malone, recommending that "prior to the expenditure of further significant costs or construction, [Kinsey should] develop a specific retail strategy, and marketing materials, describing the project and incorporating market information, and [a] proposed tenant mix and location plan,"

From the outset, Kinsey's redevelopment plans have been contingent on attracting a Cineplex to an adjacent block of Gay Street that would serve as a magnet for pulling people into the Square. Plans for the publicly funded building and garage that would house the cinema are still in a formative stage, and Kinsey's posture is that they need to be firm before he launches a marketing effort.

—Joe Sullivan