Metro Pulse/Ear to the Ground

Comment
on this story

Rotating Laws

Knoxville has another billboard controversy.

Ignoring the advice of the city law director, the Board of Zoning Appeals voted 3-2 to allow developer Robert Bedwell to convert a simple billboard along Interstate 40/75 in the Turkey Creek area into a so-called tri-vision sign, which rotates three separate advertisements.

There are a few tri-vision billboards in unincorporated Knox County, but none in Knoxville itself. Prior to the vote, Debra Poplin of the city law department told the board that Knoxville code states that "no sign having...moving parts shall be permitted" in the city limits. After the meeting, city law director Michael Kelley backed her up. "In our opinion, as long as the law is in place it is not subject to variance," said Kelley.

The citywide neighborhood organization known as the Community Forum appealed the board's decision to City Council; that appeal will be heard at the Nov. 26 Council meeting. "In the history of the city there has never been a variance granted for a billboard with moving parts," Community Forum's Mark Williamson says. "This variance not only violates the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law.

"We don't want more billboards. We want less."

Iron Fist

Creating a new park in South Knoxville is a many-splendored thing for Mayor Victor Ashe. Not only does it offer him the opportunity to increase the city's inventory of parks, but it also gives him the chance to pull off the rare double-headed gotcha. Plunking a public park right smack in the path of the hated Tennessee Department of Transportation's hated South Knoxville Boulevard extension means the state will face even more embarrassment than the public outcry it has already endured if it goes forward with the plan to build the connector, which Ashe opposes. And by dispensing with the usual protocol of consulting members of Council about decisions involving their districts, Ashe publicly embarrassed South Knoxville Council member Joe Hultquist, who is running neck-and-neck with Nick Pavlis as Ashe's least favorite Councilperson.

Hultquist, who put together a task force to study the issues involved in the road project, is pretty ticked that he was blindsided. "The first knew about it was when I got my packet for this special meeting that he's called for tomorrow," he said Tuesday. "I was completely caught off-guard. Deer-in-the-headlights kind of surprised."

Silver Tongue

On the other end of the sixth floor of the City/County building, neophyte County Executive Mike Ragsdale is taking a more subtle approach to wooing public opinion. Ragsdale has become a master of the self-deprecating punch line, and is one of the most polished public speakers on the rubber chicken circuit. His recent luncheon engagement at a meeting of the Executive Women's Association (EWA) is a good example. He started out by acknowledging that "a lot of my detractors said there'd be a train wreck after I took office." (pregnant pause) "They just didn't know it'd be 15 days after I was sworn in." (He was referring, of course, to the Norfolk Southern derailment in September.).

Then he told the EWA members about how he'd busied himself with public service activities during the year before he was elected. One of his favorites was reading to students at Sterchi Elementary School. By May, he said, "I'd gotten kind of close to them, and when we said good-bye, one little boy came up and said 'I'm really gonna miss you.' Then he asked me if he could tell me something. I said sure, and he said 'You read a lot better now than you did when you started.' "

Trust

Earlier this month, Time magazine ran an essay by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy called "Trust Me, He Says," which raises questions about the president's Iraq policy. The essay quotes George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, and JoAnn Reafsnyder, director of adult education at Bearden's Westminster Presbyterian Church. The essayists were apparently impressed that Westminster had commenced a four-part discussion on the "Impending War With Iraq." Referencing Rep. Jimmy Duncan's rare Republican vote against a pre-emptive attack, the piece quotes Reafsnyder: "The people are questioning. We hear, we speculate on what's going on, but we're not sure. We're not sure about the role of economics, the politics of fear, the politics of oil."