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Seven Days

Wednesday, January 22
A UT official says the university is opening a satellite (read lobbying) office in Nashville with an executive vice president based there. Careful...next thing you know UT may pull a Crowellesque TVA maneuver, practically moving the school to the state capital.

Thursday, January 23
A second snowfall in barely a week buries Knoxville and shuts it down, leading to speculation the weather is being controlled by the creators of the "Got Milk?" ad campaign.
Friday, January 24
Coach Phil Fulmer got no pay raise this year, following the Vols' 8-5 football season. Fulmer may well become interested in coaching Vanderbilt, where they'd give him half the endowment for a string of seven-win years.

Saturday, January 25
The University of Louisville defeats the Vols in basketball, proving that UT went recruiting at the U. of L. for the wrong purpose, selecting a president instead of a basketball coach.

Sunday, January 26
Super Snooze.

Monday, January 27
Knox County Commission votes to settle litigation between itself and the school board. Critical to the settlement is a Commission acknowledgment that the school board exists.
The News-Sentinel reports a movement on to secure a historical marker for Knoxville's first airport along Sutherland Avenue, opened in 1927 by aviator Walter Self. Editorially, we think it an unnecessary gesture in Self-aggrandizement.

Tuesday, January 28
It's disclosed that the principal of Cedar Bluff Intermediate School has been reprimanded for certain irregularities in the school's conduct of state and local security policies regarding standardized tests. Even so, there is no truth to the rumor that the school's name may be changed to Cribbers' Bluff Intermediate.

Knoxville Found

(Sorry, no larger image available)

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:
A lot of readers recognized last week's photo, but first to respond was Wesley G. Morgan, Ph.D., UT Department of Psychology. Alas for Professor Morgan, he has won Knoxville Found within the living memory of our editorial monkeys. So the prize devolved upon our second respondent, Tom diLustro (great name, Tom!)
What was it that Wes and Tom identified? None other than the cornerstone of the downtown YWCA building at 420 Clinch Ave., which, as shown in the photo above, is inscribed "Dedicated to the Glory of God and to the Service of Womanhood 1925." In keeping with that spirit, we award Tom Goddess: Inside Madonna, a biography of the material girl who expresses herself by saying a little prayer to keep herself like a virgin. Or something like that.

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

ANNUAL BUDGET RETREAT
Friday, January 31
8:30 a.m.
Ijams Nature Center
2915 Island Home Ave.
Mayor and Council will review city collections for first six months of the fiscal year and hear presentations from various departments. Sewage overflow in public parks is also on the agenda.

MAYOR'S NIGHT IN
Monday, Feb. 3
5 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Mayor's office, 6th Floor
400 Main St.
The public is invited to bring question and concerns to the city administration's attention.

CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, Feb. 4
7 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regular meeting.

URBAN DESIGN FRAMEWORK MEETING
Thursday, Feb. 6
5:30 p.m.
Knoxville Museum of Art
1050 World's Fair Dr.
The first of several meetings set up to gather public input on a new downtown master plan funded by Nine Counties/One Vision.

Snowbound
Restaurants report dire sales in wake of cold weather

People who own restaurants in Knoxville have seen enough snow and heard enough about the snow. In fact, they're a bit touchy about Knoxville's two recent snowfalls and how they affected their bottom lines.

"I've just had the worst week of business that I've had in nine years," says Terri Korom, the owner of the Crescent Moon Cafe at 718 South Gay St. "My business was down about 70 percent those days. It amazes me."

The general theme is the same whether you ask eateries downtown or in the suburbs. Terry Clayton, the general manager of the Green Hills Grill at 4429 Kingston Pike, says his restaurant's revenues were down between 35 and 45 percent during the last two weeks. "It just kills our business when it snows," says Clayton. "We had a lot of walk-in traffic from the nearby neighborhoods, but we had very little drive-in traffic."

Reed Lindsey, the co-owner of Buddy's Bar-B-Q (which has 15 locations) says eateries get hurt from the moment forecasters predict snow until several days after the snow actually hits. "As soon as people hear the word 'snow' they go straight to the grocery store and they load up," he says. "Then they stay home during the snow because they're afraid to go out. Then, when the snow is over, they stay home because they have to eat all that food they stored up on."

Lindsey says Knoxville's two recent snowfalls turned what was going to be a great month into a terrible one. "Before the snows came, our sales were up about $10,000 from the same month last year," he says. "Now that they've both come and gone, our sales for the month were down about $14,000 from the same month last year."

Mike Chase, owner of Calhoun's, Chesapeake's, and the Copper Cellar, echoes Lindsey's ideas about eating patterns during snowfall. "When it snows, those of us who own restaurants wished we owned grocery stores," he says. "In fact, there are those of us who believe that the grocery-store owners bribe the media into predicting snow." When asked to explain what it feels like to own a Knoxville restaurant during a snowfall, Chase said "it's like being in a taxi cab at a red light with the meter running."

Chase, who has three Calhoun's restaurants in Nashville, thinks the problem is worse in Knoxville than it is in other places because of topography. "With all these windy roads and hills and shady parts of suburbia, sometimes it can take days before all these roads are clear," he says.

However, quite a few restaurant owners are coming around to the theory that people in Knoxville overreact to the inclement weather. "I live on top of a mountain in Strawberry Plains and don't have a four-wheel drive car, but somehow I made it in," says Korom, whose business recently moved from Market Street. "And I thought they did a really good job clearing the streets. I just don't get it."

Cynthia Hackney, the assistant general manager of the Riverside Tavern, says she has never seen anything like the public's reaction to the first snowfall two weeks ago. "I call it the 'day of mayhem,'" she says. "It started snowing at about two, and from that point on, we had only one table booked because everyone was in a mad rush to get out of town. Finally, we closed at about six because there was absolutely no one downtown. I drove home with no problem, and I have a rear-wheel-drive car."

Hackney is proud to say that the Riverside Tavern has remained open on schedule since that first Thursday. And she says that the experience of the last two weeks has convinced her that the next time it snows in the middle of the day, people should come by her place of business.

"People should just stop and eat rather than get into that traffic," she says. "You'll get home about the same time, full, and a lot less frustrated."

—Bill Carey

Get On the Bus
KAT hopes changes will increase ridership

If Knoxville doesn't do something to stop it, KAT may rob disgruntled Knoxvillians of one of our most dependable complaints about the city. It's the one we blame for everything—from the city's nationally ranked pollution levels, to our intractable traffic problems, to the specter of downtown parking. The city's public-transit system, we've always said, is too slow, spotty, or unpredictable to be practical. And that's why, we like to say, we have to drive our cars everywhere.

That argument is based on a partly false assumption. Knoxville already has a usable public-transit system. It runs more hours of the day than it has in over 20 years, thanks to a series of initiatives in recent years to commence Sunday and late-night service. The main four trunk routes now run about 18 hours a day.

And if general manager Mark Hairr has his way, by 2005 bus service will be still easier to use. The KAT Action Plan 2010, the general goals of which were unveiled recently, calls for comprehensive changes designed to respond to market research and public comments. "What we find is that people want more frequent service, both in the city and beyond," Hairr says.

Some of it's already happening. Beginning earlier this month, KAT instituted an enhanced every-five-minutes service on UT's campus, including a new transfer point, to help students learn how to deal with a campus without parking all over it. The "T," as it's called, is among the first of several steps involved in Action Plan 2010.

Other initiatives may include "Super Stops," bus stops with enclosed waiting areas, and/or parking; a downtown transit center; new routes to far-west Knoxville, including Cedar Bluff and Turkey Creek; and extensions of some other routes.

Perhaps the most noticeable improvement is that buses on the trunk lines would run every 15 minutes. Advocates say it would make the bus more usable to people without keeping track of a schedule. All you'd have to do is find a bus stop and wait for a bus; it would never be more than a few minutes.

Something's working already. After bus ridership dwindled for years, it seems to be enjoying a modest resurgence in popularity. Last year, the downtown trolleys alone logged 565,000 passenger-trips, more than twice as many as the system had three years ago.

Ridership over the whole system is up 8.4 percent in the last year; Hairr says that largely reflects KAT's late-night ("Night Rider") buses, which link downtown with the city's four main spokes (Chapman Highway, Magnolia, Broadway, and Kingston Pike), as well as Sunday Rider. In all, Knoxvillians took over 2.5 million rides on KAT buses last year.

Improvements won't come without a cost. KAT's budget is about $10 million, and only a fraction of it comes from the $1 fare. The city pitches in about half of it, the state another eighth. Subsidies from private businesses, some of which benefit from KAT, take up some of the slack.

"We have to identify some additional resources," Hairr says, and in these days of abstemious public budgets, especially on the state level, that will be a challenge. Also, some of the low-ridership routes, including some neighborhoods' services, may be curtailed to put more emphasis on the 15-minute rhythm. Some may merely be shortened or reconfigured, others reduced to an on-demand Call-a-KAT service. He says some of the Crosstown Loop (Route 90) trips—Knoxville Center (East Towne) to West Town, for example—haven't been as successful as they'd assumed, and they may return to a more-efficient downtown-hub focus.

KAT's also moving to relieve us of another, older complaint about city buses: the smell of diesel exhaust. "We've already entered the alternative-fuel arena," Hairr says. As of this month, KAT has four propane-fueled mini-buses that are part of the new "T" in service on UT's campus. They're quieter and much less polluting than the buses Mom rode. He expects to enlist six more this calendar year.

Whether people will use the new buses, and enhanced services, is another question. KAT already provides better public transit than some other cities enjoy, but except for some student-commuter routes, a full bus is a rarity. Hairr's initiatives stand to raise the stakes in the public-transportation game—and, maybe, call Knoxville's bluff.

—Jack Neely