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Seven Days

Wednesday, March 5
In reporting on $1 million in loans made for business purposes in the city's Empowerment Zone, the News-Sentinel account said, "But with a $50,000 cap on each loan, no more than 20 could have been executed." Read that back to us again.

Thursday, March 6
Ex-members of the Sundquist administration are quoted as saying they're completely in the dark as to why a federal grand jury has subpoenaed the emails of the former governor himself and many of his administration's top officials. Probably just fishing for personal notes from Pamela Reed, the former e-mail pal-amour of former UT President Wade Gilley.

Friday, March 7
The state's law enforcement officers respond to Gov. Phil Bredesen's Thursday admonition of the highway patrol and TBI not to take names any more at anti-war protests, as some did the previous weekend. The officers promise to kick ass instead.
The new owners of Bike Athletic announce their intent to close their Knoxville plant. It came as a sort of surprise, faking Bike workers right out of their jockstraps, so to speak.

Saturday, March 8
The basketball Vols whip Vanderbilt, proving that they can, in fact, defeat a team not ranked in the nation's top 25.

Sunday, March 9
The Lady Vols lose to the SEC basketball tournament to LSU. Who cares? The season sweep's enough.

Monday, March 10
The Willie Nelson concert at the Tennessee Theatre, postponed from its March 7 date due to the entertainer's illness, is canceled. Who'll be substituted, George Jones?

Tuesday, March 11
Randy Tyree names a treasurer to raise money for a campaign for mayor. Let's see, would that be for this year, or for the last mayor's race, or maybe the next one?

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:
Luck Avenue. Dead End. No Turnaround." Is last week's Knoxville Found the perfect description of life these days or what? These signs can be found at the intersection of Luck and Sixth Avenue, just off of Broadway (if you were traveling North on Broadway, to get there you'd turn right at the light before the light at the Fellini Kroger).

In a bid to become the new Rob Frost (that is, a person who responds first so often to Knoxville Found that it appears to be a compulsive-obsessive disorder; this affliction will soon be entered in the DSM as "Knoxville Found First Responder Complex"), Brennan Robison was first to correctly identify last week's photo, but he just won a couple of months back, so he's disqualified. In his place, Tiffany Peters of Roane Newspapers receives the prize, a copy of Holy Mother! Seriously Weird Sightings of the Virgin Mary, with our fondest wishes that it bring some luck to her.

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

METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
Thursday, March 13
1:30 p.m.
City County Bldg.
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
The proposed hotel on Eleventh Street is on the agenda.

NINE COUNTIES. ONE VISION.
Thursday, March 13
7 p.m.
Roane State Community College Theatre
276 Patton Lane, Harriman
Quarterly steering committee meeting. Representatives of 23 task forces will present reports. The public is invited to attend.

CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, March 18
7 p.m.
Ridgedale Elementary School
4600 Ridgedale Road (off Western Avenue)
Regular meeting.

KNOXVILLE UTILITIES BOARD
Thursday, March 20
12 p.m.
Millers Building
5th floor
Corner of Union and Gay streets
Given all the mud-slinging betwixt the mayor and KUB, this might be fun.

NINE COUNTIES. ONE VISION.
Thursday, March 20
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Knoxville Convention Center
525 Henley St.
Downtown Task Force public meeting. Urban design consultant Crandall Arambula reps will present development ideas based on feedback from February public meeting. Group discussions, presentations, and a vote on options will follow.

Bowling for Dollars
Some business owners get creative to reach visitors

A new convention center will help business; at least that was the explanation given for why Knoxville spent $100 million to build one.

Now that the American Bowling Congress is here, some entrepreneurs are finding out it's more complicated than that. Granted, conventioneers are helping hotels; the occupancy rate at downtown Knoxville's four large hotels rose from 38 percent in January to 55 percent in February, according to national hotel consultant Smith Travel Research. As for restaurants, those that have invested money and energy to reach conventioneers say they're seeing a lot of bowlers. Those that did not say they are not seeing very many.

Take Copper Cellar Corp. (which owns Copper Cellar, Chesapeake's, and Calhoun's). A few months ago, the restaurant chain spent $15,000 to become the official restaurant sponsor of the ABC Tournament, a deal that allows it to have direct contact with bowlers through numerous advertising venues. Today, Copper Cellar director of operations Curt Gibson says the money appears to have been a good investment. "You can't really put a dollar figure on it because you can't always tell bowlers from the rest of the customers," he says. "But it has definitely helped. One way that we can tell is that the days when the tournament is not taking place there is a notable drop-off."

However, not every restaurant is as large or has a marketing budget as large as Copper Cellar. Pete Natour, owner of Pete's restaurant on Union Avenue, says he thought about buying an advertising presence in the convention center but was scared away by how much money it was going to cost. The only thing he's done so far is put up a billboard on the side of his restaurant, which the Central Business Improvement District advised downtown businesses to do. And so far, Natour says he's been underwhelmed by the impact of the tournament.

"I've been disappointed, mainly because we are probably the closest restaurant to the convention center," he says. "Most of the bowlers that have walked in here have done so only after strolling around downtown one day and then they come back the next day to check us out, usually on their last day here. And then they get here and say that they wished they'd known about us before now."

Mahasti Vafaie, the owner of Tomato Head restaurant, gives a similar account. "There is not a way for us to know how many of our customers have been bowlers, but we haven't had a spike in business, so my gut feeling is that the tournament hasn't helped us very much," she says.

If small business owners like Natour and Vafaie had their druthers, they'd like to just walk into the convention center's exhibit hall and hand out leaflets. But it's not that simple. The American Bowling Congress has gone to considerable lengths to sell expensive sponsorships to area businesses. Just distributing menus inside the convention center costs money; the ABC is charging a handful of businesses $1,000 each for the right to display brochures or menus on a plywood display inside the exhibit hall. That sponsorship money goes directly to the ABC.

SMG, which manages the convention center, has been concerned with the notion that many small businesses cannot afford to advertise to conventioneers. SMG's Susan Eaton, assistant general manager of the convention center, has just unveiled a series of new ways that businesses can advertise in the convention center. They range from big-screen advertising in the hallways to recorded phone messages on the convention center's phone system. "We think that there are many ways to reach the 475,000 people who will be visiting this facility annually," she says. Any money raised from the SMG initiative would go to the city and thus help offset the cost of building the convention center, Eaton says.

However, some business owners have already started getting creative to reach bowlers. Among the more unusual ways:

* Stick a 30-foot-high bowling pin on the roof. Three Knoxville restaurants, the Riverside Tavern, Westside Tavern, and Regas, have placed a 30-foot-high balloon of a bowling pin on their roofs to make the bowlers feel welcome. The strategy isn't cheap: it costs around $3,000 to buy a bowling pin balloon and have it installed by Balloon World. It's also not without risks: Regas had its bowling pin balloon stolen last week (the restaurant retrieved it a few days later). But Riverside Tavern assistant general manager Cynthia Hackney says the big balloon works. "This is the kind of thing that we have to do to make ourselves attractive to them," she says. "You can't just be open and expect everyone to come."

* Ingratiate yourselves to the ABC staff. Copper Cellar Corp. and the Riverside Tavern have held free cocktail parties for the people who work at the tournament. "It's a way to give away samples of food so that the people who are working there will know how good our food is," says Gibson.

* Buy an ad in a national bowling magazine. Hershel Earls, the owner of Macleods, says he's pretty happy with the number of bowlers who have come to eat and drink at his establishment. And although he doesn't know for sure, he thinks that the fact that he bought an ad in Bowling News may have helped. "I got some literature from them a few months ago, and I figured 'what the hell'?" he says. "And I think it's really helped. We've been getting anywhere from eight to 20 per day."

* Break the convention center rules. One restaurant owner (who, understandably, asked not to be identified) admitted that she had wandered into the convention center at least once and handed out flyers without asking permission. "I didn't see any reason to say anything about it," she said.

* Have naked women adorn your place of business. There are a few businesses that have managed to reach bowlers without doing anything extraordinary. Knoxville's exotic dance clubs seem to be going great guns right now. "The bowlers are here every night, and I'm glad," says Mouse's Ear owner Ralph Browning. "My guess is that on any given night we might have 20 or 30 of them here." Browning says he hasn't done anything too out of the ordinary; he advertises on radio and in a few local print publications. "My guess is that the best advertising for us is word of mouth," he says.

—Bill Carey

Farra-gutted Budget?
State's money woes hit Farragut hard

The fact that the town of Farragut does not levy a property tax renders it all the more vulnerable to Governor Phil Bredesen's new state budget proposal calling for cuts in shared revenues. State-shared moneys currently represent 40 percent of the town's income, a greater percentage by far than in either Knoxville or Knox County, where local property taxes are collected.

A look at the ledger shows more potential vulnerabilities. The town recently commenced a series of capital outlays. When its general and capital outlay budgets are taken as a whole, the current fiscal year budget calls for about $9 million in expenditures versus only about $5 million in projected revenue.

City officials point out that the current expenditures were planned years in advance, and that the roughly $4 million gap in this year's budget is covered by the city's considerable cash reserves. Nonetheless, the governor's proposed revenue reductions seem ill-timed as far as Farragutians are concerned.

"How will (the cuts) affect us?—The problem is that there's not a simple answer to that question," said Farragut Town Administrator Dan Olson.

"We have sufficient reserves to pay for the capital outlay projects we've committed to. But it's still too early in our budget season to know what the final impact will be."

Given the $780 million shortfall initially projected for next year's state budget, Bredesen has floated two scenarios whereby the state would cut the amount of money it sends back to local governments in the form of shared revenues. Those revenues include, among other things, returns from both sales tax and the Hall income tax, which applies to investment and dividend income.

Bredesen's initial suggestion was for the state to keep all of the Hall receipts, and cut other shared revenues by nine percent. That scenario would be the most damaging for Farragut, which has a disproportionately high number of Hall taxpayers; the town received more than $600,000 in Hall shared revenue for the last fiscal year. But Bredesen's proposed co-opting of Hall taxes met with resistance, and his plan now calls for nine percent cuts in shared revenues across the board. Though it has been shelved for now, the idea of the state keeping all of the Hall receipts is still favored by some legislators.

Based on the second scenario—i.e., nine percent across-the-board cuts—Olson believes the city stands to lose at least $500,000 in shared revenues next year. That would seem a considerable burden on a municipality that recently commenced a handful of capital outlay projects, including a high-dollar extension of Campbell Station Road to Turkey Creek Road, the largest such project in the city's 22-year history.

Mayor Eddy Ford is unflapped. He says Farragut currently shows a $6 million surplus, and he further notes that it is burdened by few of the expenses normally associated with municipalities. The town has no police or fire department, no school system and no social services.

"We can manage our town with the revenues we have," Ford says. "We've very conservative in our budgeting. We have a five-year capital improvement program; if we thought we might have a problem down the road, the first thing we'd do is look at that plan and re-prioritize. If that meant we had to move something out to match our expected revenue stream, we'd do it."

The statewide coalition of local governments known as the Tennessee Municipal League has expressed opposition in principal to shared-revenue cuts, although Deputy Director Ross Loder said that, before taking a hard stance, the organization will watch closely the fallout from Bredesen's budget proposal. "It's impossible to overstate the importance of tax-sharing," Loder said. "We generally oppose cuts in state shared taxes, but we anticipate working in a cooperative fashion."

Loder suggested possible compromises, including a scenario whereby the state would make cuts, but loosen some of the mandates it places on local governments. A large portion of shared revenues goes toward funding programs required by the state, Loder said.

Other compromises include the possibility of dropping some of the state's constraints on local governments' power to tax, or perhaps a more carefully targeted menu of cuts rather than across-the-board butchering.

"How this will affect individual municipalities, especially those without a property tax, is really hard to tell," Loder said. "It will vary a lot according to where each municipality gets more of its revenues from. There's no universal statement of effect."

Given the uncertainty, Farragut officials are in no rush to fashion a budget for the coming fiscal year. "We don't have to have our budget adopted until the end of June," Olson said. "We're going to wait as long as possible, so we can go in and finish it with the most complete information available."

—Mike Gibson