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Seven Days

Wednesday, April 2
About 100 Elizabethton High School students boycott classes in protest of the suspension of their long-time principal by the city's schools' director for alleged harassment of the former head of the school's vocational program. Are the kids saying the vocational chief needed harassing, or are they building points with the principal?

Thursday, April 3
A report out of North Carolina, of all places, suggests the search for a replacement for retiring UT Athletic Director Doug Dickey is down to four finalists. If so, the search has likely narrowed to the candidate with the most imaginative plan to soak alumni for season football tickets.

Friday, April 4
In the wake of a Thursday assault on a Greyhound driver on I-40 in west Knox County, Homeland security officials present a plan to require all suspected terrorists identified in a profiling scheme to move to seats in the back of the buses.

Saturday, April 5
The Associated Press reports that country singer "Whisperin' Bill" Anderson will face assault charges that arose in a dispute in which he's accused of trying to injure his domestic partner with the door of a vehicle. What ever happened to the doctrine: Sing softly and carry a big cardoor? Monday, April 7
A Knoxville police investigator is quoted as saying that there's a "strong possibility" two Saturday bank robberies less than two hours apart Saturday in West Knoxville were related. Since the suspect in each case was described as wearing a blue and white Hawaiian shirt and a goatee, you have to wonder how the two robberies could have been related.

Tuesday, April 8
The Lady Vols lose the national championship basketball game to Connecticut, meaning the scrap for coaching pre-eminence between Pat Summit, leader of UT's "Evil Empire," and Geno Auriemma, UConn's South Philly snotnose, remains undecided.

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:
With the weather getting warm, and the Dogwood Arts Festival about to kick off, it's time to be sitting out on the patio at Barley's. If you were to do that, on the building across the parking lot (AKA the Old City Dogwood Courtyard), you couldn't help but notice the Knoxville Music History Mural. And, of course, a piece of that mural is precisely what last week's Knoxville Found shows.

Peter K. Scheffler, who does something mysterious for TVA, was first to correctly identify the photo. In honor of our musically themed Knoxville Found, as his prize Peter receives Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel, with our fondest wishes that Peter and the book make beautiful music together.

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

METROPLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
Thursday, April 10
1:30 p.m.
City County Building
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Knoxville-Knox County General Use Plan and the Hill Avenue Historic Overlay district are both on the agenda.

JAMES WHITE PARKWAY TASK FORCE
Thursday, April 10
4 p.m.
South Koxville Baptist Church
522 Sevier Ave.
Regular meeting.

MAYOR'S NIGHT IN
Thursday, April 10
5 p.m.
City County Building
Mayor's Office, 6th floor
400 Main St.
The public is invited to attend.

CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, April 15
7 p.m.
City County Building
Main Assembly Room
400 Main St.
Regular meeting.

POLICE ADVISORY & REVIEW COMMITTEE
Thursday, April 17
6 p.m.
Oakwood-Lincoln Park Neighborhood Association, Christenberry
Club House
916 Shamrock Avenue
Regular meeting.

Looking for Downtown Parking
Lack of spaces drives business away

Even as several large employers are moving hundreds of workers into downtown offices, others could be on the verge of moving out.

A shortage of parking is what's prompting the potential exodus from downtown. And along with causing erosion of its work force, the shortage could also stifle downtown residential growth and commercial revitalization efforts.

"A number of companies including AmSouth Bank have expressed to us that if they are not able to solve their parking needs they may have to look elsewhere," reports Mike Edwards, president of the Knoxville Area Chamber of Commerce.

With all of downtown's garages and many of its surface lots now filled to capacity, the obvious solution is more parking. But whether the city is prepared to foot the bill for building more garages is anything but clear.

The one new garage that's on the drawing boards is just to the west of Market Square, where city-approved plans for the square's redevelopment called for a 350-space garage with 40 to 60 residential units on top. The 350 spaces were what the square's developer, Kinsey Probasco, deemed necessary to support the square's commercial revitalization and the residents.

At the behest of city officials, the size of the garage keeps growing to address the needs of other downtown business and law firms for employee, customer, and client parking. In January, Kinsey Probasco presented to City Council a plan for enlarging the garage to 525 spaces, and since then it's gone up to 825 spaces. The cost has gone up commensurably from an original $5 million to $12 million, and Kinsey Probasco has aborted plans for most of the residential units because they would make the structure disproportionately tall in relation to the two- and three-story buildings on the square.

Yet for all the city's urgings, Mayor Victor Ashe remains non-committal about whether he will recommend funding the garage in the budget he will present on April 30. The timing for a big new outlay couldn't be worse in relation to the budget crunch that Ashe is facing, even though the debt incurred to finance a garage would be serviced by a revenue stream that's separate from the city's operating budget.

The city's finance director, Randy Vineyard, suggests that downtown building owners who need more parking to keep their tenants should be prepared to pay for it at least in part. And Edwards doesn't disagree. Indeed, he claims to have gotten what he terms contingent commitments to lease close to 450 spaces. But the lease rates, he contends, can't be expected to run any higher than the going rate for monthly parking at existing downtown garages. That's on the order of $60 per month, which is less than half the amount needed by Edward's reckoning to cover the full cost of financing a garage.

"The city has got to be willing to absorb the balance in order to retain existing employers downtown before we even get to attracting new ones in competition with the suburbs where parking is plentiful," he says.

To some extent, the city is a victim of its own success in attracting corporate relocations to downtown that have filled existing garage space. The city shelled out $2.8 million in inducements to get Image Point (formerly PlastiLine) to move its corporate headquarters from Powell to the Miller's Building, and dedicated parking for many of its 300 employees in the city-owned State Street Garage. Along with tax abatement, developer Wayne Blasius got 100 dedicated spaces in that same garage to facilitate the renovation of what's now known as the Phoenix Building into an office and residential complex that's nearing completion on Gay Street.

Also contributing to the parking squeeze has been the elimination of spaces for public parking in several surface lots. Some 100 spaces in a city-owned lot that had been used primarily for public parking were turned over to developer Leigh Burch for tenants of his Sterchi Lofts apartments. And while the 63 spaces that are giving way to an extension of Krutch Park to Gay Street as part of the Market Square redevelopment plan may not sound like a lot, they just happen to be adjacent to AmSouth Bank.

AmSouth officials insist that the bank is committed to keeping its headquarters downtown but acknowledge that they are considering relocation to the suburbs of some departments. "We'd much prefer to keep all 110 of our headquarters employees downtown, but given the parking constraints, our meeting facilities and some people could move out," says Executive Vice President Harvey White. A new office building near the interchange of Pellissippi Parkway and Northshore Drive is one option that's being considered, he says.

The push to build a mammoth garage just west of Market Square is coming at the same time that a consulting firm, Crandall Arambula, is making a comprehensive assessment of downtown parking needs as one element of a much broader downtown visioning process, which is being conducted under the aegis of Nine Counties/One Vision. In recent presentations the lead consultant, George Crandall, has expressed a preference for parking structures that can be fitted unobtrusively into multi-use buildings with retail, office and/or residential components. By May, Crandall Arambula is expected to recommend sites and sizes of at least three new parking structures in addition to the one near Market Square. According to Edwards, an emphasis will be on the environs of Gay Street and Jackson Avenue where most of downtown's residential growth is taking place.

A good case can be made that final decisions on the size, and hence the cost, of a Market Square garage ought to be held in abeyance until Crandall Arambula submits its recommendations. But Edwards is insistent that, "The city has got to be prepared to move ahead with meeting parking needs or the downtown redevelopment momentum that's been generated over the past year will be lost."

—Joe Sullivan

Fare Game
Knoxville may be close to a lower cost airline

Progress toward getting a low-fare air carrier back into the Knoxville market is slow but steady, and advocates have recently settled on one target airline.

Talks with Frontier, Mesa, and AirTran airlines, plus a study on the level of Knoxville-area support for low-cost air travel, have led to the conclusion that AirTran, which served McGhee Tyson Airport from 1998 to 2000, is the best choice.

Representatives of East Tennesseans for Airfare Competition and the airport authority are to meet with AirTran officials in Atlanta April 16, and Dave Conklin, the authority's vice president for marketing and public relations, says the indications are good that AirTran is more than just interested in returning to Knoxville.

"Our top 50 [destination] cities, they overlay 80 percent of that market," Conklin says. He says AirTran is putting in routes from Atlanta to Denver, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles in the next couple of months, and adds "Those are our top three in the West and are all in our top 15 destinations. That will certainly strengthen our case [with AirTran]."

What such an addition to the McGhee Tyson airline mix would mean is a savings of more than $20 million a year to passengers flying from here, Conklin says. He says U.S. Department of Transportation data showed fare reductions totaled $120 million here over the two years AirTran served Knoxville. He says the airline was serving only 28 markets then, compared with 41 today, plus the three western cities slated for May and June startup.

"When they were here before, [AirTran's presence] lowered the average ticket price from here by about 30 percent. That's the average of all fares. Given their market growth, this time there should be more like $100-to-$110 million a year in savings."

Although there are some seasonal shifts, Washington stays at or near the top of Knoxville's destination list, Conklin says. He says a round-trip flight from here to Reagan Airport in downtown Washington now costs as much as $800. AirTran serves Baltimore-Washington International Airport between the two cities, and he expects an AirTran roundtrip to BWI might cost around $200. Train service is convenient to connect BWI with downtown Washington, but with the airfare savings, he says, "You could afford a nice limo ride, too."

ETAC, the non-profit business coalition formed last year to seek a lowfare carrier for Knoxville, serves a 17-county area and has raised about $125,000 from commercial and industrial members to perform the surveys and other groundwork needed to attract an airline to offer low-cost service, says Danni Varlan, the group's director. AirTran itself asked for the latest survey, which showed that there is a substantial "leakage" of air passengers who take surface transportation to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Atlanta to take advantage of lower fares there. Another component of the study showed what flights and traffic volume AirTran could reasonably expect to get, and another part, kept confidential at this time, surveyed corporate travel patterns. She says the surveys showed that almost everyone is satisfied with the service [at McGhee Tyson], "but nobody's thrilled with the fares."

Varlan says ETAC still needs to raise about $30,000 to cover all its costs, and she says that once a lowfare carrier decides on Knoxville and its routes are known, ETAC expects to begin raising a "travel bank," based on a successful model created in Pensacola, Fla.

What that would mean is getting businesses and industries around here to put a part of their annual travel budget—say 10 percent— in a bank account drawn on only to buy tickets on the lowfare airline. At the end of the year, if not all of a contributor's account is used up, the balance is used to buy vouchers for future travel on the airline. It gives the airline a guarantee without costing the company anything, really, Varlan says.

Earlier estimates were that an airline would need a guarantee, in the form of a travel bank or other financial arrangement, of $3 to $5 million worth of business in its first year.

"We can't raise the first penny in the travel bank until the air carrier is known and has committed itself to Knoxville," Varlan says. She says that to make a commitment, a carrier like AirTran needs assurance of controlling 8 to 10 percent of the total market. Conklin says achieving such a percentage should not be a problem for an airline with AirTran's routes and fares.

Though AirTran did not attain sufficient passenger volume when it was here before to justify continuing service, traffic in its markets grew by 65 percent, compared with 6.1 percent growth in markets served only by other carriers, Conklin says. Now that it serves more markets, the previous volume problem, he says, could solve itself.

—Barry Henderson