Metro Pulse/Ear to the Ground

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Count them John Henrys

Election Commission administrator Greg Mackay hit the ground running after the city general elections this month in an effort to tally the signatures on the petitions seeking to trigger a referendum on the question of spending public funds on a new downtown hotel. He started out with 12 temporary workers, but "we just weren't getting it done, so we kicked it up a notch," Mackay said by way of explaining why he hired another eight temps to help with the counting. The county's employment requirements for new hires would have been too cumbersome to get the job done in a timely fashion, so the EC sidestepped the red tape by putting the word out to the officers who manned the polls for the recent elections that they needed bodies to work for $7 an hour.

"That way we didn't have to hire anyone new," Mackay said. He wasn't concerning himself with the machinations of city politics that might, or might not, allow the referendum to be sidestepped.

McCallie Park Melts Away

Nobody votes at higher rates than the residents Fourth and Gill, where they turned out in massive numbers in September for mayoral contender Madeline Rogero. And even though Mayor-elect Bill Haslam wasn't the Fourth and Gill choice, he might do well to pay some attention to their neighborhood park, which has been languishing of late.

Fourth and Gillers think they are being punished because their City Council representative Rob Frost led the opposition to Mayor Victor Ashe's plan to give $6 million to a botanical garden at Lakeshore Park. Part of the Ashe Lakeshore strategy was to "bundle" money for projects in several Council districts into the same line-item as the Lakeshore appropriation, thus encouraging "yes" votes from representatives willing to indulge in the time-honored practice of vote-swapping. Included in that amount was a handsome sum for McCallie Park, a tiny plot in the heart of the inner-city Fourth and Gill neighborhood.

When the Lakeshore vote went south, so did Ashe administration interest in McCallie Park, a turn of events that has not gone unnoticed in the 'hood, as evidenced by a letter to Ashe from Carol Nickle, who chairs the McCallie School Property Task Force, who outlined the 18 months of hard work that went into the park planning. She accused Ashe of "holding our park hostage, placing it in the capital fund in order to coerce our council representative to vote for a project of your choosing. When our councilman wisely voted his conscience, you blamed him for the loss of our park."

Taking Time?

The announced departure of AmSouth's headquarters from downtown to Bearden Hill was worrisome. Not a good trend marker for downtown, to be sure, but some of us were more worried that we'd never again know what time it was.

For more than 30 years, the electric-lightbulb clock on the top of the tall building at the corner of Gay and Union, legible from North Knoxville, deep Fort Sanders and parts of Neyland Stadium, has been our standard, Knoxville's closest equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time.

The clock has always been the responsibility of the bank headquartered in the building: first Park Bank (or PARK... BANK..., as many of us remember it), then First American National Bank, before it was turned over to AmSouth. Naturally, some were worried AmSouth was going to take downtown's sense of time to Bearden. But we hear the bank is keeping its Gay Street lobby, and, we're thankful that AmSouth can keep regulating the clock on top.