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Seven Days

Wednesday, March 3
• A 50-year-old career National Park Service manager is named superintendent of the Great Smoky Mountains N.P. You have to wonder if he’d gotten the appointment if he didn’t have that thick, perfectly groomed park ranger mustache.

Thursday, March 4
• Big News Sentinel headline: “Some say Knox hotel tax hurts business.” That’s not even worth a du-uh.

Friday, March 5
• The Associated Press reports that a retired state trooper, a school board member, a state park ranger and the Chickasaw State Park manager have been fined more than $250 apiece after being caught in a raid on a cabin in the park near Jackson. They were playing poker, and the former trooper had a couple of pistols in his possession. The fines were $50 each for gambling and $200 for being criminally stupid in their choice of sites for a poker game.

Saturday, March 6
• A Nashville police crackdown on prostitution has resulted in the disconnection of 106 phone lines connected with escort services in the city, the AP reports. Uh, haven’t the cops there heard of cell phones?

Sunday, March 7
• Vanderbilt wins an SEC championship! Not only that, but the fact that it was in women’s basketball, where UT has been dominant and the parity factor is higher than in football, makes you wonder whether the Commodores are deemphasizing academics in favor of athletics.

Monday, March 8
• Knox County’s mayor and County Commission chairman are quoted as saying they think land deals involving Sheriff Tim Hutchison should be investigated. The deals were discussed in News Sentinel stories Sunday that were so convoluted that even Hutchison’s enemies concluded that the stories themselves should be investigated.

Tuesday, March 9

• TDOT’s newest published map for its $160 million reconstruction of Interstate 40, the James White Parkway and Hall of Fame Drive in downtown Knoxville looks suspiciously like a plate of spaghetti from Pasta Trio. Did the Old City Italian eatery contribute to the design?

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:
The engraved brick pictured is nestled into the corner of the downtown YWCA on Clinch Avenue. Judge Chuck Cerny was waiting on us to unlock the Metro Pulse office door last Thursday morning to offer the correct answer. The correct answer to a photo that we’ve already run in Knoxville Found. Because of the, uh, oversight, we’re happy to award Mr. Cerny with the book Tokyo Suckerpunch—a prize that we tried to give away several weeks ago, but was never picked up. Please, Chuck, come and get it.

The LCUB Dodge
Escaping payments on its Knox earnings

For many years, Knox Countians who live or do business anywhere from Cedar Bluff Road westward have sent their checks to Lenoir City Utility Board when they pay their electricity bills. And because LCUB is exempt from a state law requiring tax-exempt municipal utilities to make payments in lieu of taxes to neighboring jurisdictions, 100 percent of the revenue generated by LCUB’s Knox County ventures ends up in the city coffers of Lenoir City.

For just as many years, cash-strapped Knox County officials have fumed while Lenoir City has benefited from its city-run electrical utility serving the fastest-growing, most prosperous area of Knox County. In the late 1980s, County Executive Dwight Kessel filed suit to halt the practice of allowing Lenoir City to collect the fees generated across the county line, but ultimately came out on the short end of a state Supreme Court ruling that said the remedy—if there is one—resides with the General Assembly.

The issue lay dormant since that lawsuit, but this year, Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale is making a strong move to change the situation.

“The Supreme Court said this is a legislative issue, so we have introduced a bill in the state Legislature to deal with it,” says Ragsdale Chief of Staff Mike Arms, who has been in touch with LCUB officials.

Lenoir City and LCUB attorney Shannon Littleton says his clients have invested “hundreds of millions of dollars in Knox County” and were blindsided by the Ragsdale legislation. LCUB officials would have appreciated a call before Knox County set out to change the law, says Littleton, who also points to history to defend LCUB, which he says “...had the foresight to recognize the potential for growth in west Knox County at a time when Knoxville and Knox County chose not to provide service.”

Arms doesn’t have much sympathy for the contention that LCUB is being treated unfairly. He says Knox County’s legislation, which is sponsored in the state House by Rep. Harry Tindell and in the Senate by Sen. Ben Atchley, is a tool to expedite negotiations. It seeks to repeal the private act exempting LCUB from the requirement to make payments to Knox County.

“They (LCUB) haven’t offered to pay Knox County any ‘in lieu of taxes’ (payments) in 30 years,” Arms says. “We understand that the major portion of their service area—75-80 percent—is in Knox County. And we understand that they have made a substantial investment. But they have more than recouped their expenses over the last three decades. We’d like to sit down with them, and with KUB, and talk about long-term planning.”

Arms says one thing Knox County wants is a seat on the LCUB board of directors, which sounds simple, but is complicated by the fact that the board is made up of the Lenoir City mayor and City Council. And ultimately, Knox County wants at least a portion of some $2 million in in-lieu-of-tax payments LCUB makes annually to Lenoir City. “It doesn’t have to happen overnight, but it does need to happen,” Arms says.

Knox County Commissioner John Griess, who represents most of the area served by LCUB, agrees. “I’m glad the mayor is looking for income other than tax revenue, but before any private act is repealed, I think Lenoir City people and Knox County people need to sit down at a table and see what we can work out. I also feel that LCUB has provided good service, but they have collected a heck of a lot of money in Knox County, and with all the growth here, I cannot believe that they have not been made whole (recouped their investment). I think its clear that Knox County citizens don’t want to pay more property taxes, but my fear is that LCUB will just add whatever they have to pay us back onto the ratepayers, which will make it an additional tax, in a roundabout way, on the people of Knox County who are paying LCUB fees.”

Former Knox County Commissioner Frank Leuthold, a West Knox Countian who chaired the commission’s Finance Committee and built a reputation as that body’s budget guru, shares Arms’ opinion of LCUB’s historical argument.

“They’ve been saying that (they stepped in to serve an area that Knox County didn’t want) from the get-go. But what does that have to do with where the ‘in-lieu-of’ money goes. So the big fat monster that is Knox County would take money away from Lenoir City? What you need to ask is why was that passed as a private act? It’s been a gold mine.”

Many Knox Countians share Leuthold’s opinion, and level considerable criticism at the makeup of the LCUB board, which is a stark contrast to KUB’s independent board of directors (memories of former Mayor Victor Ashe’s high profile clashes with the KUB board are still fresh). Lenoir City Mayor Matt Brookshire chairs the LCUB board, which recently selected his father-in-law as the LCUB manager. A December story in the Loudon County newspaper reported 46 percent pay increases for some LCUB employees, pushing their salaries higher than workers at the state’s largest utilities in Nashville and Memphis.

Some say Lenoir City will likely fight any changes in the LCUB revenue formula because that money helps fund their city’s highly-regarded school system, which is separate from that of Loudon County.

And finally, Knox officials point to the fact that KUB serves portions of seven surrounding counties and makes payments to each of those municipalities.

—Betty Bean

Cell Phones for the Deaf
Messaging made much easier

It sounds like a scam—or at least the punchline to a very bad joke—but local entrepreneur Jon Sharpe hopes to create a genuine telecommunications phenomenon with the concept of mobile phone calls for the hearing impaired.

Owner and lone employee of the local Lormar Logic Company, Sharpe has engineered a system whereby the deaf and hard-of-hearing can place and receive live mobile phone calls with an Internet-enabled PDA or cell phone. Through his home-based Lormar office, Sharpe currently traffics more than 20,000 such calls per month, a tenfold increase since September.

“We’re the only company in the world that allows a deaf person to place a call with an off-the-shelf device,” Sharpe declares.

A former engineering manager at an Oak Ridge DOE facility, Sharpe conceived the service three years ago, for purely personal reasons, as a way to keep closer touch with the hearing-impaired nanny he had hired to watch over his then-6-year-old daughter. “I could never get hold of her unless she was on-line, sitting in front of the computer,” he says.

Sharpe then saw an advertisement for an on-line text message system, and set out to write a program to interface with it; three months later, he had a working model.

Lormar’s system sends messages in three ways, all of which require a phone with an attached or integral keyboard: by sending a coded email to a relay operator; by calling the relay operator through a server webpage; and by accessing AOL Instant Messenger through an ordinary phone call (unlike standard Instant Messenger traffic, neither party has to be on-line).

The first two options are slower and more labor intensive. The latter, made available in September, put Sharpe’s company on a fast track.

“That’s when our business exploded,” Sharpe says. “The deaf community are loyal users of AOL, and most cell phones have AOL instant messenger available, which is basically instantaneous.

“We told AOL what we were doing before we placed the first call. They’ve been what I would call benignly indifferent so far. They could shut us down at any time, but we use so little of their bandwidth, and it profits them to have us servicing deaf people. It’s a win-win situation.”

Lormar’s volume of calls has increased so quickly that Sharpe can barely handle the workload with his one-man operation; he runs nine separate lines out of his home, and his phone bill peaked at $4,000 last month. “At first I wanted to run this company for a long time,” Sharpe says. “But it’s turned into a tremendous hassle. I’m tired. I’ve talked to multiple suitors, and I’m pretty confident I’ll have sold it off to someone bigger within the next three months.”

In the meantime, hearing impaired persons interested in availing themselves of Sharpe’s service can still sign up at www.lormarlogic.com, at a price that is less on average than that paid by regular cell phone customers. “It’s the first case I’ve ever heard of where access is actually cheaper for the impaired person,” Sharpe says, laughing.

— Mike Gibson