Comment on this story Seven Days Wednesday, April 14 • The state Legislature considers a bill entitled the “Commonsense Consumption Act,” the aim of which is to protect members of the food industry (i.e. McDonald’s restaurants) from lawsuits filed by fat people. Also proposed are the “’Turn It Off, Dumbass’ Act” (protecting producers of bad TV shows from lawsuits filed by stupid people), and the “’Lee Greenwood...Yaaaak’ Bill” (protecting bad songwriters from litigants with low vomiting thresholds.) Thursday, April 15 • Knox County’s “action plan” to remedy its air pollution problems isn’t good enough to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing sanctions based on long-standing violations. EPA officials decide that steps such as “Switching to filtered cigarettes” and “Eating less Taco Bell” don’t qualify as serious efforts at air quality improvement. Friday, April 16 •The 2004 Dogwood Arts Festival has its debut on Market Square after organizers promise that this year’s event will be better and more tasteful than in years past. Opening ceremonies included a performance by an artist/martial arts master who paints his canvases with kicks and karate chops to a blaring soundtrack of heavy metal and Toby Keith... Well, there’s always next year. Saturday, April 17 • Members of the University of Tennessee football team line up and kiss their sisters in the annual spring intra-varsity Orange and White Game, which ends in a 21-all tie. Critics say the contest offers further proof that the Vols are incapable of winning a post-season game. Monday, April 19 • Speaking of bad TV: Local criminal court jurors hear from a Knoxville man who lost an expensive big-screen television (as well as a collection of 2,000 clip-on neckties) in a burglary while he was in Chicago to appear on the excrable Jerry Springer Show. The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways. Tuesday, April 20 • A public hearing conducted by the city Wrecker Services Commission gives Knox Countians a chance to air grievances about the allegedly unscrupulous practices of local towing companies. Unable to find legal parking spots in the vicinity of the City County Building, many locals shrewdly choose not to attend. Knoxville Found 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 mural pictured is nestled underneath Gay Street adjacent to the space that formerly housed the Underground and late-night fixture, the Boiler Room. We are pleased to pronounce Brian Pittman, who provided Metro Pulse with a history of the portrait, the proud owner of a promotional copy of upcoming Sundown in the City performer Steve Winwood’s recent release About Time. Congratulations, Brian. Meet Your City A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend CITY COUNCIL Tuesday, April 27 7 p.m. City County Building Main Assembly Room 400 Main St. Regular meeting.

Dogwood Arts
Back to its Best

In the 1980s and ’90s, the once-famous Dogwood Arts Festival had come to seem less a festival than an indiscriminate stamp of approval for a loose alliance of barely connected events high and low, held miles and weeks apart from each other. In both quality and attendance, the open “festival” part of it compared so poorly to arts festivals in other cities that it convinced some newcomers that Knoxvillians were, by nature, an unfestive people.

This year was promised to be different, and it was. The arts and crafts were mostly of a higher quality, everyone agreed. The music was better, too. The crowds were much bigger, attracting even affluent-looking folks, who have generally avoided past festivals. The food was the same as ever, but this year you didn’t mind it so much. Even the corn-dog vendors were cheerful. Several attendees were convinced it was the best DAF since its famous days in the 1960s.

Some credited the new Market Square, which in its redesigned form allows more festive space, along with the publicity the square has elicited in recent months. Some credited the weather, which, if you overlook one slightly overwarm Sunday afternoon, was perfect. Some nodded to the participation of the worthy Foothills Craft Guild, which has often participated in DAF, but only in discreet locations miles from the downtown festival; this year, they set up camp in Krutch Park. And some credited the standard-setting Rossini Festival, simultaneous on Gay Street. In recent years, it has proved that a real street festival is possible, even in Knoxville, if you do it right.

But a lot of the credit for DAF’s own improvements goes to director Ed Pasley, who re-engineered the festival for maximum festivity. Hours of operation were a big part of it. In the past, the festival was long on days but short on hours (why it generally closed at 4 or 5, when people were just getting off work, remains mysterious to historians). This year the festival was open every evening; Saturday night, the final performer didn’t leave the stage until after 10, and some vendors were still open.

Pasley also reined in several of the festival’s far-flung events, like the Foothills Craft show and the Talahi Plant Sale, usually held out west. Combined downtown, they seemed something more than the sum of their parts.

There were some glitches. Several events were hardly advertised, and the nice ladies in the information booth sometimes seemed foggy about what was going on. Probably the biggest problem, and it’s a tough one, was combining tent space with audience space on Market Square. When bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice took the stage as a performer in the weekly Sundown In the City concert, which also happened to be the first night of DAF, those lucky enough to find space near the stage enjoyed the show. Others couldn’t see the performer through the sea of striped canvas, and some couldn’t even hear. It would be a problem for several shows, especially the show of performance-painter Michael Israel, whose show depends entirely on his audience having a clear line of sight.

That Friday-night show demonstrated the festival’s demographic challenges. For Knoxville, Israel chose a program befitting a NASCAR audience, illustrating a number of kick-yore-ass patriotic country tunes; the following day, it might have worked. But Friday evening, the audience appeared to be largely after-work professionals and collegiates, including some art-faculty types. The audience applauded in awkward patches; some retreated to the aesthetic safety of the Preservation Pub.

Knoxville has always been a challenge to a festival organizer. The metro area hosts far more Ph.D.’s per capita than the American average; it also has far more high-school dropouts. Who’s the audience? Saturday night, during the Sophie B. Hawkins show, hardworking country people were shoulder-to-shoulder with hippie lesbians, without incident.

The 2004 festival also hosted a more various array of activities downtown than it has in many years. Of special note is the return of the bluegrass competition: once a Dogwood Arts staple, but missing for about a decade, it became a late entry guided by nationally known dobroist Phil Leadbetter and grassroots radio station WDVX. The festival’s final event drew scores of musicians and hundreds of spectators, in spite of its omission from the News Sentinel’s schedule of the day’s events.

Though a few vendors were disappointed with actual sales, most of those we spoke with seemed pleased. One lady selling her own Ecuadorian hot sauce was surprised to sell out. She said she’d been about to give up on Knoxville for California, because we didn’t like spicy things. But she sold out Saturday, went home and bottled another batch—and sold out again Sunday.

Likewise, the existing businesses mostly seem to have profited. Though some restaurants on the square didn’t even bother to open on Saturday, Preservation Pub reported an all-time record for sales.

That Saturday may have been the biggest all-around day downtown since the World’s Fair. With a big-time alternative-rock performer, a big-time country performer of the Nashville Hunk school, a couple of Italian operas, a parade, and more than 100 crafts vendors, it demonstrated the cultural bipolarity of the city: trucker caps and rebel-flag T-shirts and on the square, suits and ties on Gay Street; the beer and a couple of varieties of wine encouraged on Gay Street were strictly forbidden on the square. Some enjoyed just walking back and forth, enjoying the cultural journey, and the fact that these folks weren’t shooting at each other.

By some accounts there may have been more than 50,000 people downtown Saturday. From some vantages, downtown was a surging ocean of heads, like a film clip from a documentary about the global population explosion. If we improve the downtown parking situation, we may have a real problem on our hands.

—Jack Neely

False Alarms
The numbers and risks are staggering

Last year, the Knoxville Police Department was called to respond to 23,000 burglar or holdup alarms. Of those, an astonishing 18,000 were false alarms, according to department statistics. That sort of percentage has been about the norm for the last several years.

It indicates how easily the alarms can be set off accidentally by vibrations, by lightning in thunderstorms, and by people in the businesses and residences that employ them.

“They are extremely expensive to deal with,” says Gus Paidousis, the deputy chief who heads the KPD Patrol Division. Although the monetary cost is difficult to measure, Paidousis says, each alarm takes the time and attention of a call-taker, a dispatcher, and usually two officers. “And there are other legitimate services that are having to wait,” he says. Alarm calls make up roughly 6 to 7 percent of all calls for service recorded by city police. And when 75 to 80 percent of those are false, the load is more than just noticeable. A total of 18,000 unnecessary emergency runs amounts to an average 50 a day.

“You look at the risk model,” says Chief Phil Keith. “It’s a two-officer response in an emergency traffic mode.” He says the risk is great to both officers and other motorists, and the number of times it occurs should be unacceptable. Keith brought it up at recent city budget hearings, where he explained that a lowering of staffing levels, which is being contemplated by the mayor and City Council in their budget crunch, would necessarily cut into alarm response time.

“A legitimate alarm is always a priority,” Keith says, but there’s no way to tell at the outset that the alarm is real. “One officer told me a guy set off his holdup alarm just to see how long it would take an officer to get there. That wasn’t very smart,” he says.

He says as many as 20 false alarms a year are coming from the same sources, leading him and his staff to think about coming up with a “false alarm ordinance,” as some other municipalities have. It would result in a “faulty alarm citation” being issued after some number of false alarms are recorded in a single year from a single source. The details and penalties are yet to be worked out, but Keith says the city may have to resort to such an action. The county does have a false alarm ordinance, but a sheriff’s spokesperson says, “I don’t think it has a lot of teeth in it.”

In Knox County outside the city, where 945 business and 803 residence alarms turned out to be false last year, Sheriff Tim Hutchison says, “We do spend a tremendous amount of manpower on false alarms, but we can never assume one is false. We always respond as though it’s a true emergency.”

Keith says he expects that more of the city’s alarms are from business locations than the county’s, just as more of the county’s are probably residential than the city’s. But they both require virtually instant responses.

Fire alarms, which are sensitive to fire and smoke, but much less so to vibrations, may go off in significant numbers in thunderstorms. “That’s when it becomes an issue,” says Jerry Harnish, one of two division chiefs for Rural Metro, which handles alarms in the county outside city jurisdiction.

Rural Metro counts about 600 to 700 alarms as false each year, with about another 1,800 runs canceled before the trucks arrive at the site of the alarm. It’s a significant number, but not crippling, Harnish says. Ditto the Knoxville Fire Department, which records about 300 false alarms a year out of about 9,000 alarms received. If the KFD had anything like the police experience, “We’d be on the street constantly,” says Chief Ed Cureton. Storms, Cureton also says, are the biggest alarm problem.

Harnish says the storm-induced false alarms “tie up engines” at a time when regular calls for service are numerous—for lightning strikes, increased vehicle accidents, etc. Both the local fire service organizations worry, as the law enforcement agencies do, that a false alarm will cause an accident as vehicles respond at speed under emergency procedures.

The city police and firefighters may have no choice but to speed to the scene of an alarm, but the whole false-alarm picture may have to be addressed carefully, and perhaps drastically, if the number of police officers and firefighters has to be cut back to meet budget requirements.

—Barry Henderson

April 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 17 © 2004 Metro Pulse