In Knoxville

Election week 1997 presented Knoxville with a double whammy. First, as part of a nationwide downsizing, Levi Strauss announced it would close its biggest plant in Knoxville, laying off about 2,300 jeans-makers in one of the city’s largest industry closings ever. The plant closing not only will cost the area’s economy those workers’ salaries; it will also severely diminish the presence of one of America’s most socially responsible corporations, one that had been especially generous with Knoxville.

Second, a political newcomer came out of nowhere to trounce a veteran council member who has been firmly rooted in the political structure of Mayor Victor Ashe. Danny Mayfield, a young black minister who has developed a support program for African-American males, handily defeated William Powell, a leader in the black community who had distinguished himself most by his loyalty to Ashe.

Only a day or so later, the mayor announced that one of Knoxville’s most popular broadcast news personalities, WBIR-TV’s Gene Patterson, would join his cabinet as a point person in economic development.

As startling as these events were, they are only the latest in a series of shocks that, for more than a year, have had Knoxvillians shaking their heads and pondering the end times.

Since 1995, Knoxville has:

* seen hometown Forbes 500 millionaire Jim Clayton take plans for a new headquarters for Clayton Homes to nearby Maryville;

* lost the Knoxville Cherokees hockey team because of an inadequate coliseum and an unfair revenue split;

* faced the threatened loss of the Knoxville Smokies baseball team;

* watched as proposals for a new justice center, a new baseball stadium, and a new convention center hopscotched from site to site around the city’s downtown, with no one able to decide exactly what should go where;

* seen its well-respected police department racked first by the cover-up of an officer’s hit-and-run incident and, in recent weeks, by the questionable killing by officers of a mentally disturbed black man who himself had called the police for assistance.

To add ironic insult to actual injury, the smaller of the city’s two shopping malls—East Towne—has just renamed itself the Knoxville Center, even though it sits on the far eastern border of the city’s suburban sprawl, six or seven miles from the historic downtown core.

Coming on the heels of a failure to unify city and county governments last year, these events have alarmed Knoxvillians, who are not sure where their government and business leaders are taking them.

Three-term mayor Victor Ashe has taken the biggest hit so far. A seasoned pol, known for his ability to advance his agenda despite almost any adversity, Ashe has looked uncharacteristically indecisive in recent months. Nothing is more indicative of confusion than the efforts to get a new ball park for Knoxville’s double-A baseball team, the Smokies.

Last year Ashe announced that the city would move the Smokies from the city’s antiquated Bill Meyer Stadium to a new facility. When the inner-city neighborhoods adjoining the old stadium began to put up a fight to keep the Smokies there, the search for a location quickly degenerated into a site-of-the-week announcement. As the debate progressed, it soon became obvious that Smokies owners wanted to get the team away from Knoxville’s black and poor neighborhoods to environs more attractive to middle-class baseball fans.

Finally this spring, Ashe threw up his hands and abandoned the search for a new ballpark, announcing that henceforth the city would try to build a long-needed convention center.

Since then, everything Knoxvillians thought was nailed down has been coming loose and floating away.

“I think that Knoxville is going through a crisis of confidence,” says Bruce Wheeler, a University of Tennessee history professor who often writes about East Tennessee’s economic and social past. “Knoxville seems to be at a disadvantage compared to Nashville and Chattanooga in doing things that cities do very well.”

Down the river

Probably the most pernicious effect of the city’s current malaise is “ ’Nooga envy,” the tendency on the part of Knox movers and shakers to compare the city to its sister downriver.

Knoxville has never expected to rival Nashville (except in retrospect as the could-have-been home of country music) and never wanted to grow up like Memphis, but somehow it always thought it should be one up on Chattanooga.

After all, Knoxville holds a solid place as Tennessee’s third largest metropolitan statistical area, according to U.S. Census data. In 1994, the Knox MSA boasted 631,107 people, while the Chattanooga MSA remained a distant fourth at 439,189.

But while Knoxville rested after the 1982 World’s Fair, Chattanooga began a prolonged episode of planning and community involvement that culminated in the Tennessee Aquarium, which has become an outstanding tourist draw and the generator for a substantial reinvestment in the center city. Knox movers and shakers are now prone to bouts of hand-wringing over why they weren’t first to think of a fish zoo.

Mayor Victor Ashe’s own vision for Knoxville’s development is suspiciously similar to what has happened in Chattanooga—a riverfront development linked to various parts of town by an extensive greenway system. (The line making the rounds after the announcement of the riverfront initiative was: “Wonder what would have happened if Victor’s office had been facing downtown instead of the river.”)

The city faces other problems that are much more than cosmetic. The tripod that undergirds Knoxville’s economy has begun to wobble noticeably in the ’90s. With the end of the Cold War, the Department of Energy’s operations in Oak Ridge have been scaled back dramatically, and now Congress is reneging on funds for environmental cleanup and management—money that Oak Ridgers had counted on for jobs for the next decade. Employment at DOE and its primary contractors has dropped from 18,565 in 1994 to 15,610 on June 30 this year. Once close to a billion dollars, DOE’s East Tennessee payroll has shrunk from $837 million in 1994 to $799 million at the close of 1996. The trimming is a special threat to prosperous West Knoxville, where decades of DOE salaries have changed pastures into palaces.

Retrenchment is also the watchword of the decade at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Starting with Marvin Runyon and continuing under current board chairman Craven Crowell, TVA has eliminated some 20,000 jobs systemwide since 1988. Market Square, the heart of Knoxville’s downtown, has dried up as TVA’s lunchtime diners and shoppers have gotten their RIF notices.

Even the University of Tennessee, that fount of low-paying but stable and perk-rich jobs, had layoffs in 1996. While some have blamed lagging state tax collections for UT’s budgetary shortfalls, a darker explanation lays the university’s woes at antagonism between the administration of Gov. Don Sundquist and the Democrat-heavy superstructure in Andy Holt Tower. Whatever the source, UT officials now say the school will not again experience the dramatic expansions of the past 30 years.

Unfortunately, these deeper woes aren’t amenable to the rah-rah boosterism that typically passes for development among Chamber of Commerce types.

Developing the picture

Diagnosing Knoxville’s problems has become a persistent pastime for the city’s business and community elite.

Some among the ruling class hold News-Sentinel managing editor Frank Cagle responsible for putting a disheartening spin on the city’s current state. Earlier this year Cagle columnized that the city’s problems sprang not from a loss of industry but from a failure of leadership.

Comparing a decade and a half of non-starter projects in Knoxville to Chattanooga’s runaway vitality, Cagle suggested: “Maybe instead of trying to recruit industry, we ought to send a delegation to Chattanooga to recruit community leaders there.

“Real leaders have the vision to see the community as a whole. Our so-called community leaders can see only what’s visible from behind the barricade they have erected in front of their subdivision.”

Cagle’s comments drew a much stronger reaction than even he had anticipated. Seen by many as an attack on the mayor, the column provided grist for local talk radio and luncheon meetings for weeks.

Cagle’s commentary gave people permission to talk about the issue, and, coincidentally or not, changes have already started, at least on a superficial level. Jack Hammontree, the head of the Greater Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and the man credited with breathing a conservative vitality into the organization, has been quietly edged out. In fact, after failing to unify Knox governments, business interests are now pushing to roll the chamber and various other organizations into one “superchamber” that would put all of the area’s development efforts under one authority.

Most significant is the fact that each of the three big downtown building projects that had languished on the community’s development agenda for half a decade is now on a faster track. Planning for the justice center and the convention center is getting under way with at least token community involvement, and now the city and county are trying to put together a stadium package that will keep the Smokies in Knoxville.

Privately, business leaders profess not to be worried. “Everything’s fixable,” says one who is intimate with the city’s business leadership. “On the plus side, we have a good location, good weather, highways, mountains, and a good work ethic. On the bad side, there’s been disorganization and a lack of focus.”

Among the city’s influentials, the central issues are promoting economic development, completing a convention center, and establishing Knoxville as a destination for tourists and convention-goers. Ashe’s post as mayor is deemed to be secure, as long as he remains business-friendly and committed to these goals.

Ellen Adcock, Ashe’s director of administration, is predictably optimistic. “We’re right on the verge of going over the top of the mountain,” Adcock says. “Because I am aware of a lot of planning and meetings going on, I see things that are in place that will soon be visible.”

News-Sentinel political columnist Theotis Robinson basically shares that optimism. He’s resting his hopes on turning Knoxville into a tourist destination and points to the city’s riverfront attractions—the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame now under development, and Haley Heritage Square, a new park and statue dedicated to the Roots author, who adopted Knoxville as his final home.

“Knoxville once again is on the threshold of making some economic progress,” Robinson says. “We are something other than a nice place to stop on the way to Pigeon Forge,” the family amusement and outlet resort in nearby Sevier County.

But others, like maverick Knoxville council member Carlene Malone, are having none of it. “You cannot trust that any governmental body in this town will keep its word,” she says, speaking of local government’s laissez-faire attitude toward planning and development. “That’s the biggest problem we have in this city and county.”

City elections in 1999 are shaping up as a referendum on Knoxville’s sense of itself. Ashe is expected to go for his fourth term as mayor, and at least two community leaders are considering a race against him. Council member Nick Pavlis is a potential contender, and state Sen. Bud Gilbert, who isn’t seeking reelection to the General Assembly, is known to be considering a run for the job. Either would bring a new mix to the Knoxville power structure.

Whoever runs in ’99, development—or the lack of it—is on the front burner. The fate of Ashe and the city’s at-large council members will hinge on how much progress can be made in two years on the various projects now getting started.