GOVERNMENT/POLITICS A4 | OUR COLUMNISTS A6-7 | FAITH A8-9 | YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS A10-11 | HEALTH & LIFESTYLES SECTION B
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halls / fountain city
VOL. 50, NO. 35
AUGUST 29, 2011
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Friday night lights shine again
‘Some like it hot’
The Halls High School dance team and cheerleaders lead the football team onto the field before its seasonopening 21-12 win against Clinton. Jake Mabe sits down with coach Kevin Julian to talk about the game and preview this week’s Emory Road rivalry matchup against Powell. See Jake’s story on page A-11.
Tips on staying in shape, eating right See My Fitness section
County OK’s Halls greenway By Sandra Clark
Cook
Eldridge
Churches challenged Places of worship react to sluggish economy See page A-9
FEATURED COLUMNIST BETTY BEAN
The Halls area “park to school link” greenway project was OK’d by County Commission last week, the final hurdle before construction can begin. Knox County will use $501,282 in federal pass-through money from TDOT, with a local match of $125,320, said Mayor Tim Burchett. The Halls project, along with a greenway in Plumb Creek Park on Hickey Road in northwest Knox County, was funded when Burchett was a state senator. Former
Godspeed, Superman Betty Bean says goodbye to longtime friend James Anderson See page A-4
Sen. Jamie Woodson was instrumental in securing the Halls funds. Knox County’s match primarily will be labor from the departments of Parks and Recreation and Engineering and Public Works. Commission approval was unanimous. The one-mile Halls project will connect Halls Elementary School to Norris Freeway. The new greenway will pass through Clayton Park at Halls. “This project will provide a safe route for students who
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Burchett forms Friends of Clayton Park Carl Tindell will chair an eight-member committee, “Friends of Clayton Park,” appointed last week by Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett. Tindell is a longtime member of the Halls
Playing with fire No coverage is a costly gamble By Larry Van Guilder
ONLINE
walk to school, as well as additional recreational opportunities for Halls residents,” said Burchett. “These are much-needed improvements that will increase pedestrian accessibility in the Halls community.”
The numbers can be stunning. A Corryton resident was billed $56,200, later reduced to $44,200, to contain a fire in April 2009. More recently, Mary Kiser’s father received a bill for more than $18,000 from Rural/Metro to extinguish a blaze at a trailer he paid $2,500 for 20 years ago. Speaking at the recent County Commission luncheon, Kiser said the bill represented two years of Social Security benefits for her father.
Contacted late last week, she said a compromise was in the works. Sources close to Rural/Metro say these incidents are uncommon. But when they do occur, the wisdom of subscribing to Rural/Metro or the fire department serving your community in the county becomes apparent. Before Kiser spoke, Chief Jerry Harnish of Rural/Metro provided commissioners with an overview of the department’s costs. For unlucky county residents such as Kiser’s father, one number stood out in the chief’s presentation. The cost for subscribing to Rural/Metro for the owner of a 1, 500 to 2,000 square
Business and Professional Association who headed the fundraising to purchase land on Norris Freeway for Clayton Tindell Park. Committee members are: Martha Arnold-Charnay, founding president of the Halls Crossroads Women’s League; Mike Blankenship, teacher at Halls High School; Darren Cardwell, president/CEO of Hallsdale
foot house is about $264 annually. The comparable subscription cost in Shelby County is $366, Harnish said. If calculated as cost per capita, the method used by the International City Management Association, Knox County residents pay $60 compared to more than $150 in Shelby County. Harnish said nonsubscribers use about 40 percent of the department’s services but pay only about 2.5 percent of the costs. Some costs are unrecoverable, such as personnel and equipment utilized in the Tedford Road landfill fire in 2008. There’s nothing mysterious about the bill a nonsubscriber may face for containing a fire, Harnish said. He acknowledged that anyone getting a $1,500 invoice for extinguishing a
Powell Utility District; Travis Edmondson, attorney and representative of the Clayton Foundation; John Jones, executive vice president of Food City; R. Larry Smith, county commissioner; and a representative from Burchett’s office. The committee will be purely advisory, but will coordinate events and development of the park, 11 acres on Norris Freeway across from the old Walmart. Meetings will be open and publicized in this newspaper.
fire in a car worth $800 may not see the value, but it reflects the actual costs, which he pegged at $1,500 per hour – annual expenses divided by annual hours worked. Among the biggest issues facing the industry are the costs for nonsubscribers and the “fragility” of volunteer services, Harnish said. A utility district service charge could address these issues in part and reduce the cost to former subscribers by bringing anyone with a water meter into the system. Harnish said a special district tax would allow the most equitable distribution of costs and allow the county to specify service levels. However, instituting it might require modification of the county procurement code.
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Carter proposal: What might have been By Larry Van Guilder The Devon Group’s announcement that it was withdrawing its proposal to build a new elementary school in Carter shook Knox County
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news@ShopperNewsNow.com ads@ShopperNewsNow.com EDITOR Larry Van Guilder lvgknox@mindspring.com ADVERTISING SALES Patty Fecco fecco@ShopperNewsNow.com Darlene Hutchison hutchisond@ ShopperNewsNow.com Shopper-News is a member of KNS Media Group, published weekly at 4509 Doris Circle, Knoxville, TN, and distributed to 27,825 homes in Halls, Gibbs and Fountain City.
Mayor Tim Burchett’s office and left most observers scratching their heads. Now a review of the scores awarded to the project finalists by the county’s evaluation committee reveals how close the competition was and how the rankings of one evaluator changed the outcome for the runner-up, Partners Development, and may have sealed the fate of the project.
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The six-member evaluation committee was chaired by Mitch Steenrod, a senior executive with Pilot Travel Centers. Developer Buzz Goss, Mathew Myers from county purchasing, Doug Dillingham with the school system, local executive Kevin Wilson and UT architecture professor Tricia Stuth rounded out the committee. The finalists were the Devon Group, Hewlett Spencer LLC, Municipal Capital Markets Inc. and Partners Development. The proposals were rated in five categories: cost, adherence to program standards, time to complete, innovation and “identification and complete understanding” of any proposed financ-
ing arrangement. Cost, which considered the long-term operating costs of the facility in addition to the contract amount, was worth 35 points. Program standards was assigned 30 points and time to complete 15. Innovation and understanding proposed financing were worth 10 points each. Thus a perfect score was 100, and a proposal could receive a maximum score of 600 when the individual evaluations were totaled. Hewlett Spencer and Municipal Capital Markets finished with scores of 541.63 and 539. 2 respectively. Both lagged the leaders by a fair margin. The Devon Group edged Partners Development
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558.22 to 552.5. In order, these were the individual scores for the Devon Group and Partners Development: ■ Goss – 98, 97 ■ Dillingham – 96.8, 97.5 ■ Steenrod – 94, 97 ■ Stuth – 94, 78 ■ Wilson – 93.12, 96 ■ Myers – 82.3, 87 A glance at the list reveals that Myers was not as impressed with the proposals as his fellow committee members. His rankings for all the finalists ranged from 82.3 to 87.1. But Stuth’s score of 78 for Partners Development leaps off the page. Statistically, it’s an “outlier,” although not a
“significant” outlier. The Shopper-News asked purchasing director Hugh Holt if he considered dropping Stuth’s score from the ranking because it differed so markedly from the others. “We looked at that,” Holt said. “We’re numbers people.” In the end, he said, “everybody on the committee” felt Stuth had performed conscientiously, that her ranking was not “arbitrary or capricious.” A closer look at the evaluation shows most of the difference in Stuth’s scores for Devon and Partners derives from two areas, cost and innovation. Innovation encompasses nearly any aspect of To page A-2
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