More “Retail”: Good for Some, But for Others, Not So Much
[Unpublished: Submitted in 2008 As Part of Application To Become a
Knoxville News Sentinel Community Columnist]
Last year Oak Ridge city fathers proposed to lend money to a developer for a new shopping center. The city fathers claimed that Oak Ridge needed more sales tax revenue and thus more “retail”, or it would wither away. A citizens’ group solicited signatures on a referendum petition, arguing that attracting more stores was fine but tax money should not be used to aid developers without citizen input. The petition was a success: the city fathers saw that the referendum might go against them and they withdrew their proposal.
It is a long tradition in Oak Ridge for the city to help developers and for the development then to fail or not to fulfill the glowing predictions made for it. Citizens were finally standing up and saying they would not take it any more. As one of the fed-up, I became a volunteer in the petition drive. The main reason was the track record of city investment, but like others, I had other reasons. For one thing, having more retail establishments would not necessarily contribute to my quality of life. The new Target that was to anchor the proposed shopping center might have been an attractive alternative to Wal-Mart, but I preferred that my tax money be spent on, e.g., stabilizing the [electrical] power supply.
Retail establishments in Oak Ridge more and more have failed to satisfy my clothing and other needs and I have had to go to Knoxville; having a Target would not change this. For example, take undies….all right, full disclosure here: I can’t find bras. Yes, saleswomen in two prominent retail establishments in Oak Ridge tell me that they do not have bras in “adult” sizes to fit me, but the teen section might. I am 4′-9″ and weigh about 87 pounds, but still I have always found adult bras before. At the teen section, I find only starter (nonsupportive) or padded bras, often with minimal adjustability; these are cheaply made garments because the girls are of course going to grow out of them soon. Tennessee is too hot for people to wear padded bras while working in the garden, I say to the saleswomen, but they just shrug. I have a similar problem with other undies, pants, shirts, dresses, and shoes; the children’s sizes do not fit my woman’s shape, while my older adult garments, often bought at these same stores years ago, still do. I used to sew, but they don’t make patterns in my size any more.
As a gardener, I grow a lot from seed and have many plants in pots. I can’t find the variety of plastic pots, cells, flats, etc. that I used to find in Oak Ridge, so now I go to a place on Rutledge Pike. As a knitter, I used to be able to find supplies and some yarns at the late Ridge Handicraft, but then Wal-Mart came in and Ridge’s button supply went to hell. A Ridge saleswoman told me they were “struggling”. Eventually, Wal-Mart closed out its fabric-yarn-button section, the owner of Ridge decided to retire and closed the store, and now there are few options for these things in Oak Ridge. I have go to Knoxville for these too now.
I don’t expect all Oak Ridge retail stores to stock things I need, but it would be nice if a few of them did. What I object to is the city’s investing in yet another store that sells the same clothing brands (and sizes) or, e.g., boxes of black garbage bags and then arguing that such duplicative “retail” benefits the city. It only divides the pie without supplying existing unfulfilled needs.
——————————————————————————————————————————–
Municipal Council Shenanigans
[Unpublished: Submitted in 2008 As Part of Application To Become a
Knoxville News Sentinel Community Columnist]
Ever since I moved to Tennessee in 1989, I have been reading the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s coverage of the city council and county commission shenanigans and The Oak Ridger’s coverage of the Oak Ridge City Council maneuverings. I agree that the Knox County term limits and commissioner appointment foofaraw was pretty outrageous. But as an old dog I have to say that this is not the worst I have seen — if that’s any comfort to anybody.
Before coming to Tennessee, I lived in Chicago for 13 years, a time when the Chicago City Council functioned as an arm of the Daley political machine. Many of its decisions were just rubber stamping of the requests of special interests who were big donors to Democratic party coffers. People in other states are amazed to hear that for many years in Chicago you could not buy meat at grocery stores on Sunday; the rest of the store was open but the meat counter was closed. This was because the butchers’ union did not want to work on Sundays and had wangled an ordinance to effect that. The butchers could have cut up, wrapped, and labeled extra meat on Friday and Saturday that could be sold on Sunday without the butchers being present, but the union did not want that to happen either. Many people disliked all this, but Mayor Daley’s attitude about dissenters was basically that they could kiss his mistletoe. This sort of thing seems unimaginable nowadays — or does it? Wasn’t there some sort of proposal in Tennessee to close car dealerships on Sundays so the salesmen “could be with their families”?
To make the Daley machine work efficiently, the local party was staffed by loyalists — the Chicago version of a good ol’ boy network. Chicago newsman Mike Royko told the story of a young man who was feeling civic-minded and innocently went to his local Democratic precinct office to volunteer his services. An official there asked suspiciously who had sent him; the young man replied that nobody had, he was just trying to help. Finally, the official sent him away, saying, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent!” It strikes me that some Knox County and Oak Ridge officials have in effect expressed the same sentiment about potential commission appointees.
In my early years in Chicago, a Democratic “get out the vote” guy came to my door to ask me to vote for a particular national Democratic candidate. I refused. He then showed me a sheaf of traffic tickets he had collected from other voters in the neighborhood, explaining that these tickets were to be “fixed” (presumably by a cooperative judge) in return for voting for his candidate. This sort of thing was so entrenched in Chicago life that hardly anybody was shocked or surprised by it. Thank goodness we don’t see this sort of blatant vote-trading in Tennessee (or do we?).
For several years, I was a reader on a small radio station that broadcast to blind and other reading-impaired people in the Chicago metropolitan area. In one of my slots, I read articles from a south Chicago suburban newspaper, covering the doings of the five-member local city council. This was the Chicago city council in microcosm as far as special interest influence went. Besides that, there were intra-council accusations of influence peddling and double-dealing and bad faith; police investigations of (apparently) all five members for financial crimes; and sometimes even an apparent paralysis of the council when backroom dealings were proceeding. Sound like anybody we know?
Yep, been there, seen that.
Where Some of Our Tax Dollars Are Going
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel, September 21, 2008]
Some uses of our tax dollars were reported recently with hardly a raised eyebrow. First, the News-Sentinel reported that site work for the Oak Ridge Science and Technology Park (ORSTP) was complete, at a site prep cost of $2.4 million. The Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee (CROET) fronted some of this money, but expects to get it back via a $1.8M federal grant and a $750,000 state grant, for a total of $2.55M. So we taxpayers — you and I — will have paid the entire cost of the site prep.
The News-Sentinel said confusingly that this private park was “next to” Oak Ridge National Laboratory and “on the ORNL campus”. But clearly the land is federally owned. The company Pro2Serve (already having received heavy subsidies from the City of Oak Ridge, its present headquarters) is building its new headquarters at the park. It is expected that other companies will establish themselves there to take advantage of the proximity to ORNL. (Oak Ridge and Knoxville are not close enough, apparently.)
Maybe this is just me being a dumb girl, but in these economically challenging times, why would our legislators expend what must have been a huge amount of political capital to obtain grants for a speculative private venture? Why would the federal government even think of paying for site preparation for a “private” business park? Why would the state — which is laying off workers and cutting back on services — even consider subsidizing this? Who will actually run the park and control what businesses get to operate there — feds, state, CROET, or some private entity? The press does not seem to be asking these questions.
The News-Sentinel also reported that unspecified grants totaling almost $700K would be used to upgrade ORNL’s Building 2033; as the new Halcyon Commercialization Center, it will be leased to companies who can “make use of lab technologies”. Subsequently, a notice in the Legal classifieds in The Oak Ridger indicated who was supplying the grants: the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The notice said that 2033 was being converted from “a single tenant facility into a multi-tenant incubator facility”; the funds were to be released to Technology 2020, a self-described “public-private partnership” to foster technology business, rather than to DOE, the owner of 2033.
Whoa — HUD? When “housing is [HUD’s] national priority”? Refurbishing Building 2033 was not in aid of housing or even (since Building 2033 is not within any city limits) urban development. 2033 was not, say, a building the city had acquired for unpaid taxes, but a building the feds put up, used for years, and now have no use for — governmental blight, as it were. I called HUD to ask why these grants were being made, but my call was not returned.
HUD seems to be “repurposing” money that we taxpayers thought Congress had allocated for other uses, i.e., actual housing and urban development — and doing so for the benefit of another part of the government, DOE. Again, this all took solid congressional muscle (earmarks, you know); again, why is political capital being spent thus? Further, since the federal government is the apparent landlord, wouldn’t the feds be on the hook for financial defaults or hazmat cleanup if the lessee businesses failed?
How cozy this all is for those involved, not just spatially but financially. DOE and our federal and state legislators are apparently comfortable with it, but it should unnerve the rest of us, who are paying a lot now for an uncertain return later. Why isn’t the press more curious about this?
Boutique Stimulus Spending
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel, July 26, 2009]
Stimulus spending measures for shoring up banks and megabusinesses and helping people avoid foreclosures are set up mostly on a national level, but many measures for putting the unemployed back to work are set up on a state-specific basis. It’s interesting to see what is being done with the stimulus money coming to Tennessee directly to be spent either at the state’s discretion or as targeted federal funding.
The latter includes contaminated area cleanup at Y-12. The project at first involved only already employed Y-12 workers. How will that put any unemployed folks to work? If Y-12ers were diverted from regular work, is regular work going undone? If instead their jobs were at risk because of federal cutbacks, then this use of stimulus money seems to be DOE taking away with one hand and giving back with another. It is unclear whether there is any net increase in federal funding in this situation at all.
Well, at least this work may eventually provide some new albeit temporary jobs and is work that many unemployed people here already know how to do. But another type of stimulus spending — “boutique stimulus spending” — purports to create jobs yet is likely to have only cosmetic effects. It reminds me of the woman whose family is way overextended on its credit cards, but who still shops for clothes at expensive boutiques because “those things they have at Wal-Mart are so tacky”. I.e., she continues to go for style even when faced with a crisis.
Case in point: a solar research institute and a solar “farm”, to be built respectively on UT’s Cherokee Farm “innovation campus” and over near Memphis (an inefficient co-siting obviously meant to spread the $62 million around).
Solar power, hailed as the energy source of the future 40 years ago when I started college and in every decade since, is useful for lots of applications. But for reasons well known to technical people, solar power never has provided and likely never will provide a significant contribution to our energy supply. Still, there are people who have nothing better to do technically than to tinker with it — and to seek big chunks of funding for it.
It isn’t just Tennessee’s decision to use the money this way: the feds required that this particular pot be spent on “alternative” energy sources. But Tennessee could have considered a more promising technology, or forgone this pot in favor of applying for money from a more flexible pot. Besides, when this funding runs out, the feds and the state will have to find more money to keep the project going.
State officials say the solar project “could” create 600 jobs, but such a rosy outcome is doubtful, especially long-term; ORNL’s director opined that there was only “a good chance” of bringing more jobs here. Hmmm….over two years, $62M, divided by the Tennessee median family income of $47K, would support 660 workers, but only if spent on salaries alone (none on benefits, construction, etc.).
We should evaluate this solar project on an employment basis. Potential institute employees will be “graduate research scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and support staff”. Is there a breakdown of the unemployed and underemployed in Tennessee? How many construction workers, how many clerks, waiters, teachers? Has any effort been made to match new stimulus-funded jobs (or “resupported” jobs) to the actual distribution of the unemployed?
Will a solar institute address this problem in any meaningful way? Or is the project merely a boutique purchase meant to showcase the “exciting” scientific sector? I believe in government funding of basic scientific research and in targeted injections of public funds for job development when unemployment is high, but it is doubtful the two can be effectively combined in this particular package.
IDB Tax Break, City of Oak Ridge Borrowing, and a CROET “Donation”
[Published by The Oak Ridger as a guest column, September 18, 2009]
Recent articles in The Oak Ridger and the Knoxville News-Sentinel illustrate the wrong direction in which Oak Ridge is being taken by its civic leaders.
First, we hear that the city’s Industrial Development Board has approved a 50 percent property tax break for a ten-year period for the proposed Holiday Inn Express to be built on Tulsa Road. The City Council, judging from past experience, will likely rubber-stamp it. This project has been fraught with controversy from the start (is it really “on” Tulsa now?) but like the Energizer bunny, it keeps ticking along. It is questionable whether a new hotel can maintain a 60-70% occupancy in these straitened times and thus whether its contribution to the tax base will be worth the giant tax break over such a long period. Beyond the wisdom of granting the break, one has to question the fairness of granting it, considering that the new hotel will compete with those who have been here for years.
Second, we hear that the city wants to borrow $20 million. This will increase the debt load to $170 million — over $6000 per resident. This borrowing is ostensibly to replenish cash reserves, but some $5 million is to be used for electrical work, $2M for west end improvements, and $2.5M for street work, all over the next four years. That sounds like borrowing for current projects, not for cash reserve replenishment.
Third, it seems that CROET is “contributing” $500,000 to help in the long-term development of the west end Specifically, they are helping to pay for a new water line that will extend from Wisconsin Avenue to the CROET-sponsored Horizon Industrial Park. There’s more: the water line extension is part of a highway bid package for TDOT for the expansion of the Turnpike from Wisconsin to State Highway 58. And the $500K was reallocated from CROET’s East Tennessee Technology Park funds. One has to question whether this donation (if it really is a donation) to a public entity and the reallocation are consistent with CROET’s charter and stated purpose. Why would DOE allow it?
Beyond that, isn’t CROET actually donating the money to its own project, under the guise of helping the city? Does the city — the residents, not the city council and the developers who seem to be calling the shots — really want to “allow for economic development” from the city’s edge out to the Horizon Center? This bundling of the CROET/developer interests with the overall city interests in effect amounts to a PR “selling” of the identification of development with the city’s (residents’) best interests. This is a proposition that I believe many thoughtful residents differ with.
I wonder why The Oak Ridger and the Knoxville News-Sentinel aren’t digging into this more vigorously.
Alexander Inn
[Published by the Knoxville News Sentinel, April 7, 2013]
Non-Oak Ridgers who feel they have no skin in the Alexander Inn game should think again, because federal tax dollars are being used to goose this turkey of a project along.
In 1943, the government built the “Guest House” for Manhattan Project visitors to Oak Ridge. Renamed the Alexander Inn, it was sold in 1958 to a private party, who expanded it and ran it as a hotel. After several more owners, it was closed in 1992 and has been deteriorating ever since. The current owners couldn’t sell it at their asking price and fell behind in property taxes and fines. Now the dilapidated building and land are assessed at $300K and major bucks are required for repair.
Several years ago, the Oak Ridge Revitalization Effort (ORRE) was formed to raise funds to buy the building for $354K and restore it. ORRE signed a purchase agreement and the deed was transferred to ORRE. However, a sensible public refused to donate to this cause. ORRE tried to return the deed, but the owners refused to accept it. The building thus was in legal limbo until a scheme was devised to save it.
Mahattan Project history buffs originally wanted to preserve K-25’s main building, but DOE found that too expensive. So Oak Ridge settled for a limited K-25 exhibit area — and as a sop, the old Inn. DOE is providing a grant (to the East Tennessee Preservation Alliance rather than to ORRE) of $500K to “stabilize” the building by purchasing the property for $350K from its owners and using the remaining $150K to start restoration.
Full restoration of the building would involve much more than $150K, so a developer was found who wanted to convert it into an assisted living facility. He has similarly converted two schools and a hospital, but surely an old hotel would be harder to reconfigure for assisted living (requiring wider doorways and roomier bathrooms).
Although this conversion is “outside the matrix” (scope) of the Oak Ridge Industrial Development Board, the city asked the IDB to make a recommendation regarding a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) arrangement for the developer. The IDB roundly endorsed the PILOT: a 90% deferment of taxes for ten years (or about $644K), plus the $150K balance of the DOE grant. Strangely, during the PILOT period it is the IDB — not the city or the ETPA — that will hold the title. Originally it was said that the developer would “lease” or “purchase” the site, but now the site will just be handed over to him for free.
Most Oak Ridge officials call this a wonderful deal because it would cost the city $200K to raze the building. But if it were razed and the site sold, the city might recoup the $200K and tax-producing businesses or residences might be built. Besides, as City Councilwoman Trina Baughn notes, using the federal grant to buy the property for $350K is just rewarding the deadbeat owners, while the grant and PILOT constitute “a $1.2M gift to a business
[developer]
that did not compete for it” and is part of a thriving industry needing no incentive to build and operate profitably.
Furthermore, the building is to be included in the proposed Manhattan Project National Park project as an “essential part” of the Oak Ridge story. Well, Fermi stayed there once, but he stayed in many places on atomic bomb business. Is short-term occupancy really enough to make an architecturally uninteresting building “historic” and commemorable? The true reasons for preserving it seem to be the hope of attracting tourists and a sentimental feeling that it is the last of such buildings in Oak Ridge.
What would a tourist see at the Alexander Inn? A restored façade outside (with an ahistoric wheelchair ramp and automatic doors) and one “history wall” inside (boring plaques and photos). This is going to “tell the Oak Ridge story” to future generations? What a poor return for all those federal and local dollars and all the political capital that was expended to make it happen. But worst of all is the precedent that has been set: buying an overpriced building with tax dollars and handing it over free to a developer.
Giving Away the Store — Or the Town
[Published by the Knoxville News Sentinel, June 16, 2013]
Here we go again: local officials are giving away public money and property for specious reasons.
The Knox County Commission is giving unused sick time payoffs to retiring employees. This is to encourage non-retiring employees not to use sick time as additional vacation or personal time.
But the amounts involved are sizeable. So paying for unused sick time will also encourage employees to work when they are sick — which paid sick leave was originally supposed to prevent. Besides, paid sick leave is a compassionate benefit by the employer, to be used only as needed, not an entitlement projecting far into the future. Such a bad precedent: Knox County must now plan for uncertain but possibly massive future payouts and other employers may be pressured to follow Knox County’s lead.
Then there is Ben Atchley Street, which the city of Knoxville will hand over for free to the popular store Anthropologie, with street reconfiguration costs to be borne by Knoxville. Anthropologie needs more parking than is presently available, so the street will provide the extra square footage. The nominal value of the street area is $230+K, i.e., not chump change. Many Knoxvillians have expressed concern about this, but still Knoxville officials opine that everybody benefits by accommodating this single store. Another terrible precedent: instead of the city’s requiring every retail outlet to have adequate parking, the store is in effect requiring that the city provide it with parking space.
Oak Ridge officials are at it too. A beat-up old house burned down in February; its owner is behind in his taxes and is not cleaning up the debris. His next-door neighbor offered him $10K for the property and other neighbors also made offers. But the city decided to purchase it for $11K — after paying for a title search and forgiving the overdue taxes — and to give it to Habitat for Humanity for free to build a house for a single mother and her children.
Officials claim that giving away the house saves the city the cost of clearing the lot — but so would a private sale. The new owner will pay annual property taxes of $700, making the payback period for the $11K+ more than 15 years. One city council member huffed that even discussing this decision was “ridiculous”: it was a perfect example of a “public-private partnership”. He missed the point that in a partnership both parties benefit, while this deal seems more like a charity donation. The Habitat director too emphasized the partnership aspect, saying that such deals would return blighted properties to “a taxable status” and were a “common-sense solution to [Oak Ridge’s] affordable housing problem”. But surely this would be a solution only if many such houses were purchased.
The Oak Ridge Board of Education proposes to give a $500 bonus to school employees who, having reached the top of the pay scale, have no prospect of a raise. This will cost $149K for the 36%(!) of the education staff who qualify. One school board member argued that the bonus is necessary to retain good people; another said that having no pay raises for people devoting themselves to education was “abhorrent”; and yet another said that the bonus would encourage people to go into teaching. (Really??)
Yet the school system is laying off 18 people, including eight teachers, due to budget constraints. Besides, bonuses are intended for high performers, not people who merely hit the pay limit.
Clearly there is a pattern in these giveaways. We mere citizens are not supposed to conjecture that the motives are political (e.g., to buy employees’ political loyalty) or personal (e.g., to get officials’ egos stroked by being regarded as nice guys). Rather, we are supposed to take officials at their word and believe every high-minded justification that special-interest PR can devise. However, naively doing so allows officials to be generous with public money for ostensibly virtuous reasons while their actions may be unseemly from the point of view of actual benefit to the whole community.
It seems that everybody deserves a break except the poor taxpayer. But just because something is a nice thing to do does not make it a wise thing to do.
A Scumbag Disguised As A Distinguished Judge
[Published in the Knoxville News Sentinel after July 15, 2013]
I watch many true crime shows. My husband used to say it was because as the victim of an injustice myself, I liked to see malefactors get their just deserts. True, but it is also that I keep trying to understand how people can commit violent or destructive acts. The question still confounds me.
But there is one episode that I can’t bring myself to watch: the case of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
Like so many people, I saw the story unfold in real time, agonizing detail after agonizing detail. It would have been a great grief to their parents had they died in a tornado or an automobile accident, but for them to have been brutally tortured and murdered was as if the murderers had plunged a knife into their parents’ hearts as well. Like so many people, I was angry because of the callousness and cruelty of the murderers and the pointlessness of the young couple’s deaths. But finally the evil perps were brought to justice and the parents had that satisfaction, at least.
Until they didn’t have it. Until Judge Baumgartner’s deterioration could no longer be ignored and his malfeasance was made public. Until there was uncertainty regarding new trials for those tried in his courtroom. Until two of those convicted in the Christian-Newsom case indeed got another shot at instilling reasonable doubt. Until it was clear that the parents and we sympathizers would have to review all over again, in excruciating detail, the suffering that Channon and Christopher were subjected to.
Richard Baumgartner. What a fraud that man is! For years he appeared to be a man of integrity and sound judgment, one who could weigh the merits of a case and rule fairly, who could in particular impose sentences that altered the courses of people’s lives. Now he has shown us his true character. It is not a pretty sight.
Born with intelligence, he got to go to college and law school and obtain a well-paid and prestigious judgeship. By occupying the bench and accepting trial assignments, he represented himself as being competent to preside over the dead serious proceedings in his courtroom. But in the end he was not competent: not physically, not mentally, and, as we know now, not morally and ethically. He of course knew it himself, but he kept the job and took the money anyway. God gave him a gift and he used it to grift.
Like so many people, I got angry all over again as information about his various lies and perversions of the law emerged. Not only did was he often judging under the influence, he made a woman who appeared before him in court become his drug courier and mistress and he lied to fellow judges and other officials.
I don’t buy the argument that he “just made a mistake.” He knew that what he was doing was illegal — who better? — so clearly he believes that he is above the law. Others should not get involved sexually with those who appear before them in court, but he could. Others could not avoid punishment for being drug users, but he could.
It is astounding that he at first got away with his pension and no jail time, and that even now he is serving only six months for a single count of official misconduct. He held others accountable by giving them long sentences, but got a slap on the wrist himself. Court staff and prosecutors are supposed to report concerns about judges’ inability to function, but those in his court, dependent on his good graces, served as enablers. Some fellow judges have tried to protect him too. However, any good he did is far outweighed by the damage he did by undermining a foundation of justice: the integrity of judges. So how could others in the legal system cover up for him and let him off easy? Baumgartner was supposed to be a moral pillar upholding the law and with it civilization itself. How can we have equal and reliable justice when a Baumgartner can sit on the bench for so long behaving as he did? The Christians and the Newsoms especially deserve better.
