Commission gets development inpu

Residents shared ideas and concerns for more than an hour Oct. 13 about planned unit development regulations in Loudon County.

A meeting hosted by the county planning and zoning study committee, comprised of Commissioners Van Shaver and Adam Waller, was held at the Loudon County Courthouse Annex. Commissioners David Meers, Kelly Littleton-Brewster, Henry Cullen and Bill Satterfield were also present.

“I know how people feel in the community about the development that’s happening,” Shaver said. “Very pleased to see this many folks show up, this many people voice their opinion and, for me, I can add another hundred to it because I’ve had that many emails in the last two weeks on this very topic right here. ... We have our six months. We got one good shot at this. We want to try to get it right. We want to do right by the folks.”

“It’s all about what the citizens want,” Waller added. “... I just want to continue to hear more and more from the people and take all that into consideration into what we do moving forward.”

Loudon County Commission passed a six-month moratorium on PUDs on Oct. 4. County regulation allows for 2.5 housing units per acre for PUDs and requires at least 75 acres for consideration. An R-1 Residential District allows two units per acre.

Throughout the meeting, residents expressed worries about quality of life.

Linda Paschal moved to Loudon County about 20 years ago after living in Maryland where subdivisions “started to take over.”

“A farm that was across from us became this huge subdivision, golf course, became crazy, prices went crazy, everything,” Paschal said. “Said, ‘It’s time to move. I’m over this,’ and so we moved down to Tennessee closer to family down here. We were told that our subdivision — there was a big huge farm of 100 acres behind us would not be developed in our lifetime.”

Within a year, ground was broken on land beside them and subdivisions grew, she said.

“Harvey Road is no larger than it ever was and is very dangerous now,” Paschal said. “That little tiny road is very dangerous and very busy. ... I’ve seen right up Northshore where the houses look like Monopoly houses sitting next to each year. You can’t move. They go up high but you can’t hardly walk between them they’re so tiny. We can’t hardly get out of the roads out there. I have to add 15 or 20 minutes to my drive to work because I’m sitting in traffic and it’s dangerous.”

Paschal, who was a teacher in Maryland, said she saw firsthand how overcrowding impacted schools. She doesn’t want that to happen in Loudon County.

“We need to plan ahead,” she said. “If development’s going to happen, plan your infrastructure first. ... The kids come with the houses, as Van was saying, and kids come, they just do. Be prepared, don’t short the children.”

She asked commissioners to be “wise in allowing over-construction.”

Jackie Dean, who is homeowners association president for Deerfield Crossing, applauded the county for “halting this runaway train.”

“We know that this is a great place to live, this is why we live. It’s beautiful,” Dean said. “We have cows, we have tractors, we have forests and we have wildlife, and we know that rural America is disappearing, that’s the way it is. Everybody’s figured out this is a great place to come, it’s an honest place to live and they want to move here, and nobody here — I don’t believe — is against growth.”

Dean referenced 108 acres for sale near her subdivision. She worries about adequate infrastructure.

“We still don’t have adequate fire protection in the county. We’re still dependent upon a volunteer fire department,” Dean said. “We have 11 neighbors in our neighborhood and one of our neighbors’ houses burned to the ground the year before last before the fire department could get there. ... The road situation, the shoulders, the narrowness of the road, the density of the traffic, the schools that everybody’s already talked about, we just don’t have infrastructure to take high-density PUD-type things and dump them in the middle of a rural area, and it’s so uncharacteristic. I mean you’re driving down the road and you see a field of cows and wild turkeys and ponds and then, boom, you’ve got this huge, dense, tons of people coming in and out all day long with heavy traffic going up and down, I mean hundreds and hundreds of cars.”

Dean said the future quality of life is in the hands of commissioners.

“All we can do is come to you, work with you and stress our concerns, and we just want to thank you for trying to work with us to develop the character of the county that we would like to see going forward — what we came here to live in and not have it destroyed by the dollar, wall-to-wall housing for profitability and not considering quality of life,” Dean said.

Pat Hunter moved to the county 40 years ago and lived near a farm that now contains two subdivisions.

“There are people that want to live in the city, they want city services, they want police protection, fire protection, garbage service, they want everything,” Hunter said. “Well, we want that, too, in the county, but it’s also about quality of life and affordability. I hope that you go to the various county communities and have a listening tour because back in 1998 ... we had a series of community meetings, it was called the ‘Loudon County Growth Management Plan Report,’ and it said, ‘Your voice, your future, your choice.’

“Now what we’ve learned in the various communities was the very thing that was important to those communities, and one thing that stood out above everything else, was the character of the community and the quality of life,” she added. “Basically 20-something years later we’re still talking about the same things.”

Monty Ross urged the county to revamp ordinances, which may come with a price tag.

“Find out what people (want), set goals to get there and then change the ordinances to meet those goals,” Ross said. “A PUD is something that you have control over. It’s not something that somebody brings in and says, ‘I’m going to do this,’ it’s something you have control over.”

She referenced Knoxville officials recently updating ordinances.

“There’s some good ordinances out there,” Ross said. “We just need to look at them and see what we want in this community and adopt those things that keep us that way, and we have complete control over it.”

Meers said he believes the county needs a detailed study on residential housing.

Overlay consideration

Shaver hopes to eventually present commissioners with a “suburban preservation overlay,” but he said more public input is needed.

“I think the decision on the density, the decision on whether or not commercial activities will be allowed in the overlay,” Shaver said. “It’s so preliminary it’s hard for me to say yet because I’ve got to have a lot of input from a lot of directions. Like I said, Nashville is where I found all these overlays. They’ve got dozens, but they had an historical preservation overlay, they had a suburban overlay, they had commercial, I mean they have every kind of thing, so that’s kind of where the idea came from. All it goes back for me is citizen input. Citizens should have some input in their community, so that’s what the drive is for me.”

Additional meetings are expected, although dates and locations are undecided.

“I know Commissioner Meers mentioned about bringing the planning commission in, which is fine,” Shaver said. “I see the planning commission having as much input as citizens do. I think they ought to have input, but we ultimately are the legislative body. Planning commission doesn’t make the final decision, we have to make the final decision. I think we have to come up with what we think our constituents expect of us.”