RidgeTop Repercussions (Page 1 of 5)

A crisp fall wind in North Knoxville rustles the slowly withering leaves in varying shades of henna, copper, rust and chestnut, clinging to oak and redbud trees  that have towered above the ridge for many years. Slants of light make their way through the deciduous branches to the floor of the ridge, as the songs of Tennessee Warblers join with those of their migratory cousins, the Vesper Sparrow. Though the fox and deer are still sleeping, they will later use this ridge to travel in search of food.

Fast-forward 18 months, and where the trees, birds and the surrounding beauty once lay is now a steep slope of nothing but mud, reaching from ridge top to road. The soil runs in rivulets with the rain, straight down the slope and into the swiftly flowing ditch, sediment that will damage local water quality and gather in flooded pools of pollution.

To the neighbors who once enjoyed this view from their windows, it’s as if someone paved paradise and put up a Wal-Mart.

Lisa Starbuck’s home is near the New Harvest Park site on Washington Pike, and she can remember a time when these autumnal ridge-top visions were more than a memory. “I’ve lived around here for about 20 years,” she says. “ One of my favorite things to do in the fall, and it’s kind of a secret in Knox County, is driving down Washington Pike. You have panoramas of beauty on both sides of the road all the way to House Mountain.”

Development has been a booming industry for both the city of Knoxville and the county — flat, open land is scarce as a result of urban sprawl, and the ridges are perhaps the last haven for developers seeking new property. Citizens are now questioning the policies regulating such development following the construction and surprise appearance in December 2007 of a water tower servicing developments on a South Knoxville ridge. The blame for that “blighting eyesore,” as City Council member Joe Hultquist has called it, admittedly falls on county commission, City Council, KUB and the Metropolitan Planning Commission, but each agency has a finger to point elsewhere. That leaves many residents feeling helpless to the agendas of city planners and tycoons.

In an area literally steeped with natural ridges, Starbuck has seen change come creeping in under the guise of ridge-top development. She describes the site of Eastwood Landscaping next to New Harvest Park as nothing more than blight. “It was completely natural, in a completely natural state, until they started digging. It’s a shame this gouging has gone on,” she says. “[Knox County Parks and Recreation] spent $2 million on the park trying to make it beautiful, and right next door is the desecration of that ridge.”

Originally a wooded hillside, the ridge’s soil was used to supply dirt to fill in a nearby wetland so the area Wal-Mart could expand their parking lot. Bob Wolfenbarger, a resident of the Alice Bell Springs neighborhood, says this was not a practice made known to citizens but was, nonetheless the lesser of two evils.

“The powers that be and the community would prefer [Wal-Mart] stay where they are, rather than move to a new green field,” he says. The decision to enlarge the parking lot to prevent the big box store’s abandonment of one location in search of another meant, however, that Love’s Creek would have to be relocated and soil found to fill in the lot’s neighboring wetland. The needed soil ultimately came from the nearby ridge that now lies barren and muddy after its pillage.

“As the vice president of a neighborhood association, we chose not to oppose something that’s philosophically and environmentally unconscionable,” he says, referring to Wal-Mart’s original proposal to build on an entirely new location. “With that decision to relocate the creek, we never thought where the dirt would come from.”

In the aftermath of the Jan. 3 public meeting on the South Knox water tower, during which ridge-top grievances came to a head, residents are looking forward to the protection and preservation of the remaining unique and picturesque ridges throughout the county that represent not only the identity of the local landscape, but also undeveloped land.