Wolf Naegeli
Updated: Knox County Commission approves revisions to “use-on-review” policy
Knox County Mayor Jacobs and the Knox County Commission intend to further limit citizen rights to oppose neighborhood disrupting developments.
KNOXVILLE County Commission passed on first reading Monday an amendment to the county's process for appealing Planning Commission decisions, according to Compass.
"The revised measure passed on first reading with seven out of 11 votes, but Commission Chair Richie Beeler said his support was soft and he would need to be persuaded to vote for it a second time next month. If approved, the ordinance would give developers the option to have appeals of their plans heard by the BZA or in Chancery Court," Compass reported.
Hellbender's initial story follows:
Residents and developers who do not agree with a decision of the Knoxville-Knox County Planning Commission to permit or deny a land use that is somewhat unusual for their neighborhood can appeal to the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA). If their appeal is denied they may further appeal to the City Council, and as a last resort to the Circuit Court.
Knox County residents and developers, however, are not allowed to appeal to County Commission if the county BZA denies their appeal. For a second reconsideration, they must directly go to court, which tends to be prohibitively expensive for many.
Now Jacobs and most county commissioners want to take away the option to appeal to the BZA for such projects outside the city limits, leaving the Circuit Court as the one and only way to have concerns reconsidered.
Updated: Power line project threatens regionally popular greenway on the Oak Ridge Reservation
OAK RIDGE WBIR channel 10 News 2-minute video highlighting a controversy that has been brewing for a decade.
Infographics and more details added May 5, 2022
Tree clearing would radically degrade the visual experience and take away shade crucial to enjoyment of a walk during increasingly hot weather
On April 4, TRISO-X LLC, a subsidiary incorporated last August by X-Energy LLC, disclosed plans to build a plant at Horizon Center to manufacture a new kind of “unmeltable” tri-structural isotropic nuclear fuel (TRISO) for high-temperature pebble-bed gas reactors. It will use uranium, enriched to less than 20 percent, to fabricate spherical, billiards-ball sized High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) pebbles.
Horizon Center,
situated among sensitive natural areas, was designed as an upscale light-industrial and office park. Despite its fancy landscaping with sculpture gardens, it failed to attract the many buyers that had been anticipated when it was created a quarter century ago. A principal argument for its establishment was that Oak Ridge needed to attract more private enterprise to reduce dependency on Federal jobs.
Terragenics’ $38 million plant, which was built to manufacture implantable radioactive pellets to treat prostate cancer never went into full production and was abandoned in 2005. 2015, with Governor Haslam in attendance, Canadian CVMR promised 620 jobs, using the plant for it’s first U.S. production site and to move its headquarters to it from Toronto, too.
Maybe we should call it Ocean Day
Best Earth Day feature: We still know so little about so much that is vital to life on our planet
CBS News Stunning midwater creatures of the deep sea
You have to endure a half-minute commercial to see this 6-minute report on the fascinating footage captured by a high-tech marine science project of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Make sure to turn on full-screen viewing, if you can. Have you ever seen a bloody belly comb jelly?
We think you’ll agree it’s the most worthwile video you watched today.
Updated: Your — once in 20 years — opportunity to influence the livability of Knox County
You can still share your own ideas to improve and protect our community Advance Knox
Updated again on May 4: Hundreds of ideas, complaints and comments, many of them with map locations, have been posted on the Advance Knox website.
As announced in Hellbender Press earlier, Advance Knox held a series of public input events across Knox County during its Ideas Week at the end of March.
If you missed those in-person gatherings and could not attend the virtual session, we hope you recorded your preferences and opinions online at the Advance Knox website.
You can now see what others had to say about your neighborhood and your favorite places.
And, even if you already participated, you may have had new ideas or important thoughts not recorded yet. Please let us know,
— what you treasure in Knox County
— what you miss
— what you think is most important to consider as the county keeps growing.
The interactive facility to submit ideas will remain open online through May 10, as suggested at the last Advisory Committee meeting.
Dry Hollow rezoning: Trade historic cultural landscape for a crammed subdivision? Expanded and updated again May 21.
Dry Hollow before the bulldozers devastated it. This rural area is zoned agricultural except for the old commercial/light industrial cluster and the church area at right. The barn at the end of the church parking lot and the trees in the project area are already gone! The trees can grow back over time if Knox county commissioners make a wise decision. Synthetic virtual oblique aerial view generated by Atelier N / Hellbender Press
More and much improved picture galleries
May 20: included new “Six on Your Side” report from WATE TV Channel 6 News
Massive residential development planned without regard for beautiful farmland, historic context and rich wildlife habitat — what’s at stake?
SOUTH KNOX COUNTY When you drive out of Knoxville on Chapman Highway toward Seymour and Sevierville, you see little more than ugly strip development. That bleakness is interrupted only when passing through narrow gaps in the ridges, which tend to focus your view even more on the heavy traffic. No notable pleasant vista until just before the county boundary at Shooks Gap! If you look to your left, across the slope of Berry Highland South Cemetery, you get a brief glimpse of Dry Hollow.
That is the only view I remember from my first drive on Chapman Highway after moving to East Tennessee in 1985. Then, we did not yet have so much urban sprawl that one hardly gets a feeling of having left Knoxville before crossing into Sevier County and momentarily passing through a corner of Blount County.
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Advance Knox — Ideas Week: Knox County invites public participation to guide land use and transportation decisions for years to come
Knox County offers opportunities for public participation in the overhaul of planning guidelines Knoxville-Knox County Planning
Framework for growth in Knox County
Advance Knox is a comprehensive planning process initiated by Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs “to guide growth, land use, transportation, economic prosperity, and quality of life.”
The process is intended to result in a new Knox County general plan and subsequently shape revisions of the sector plans. Together, that set of major plans establishes criteria for further plans by Knoxville-Knox County Planning, such as local area and annual plans, as well as timing and implementation specifics for the Knox County portions of the Regional Transportation Planning Organization’s Long Range Regional Mobility Plan.
At each 90-minute Ideas Week event, you’ll learn about the process through idea generation and map-based activities. It’s a chance to share what’s important to you.
— Sunday, March 27 – 1:30 p.m. at Gibbs Middle School
— Monday, March 28 – 5:30 p.m. at Hardin Valley Middle School or Carter High School
— Tuesday, March 29 – 5:30 p.m. at West High School or Northshore Elementary School
— Wednesday, March 30 – 5:30 p.m. at Powell High School or South Doyle Middle School
Knoxville-Knox County General Plan 2033, adopted in 2003, established the framework for the current sector plans and was amended with the Knoxville-Knox County Park, Recreation and Greenways Plan in 2010.
Toward a new age of enlightenment

will launch a pilot project to engage citizen volunteers
in grassroots initiatives for community resilience, sustainability and global solidarity.
At this time a year ago, we were hopeful 2021 would bring an end to the pandemic.
The final week of 2020 saw the counts of new cases decline markedly in the United States and worldwide. Except for scientists and medical professionals, few understood yet the risks posed by variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. It wasn’t until May 2021 that the World Health Organization (WHO) started naming major variants for Greek letters.
Not every change brought about by the pandemic had purely negative consequences
Learning from what is going wrong may help us avoid deleterious outcomes of other global crises.
Rotty Top Live — flower lasts no more than 2-3 days
A live video stream was featured at the top of this article while “Rotty Top” was blooming, July 29-31, 2021.
Another article includes details about that particular plant and the event.
The corpse plant at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville has not bloomed in 20 years
The titan arum (Amorphophalus titanum), native to Sumatra, is remarkable for several reasons.
It is more often referred to by colloquial names, such as corpse flower, rotting corpse plant or carrion plant, because of the strong distinct odor it releases to attract pollinators when it flowers.
No other species of flowering plant has an unbranched inflorescence, or flower-bearing reproductive part, as large as titan arum. Unbranched means that all flowers grow from a single stem; a gigantic one in this case. A record height above corm (underground storage tuber) of 10.5 ft was measured at Bonn Botanical Gardens in June 21, 2013.
FGS calls on TVA to get serious about addressing the climate crisis
As Hellbender Press reported in April, the Tennessee Valley Authority plans to phase out its use of coal. And as we mentioned in an action alert, TVA is conducting a scoping process pertaining to the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for retirement and replacement of the Kingston Fossil Plant. TVA is preparing similar EIS for its other remaining coal-fired power plants as well.
Although TVA lists "construction and operation of solar and storage facilities" in these scoping documents as an alternative for replacement of coal as the power source, it has made no secret of its belief that construction of gas-powered combustion turbines (CT) and natural gas pipelines to feed them will be the best solution to replace the outdated generation capacity.
Unlike other power utilities, TVA has been making it more difficult, financially unattractive or impossible for distributed renewable energy, storage and even efficiency projects to get realized, according to proponents of renewables and some of TVA’s local power distribution partners. TVA also reneged on its agreement with other utilities to make large amounts of wind power available to the Southeastern United States through the Plains & Eastern Clean Line high-voltage direct-current power line project.
- tennessee valley authority
- tva
- foundation for global sustainability
- fgs
- climate change
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- electric utility
- power plant replacement
- fossil fuel
- coalfired power plant
- gasfired power plant
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- distributed electricity generation and storage
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- solar energy
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- stranded asset
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- renewable energy
- decarbonization
- plains & eastern clean line