Beleaguered Tenn. County Tries to Change

February 26, 2008 5:50 AM EST

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Maybe it was the expensive lobster lunch. The questionable federal grants. The collective amnesia about term limits. The blatant nepotism.

Knox County voters turned out in record numbers - more than any other county in Tennessee - in the Super Tuesday primaries on Feb. 5, and it had little to do with the presidential race. The issue was county government, and the public was growing weary of business as usual in this eastern Tennessee county of 400,000.

The primaries and last week's temporary appointments of eight new faces to the Knox County Commission may mark the end of that perception.

"After years of apathy, the voters are taking back their government," said new commissioner Sam McKenzie, a 42-year-old radiation safety officer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The turnaround may not be fully realized until the August general election when full-term commissioners will be chosen and a nine-question referendum may be on the ballot to ban nepotism, cronyism and self-interest in county government.

Still, Kathy Hamilton is encouraged. The former county finance director is a volunteer with the group promoting the referendum.

"It is a different environment right now," she said. "The best thing to come out of all this chaos is that voters in this community are very interested and are paying a great deal of attention to their local government. We have not always been able to say that."

In July, the county's finance director resigned and a mayor's aide was transferred after the assistant charged a $227 lobster lunch for three on her county credit card.

Earlier this month, the community services director resigned after the Knoxville News Sentinel reported her office had dispensed thousands of dollars to nonprofit organizations to which she had personal ties.

And back in January 2007, a state Supreme Court ruling upheld Knox County's government charter, including term limits approved by voters in 1994. County government leaders, relying on a faulty state attorney general's opinion, had ignored the two-term limit until then.

The fallout was immediate. A dozen veteran office holders lost their jobs - eight of 19 members on the county commission and four countywide officers, including the sheriff.

When the 11 remaining commissioners met Jan. 31, 2007, to pick replacements, the final selections included relatives of commissioners and deputies of displaced officeholders who later hired back their former bosses.

The Knoxville News Sentinel newspaper and nine residents sued the commission for violating the state's Open Meetings Act. They convinced a jury, and a judge in October threw out the appointments - the largest action of its kind ever in Tennessee.

Told by the state there could be no special election to fill the vacancies, the 11 sitting commissioners gathered again last week to make appointments to now seven-month terms until the general election.

But times had changed. Of 11 officials linked to last year's controversies, primary voters defeated three ex-commissioners, rejected the term-limited county trustee's bid for county property assessor, picked a challenger over the county law director and defeated Commission Chairman Scott Moore's bid for county clerk so convincingly that Moore then gave up his chairmanship.

The new appointments were made under tight rules. Commissioners couldn't take a bathroom break without permission. No one from the audience was allowed to approach them during deliberations to prevent lobbying.

"This is a totally different process," Interim Chairman Tank Strickland said. "Everything was done in front of the eyes of the community."

Most of the appointees, like new commissioner Richard Briggs, a 55-year-old heart surgeon, had never run for office before.

"I had never considered this. But I said, 'Somebody needs to do something.' This is a maybe once-in-a-hundred-years event, where you really do have a chance to change government," he said. "We have an opportunity, if we can just get it right."