Guest column: Holiday inn — Oak Ridge needs lodging for recreational visitors

By Leslie Agron and Pat Fain

Not so much the old Holiday Inn on South Illinois Avenue next to the Skyway Drive-In Theater (with movie sound piped into the facing motel rooms!), nor even our newest hostelry on Tulsa Road… We’re reaching back to the 1942 Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire flick called “Holiday Inn” in a blatant attempt to stretch a holiday tie-in. With terrific Irving Berlin music, including “White Christmas,” for which it won an Oscar for Best Original Song, they sing and dance their way through the plot: “At an inn which is only open on holidays, a crooner and a hoofer vie for the affections of a beautiful up-and-coming performer.”

Coincidentally, another 1942 event was the founding of Oak Ridge as a part of the Manhattan Project.

Often in our vision for “Something Else” for the economic revitalization of Oak Ridge we have mentioned that this city could greatly benefit from serious development of the visitor portion of our economy. This is a proposal for additional lodging in Oak Ridge to forward that end. We need to take a long, hard look at the characteristics of what is available now versus what it would take to appeal to people coming here simply to visit.

That is to say, we cater very well to government and business travelers and adequately to the needs of the locals to lodge out-of-town guests. We’re blind, however, toward providing a convivial sojourn to a recreational visitor. What? People coming here for beauty and recreation? Why not, we greatly enjoy the beauty and recreation available here—why wouldn’t others?

So, specifically this is a proposal to build facilities in Oak Ridge to house an entirely different segment of visitors. What we can be reminded about from the aforementioned holiday classic, despite the fact that theirs is a fantasy facility—on a par with the apocryphal “my uncle has a barn, let’s put on a show”—is that recreational visitors are best served by a different sort of accommodations than other segments of travelers.

Our vision for this new facility for Oak Ridge would be a lodge, cabins, and campground adjacent to, or on the grounds of, Clark Center Park, which is often called “Carbide Park” locally). This is a very lovely, but significantly underused, venue on the waterfront south of Bethel Valley Road past the end of Scarboro Road. We understand it to remain under federal ownership, but to be operated without public expense because the cost is donated by U.S. Department of Energy contractors for that purpose.

We see this development as best achieved by a private sector long-term leaseholder financing, constructing, and operating the accommodations. This has a regional precedent: inns are operated at six Tennessee state parks; cabin rentals are available at 20. There is a DOE precedent for this as well in the recent construction and ongoing operation of the Guest House on Oak Ridge National Laboratory grounds.

The rent from our proposed new lessee could augment the donations made by DOE contractors. We see adding such a concessionaire as greatly enhancing the power of this public/private partnership and noticeably increasing the city’s tax base (bed tax, sales tax, and property tax on the buildings).

Besides accommodating some of the recreational visitors we get now, this facility could also house ORNL or Y-12 visitors who want a less business-like stay; not to mention accommodating the guests of local residents who feel similarly. An enhancement of the rowing venue, which could easily triple the number of rowing weekends, comes immediately to mind as greatly increasing the kind of visitors who would find such a facility attractive as well.

Beyond this, we also need to continue to develop facilities for visitors, such as the National Parks Service proposal and additional enhancements to our waterfront. We also need to do a much better job of marketing Oak Ridge as a destination. We know that the Oak Ridge Convention and Visitors Bureau is charged with this responsibility, but we feel that if they were fulfilling it particularly well we would see far more vehicles with out-of-state plates on South Illinois Avenue. Why should the potential recreational quality of the waterfront on three sides of Oak Ridge remain the best-kept secret in the Secret City?

Agron and Fain are Oak Ridge residents and columnists.