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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns 35 Comments
By Pat Fain and Leslie Agron
In Nimes, France, there is a 2,000-year-old Roman coliseum. For 500 years in the Middle Ages, thousands of people lived their lives within the walls of the coliseum, and in modern times it has hosted rock concerts and safely seated nearly 15,000 people.
Yet at less than 75 years of age, Oak Ridge has the blight. Woolly housing adelgids, no doubt. [Read more…]
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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns 10 Comments
By Leslie Agron and Pat Fain
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…†Oak Ridge is on the cusp of a renaissance; Oak Ridge is in its worst-ever financial shape. Despite the looming risk of the guillotine for questioning the conventional wisdom here, we want to examine where Oak Ridgers are coming from when they speak of our future. To do this we, conveniently, will compare these possible futures for Oak Ridge with two present day Tennessee cities: Farragut and Chattanooga.
Farragut is a place most Oak Ridgers are fairly familiar with. It is mostly new and upscale. It tends toward sprawl and toward heavily developed strips, but has no real heart. It has low taxes, but is not a full-service city. Chattanooga is an older city with a downtown and outlying neighborhoods of varying ages. It is a full-service city with commensurate taxes. Chattanooga has done an outstanding job of revitalizing some of its older neighborhoods. The neighborhood in the vicinity of its Aquarium is particularly noteworthy in this regard.
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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns 34 Comments
By Pat Fain and Leslie Agron
The usual theory behind economic development for a community is that the local economy is too small. So, economic development experts seek to bring in new companies, especially industrial ones, to enhance that economy. The theory is that increased local purchases by new companies and their employees are multiplied several times as the money spreads throughout the community. Every additional purchase results in additional sales tax from the same original dollar that exited the new company. Companies that manufacture goods or provide services externally have the greatest value theoretically as they actually bring new money into the community. The rate at which this happens is called the velocity of money.
In Oak Ridge, however, the size of the economy that occurs within our city limits is enormous for our population. The problem for Oak Ridge is that much of that economy occurs within non-taxable institutions and the vast majority of their staff does not live in Oak Ridge. Thus, in Oak Ridge the velocity of money is 70 mph—the speed at which those folks are cruising down Interstate 40 on Friday evening as they take their paychecks home!
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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns 7 Comments
By Leslie Agron and Pat Fain
“This Island Earth” is a classic 1950s sci-fi flick. Its gifts to the popular culture include the “interocitor” (an all-purpose communicator and weapon) and the origin of the sound bite “They’re pulling us up!” In it we learn not only that we are not alone, but that we are not even remotely enough located to stay uninvolved in cosmic conflicts.
Oak Ridge in the early 1950s was a remotely located, somewhat self-sufficient compound. It had been built that way intentionally by Gen. Groves in the 1940s. Nearly everyone who worked here also lived here because the government had made sure to offer them suitable rental housing.
The seeds of change were sown in the mid-1950s with the sale of those government-owned homes and the enactment of Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. As the interstates were built and the region grew a little closer, a few people began to commute to jobs in Oak Ridge.
As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, West Knoxville blossomed, and Pellissippi Parkway was built.
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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns Leave a Comment
By Pat Fain and Leslie Agron
In this column, we offer our New Year’s resolutions.
Most New Year’s resolutions are known more their breach than honoring. As we have dared to insert ourselves into the public dialogue for the past eight months, without invitation or expectation of embracement, we again dare the whimsical and promise to really try to keep the following resolutions as guest columnists:
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By Oak Ridge Today Guest Columns 1 Comment
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.â€
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.
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By John Huotari Leave a Comment
As part of the Secret City Festival, Oak Ridge Revitalization Effort will present a free reading of Oak Ridge playwright Leslie Agron’s new play “Let Them Eat Cupcakes!”
The reading will be at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Oak Ridge Public Library Auditorium.
