Knoxville City Council At

Knoxville City Council At-Large, Seat A member Lynne Fugate, a longtime civic leader who is vying for a second term, is facing two challengers in the Aug. 29 primary election.

Fugate, 62, is CEO of the Girl Scout Council of the Southern Appalachians and previously served on the Knox County Board of Education.

Challenger Cameron Brooks, 45, is a real estate agent, Democratic Party leader and former labor organizer.

Challenger Darin Worsham, 50, is a welder with experience in several fields such as construction, auto repair and truck driving.

The top two vote-getters will move on to the general election on Nov. 7. Each city council term is four years, and candidates are limited to serving two terms.

Here are the candidates' summarized responses from their interviews with Knox News.

Business development

Making a case to spread business growth and development to the entire city, Brooks said, “There are really two Knoxvilles, in my opinion. You see the hundred-million-dollar baseball stadium and all the press around it and then you see all the development downtown with millions of dollars being spent and it looks great. But the other side of Knoxville is that 22% of our citizens live in poverty.”

He wants to attract new businesses that offer living wages, especially to the east side of Knoxville.

“I think there's an overemphasis on downtown in the overall narrative," he said.

Affordable housing

Housing prices have skyrocketed but wages haven’t kept up, he said. To have a healthy middle-class community, the city needs to focus on having a higher percentage of people who are homeowners, Brooks said.

While he would support incentives to build more homes, he’s more concerned about making sure that new housing is truly affordable, including supporting ways to renovate dilapidated properties, bringing them back on the city’s tax roll.

Violence

Speaking of the city's violence reduction programs, Brooks said, he's "skeptical but supportive."

“I really think there needs to be an emphasis more on community policing.” Based on suggestions from voters, he said he wants police officers to establish better relationships and build trust.

Transparency

During the police chief search that culminated in Paul Noel's hiring in 2022, the city contracted with a third-party company, and Mayor Indya Kincannon argued that exempted the process from open records laws.

Knox News sued for these records and eventually obtained them. However, there is no policy prohibiting the city from doing this again.

“I disagree strongly with what the mayor did,” Brooks said, referring to the closed search.

Brooks said he would support efforts to publish open policing data on an easily accessible website.

Homelessness

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, and I’m not going to offer one,” Brooks said, adding that mental health services, paid for by state legislature, are needed.

Homeless encampments are not good places for anyone and hurt everyone in the city, he added.

“It's a shame that we live in such a wealthy nation and this (homelessness) is going on," he said.

Drug treatment services and mental health support are key in resolving Knoxville’s homelessness problem. He said he would also be supportive of using city funds to provide shelter for homeless youth, especially LGBTQ+ teens.

Taxes

The last property tax increase the city passed hurt working families because it hit at a time of skyrocketing rents and mortgages.

“Families were already struggling under record inflation,” Brooks said. “It happened at the worst possible time.”

He supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour for city workers, but disagreed with raises for those on the upper end of the city's payroll.

Business development

Change, whether its perceived as good or bad, can be scary. Fugate said she sees downtown growing into nearby urban neighborhoods and, as a councilmember, she would encourage residents and developers to engage with each other in a “thoughtful way to minimize disruption to people that live there, but really add vibrancy to our city.”

Of course, new development needs to include residential options, and not just for existing residents, she said. The city is growing, and businesses that want to open here need places for employees to live.

“Being located in the city (as a business) gives you a buzz and an access to things closely that you don’t get,” Fugate said. “People drive in from outside the city limits to experience a lot of what we’ve worked on over 20 years to revitalize downtown and make it the urban heart of the region.”

Fugate said she recognizes the increased interest in Knoxville has caused a backlog when it comes to inspections and approving permits for buildings, but the city is catching up by adding resources. Once caught up, she said, the city should ask itself: “What do we really need” to make the process efficient?

Affordable housing

Fugate said Knoxville has both an affordable housing crisis and a housing affordability crisis, and both should be solved together.

The solution mostly includes adding more housing stock, Fugate said.

“I think we've got to get really creative about different ways to add to affordable housing stock,” she said. ‘When you are in a crisis, we tend to do mostly multifamily apartments because that's how you get the most units quickly. But that's not the only way to do affordable housing.”

In order to build more, Fugate said the city needs to encourage developers to build using tools such as below-market interest loans from banks and payment in lieu of taxes programs from the city. PILOTs, as they're called, allow businesses for a limited number of years to pay a lump sum that's typically lower than what they'd be assessed.

Violence

Fugate supports the violence interruption efforts implemented by the city. She said that the city must continue to be willing to try new things and that patience must be given in order to measure success.

She also believes the community must be centered in its efforts and involved in leading the work.

"So what I tried to do on council is be the person that listens to the new programs and suggestions that are brought to us. I'm still old fashioned and believe that relationships matter. People matter. I think it's a real key to the balance of violence interruption, in that it has to come from the community."

Transparency

Because the police chief is an appointed position, Kincannon was within her rights to handle the search as she saw fit, Fugate said, and protecting careers of applicants by shielding the release of their names was appropriate.

“Transparency is always better, but I may see it a little more nuanced than other people because a) I’ve been recruited for a job and b) because I was on school board (when they hired a superintendent) that had to hire publicly.”

Editor's note: A Knox News report published November 2022 shows police chief candidates whose identities are public suffer no career harm.

Homelessness

Fugate said the city is largely funding what it can and while shelters continue to have open beds, getting people to take advantage of those services continues to be a tall task.

More pressing, she said, is the lack of a mental health hospital for residents ever since Lakeshore was torn down.

“We’re the only major city in the state that doesn’t have our own mental health hospital and so we don’t have the place to help people the way other communities do.”

Taxes

Fugate said the 2022 property tax increase was necessary since the city was “facing a crisis” because it was unable to appropriately pay staff.

The city was losing employees to the private sector where they could get paid more. Public Works positions that had been vacant for over a year got filled once pay increased, Fugate said.

“We had to do something,” she said. “(Property taxes) had to go up, and that’s going to have a long-term impact.”

Business development

Worsham’s priorities for downtown’s evolution center on growth and the revitalization of historic buildings.

“Our downtown is relatively small compared to everybody else’s,” Worsham said. “We’ve got a bunch of opportunities and land down there that’s not being used. We need to grow and have a thriving downtown.”

For Worsham, the future of downtown is intricately tied to the two issues he most wants to change: the twin crises of housing and homelessness. He said restoring the beauty and historical value of downtown could depend on solving these two related problems.

Affordable housing

Worsham supports attracting private investors to Knoxville, who he said could take bigger risks on building additional affordable housing. He is concerned with local government taking the lead on housing using taxpayer dollars.

“We need some alternatives other than the city,” Worsham said. “That’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of reaching out to investors that are willing to throw some money out there.”

Worsham advocates for the construction of apartment alternatives, like tiny homes and homes built from recycled shipping containers. These forms of housing, he said, would support those who are suffering in a city with “high-end housing, but not high-end pay.”

He also wants the city to partner with Project Foundations for Families, a faith-based organization that connects families with the education and resources to buy land.

Violence

In 2012, the city closed the state-run Lakeshore Mental Health Institute, and Worsham would support a return of state-funded mental health facilities because he believes mental illness is the leading cause of violence in Knoxville.

Without a state-funded facility, Worsham said those suffering with mental illness were left on the streets, where they were more susceptible to drug use and violence.

“I wanted to run to get our city in order,” Worsham said. “Let’s get all this taken care of, because I think it will all fall into place if you get your priorities right.”

Transparency

Worsham would support a city ordinance to prohibit third-party agreements that keep talent searches away from the public. During the police chief search that culminated in Paul Noel's hiring in 2022, the city contracted with a third-party company, and Mayor Indya Kincannon argued that exempted the process from open records laws.

He said he would be dedicated to transparency, which he believes is critical to democracy.

“The government is not supposed to run the people, the people are supposed to run the government,” Worsham said. “If the people don’t know what the government’s doing, they can’t have a say so, and I think every citizen needs a say so.”

He's frustrated with the mayor's decision to look outside the city for a police chief.

“You’ve got plenty of talent in Knoxville,” Worsham said. “I would probably look within. I wouldn’t have started outside of our internal people, like veteran police officers who have put their life on the line for years.”

Homelessness

Worsham supports revitalizing unused buildings into shelters for the unhoused population. While he does acknowledge that police may need to be involved for the safety of homeless people in Knoxville, he would advocate against punitive measures for trespassing and loitering.

“There’s places that people don’t need to be,” Worsham said. “There are dangerous places where they don’t need to be trespassing, but they still need to be connected to a service. Without some place for them to go, you can’t lock everybody up.”

In general, Worsham thinks the city council needs to rethink its priorities. He referenced the project to build a bicycle and pedestrian bridge across the Tennessee River. Worsham said it should be tabled until other problems are solved.

“The needs come before the wants,” Worsham said. “We need to get the homeless taken care of. We don’t need the bridge, we want the bridge.”

Taxes

When it comes to last year’s property tax increase, Worsham said it was a necessary step, though he said it was too much of a burden on taxpayers.

“There’s no way around it and you’re never going to have enough increases to pay for everything the city needs,” Worsham said. “I probably would have voted on the tax increase, but it would have been a lot lower.”

Just like with other issues, he said tax increases needed to be subject to an assessment of what the city wants versus what the city needs in order to achieve proper balance.