Note: This is Gerald Largin's column from today's Roane County News. I do not re-post articles from media outlets for reasons of copyright and deference, but this is one time I'll make an exception due to the pertinence to Roane County. The TVA Board of Directors should respond to this article with their reasons for allowing a TVA policy this blatantly counter productive. It is long and I hope you will read the entire thing and pass it on.

A VIEW from LICK SKILLET: A report from McGlothin-Largen Park

Friday, July 25, 2014

Lick Skillet Flats has seen the beginning of activity in the development of McGlothin-Largen Park, which the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency on
the newly erected sign officially designates: “McGlothin-Largen Wildlife Management Area,” but which we will always think of, and call, the “park.”

The sign also explains that the area was “Donated to the People of Tennessee in Memory of Martha McGlothin Largen and John Roy Largen.”

Of the activity to which we referred, first there was the maturing of the seeds which were planted last spring that converted the “Indian Mound Field” from a weedy-looking area into a sea of huge yellow flowers as these plants revealed themselves to be sunflowers — thousands of nodding yellow headed sunflowers. While not as showy as some plants might be, we, and many passersby, have found them to be a striking display.

Second there was the earth-moving activity of the big yellow behemoths that carved out, leveled off, smoothed out, and packed down the area that will be the entrance and the parking lot for visitors to the park.

Soon there should be trails and lanes leading off from the parking lot area to the water front and walking paths along the river bank, but, as the ancient phrase cautions us: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

There should have been another project well along, if not finished, which is the planned fishing pier.

Unfortunately, nothing other then the planning and surveying lay-out work has been done for this much anticipated amenity, despite the TWRA folks being ready, willing, and able to get the pier built and open to the public for their enjoyment.

The cause of this failure may come as much of a shock to you, gentle reader, as it did to us. The thing that has brought the fishing pier project to a screeching halt is the intransigence of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

That august body refuses to issue a permit to the TWRA to build such a facility. When we heard this, we frankly disbelieved it, and undertook to see if we couldn’t get a permit issued.

Over the past several decades in dealing with TVA and its people, we had found them to be courteous, competent, and cooperative, but we quickly found that coping with today’s reorganized TVA is not like dealing with the TVA as it existed for the first sixty-five or so years since its creation.

The person we were told we needed to talk to was Janet L. Duffey, Program Manager, Reservoir Land Use & Permitting, at the Lenoir City offices, (865-632-1301 or jlduffey@tva.gov).

It took her almost no time at all to tell us that we were wasting our time — that the decision had been made and no permit could be issued.

The reason for this refusal is that this pier is to be for PUBLIC use. She assured us that if, instead of giving the farm to the state for public use, we had cut it up into lots, and sold them, TVA would have had no trouble in issuing dock or pier permits for each of these lot owners.

(She said, although she might now deny saying, that they could issue a hundred private permits for this land, but not one for public use!)

This position of TVA struck us as bizarre in view of their widely publicized efforts to demonstrate their efforts to promote the area, and their expenditure of millions of dollars in pursuit of this effort.

Then we learned that TVA itself had constructed a fishing pier for PUBLIC use at the ash-spill area.

Why a PUBLIC fishing pier is offensive to TVA policy when done by an agency of the State of Tennessee, TWRA, but is sound policy when undertaken by TVA itself is beyond our comprehension. If you, gentle reader, think a nice fishing pier here in Lick Skillet that you and your family and your friends could use, and that visitors to our area might use and thus get a favourable opinion of us and our county, you might want to express your opinion in such manner as you think most likely to convince the TVA Board of the wrong-headedness of their policy, please do so. The Board is presently made up of six members, with the terms of two Tennessee members, Barbara S. Haskew of Chattanooga, and William B. Sansom, former chairman of the board and head of the H.T. Hackney Co., having expired on 18 May. The remaining six members are: Chairman Joe Ritch of Huntsville, Alabama; Marilyn A. Brown, of Atlanta, Georgia; Lynn Evans of Memphis; Richard Howorth of Oxford, Mississippi; Peter Mahurin of Bowling Green, Kentucky; and Michael McWherter of Tennessee, son of former governor, the late Ned McWherter. In addition, some readers might think it expeditious to take up this outrage with some of the folks presently seeking our votes so that they may continue sitting in the seats of power (from which seats they could doubtless exercise considerable influence on the bureaucrats responsible for the inexplicable policy being enforced by Janet L. Duffey et al.)

We speak, of course of such power brokers as Chuck Fleischmann who has a seat on the House Finance Committee and should be able with a single telephone call to get this problem fixed.

And then there is the candidate for return to the Senate, Lamar Alexander, who supposedly knows where all the levers of power are located and how to manipulate them.

There are others and you doubtless know who they are.

It’s your park, and it’s your river.

How dare Janet Duffey and those of her ilk deny you and yours the full enjoyment of your park and your river?