Draft plans for redevelopment will be shown to residents tonight

A meeting set today on plans for redeveloping blighted properties in East Ridge probably won’t raise the firestorm it did last week, when local residents expressed outrage over private homes being included in a draft plan for possible government takeover of the land involved.

In the face of homeowner blowback, the East Ridge Housing and Redevelopment Authority announced Monday that it “has heard the strong directive from the East Ridge City Council to scale back the proposed boundary map and redraft the plan to concentrate on commercial properties and eliminate any reference to the taking of houses in the city.”

Although the authority’s focus and intent “is to identify only commercially blighted properties (i.e., vacant, abandoned, unimproved, or dilapidated), the [authority] will not target or attempt to secure the ability to displace residents from their homes,” authority officials said in the statement.

“We understand the direction of the city council and certainly are going to work to meet this objective of redeveloping the commercial corridor,” East Ridge Housing and Redevelopment Authority chairman Darwin Branam said.

East Ridge City Manager J. Scott Miller said there was no mistaking what residents thought of the initial plan.

“We had an overwhelming crowd at last Thursday’s council meeting and I can say that the city council heard them loud and clear,” Miller said. “Emphasize, loud and clear. They heard the public input.”

The first step taken since Thursday was to eliminate all residential properties from the plan, Miller said.

“It was never the intent to take property and displace people,” he said. “What we were looking at was we’ve got various houses in neighborhoods that are abandoned, that are boarded up and that utilities are turned off. There’s no activity on them.

“But we want to put residents’ minds at ease,” he said. “We appreciate what their concerns are.”

The map will be redrawn and the plan revised to “only concentrate on commercial,” Miller said. Moore and Germantown roads, formerly in the plan, will be removed completely.

“The emphasis is going to be placed on Ringgold Road,” he said. “The plan will be, I would say, significantly pared down to only deal with commercial redevelopment.”

Vacant, abandoned buildings with no utilities turned on will become the targets for redevelopment.

Miller said the idea is

not to take property but to work with the property owners to make the property productive.

“We have the opportunity to provide financial assistance through incentivizing redevelopment efforts with use of the border region sales tax,” Miller said.

Miller is referring to the Border Region Retail Tourism Development District Act of 2011, which is designed to encourage commercial development on the Tennessee side of towns bordering a state line. Bristol and Kingsport are the only other Tennessee towns with such districts.

The border region redevelopment district in East Ridge consists of about 950 acres, much of it on Ringgold Road, Miller said, where special rules apply to sales taxes collected from businesses operating there that allow a certain portion to be returned and used for development.

“We want to see rejuvenation, and we can provide some financial assistance with that,” Miller said.