UNNECESSARY THUNDER?
We don’t know Ronnie Kennedy or Joe E. Blevins Jr., but the Marion County men sound like a couple of salt-of-the earth folks who just want potential buyers of mountaintop property to be wary about what they might be buying.
Now, because of social media remarks they made about the property, they’re being sued by John “Thunder” Thornton, owner of the 7,500-acre Aetna Mountain development called River Gorge Ranch.
The suit claims Kennedy and Blevins are “angry and disgruntled about the development” and that the men’s alleged remarks on social media were made out of “malice, spite and vindictiveness.”
“These comments,” the suit says, “indicate hostility to Mr. Thornton.”
We think the developer, to go so far as filing a suit, to quote Mr. Shakespeare, “doth protest too much.”
After all, Thunder Enterprises, “at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars,” employed Universal Engineering Services, which through a geotechnical study found no evidence of underground mines that would threaten any residential development at River Gorge Ranch, according to the suit.
“[T]he highest proposed elevation residential lots … that would face the most risk from any potential subsidence” [gradual caving in or sinking of land],” it said, “are located on a Newton Sandstone formation that averages approximately 120 feet in thickness.”
In other words, pretty dang solid.
However, it’s no secret that mining was done on Aetna Mountain. Times Free Press newspaper archives show public notices as late as 1979 stating the intent to surface mine on the mountain.
A 1948 Chattanooga Times news story about plans for a coal dock on the Tennessee River in Marion County said “coal to be handled by the projected new dock will be mined principally on Aetna Mountain which is a few miles from the site of the new facility. Capacity will be 800 tons of coal a day.”
Indeed, when Thunder Enterprises bought the property in 2021, it was described as a former coal mine and timber property.
The suit details the various postings by Kennedy and Blevins, all of which — to us — suggest a wariness to buyers but in no way proof that homes in the development might be threatened.
Several of them simply say the mountain, which encompasses far more thousands of acres than the development, has abandoned mines, which is plainly true. Others warn that “anyone building on a possible underground coal mine needs to think about this” and “realize what this possibly means” and says that mines and “underground fires” are a “possible threat.” Another Facebook response to a post promoting the home sites simply says “Swiss cheese.”
As to the last remark, the suit says the statement was reasonably understood to constitute “an assertion that the home sites are underlain by something as unstable as Swiss cheese.”
We’re not building a billion-dollar development, but if we took the same type of offense to everything that was said about something we wrote, we would spend all our time in litigation.
We wonder, in fact, if this lawsuit eventually might be found to fall under the state’s Anti-SLAPP Act, which was designed to protect free speech by deterring and/or punishing SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) lawsuits.
Thunder Enterprises has put a lot of money into the Aetna Mountain development, including building a 1.6-mile road to the top, where $1.5 billion of homes and amenities are expected to be completed.
It’s understandable Thornton doesn’t want potential buyers to be warded off by innuendo, and he does have a track record in the area.
His Jasper Highlands, a gated mountaintop community with 1,300 or so lots, has been developed over the past decade nine miles to the west of River Gorge Ranch. It has attracted homebuyers from 48 states and eight countries, another Thunder Enterprises official said. When fully developed, it is expected to have 2,500 to 3,000 residents and bring nearly $700 million of new investment to Marion County.
And Thornton is a smart enough businessman to know that building a community on “Swiss cheese” property would result in lawsuits seeking damages that would far exceed whatever “damages and expenses,” “legal, consulting and other expenses” and “attorneys’ fees and all court costs” he could expect to extract from Kennedy and Blevins.
So we hope, instead, he will drop his lawsuit, lean on the assumed soundness of his geotechnical study and any other proof he can offer about the solid foundation for his development, and move forward with what over the next decade or so should be another economic boon for Marion County.