KNOX COUNTY, Tenn. (WATE) — Monday, May 23, Knox County commissioners are set to consider many rezoning requests. Including two from Thunder Mountain Properties. If the company’s requests are approved, it would pave the way to build more than 200 new homes in the Dry Hollow area.
Dawn Close loves calling Dry Hollow home but she and the majority of her neighbors don’t want their rural way of life disrupted with the proposed development.
“We’ve owned the property (Loveday Springs) a couple of years and as soon as we moved in, within a few months all of a sudden trees started coming down across the street.”
Developers are hoping to build 225 homes on the near 160 acre property off of Sevierville Pike and Dry Hollow Road.
“Gone to about six or seven of these county meetings and they have yet to say no to any of these developments,” Close said. “It’s a rubber stamp, rubber stamp, rubber stamp. Yes, yes, yes. Whatever these developers want to do they’re just completely disregarding the growth sector plan.”
Close doesn’t have an issue with growth but she said the land across from her house isn’t the right fit for a neighborhood.
She said, “There’s a big industrial park and there’s a sandblaster that’s in that industrial park. If they build homes there, those people will not be able to hear themselves talk in their backyard. The sandblasting is so loud.”
Other neighbors report they’re already having problems with the development even though nothing has been built yet.
“They tore my fence down. They took bulldozers across my property, came up my property,” Ronnie ‘Zorro’ Parsley said. “We need to get it stopped. Nobody around here wants that.”
“Help us oppose all of this transformation of farmland into subdivisions,” Close said. “They’re doing it all over the county. The same developers just bought 100 acres in Gibbs and they’re planning on putting 540 homes over there in the middle of a rural community. This is becoming a crisis in Knox County.”
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Dry Hollow neighbors are also concerned about more traffic in the area if the neighborhood is built.
As of Friday, nobody from Thunder Mountain Properties had a comment.
Knox County commissioners are reviewing the rezoning requests and will vote on them Monday night at 7:00.