A study that could reset the guidelines for growth in Blount County is approaching its final stages, but before it’s finished the writers want more input from the public.
Nearly a year ago a team of consultants publicly introduced a project to update recommendations for how Blount County develops. Now, staff members with Inspire Placemaking Collective have reactivated a feedback section on their Blount growth plan website .
Components of the updated plan will include guidelines on land use, transportation and infrastructure, as well as housing, recreation and conservation.
The push for more feedback follows a public kickoff meeting, two in-person workshops and lengthy web engagements last year designed to get at the same sort of questions: What’s valuable about Blount County now, and what should it look like in the future?
Priorities
So far, “preserving rural spaces” has proven a priority among most of those who’ve added their voices to the public outreach portions of the plan. And several Blount officials have likewise said the rural parts of the county should be protected from higher density development as the county grows.
Along with housing affordability and strain to local infrastructure from growth, keeping areas of the Blount landscape rural or retaining an agricultural focus in its industry were the most frequently voiced interests of those who took part in online engagement activities produced by Inspire last year.
The in-person workshops generated similar results, Inspire principal Sarah Sinatra Gould told The Daily Times last fall.
The site itself drew 4,100 individual visitors while it was first active. That response rate was “significant,” Gould told members of the Blount County Planning Commission last week, April 25.
Once the plan is finalized, it will serve as an update to an older growth study — one some officials have said was often disregarded when new developments got the green light from county boards.
Growth and new housing developments have shown themselves to be controversial within the county. Members of the public routinely speak at public meetings about problems — environmental degradation, noise pollution and narrow roads — stemming from denser development. At the same time, area housing advocates have countered that new restrictions on development can worsen an ongoing affordability crisis.
Like most Tennessee counties, Blount saw some growth from 2022 to 2023. The county added 1,646 people to its population from 2022 to 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates from March.
Neighboring Monroe and Sevier counties saw less growth than Blount, at 914 and 609 people, respectively. And both Knox and Loudon counties are in the top 10 counties in the state for population growth in numbers over that period, adding 5,289 people and 2,347 people to their resident rolls.
Possibilities
One way of acting on resident and official comments on rural areas, Gould said during last week’s meeting, could involve splitting a current county zoning district that’s now designed for a moderate level of development to include a new zone, reserved for lower density growth.
“It’s envisioned as sort of a transitional area between the (county’s) high-density Suburbanizing (zone) and the low-density R-1 (rural zone),” county Development Director Thomas Lloyd said Thursday. The proposed zone also overlaps with what was once the city of Maryville’s planning region, he noted.
Preserving more rural areas and easing housing cost issues could be done simultaneously. Gould said that gauging where to build can be as critical as what type of structure is built. For housing, she said, “What helps towards affordability, and it helps toward preserving views, is getting away from the large-lot homes that just keep sprawling out.”
“The idea is to gear development where it’s appropriate,” and where the infrastructure to support more people exists, she added. In many cases, she said, areas near the cities already possess such infrastructure.
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