BusinessTN

Knox County’s recent investment across county lines in a next generation research park could legitimize the term “regionalism” in Tennessee.

Called the Pellissippi Research Centre on the Oak Ridge Corridor, the Blount County-based park is designed to recruit corporate headquarters and high tech companies and even includes a residential and retail component to be handled by the former property owner, Mike Ross of Rarity Communities. Maryville-based Molecular Pathology Laboratory Net- work, the park’s first tenant, relocates next year. It’s certainly not uncommon for government entities to work together in spirit to recruit industry. But alongside Blount County and the Blount County cities of Maryville and Alcoa, Knox County recently poured $5 million into the $20 million phase one development of the planned 450-acre research park, one located outside its jurisdiction. Prior to May 2006, Tennessee state law actually prohibited one county from contributing financially to another county’s industrial development board and sharing in the benefits a project like a research park promises to deliver. Legislation pursued by Knox and Blount County officials earlier this year enabled the first of its kind financial transaction.

Bass Berry & Sims attorney Mark Mamantov, author of the new statute, says the law as amended “provides a legal framework for regionalized economic development that more directly allows for the sharing of benefits,” adding that “we tried to make clear that the tax revenue would go to the board, and that they all share in the tax benefit equally.”

Does this mark the advent of the erasure of jurisdictional lines in Tennessee? The answer appears to be a resounding “perhaps.” Sharing costs and benefits does indeed eliminate “ownership” of such a deal, diluting the age-old rub with regionalism. But will cooperation between counties flourish under the amended law?

Bryan Daniels, executive vice president with the Blount Partnership, allows for a bit of crowing when he says there’s always been a lot of “lip service” about forming such regional partnerships statewide in the past—but never any follow through. “This project was five years in the making,” Daniels says. “Who else could pull off a tech park like this?”

Now that Knox County has led the way, the state’s business community can certainly hope to see more counties crossing the line in the name of regionalism