Rejected
Norris City Council turns down RV park rezoning, but will reconsider Aug. 12
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But that’s not the end of it.
Mayor Chris Mitchell asked the council to schedule a public hearing on the rezoning request for 5:30 p.m. Aug. 12, just prior to the next regular council meeting at 6 p.m., and to vote a second time on the proposed ordinance.
This was an unusual move, because normally a proposed ordinance is dead if the council votes it down on first reading.
Usually, a public hearing is scheduled only when an ordinance passes on first reading, and the hearing normally comes before the proposed ordinance is on the council agenda for second and final reading.
In this case, the mayor said he wanted to schedule the public hearing to allow church representatives extra time to appear before the council to state their case in favor of the ordinance, which would rezone a 3.3-acre parcel of the church’s 17.6-acre Norris campus to C2, a general commercial zone. RV parks and trailer parks are permitted in such zones, but are not currently allowed in the P1 professional/civic zone that covers the church property now.
The second first-reading would also allow the two absent council members, Chuck Nicholson and Bill Grieve to cast their votes on the issue.
On Monday night, Mitchell and council members Loretta Painter and Will Grinder voted down the rezoning ordinance, on a motion by Painter that was seconded by Grinder.
Painter said she would not be able to attend the Aug. 12 hearing and meeting, but presumably Nicholson and Grieve would be in attendance.
Nobody from the church showed up to support the proposed rezoning at Monday night’s meeting. The church’s lawyer, Daniel Sanders of Knoxville, said during the July 1 Planning Commission meeting that neither that meeting nor the July 8 council meeting was convenient for church representatives to attend.
The city, however, has been battling the church for more than five years over the RV park, which Covenant Life built and opened in 2019 without first obtaining the proper zoning and building permits, and operated it illegally until it was shut down in May on the order of U.S. District Judge Charles E. Atchley Jr. in Knoxville.
The Planning Commission voted 7-0 against the rezoning, citing documents from 1937 and 1959 in which the Tennessee Valley Authority required that the land along Norris Freeway from Andersonville Highway to beyond Norris Dam be preserved as a greenway, and not be used for commercial purposes.
Mitchell, who supplied the Planning Commission with the documents, led the discussion at the Planning Commission and again during Monday night’s council meeting, in which he again cited protection of the Norris Freeway greenway as the reason the church’s rezoning should be denied.
“The city and TVA have valued this as a special area,” Mitchell said before the vote on the rezoning request at the Planning Commission, adding that the “intent is to keep the area beautiful.”
Also cited during the Planning Commission discussion was the recently created Norris Freeway Scenic Byway, part of a state/federal program that gives special recognition and protection to certain designated scenic routes from development and commercialization across the United States.
The rezoning request from the church came early June after the church had cleared the last of the RV trailers from the 16-space pull-though campsites by May 31, as required by the federal court order issued May 1.
The church, at the northwest corner of Andersonville Highway and Norris Freeway (U.S. 441), had been operating the Solid Rock RV Park, which it later renamed the Solid Rock Retreat, without required city zoning and approvals since 2019 before being shut down by the court order.
It was only after that order was issued that the church decided to follow the city’s regulations, and asked Norris to rezone the site to allow for the campground.
The church’s request would have resulted in rezoning of the area carved out earlier for the RV park on the church’s property along Andersonville Highway and Norris Freeway.
Although the church’s attorney, Sanders, acknowledged that the RV park initially charged campers for staying on the site, he said that after the city made an issue of that, the church began accepting donations from campers, rather than directly charging them overnight fees.
He told the Planning Commission, however, that the church might go back to operating the campground as a commercial enterprise if the rezoning is approved. But the church would also collect hotel/motel taxes that would be turned over to the city, he noted.
While it was operating commercially, the church charged campers $800 a month for an RV site, and advertised the park on its own website, where people could reserve a space and pay for it online.
Many of the park’s users had been living in their trailers on the site for more than a year, leading some city officials to characterize the enterprise as a trailer park rather than a conventional RV park, which normally serves only short-term renters (30 days or less).
Even if the City Council subsequently overrules the Planning Commission and grants the rezoning – which is not expected to happen on Aug. 12, either – the church would then be required to submit an engineered site plan to the Planning Commission to obtain building permits, a prerequisite to getting a certificate of occupancy to allow the RV park to operate.
The RV park site is accessible by entry from Andersonville Highway via Sycamore Place, which runs up to the church from that highway, or from Norris Freeway/U.S. 441 across from Cross Pike Road.
A site plan filed with the rezoning application included a satellite photo that outlined the 3.3-acre parcel, and also showed the RV park already in operation with 15 travel trailers parked in the 16 spaces that were constructed in 2018-19. The sites included water, sewer and electrical hookups, along with picnic tables for each.