The Town Of Greeneville met with Maryville, Blount County Friday for a forum on future visioning in Greeneville and how to handle growth and development.
The City Council, many departments, and Greeneville leaders met with Maryville City Manager Greg McClain and President and CEO of the Blount County Partnership Bryan Daniels, with the hopes to learn from their experience and lessons. Maryville has faced challenges in terms of rapid growth, so they shared some data/facts/advice with attendees/all.
Both Greeneville and Maryville were incorporated in 1795. Tennessee is rated number 6 for net migration across the nation. TN is one of the top states that people are moving to the most including South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida.
Why do people want to live in Tennessee? Some reasons provided at the forum included:
Quality of life in Tennessee
Education
Southern Grace
Low Crime
Four Seasons
Maryville City Manager Greg McClain speaks on ‘Root Cause of Migration’
COVID impacts: Since Many are able to work from home now after the pandemic it seems as if where you live doesn’t really matter. Children are now more often home schooled, or either attend charter schools, cyber school, etc.
Stimulus Money: Trillions of dollars have been flooded in to the economy. More people now have the ability to start businesses and other opportunities that they might not have been able to do in the past.
Immigration politics: Policies are changing with the amount of people coming into the country.
High tax impacts: People are fleeing to low tax states.
AND Boomers are retiring.
‘What can we do to stop growth?’
Well let’s face it, you can’t really stop the growth. People are coming to the state and we can’t stop them. Maryville City Administrator Greg McClain said the decisions you make now have a big impact on the future and your children. So he and Blount County Partnership and CEO Bryan Daniels suggests embrace the growth. They added if you want to stop the growth you could just stop fixing schools and potholes, and stop investing in your state. But that’s not good for any of us.
They advised to not make policies based on how low or how high the population in your county or city is, those would make bad policies. Instead they suggested making policies based on where you know you’re going to be and to “look at the trim line.”
Blount County is the 18th fastest growing county in the state, according to the Maryville representatives. There are spikes in population in their city. One year it’s increased but then you see it drop again and they’ve noticed there’s a pattern.
With all the projects in Greeneville and the developments being spoke of there seems to be a lot of money spent and residents in the community may feel there isn’t much to show for it. Maryville representatives agree and say it was the same for Maryville, but they’ve overcome that. Now in Maryville people will say it seems like the city changed overnight and in a good way, but it didn’t happen over night according to the CEO and President at Blount County Partnership. He said it’s a long game. That’s what people should remember in Greeneville!
Vision for Greeneville in the Next 10-20 Years
When it comes to projects and change for the better, it’s a long game and you won’t see change overnight. Greeneville City Manager Todd Smith expressed the point of the vision forum was to discuss who do we want to be here in Greeneville and where do we want Greeneville to be in 10 or 20 years.
The second half of the forum focused on just that and all who attended the forum had a discussion on suggestions for the town, like getting rid of the city versus county mentality. That was discussed briefly when a resident stated they felt the city and the county should work together more.
More ideas brought up were public transportation in town and to make Greeneville more unique. To have more walk- ability and connectivity in town, more biking trails, and to have social economic balance. More career fairs and quests, community public forums, and more youth related activities like laser tag and an arcade.
Jeff Taylor, CEO and President at Greene County Partnership expressed many of the ideas people were sharing Greeneville already had and people aren’t utilizing it because they may not even know. The Partnership has been working hard on engaging with the community especially with tourism ideas they are currently working on that has plenty of activities for people in Greeneville to do.
You can’t be everything to everybody, so who do we want to be? Words shared from a resident that attended. Greeneville Mayor Cal Doty said we need to work together and suggested perhaps having 4 to 5 groups of committees formed to speak on these topics. Volunteers would help with the transition in town. Councilwoman Ginny Kidwell shared this forum was done as an opportunity to hear from the community and get fresh ideas. Now the first step is for people to step up and do the hard work.
