Town of Greeneville Planning Administrator Randy Davenport is seeking answers from TDOT for questions brought up during the morning meeting of the Greeneville Regional Planning Commission.
While TDOT is allowed to sell frontage to property owners, not knowing who owns such property in advance it’s believed could affect the towns’ ability to make improvements to help with traffic flow.
Davenport was awaiting a response from TDOT to a message he sent to the regional office requesting clarification on their procedures.
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Davenport comments to the Commission
Well, if you don’t mind, I like to bring up something that I just discovered the other day. TDOT, you’re probably aware of this, has a program where they can sell what they refer to as “excess right of way.” If there’s an area where when they originally bought the right of way to build a bypass, they bought a right of way approximately 340 feet wide. Obviously, you, we talked about how it would be great to have a frontage road on both sides, and we could eliminate a lot of those entrances. But what I discovered, and actually it’s in an approval, you’re going to see today, apparently TDOT, unbeknownst to us, is going ahead and selling “excess right of way” to these property owners and never informing us that that has happened. Because one of the approvals you’re going to see today is a lot further west of this site on the same side of the highway, and I got to looking at, you know, what are they proposing, and they gave a reference to a deed and approximately a year ago, the Department of Transportation actually sold a portion of land to this landowner, and we were never informed that this action had taken place and did not discover it until I looked at the deed, and in fact, it was a deed from the Department of Transportation to a private owner. So that may be something in the future. I don’t know what TODT’s policy is as far as informing the local municipality for this situation arises, but certainly there are other lots along that side of 11-E, where the same situation has happened. TDOT has sold “excess right of way” without consulting with the town or without informing the town, that they’re selling these properties. So that’s something we need to try to understand from the Department of Transportation standpoint is what is their policy on informing the local municipality when those types of things happen?
Then the town, if the town ever wanted to do it as opposed to TDOT perhaps donating that property to the town, then the town has to go back in and we would be responsible for buying the right of way back from the property owners. So there’s some communication lines there that need to be explored of why they’re doing these things and what their policy is on informing the town when they’re planning on doing something like this. Otherwise, we really have no knowledge of that happening.
I think it’s just based on when the property owner approaches them. To my knowledge, because we mayor probably refer to this, you know, when we met with TDOT back several months ago and brought this whole idea of a perhaps frontage roads along to my knowledge, they never mentioned the fact that we’ve already sold some of this right away. You know, so the left hand and the right hand don’t always know what’s going on in TDOT.
The first step that needs to be taken is for us as the town planning department, is to get a clear understanding from the Department of Transportation exactly what is their policy. I mean, I know I have dealt in my past career with this same situation. A perfect example of this is where Aubrey’s restaurant is located and Consumer Credit Union. If you recall, at one time that was always a very steep slope across there. And with Mr. Kent Bewley decided to develop that property, he went to TDOT and he was able to purchase a lot of right of way because they bought right of way to the top of that cut slope. So there is a process for doing this. We actually went through this process not long ago with the fire station that’s on the bypass. Now, it was not right of way that came out closer to the road. It had been planned for a future street to go, and the state had bought right away for 11-E. That street never got built. We discovered that the parking lot for that fire station was actually on TDOT right of way. So again, Chief Shipley worked with TDOT and they were able to purchase that excess right away from them.
And as I said, so it’s not anything that’s not common. There is a procedure to do this. It’s just that for whatever reason, as the town, we’re not being informed and when these sales are being made. So that’s the first step is to try and understand for them, do you go about advising the town that you’re getting ready to sell some of your right of way?
And as far as how those other things happened, again those facilities have probably been there 25, 30 years. I don’t know what happened. I mean, technically they should not have been allowed to do that, but they were. It has been legally sold. We still have the option to purchase any excess right away that we would like to that’s out there now. Some purchases one of other buildings and they have a change in use, where they have to have more parking? The parking is on the right of way is not going to be able to count unless they have some kind of a lease agreeable TDOT, that would a major problem. And that’s something we would have to look at it each individual parcel it with that situation ever came up, we would have to say, well, do you realize that you legally do not own this parking and we cannot count it towards your required parking numbers because you don’t own it. And unfortunately, that situation exists and we have had individuals approach us in the past that want to expand their parking lots, and we have to say, no, because you’re going to expand it on TDOT right of way that you do not own.
Q- So we have denied just before it ever came to you all, even the request to expand some of these parking lots in this section of town. In the future, we need to add another to that highway. This makes it impossible.
Randy – It makes it expensive. That’s better if that way if we ever wanted to do that. If we if we were forced to purchase the right of way back from. Well, that would be expensive. We need to find out what their policy is.
