The Roane State Building Is on Monday's Agenda. Here's the Background.

October 17, 2026

Monday evening, October 19, the Commission workshop takes up a discussion of the Roane State / Career Center building in Lenoir City, placed on the agenda by Commissioner Van Shaver. Earlier that same day, the Budget Committee returns to the building's HVAC problems — an item carried over from September.

If you have used the Lenoir City library, voted early, visited the veterans service office, or had a student take dual enrollment classes through Roane State, you have been inside this building. Here is the background I think residents should have before the discussion, because most of it is not in the meeting packet.

How the county came to own half a building

On June 28, 1999, the Commission voted 8–0 to adopt an interlocal agreement with the City of Lenoir City. The fire that destroyed the 100 block of West Broadway that March had cleared the ground, and the two governments agreed to build a roughly 20,000 square foot facility there housing a Roane State campus, a career center, a business development center and an expanded library.

Loudon County paid 60 percent. Lenoir City paid 40 percent. The two governments own the property and every improvement on it jointly. That agreement ran for twenty years and renewed automatically for another twenty. It is still in force.

The agreement already said who maintains it

This is the part I think has been lost. Section 7 of the 1999 agreement created a five-member board — two county appointees, two city appointees, and the president of Roane State or a designee — with administrative responsibility over the building. Section 8 required that board to meet at least once a year and prepare a budget for both the County Commission and the Lenoir City Council to adopt.

Section 5 directed that lease revenue from the building be distributed to the two governments quarterly, after maintenance and facility expenses were paid. Maintenance was supposed to come off the top, out of what the building earns. It was never meant to be a surprise appropriation.

Where that stands today

The county's current roster lists four members on a body called the Roane State Maintenance and Operations Advisory Committee — not the five-member board the agreement describes, and “advisory” rather than administrative. Residents who have attended its recent meetings report that a quorum was not reached.

And the county's adopted budget carries a single line for this building.

I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of thing that gets turned into an accusation and I do not think an accusation is warranted. I am not suggesting anyone acted improperly. I think a governance structure set up in 1999 gradually stopped operating, and because nobody was tracking it, the building ended up without a board producing a budget and without a budget line to repair anything. That is how a roof and an HVAC system become an emergency instead of a line item.

What I will be asking

Has the board been meeting? Who holds the seats? What has the building earned in lease revenue, and what has that revenue paid for? What does the HVAC work actually cost — the item was tabled in September awaiting further information, and it returns Monday without it. And which account is supposed to carry these expenses going forward?

One more thing worth stating plainly, because the subject has come up: under the 1999 agreement, selling this building is not something Loudon County can decide on its own. Section 9 requires a recommendation from the joint board, ratification by both the County Commission and the Lenoir City Council, repayment of grant funds where the grant agreements require it, and a 60/40 split of any proceeds. I am not aware of any proposal to sell it. I mention it only so that if it does come up, everyone is working from the same set of facts.

If you want to follow along

The Commission workshop is Monday, October 19, at 6:00 p.m. at the Courthouse Annex. There is a sign-up sheet on the podium for public comment. Budget Committee packets and minutes are now posted on the county website under the Budget Committee page, and the 2026 Debt Report is under Accounts and Budgets. Those documents are public, and they are worth reading.

This background came together because a resident took the time to dig the 1999 minutes out of the county archive and send them to me. That is how this is supposed to work, and I am grateful for it. I will post what comes out of Monday's discussion.

The June 28, 1999 minutes and Resolution 062899-A →

The Grocery Store Vote: What It Costs the County

October 12, 2026

On October 5 the Commission voted to delegate authority to the Loudon County Industrial Development Board to enter a ten-year lease with the developer of the proposed grocery and retail project in Tellico Village. I seconded the motion and I voted yes. It is the first arrangement of this kind Loudon County has seen, and reasonable people on this Commission landed in different places, so it deserves a fuller explanation than a roll call.

Strip out the acronyms and this is a ledger entry. Loudon County committed no money, abated no tax, took on no debt and accepted no risk. In exchange a parcel generating about $2,800 a year starts generating over $60,000 a year — permanently, not for ten years — and a $1.2 million fix to a dangerous state intersection gets built without a dollar of county or state money in it.

This is not a tax abatement. In the usual arrangement, a business deeds its property to an industrial development board and then pays the board less than its tax bill would have been. Here the opposite happens: more is paid in than the taxes due, the county collects the full amount owed, and only the excess above the tax bill goes toward the public infrastructure — the traffic signal and the widening of Poplar Ridge.

That is the whole reason for routing it this way. Under state law, money moved through an industrial development board has to go to public infrastructure, and that requirement is what puts the cost of the road work on the company rather than on the developer. It is the grocery chain carrying the public portion of this project, not the people building it and not the county. The lease itself is with the developer — that was confirmed on the record — but the road money comes from the tenant.

One more thing worth knowing: the site was already zoned for commercial use in 1998 and that designation was approved by TVA, so the Commission was never voting on whether the store gets built.

The arguments against my vote are fair ones and I would rather you have them straight. We have asked a board that has not been active in years to hold a ten-year agreement. This structure will be cited by the next applicant who comes through the door. And Food Lion, which anchors the south end of the Village, never got an arrangement like this. My answer to the last one is that no one else proposed signalizing an intersection and widening a state road at their own expense — what the statute allows is tied to public infrastructure, not to a tenant, and that door is open to anyone who brings a seven-figure road project with them. I am following up in writing on the first.

There is a view that the county should have stayed out of this entirely — that the thriftier vote was no. I think the arithmetic runs the other way, and it is worth setting out on its own: why a yes vote was the cheaper one for taxpayers →

Commissioner Van Shaver voted no and has published his own account of the meeting. Read it alongside mine.

Commissioner Shaver's write-up →