TN: Summertime and the Livin’ Ain’t Easy!

[womenagainstregistry.org – 6/6/18]

Knoxville, Tennessee. The South. Home of plantation porches and sweet tea.

Land of greenways, rivers, lakes, mountains, parks and bike trails.

Summertime and there’s plenty of outdoor activities, fishing, hiking, biking, kayaking and swimming to name a few.

Your city and county tax dollars are at work to help maintain all of these wonderful avenues of adventure and sport, but as a registrant, you are excluded from taking advantage of many of these activities. Your almighty tax dollars aren’t working for you at all.

The city of Knoxville is approximately 104 sq. miles, Knox County is 526 sq. miles. There are more than 100 miles of greenway trails in Knoxville! Yes, that’s 100 miles of walking and biking trails that part of a registrant’s tax dollars are used to maintain, but that registrants can’t access because “greenways” as these trails are called, are off limits to registrants.

There are 88 parks and 45 greenways that wind throughout Knoxville If you study the registry zoning map, registrants are excluded from living or working in much of this urban city because there are hiking and biking paths or small green areas designated as “parks” throughout much of the town.

But this is not exclusive to Knoxville.  Many towns across the country seem to be adding more bike paths and tiny parks throughout communities. Knoxville is currently in the planning stages to add another 4 miles of paved trails to their greenway system. The term “park” is now being used to designate anything from a postage stamp size piece of green lawn in the middle of the town square to the mountainous terrain of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

In Tennessee, there are many parks that include marinas for boat launching.  Because the marina is technically within a park, registrants can’t launch their boats or even board someone else’s boat at the marina because they’d have to be “inside the park limits” to do so, and parks are “off-limits.”

We all love parks, waterways, bikepaths. Especially in the summer.

What ‘we’ don’t love is the exclusion of certain members of our society from those places, certain taxpaying members, like registrants.  

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Great article. The times they are a changing’. I love the line, “We are not happy that certain members of our community are excluded from enjoying our beautiful parks.”

I posted this in the post on WAR website.
“What I want to know is why no one is challenging their tax bills based in exclusion. If your taxes go to maintain these areas then you should have access or a tax rebate based on the fact that you are barred from them. Just my thought.”

Any thoughts

Something very significant that is over looked with these bike paths in urban areas is where does the funding come from? Well I researched the source of these funds for paved bike paths. They come from the federal department of transportation. Grants are given to states and municipalities apply for the funds.
The bike paths are really public road ways. Nobody can be banned from public roadways per SCOTUS.
In my community the bike paths are parts of their long range transportation plan. A few of the bike paths run parallel to major highways and are with in the public right of way. These bike paths (public roads way) are so numerous it causes banishment.
Also having scrutinized the child safety zone map in my city it is apparent city officials have misrepresented what a park is. For example they labeled a retention pond as a public park, or private subdivision green space as a public park.