Madisonville protests 'low income' apartments | News

New housing in Madisonville dominated the town’s August meeting as a group has come out against construction on Willow Creek Drive.

Hall Investments is the company behind the construction and controversy over the building of “low income” apartments started when talk spread that Sweetwater, which has some of the apartments close to Interstate 75, was not happy with the end results.

Maurice Moser, a former principal and teacher and the current transportation director for the Monroe County School System, was the spokesperson for those opposing the apartments, telling the Madisonville Mayor and Aldermen that he wanted the town to do whatever it could to stop the project.

“Blount County turned him (Gary Hall) down,” Moser said. “Monroe County Mayor Tim Yates wants nothing to do with it, and now Sweetwater is regretting letting him build over there.”

Moser said apartments such as this can “wreck a school system” when outside families with children come into the area.

“Fight this problem, even if you lose,” Moser said. “Let them know Madisonville doesn’t want this kind of thing.”

James Lee, who sold the property to Hall, said he appreciated Moser’s comments, but he did not classify the housing as low income.

“The rent for these apartments will be $745 a month,” he said. “For a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, that’s not very cheap. It is also required that the people who live in them must have a job. It’s not Section 8 housing. There are 34 kids in the Sweetwater housing and it’s my understanding that only seven of them came from outside the Monroe County area, so they were already here (and didn’t expand the school system).”

Moser later disputed these numbers, saying he had been told there were 29 kids in the Sweetwater apartments and 11 of them had come from other areas.

Lee also said there are no tax dollars going toward the apartments.

“They (Hall Investments) receive a tax credit and that credit is used to make the mortgage payment,” Lee said. “It is affordable housing. Let people have good housing if they can afford it.”

Gary Hall spoke to the board, telling how in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan signed into law, with congressional approval, the Low Income Housing Act as it was called in order to get it passed in Congress.

Madisonville City Attorney Jerome Melson said the Tennessee Housing Development called it low-income housing.

“Are you saying it’s not?” he asked Hall.

“It had to be called low income housing to get passed 30 years ago,” Hall said.

Hall said in his apartments in Sweetwater there are nurses and school workers.

More from this section

“We run checks on everybody we rent to,” he said. “They are working people that didn’t come from outside the area. They were already in the school system. We just gave them better housing.”

Melson pointed out Hall’s company had filed paperwork in Nashville saying the project had been granted a sewer easement.

“This board has never heard anything about that,” Melson said. “At best, that’s a breach of ethics to not even give me the courtesy of a phone call about it.”

Hall apologized for that, saying his lawyers appeared to have jumped the gun.

“We’re not anywhere near ready to hook to the sewers,” he said.

In the end, the board took no action in what Moser wanted and it did not tell Hall he could not build. After the meeting, Hall said he had been working on the apartments for three months and had been to City Hall several times to fill out paperwork.

“I have no idea why this is coming up now,” he said.

In other business:

1. The board voted to install security cameras at Kefauver and Houston Parks. Parks Commissioner James Bledsoe said $3,000 worth of damage had been done to the parks in the past month in the form of broken toilets, picnic benches and a charcoal grill that had been thrown in the lake at Kefauver.
2. The board voted to lower the speed limit on Tellico Street from 35 mph to 25 mph from Park Street to Edgewood.