presstalk
• This is directed to the individual who on Saturday night, Aug. 6, decided to have a fireworks show at 12:30 in the morning. He/she woke up half of West Knoxville. Come on, be a good neighbor, quit being a jerk.
• Responding to the letter to the editor last week [Aug. 4] defending the Farragut Business Alliance, I have no doubt the FBA lobbied Costco to come to Farragut. So did prominent developers in West Knox County and Farragut 10 years ago, long before the FBA even existed. To take credit for something you didn’t do is just “throwing a blanket over a winning horse.” The FBA voted for the Smith Road apartments, the FBA voted for $60,000 for the Town’s new branding with the nonsense motto “Live Closer. Go Further.,” and the idiotic new logo of a green tree in the shape of a lowercase letter F. And most egregiously, the FBA voted to ask for $600,000 of Town money to fund Farragut Business Alliance to take over Town responsibility for marketing. It is past time for FBA to be self-funding. No more Town money for this group.
• I have to take issue with the letter writer in the Aug. 4 edition. The writer begins by proclaiming the hard work Farragut Business Alliance did in bringing Costco, a big box store, to our Town and then closes the letter admonishing those who patronize the big box stores instead of, in this case, her small business. This is like speaking out of both sides of your mouth, you can’t have it both ways.
• Google is an amazing thing. With a simple search you can find all the articles written in farragutpress about such things as the forming of Farragut Business Alliance and the opening of Costco. Going back and reading the FBA formative stories details its initial meetings, its formative meetings and even its hiring of a director. The director and funding came about a year before the opening of Costco, which the News Sentinel reported as opening on Nov. 9, 2012. The FBA was hardly organized when it hired its director in October 2011. For the letter writer to claim that FBA “heavily” recruited Costco is fantasy at its best since the organization seemed hardly able to recruit members to its meetings. I believe more of the credit for Costco coming to Town was the Schaad family, who owned the property and closed the deal. According to farragutpress, Costco announced coming to Farragut in May 2011. How and when FBA “heavily” recruited Costco is a mystery.
