City didn't cause Main Street congestion

But I had to laugh at some of the comments I heard and read during the recent city election campaign. Apparently, some people think the city government has some sort of secret subterranean lair, deep underground, that tells businesses where they need to locate. Some people seem to think that the city is telling businesses to open on North Main Street rather than the other way around.

It is true that planning and zoning can have some impact on where commercial zones develop. When something is zoned residential, or (in the county's case) agricultural, planners can decide whether or not to grant rezonings when they are requested by potential business owners. That was the process at work Tuesday night when a business owner asked the county commission to rezone some property so that he could move his business. Neighbors objected, and the county commission refused to grant the rezoning.

But, within the Shelbyville city limits, it's clear that North Main Street is a commercial district. And when city residents demand more shopping and dining options, officials must be careful about putting too many restrictions on the process. In the 1970s, the city blocked a new mall from opening in Shelbyville. It went to Tullahoma instead and became the anchor of a busy shopping district. Tullahoma has had a retailing edge on Shelbyville ever since.

The reason that businesses are locating on North Main Street is because the county's population center is moving northward. There are still plenty of people, and growth, in the city and elsewhere, but the northern end of the county is growing especially fast, which makes North Main Street the city's front door for many county residents. Retailers want to position themselves to serve both city customers and northern county customers. Many of your large retail and dining chains do considerable research into where they want to locate. They study the traffic count maps that are available from the state, as well as census population figures, and they look for specific criteria. They don't want to be on a quiet side street; they want to be where the traffic is.

Yes, we have vacant and abandoned retail space within which needs to be developed, and there are local developers working to do just that. But if Mega-Lo-Mart (the fictional store on TV's "King of the Hill") wants to build on North Main Street, they're going to build on North Main Street -- or not at all. You can't blame the city government for it; in fact, you have to give the city credit for creating an environment in which new retailers want to locate here.

There's also the question of who has property for sale and how much they want for it. I've heard complaints about the new location for Bedford County Medical Center being too far out of town, but I'm guessing it would have been prohibitively expensive for BCMC to buy as much land as they needed in the center of town.

Clearly, the city and county have an important role in land use planning, just as the county demonstrated Tuesday night. But people who think the city could have -- or should have -- prevented the development of North Main Street are missing the point.

The city needs to look, and is looking, at ways to deal with the traffic on North Main Street. There are, I feel certain, ways to address the problem without putting the brakes on new development.

In the meantime, don't blame the city for the decisions made by private businessmen.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com .