If growth, development and infrastructure are the dominant themes in many county election campaigns this year, that goes double for the West Knox County 6th District.

Hill has won three elections in the district and has a sizable fundraising advantage.

The district stretches along the county’s northwestern border from Hardin Valley through Karns to Clinton Highway. And it has been ground zero for growth in the county for most of the past two decades.

The residential developments that have mushroomed throughout the area have put pressure on the county’s infrastructure, particularly roads and schools. And questions about how best to protect the quality of life of existing residents are at the top of the local agenda.

The district has been represented on County Commission since 2020 by Terry Hill, who is currently Commission chair and is seeking a second term. She has actually won three elections in the district, having been previously elected to school board in 2014 and 2018.

Hill, whose family has been politically engaged in the area for decades, ran for the seat without opposition in 2020. But she’s not so lucky this year. In the March 5 Republican primary, she faces a challenge from first-time candidate Julie McBee-Fritts, who is running primarily on those growth and development issues.

With the advantages of incumbency and name recognition, Hill has a significant fundraising edge. For the period from July 1, 2023, to Jan. 15, 2024, she reported $15,700 in contributions, which combined with prior donations gave her $39,073.94 in cash on hand for the campaign.

Her donors include familiar Republican names like former Trustee Ed Shouse, former County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, fellow county commissioners Larsen Jay and Kim Frazier, and developers Tim Hill and Tim Graham.

McBee-Fritts, meanwhile, reported $2,000 in contributions, with only $100 in cash on hand.

The winner of the primary will face Democrat Daniel Greene in the Aug. 1 county general election.

We will take a deeper look at Greene ahead of that election, but for now here’s an overview of the two GOP contenders.

Terry Hill

Hill, 73, grew up in a military family. Her father was a fighter pilot, and the family moved all over the world with him. Between kindergarten and 12th grade, she attended nine different schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Central Florida, and then “through a husband and a move” ended up doing her graduate work at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

She worked as a licensed clinical social worker with Knox County Schools for 30 years. She entered the system at a time when providing services beyond classroom instruction was relatively new.

“At the time, I was one of three (social workers) that they had in the system,” Hill said. “It makes me proud to say that I retired as lead consultant for a department at that time of about 28 social workers.”

After she retired, the shift into running for school board seemed natural — she was the third person in her immediate family to do it. Her husband, Steve Hill, served on the board in the 1980s, and her daughter, Cindy Buttry, from 2004-2012. Buttry’s husband, Steve Buttry, is a former state legislator and now a lobbyist.

Terry Hill was elected to the school board in 2014 and re-elected in 2018, serving as school board chair in her last year. She ran for County Commission in 2020 because of what she learned on the board.

“We called it ‘across the street,’” Hill said of the distance between the former Knox County Schools offices on Gay Street and the City County Building. “It didn't take me too long to figure out I needed to be across the street, because that's where the money decisions were made.”

County Commission sets the annual budget for all of county government, including the school system. It can’t dictate how the school board spends its money, but it controls how much local funding the district gets.

Hill took office in September 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as local conservative furor over public health restrictions was starting to boil over. Commission meetings were routinely packed with crowds protesting health mandates and yelling at commissioners.

Hill navigated a somewhat middle path through the pandemic. She was initially cautious about calls to dissolve the county’s Board of Health, which had enacted mask mandates in public places and closing times for bars and restaurants. But as months wore on and the issue became increasingly politicized, she voted with an 8-3 Commission majority to abolish the board. (The action was subsequently rendered superfluous by a state law that accomplished the same ends statewide.)

“It was a tough first year, it really was,” Hill said.

But once Commission returned to more or less normal functioning and there was time to think about larger issues, Hill said, “Two things were blatantly clear. The first was our inability to have a mindset on planning and growth and development, and (the second was) our issues with our Knox County Sheriff's Department and the difficulty they were having with retention because of their salary base.”

She is glad to say the county has made strides on both in the subsequent years. The Advance Knox planning process is moving toward important votes in the coming months, with updates to the county’s growth, land use and transportation plans.

“Overall, I feel very positive about the plan,” Hill said. “I do know that we have some areas where some of our folks are not so happy. I still certainly would be open to more tweaking, if that's what it took to get this through.”

And last year, Commission approved a record salary increase for the Sheriff’s Office, pushing starting pay for deputies and corrections officers above $50,000 a year.

In 2022, after elections brought several new faces and a first-ever female majority to Commission, Hill joined with the other five women on the body to elect Commissioner Courtney Durrett as its first woman chairperson. Hill was elected vice chair.

Durrett is one of just two Democrats on Commission, and the Republican women commissioners who voted for her faced a few weeks of grumbling and threats of reprisal from local and state party leaders.

Hill said she had been approached about being chair but didn’t have time to take it on that year. So she agreed to support Durrett and serve as vice chair. She then ran unopposed for chair in 2023. 

Of her support of Durrett, she noted that the chair’s vote doesn’t count any more than a vote from any other commissioner. It is a primarily organizational role. 

“I had hoped that it would demonstrate that it is in fact possible that we can have a cohesive commission that can work together regardless of party affiliation,” she said. “And overall I think we’ve been pretty successful about that.”

Priorities for a second term include continued focus on infrastructure to serve the booming Northwest county area, including the often-congested stretch of Emory Road that runs across the entire 6th District. Plans for improvements to that highway are ready to go but await state action, Hill said.

She is hopeful about development proposed for the area around the Watt Road exit from Interstate 40, right at the border with Loudon County. An initial residential subdivision is supposed to be joined by sports fields, hotels and restaurants. Unlike most of Hill’s district, it is not in a heavily populated area.

“A beauty of all that is that is at the edge of our county, so it really directly impacts very few people, as far as residents,” Hill said.

As far as the growth tensions that simmer throughout the district, Hill said that continued investment in infrastructure is crucial. She said the county has a backlog of projects that are playing catch-up where growth has occurred. She was cautious about options for paying to speed up that work.

“I would never say never to a property tax increase,” Hill said. “But I will tell you it would have to really be proven to me that we are just not getting it and not meeting the needs specifically that we have, especially in District 6.”

Julie McBee-Fritts

For McBee-Fritts, 54, the consequences of the exploding growth in the 6th District take on particularly personal forms.

Her husband’s family, which has been in the Karns area since before it was called that, has ancestors buried in a small country cemetery in what has been rural land along Emory Road. But that land is now being developed, as part of the mega-sized Belltown project.

The developers have promised to preserve the cemetery — and access to it — but McBee-Frits is skeptical.

“As of right now, I am not happy with what happened to that cemetery,” she said.

To her, it is one more instance of developers looking to cash in on valuable land without regard to their impact on everyone and everything around them.

“Our County Commission and our officials that sit there, they are put into that office by the people that reside in this county and in the city,” McBee-Fritts said. “They campaign and they want our votes. But then when it comes time to decide on something, it's like the residents and the constituents that voted for them, they don’t hear it.”

Her own family has roots in the area too, going back to a farm 85 years ago. Both of her parents graduated from Karns High School, as did she in 1987. 

“I had a great childhood,” she said. “Growing up on a farm with livestock, we had a smokehouse — which most people don't have anymore — and then we had vegetables and all the fruits that got sold at market.”

McBee-Fritts earned a registered nurse degree from East Tennessee State University and then moved to Nashville for a few years before returning to Knox County. Her nursing career was cut short in 2010 by a car wreck that severely injured her back and caused permanent nerve damage. She can move about, but she can’t do the kind of physical work required of nurses.

“It has been a struggle since that time, but I'm fortunate that I can get up and move around,” she said. “Some days are a little bit rough, but I am grateful it wasn’t more traumatic than that.”

Like many people who end up running for local office, her first exposure to the mechanics of government came through concerns about a particular project — in this case, a subdivision planned by developer Scott Davis.

“We live on a very small country road,” McBee-Fritts said. “People that grew up here and people that live here now, you knew where you could pass people, you knew where you couldn't. So we became concerned because of the safety issues.”

She and a group of neighbors made their case to the Planning Commission, which was considering the proposal. It ended up getting approved with a few conditions. McBee-Fritts found it dispiriting but educational.

“Many people don't understand the process,” she said of development and rezoning approvals. “I studied it. I went back and I looked at stuff, and I looked at documentation, and I looked at cases and all of that. So I thought, you know, I need to do this. I need to become involved in our communities.”

She has been, often attending Planning or Commission meetings. That included the meeting last month when the county’s Growth Policy Coordinating Committee recommended approval of County Mayor Glenn Jacobs’ proposed changes to the county growth plan.

McBee-Fritts was impressed by the crowds that turned out to the meetings, raising concerns about development in rural areas and further overwhelming local infrastructure. She was less impressed by the assembled local officials and representatives on the committee.

“I was really disappointed in that, because they didn’t listen to the constituents,” she said. “My thing is, I will not be a ‘Yes’ girl. And I’m not ever going to be that way. There will be things I know that I will vote yes on. There will be things that I will vote no on — because I just don't think it's best at that time for our communities, for the people that would vote me in to be their voice.”

Like Hill, she is cautious but not absolute about the possibility of a property tax increase to pay for county needs.

“Nobody wants a tax increase, but everybody wants the benefits of having that,” McBee-Fritts said. “I would not be greatly opposed to that. We would have to look at the information. We cannot make a quick decision on that.”