Knox County’s sprawling 9th District has a little bit of everything: dense, older urban neighborhoods just south of the Tennessee River, rolling rural vistas farther out with views of the Great Smoky Mountains, and new suburban subdivisions springing up in the areas in between.

Andy Fox and Barry Neal are vying for the Republican nomination to the open seat.

It covers all of South Knox County and to the east it reaches across the French Broad River to take in the entire Gov. John Sevier Highway corridor to Interstate 40.

Politically it has long voted Republican, although as its precincts within the City of Knoxville have turned more blue, the partisan margins have narrowed. Current County Commissioner Carson Dailey won his first term in 2016 by a 59-34 percent margin over Democrat James “Brandon” Hamilton (with a third-party candidate taking 7 percent), and ran unopposed in 2020.

But in the most recent partisan election in the district, a school board race in 2022, Republican incumbent Kristi Kristy beat Democrat Annabel Henley by just 261 votes, for a margin of 52-48 percent. Whether this year’s Commission contest will continue that trend won’t be clear until the Aug. 1 general election.

Meanwhile, two Republicans are facing off in the March 5 primary: attorney Andy Fox and University of Tennessee events planner Barry Neal. The seat is open because Dailey, a Republican, is term-limited after serving two terms. Dailey has endorsed Neal in the race.

Growth, development and housing costs are issues across the district, from the rapidly developing South Waterfront to neighborhoods near the popular Urban Wilderness areas to former farmland being turned into subdivisions farther out from the city center.

Fox, who has been active in conservative causes like gun rights and opposition to government mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, frames the issues in the campaign as a subset of broader political and cultural struggles. Neal, a leader in his local neighborhood association, talks enthusiastically about the Urban Wilderness and sees the issues mostly in terms of their local impact.

Whoever wins the primary will face Democrat Matthew Park, a local business technology executive, as well as independent candidate Stacey Smith.

Fox has a fundraising edge in the race, reporting $22,257 in contributions through Jan. 15, plus another $28,751 in loans. He had $33,385 on hand. Neal had raised $7,007 plus $10,000 in loans, and had $6,621 on hand. Park, meanwhile, is setting the stage for a competitive general election, reporting $17,828 in contributions.

We will profile Park and Smith ahead of the August election, but for now here’s a look at the two GOP contenders.

Andy Fox

Fox said that as he has knocked on doors throughout the district, the primacy of concerns about growth and infrastructure has been clear. He shares those concerns — although not only for the reasons typically cited by residents.

“I am unabashedly partisan, and I want Knox County to remain a Republican county,” Fox said in an interview. “In researching about this development issue, I found that there is a clear correlation between the density of population and how people tend to vote.”

In general, he said, as areas become more densely populated per square mile, they also tend to vote more Democratic. Aside from the practical considerations of new housing overwhelming local roads and schools, Fox also fears that increased density will lead to cultural and political shifts. He mentioned liberal prosecutors in other cities supported by the financier and philanthropist George Soros.

Fox acknowledged that the reasons for more liberal politics in more densely populated areas are complex. But, he said, “If you avoid the correlation, you don’t have to worry about the causation.” That’s one reason he favors keeping new development to just a few units per acre.

That reading of big-picture ideological questions onto the landscape of local politics is key to what Fox wants to bring to County Commission. He was dismayed by what he saw as Commission’s haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when he thought the body gave in too easily to state and local public health mandates for business closings and mask wearing.

“I want to be a voice on Commission, because I think there may be additional existential challenges,” Fox said. “And I felt like the County Commission at the time did not have the worldview foundation to address these issues.”

Fox has lived in Knox County since 1979, when he arrived with his parents as a sixth-grader. (His father, Bill Fox, is an emeritus professor of economics at UT and was the longtime director of the university’s Center for Business and Economic Research.) He graduated from Bearden High School and then from UT with a degree in political science.

After a few years working for the state government in Nashville, he returned to Knoxville and earned his law degree at the UT College of Law. He has been in private practice for nearly three decades, working in family law, contracts and other civil areas. He and his wife have three grown children and are parishioners at Lonsdale Community Church.

Fox said he has been civically and politically active from a young age. He remembers voting for Gerald Ford in a third-grade classroom election in 1976, and in college he had an internship with the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. 

As an attorney, he has been trained by and provided volunteer legal services to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a leading litigator for cultural conservative causes. The group is strongly anti-abortion and has fought vehemently against LGBTQ rights. (The gay rights organization Human Rights Campaign calls ADF “one of the biggest threats to LGBTQ+ equality.”)

He has also volunteered with the similarly minded Thomas More Society, and as a specialist in 2nd Amendment rights issues he sits on the advisory council for the Tennessee Firearms Association.

He has been involved in litigation against Knox County Schools (for denying a group raising alarms about Islamic Sharia law the right to hold a meeting on school property); the City of Knoxville (for prohibiting guns at the Tennessee Valley Fair); and both Knox County and the state of Tennessee over pandemic restrictions.

Most of those cases were settled without going to trial, but Fox said he believes his interventions often affected the outcomes.

Fox has been endorsed by Knox County Conservative Republicans, a group affiliated with local conservative consultant Erik Wiatr’s Knox Liberty Organization. Knox Liberty Organization has contributed to Fox’s campaign, and Fox has paid $5,000 for campaign services to Wiatr’s Wind Consulting firm. (The endorsements by KCCR are voted on by its members.)

Fox’s donors include fellow anti-mandate activists from the pandemic battles (Kevin Hill, Debi Stafford, 1st District Commission candidate Justin Hirst), developers (Tim Graham, Victor Jernigan), traditional Republican donors like Pete Claussen and Patricia Bible, and others including former South Knoxville City Councilman Joe Hultquist.

On growth and development, Fox said he thinks the county needs to make sure there is infrastructure in place to support new building before it happens. He said South Knox County will be best served by maintaining low-density developments that won’t overburden its roads or landscape.

“We have new developments going up every day, we’ve got a big one out there on John Sevier Highway between Martin Mill (Pike) and Government Farm Road,” he said. “There's lots of development going on and the intent of the infrastructure being in place before you have all these new developments coming up, I don’t even hear any plans about dealing with it.”

Barry Neal

If Fox’s concerns revolve around worldviews, Neal’s are somewhat closer to home. He was born at the old Baptist Hospital on the south bank of the Tennessee River, grew up in the Colonial Village neighborhood and has lived in the South Haven neighborhood for the past 28 years.

He went to South Knox schools that don’t even exist anymore — the old Anderson Elementary and South-Young High, from which he graduated in 1977.

Neal is in his 34th year working as a program manager for UT’s Department of Conferences and Event Services. That means event planning and coordinating for the wide array of events that use campus facilities.

“We’ve helped to bring in tens of thousands of visitors to Knoxville and literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic impact,” he said. 

He has long been active in the community. He is a past president of a local Kiwanis club and has served several terms as treasurer of the South Haven Neighborhood Association. He was appointed to serve on the James White Parkway community task force and to Knox County’s Charter Review Committee in 2021. He is a longtime member of the Three Rivers Republican Club, which covers the 8th and 9th districts.

He sees serving on Commission as an extension of his community service.

“I’d like to continue to represent the hard-working folks of the 9th District,” Neal said. “I’d like to bring my experience, my East Tennessee values, homegrown values, to the County Commission.”

He said that overall South Knox County is on an upswing, with the development of the popular Urban Wilderness areas and new commercial investment along the South Waterfront.

“I think we’re in a good position,” he said. “When I first purchased my home here in South Haven, I remember folks asked me, ‘Why would you want to buy over there?’ Now, it’s one of the most sought-after areas in the city, because of its proximity to the Urban Wilderness.”

But he shares many of his neighbors' concerns about too much sprawl into the more rural reaches of the district. 

“I really don’t want to see much changes beyond Tipton Station Road and Stock Creek as it runs across the south part of the county,” Neal said. “And also from Hendron Chapel out to the county line on the other side of Chapman Highway.”

That said, he welcomes new investment along the district’s major corridors — Chapman, Gov. John Sevier Highway, Alcoa Highway — where he sees opportunity to accommodate growth without overwhelming the local roads.

“Those are areas that I do believe need to be looked at for development and further growth,” Neal said. “There’s going to be subdivisions, there’s going to be multifamily housing and that sort of thing. These are areas that can be serviced by the infrastructure that is in place. As well as transportation nodes that can be utilized that are currently there, and improvements that can be made with everything from bus routes to bike lanes to wider roads.”

He also supports plans to expand the capacity of Bonny Kate Elementary School to handle the influx of new residents. And he wants to try to address a specifically South Knoxville challenge of the narrow underpass at a railroad bridge on Maryville Pike, which is periodically blocked by trucks too large to clear it. Since that is a state route, it will take attention from the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Neal said he has been talking to state Sen. Becky Massey’s office about possibly changing the layout so there would be a bridge for cars over the railroad tracks rather than vice-versa.

Neal has been endorsed by both Dailey and his predecessor in the 9th District Commission seat, Mike Brown. Another former district commissioner, Paul Pinkston, is among his donors. Other contributors include developers Tim Graham and Victor Jernigan — who also donated to Fox — as well as developer Scott Davis, Crowne Plaza general manager Ken Knight, and Weigel’s founder and CEO Bill Weigel.

Overall, Neal said that he wants to continue to provide the level of attention to detail and community engagement that Dailey has brought to the Commission seat.

“I want to keep up the same kind of efforts and work that he has been doing,” Neal said.

CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to clarify the relationship between the Knox Liberty Organization and Knox County Conservative Republicans.