The big story of the last two decades in Knox County’s western 6th District has been growth.

Voting patterns in the largely suburban district lean strongly Republican.

As the formerly rural Hardin Valley area exploded, new developments also took root in Karns and the surrounding communities. The resulting population increase has crowded local roads and schools, turning a once bucolic corner of the county into a rush-hour nightmare.

The district is represented on County Commission by Terry Hill, a Republican who currently serves as Commission chair. She was elected to school board twice in the district before running for Commission in 2020 — a race in which she was unopposed.

Hill is seeking a second term this year, but her path has not been quite so clear. In a Republican primary in March, she easily fended off a challenge from local community advocate Julie McBee-Fritts, who raised concerns about the ongoing growth.

In the Aug. 1 county general election, Hill faces Democrat Daniel Greene, a first-time candidate with a banking background who is calling for more honest discussion of the county’s financial situation.

The district is largely suburban, although it reaches in to a few northwestern city neighborhoods. It leans strongly Republican — in the most recent contested election there, in 2022, Republican school board member Betsy Henderson defeated her Democratic opponent by a 60-40 percent margin. 

Hill also has a sizable fundraising edge. As of the end of March, she had raised $26,250 — which, combined with funds remaining from prior campaigns, gave her $43,148 on hand. Greene had raised $3,101 and had $2,401 on hand.

Here’s a look at the two contenders. (The profile of Hill has been updated from our primary coverage.)

Daniel Greene

Greene, who just turned 36, said his run for office was partly fueled by a sense of false promises. A resident of Hardin Valley, he believes that the county failed to deliver on infrastructure that was supposed to accompany the area’s rapid growth.

“I moved to Hardin Valley from the city in about 2018, 2019, and the Realtors out here kind of presented it as, ‘It’s a growing place with a lot of infrastructure coming. There's gonna be parks, there’s gonna be roads, they're gonna do this, they're gonna do that,’” Greene said. 

That’s not quite how it has panned out.

West Knox County is Greene’s native turf. He grew up off Ebenezer Road in the Bluegrass area, graduating from Bearden High School in 2007. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve to help pay his way through college.

After attending Pellissippi State Community College, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Tusculum University. He entered a workforce that was still recovering from the Great Recession and initially found part-time employment with the ORNL Federal Credit Union. He worked his way into a full-time position and step by step into management.

He said he enjoys working at a nonprofit credit union — “It’s not about the shareholders, it’s about the members and the community that’s around us, trying to enrich their lives, help them get their first home loan, car loans, help them manage their books, teach them personal finances.” 

And he likes living in Hardin Valley, with his wife and young child. But it has its frustrations, too, many of them the result of residential development that far outpaced any county infrastructure.

“I saw how poorly things were developing and false promises and just kind of felt misled, to an extent,” Greene said. 

As he made inquiries about the situation, he found a group of local residents already deeply engaged in the issues — Hardin Valley Planning Advocates, the organization co-founded by Kim Frazier, who was elected to County Commission in 2022.

Greene became chair of the group after Frazier’s departure for public office. He led its engagement with the Advance Knox planning update, which was initiated by County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, before stepping down ahead of his own political campaign.

Although he doesn’t think the updated growth and land use plans that have come out of Advance Knox are perfect, he said they mark significant steps toward more balanced development in the county’s unincorporated areas.

“I think it's going to help condense housing down and also allow us to preserve specific areas that we can,” Greene said. “I think it’s going to be a great start, and even as a Democrat I applaud Mayor Jacobs for this. It was a much needed thing.”

He said the key for implementing the plan will be for both Planning Commission and County Commission to respect it, rather than constantly revising it on a case-by-case basis. One change he would like to see would be for members of County Commission and City Council to have some input into appointments on the Planning Commission. Currently, they are appointed by the county and city mayors, and on the county side especially they often tilt toward people involved in development and real estate.

“I don’t like that we have Realtors, I don’t like that it’s full of people who own these building companies,” Greene said. “That’s not OK. I think we need to restructure Planning Commission in some fashion, I think that will allow us to take a more balanced approach.”

He is also concerned about the county’s revenue and debt picture. In passing this year’s tight county budget, several current commissioners talked about the need to rethink revenue sources in the near future.

“My biggest concern now and something that’s part of my platform is fixing what I call the broken Knox County approach,” Greene said. “We have to figure out how to get in more revenue to actually fix our roads, put in better infrastructure. We really have to start looking at that, because the future of Knox County financially is very bleak.”

He noted that the county hasn’t raised property taxes in 25 years, and that most of the growth over that time in the property tax base has been eaten up by inflation, while needs and demands have increased across the county.

At the same time, Greene said he was concerned about the impact of any property tax increase coming off of a period of high inflation that many people’s salaries have not kept pace with. He said his background in banking has prepared him to wrestle with the county’s looming economic decisions.

“We need somebody in this role who understands macro and micro economics, that is going to help manage what this is going to look like in the future,” he said. “Because honestly, no matter how you look at it, in about five years Knox Countians are going to be paying more. How that's going to look is going to depend on who we elect now on County Commission.”

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. 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.

Meanwhile, the Advance Knox planning process led to the adoption of updated growth and land use plans this spring, both of which Hill supported. (Those plans were also supported by local homebuilders and developers, and Hill recently earned the endorsement of the East Tennessee Realtors.)

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, and then last year as chair.

Her 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.

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.”