This year’s County Commission contest in the 9th District has created a political landscape as distinctive and unpredictable as the hills and winding roads that dominate the terrain south of the Tennessee River.

The traditionally Republican district has become more Democratic closer to the river.

The district covers all of South Knox County, from old industrial city neighborhoods like Vestal to the rural reaches of Bonny Kate and Kimberlin Heights. It encompasses the exploding apartment construction along the South Waterfront, the trails and quarries of the Urban Wilderness, and the new subdivisions sprouting where farmland once stood along Gov. John Sevier Highway.

It has long been a GOP-dominated district, currently represented on Commission by Republican incumbent Carson Dailey. But its more urban precincts have been trending increasingly Democratic. In 2022, incumbent Republican school board member Kristi Kristy won reelection by fewer than 300 votes, giving her a 52-48 percent margin over a Democratic challenger.

A somewhat unlikely trio of candidates is on the Aug. 1 ballot for the Commission seat, making it one of the most interesting local races of the election. 

Republican Andy Fox, a conservative activist attorney, easily defeated neighborhood advocate Barry Neal in the March primary, despite Dailey’s endorsement of Neal. Fox is part of a wave of hard-right candidates who have emerged for local offices in recent years, and like many of them is working with conservative campaign consultant Erik Wiatr. In his campaign, he has emphasized national culture war issues as much as local concerns.

Democratic candidate Matthew Park is an information technology consultant and president of the Island Home Park Neighborhood Association, a champion of the Urban Wilderness and an advocate for better county services in the district. He would also be county government’s first openly gay elected official.

And then there’s independent candidate Stacey Bryan Smith, a devout Christian and longtime Republican who has become disillusioned with major political parties. He advocates for better environmental stewardship of the district’s natural beauty and resources.

Smith’s presence in the race sufficiently alarmed some Fox supporters into filing a complaint attacking the validity of his nominating petition, in an effort to have him removed from the ballot. That failed, with the Knox County Election Commission rejecting it for lack of evidence, and in the process angered and energized Smith and his supporters.

How all of that plays out among district voters is unpredictable. The election could give Commission one of its most ideologically strident voices ever, it could flip a long-red district into blue territory, or it could validate Smith’s earnest, low-budget, word-of-mouth campaign.

Park and Fox have both raised hefty amounts of money for a Commission race, but Park had more available as of the end of March. 

Park reported $35,455 in contributions through March 31, with donors including Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon, former Mayor Madline Rogero (who lives in South Knoxville), Vice Mayor Tommy Smith (who also lives in Island Home), school board member Katherine Bike and City Council member Debbie Helsley. He had $13,653 on hand.

Fox raised $30,849 from Last July through March, and had $7,281 on hand. His contributors include fellow anti-mandate activists from the COVID pandemic battles (Kevin Hill, Debi Stafford, 1st District Commission candidate Justin Hirst), developers (Tim Graham, Tim Hill, Victor Jernigan), traditional Republican donors like Pete Claussen and Patricia Bible, and others including former South Knoxville City Councilman Joe Hultquist.

Smith hasn’t raised money from any contributors, with his only funding coming from $750 he loaned his campaign. He was delinquent in reporting that contribution, but election officials say his forms have been corrected. Smith, a first-time candidate, said he wasn’t aware he had to report it.

Here’s a look at all three contenders. (Fox’s profile has been updated from our primary coverage.)

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.)

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.”

He attended last month’s Planning Commission meeting to object to proposed new developments in the district, accusing the commission of not giving a fair hearing to residents’ concerns.

Matthew Park

Park cites several reasons for running for office, but the one that stands out has to do with his own time working on local ambulances as an emergency medical technician.

He watched last year’s process of awarding a new county ambulance contract closely, and he was disappointed by what he saw — and didn’t see.

“I was an employee of Rural Metro, before it was AMR,” Park said, referring to the company that was selected for the contract. “I was paying close attention, and the thing that I was always waiting for some county commissioner to ask was, ‘What do we want this to be? What’s the goal that we’re shooting for?’”

That’s why he has emergency response services at the top of his agenda for county government. When he is out knocking on doors, ambulance response time is the first issue he brings up. He says it resonates. 

“The conversation I want to drive on County Commission is, why can't Knox County have the best ambulance system in the country?” he said. “What is stopping us? It’s probably not which contractor we choose, although there are differences. It’s probably more, what are we willing to invest?”

Park grew up on a small family farm in Benton, Tenn., “literally right on the Ocoee River.” He went to school for EMT certification at Roane State Community College. He worked for Rural Metro and then became a full-time staff member at Camp Wesley Woods, the Methodist retreat in Townsend. Park was an outdoor educator, leading nature expeditions.

A longtime self-taught computer tinkerer, he decided to enroll in the computer science program at the University of Tennessee. He also started working in information technology consulting as a side job, which then became busy and lucrative enough that Park left UT and started his career.

While working with a private equity firm in New York, Park met the man who would become his husband. They eventually moved back to Tennessee.

Park now works in IT for Cirrus Aircraft, leading the customer experience technology team at the company that builds and sells personal airplanes. The job combines Park’s technology background with his passion for aviation. He is a licensed pilot, and has completed more than 3,000 skydives over the past 15 years.

Besides his neighborhood group involvement, Park serves as vice president of the bicycle-focused nonprofit Two Bikes and is active in helping local startups through programs at the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center.

He said running for office was an outgrowth of those various efforts and interests. He first ran for state Legislature in 2020, finishing second to Sam McKenzie in the Democratic primary for House District 15. 

This year’s campaign was prompted by concerns about the ambulance contract as well as community outrage about proposed developments in the Dry Hollow area off Chapman Highway near the county line.

“I think we're in transition as a county from one where your commissioners showed up and voted on things that they were presented, to having commissioners that are out in their district, moving their district towards, ‘Hey, what do we want this to look like?’” Park said. “Not just going and voting and calling it a day, but actual leadership.”

He supports the broad aims of the county’s new growth and land use plans, especially concentrating density closer to the city center and along major corridors. (He was endorsed by the East Tennessee Realtors, who also supported the new plans.)

But he said more needs to be done to actually conserve existing farmland. He proposes creating a county agricultural coordinator, to serve as a liaison and resource for farmers and those potentially interested in becoming farmers. 

“A lot of farmers that I've talked to have said, hey, I would sell my land for a little less if it was to another farmer rather than a developer,” Park said.

He has other ideas: creating an urgent care center of some kind in the area near homeless service agencies on North Broadway, to reduce the number of ambulance calls there; a corridor transition plan for Maryville Pike, which is dotted with abandoned industrial properties; some greater standardization of fire protection services in the county.

And he believes that his presence on Commission would be helpful to representing both the local queer community overall and South Knoxville in particular, which is home to the Knox Pride Community Center and the annual SoKno Pride festival.

Noting Fox’s work for Alliance Defending Freedom, Park said, “I walk down Sevier Avenue and I think to myself, can you really imagine this area being represented by Andy Fox? I don’t know how often he comes to Sevier Avenue. I just feel like it’s such a disconnection from the culture of what the district is.”

He also said that having an LGBTQ colleague might shift some commissioners’ views and make future attempts to pass resolutions with implicit or explicit anti-LGBTQ bias less likely.

“I think when people start to have relationships, (they think), ‘You know, maybe this isn’t the most important thing for me to put forward anymore,’” he said. “And that’s the whole idea behind representation.”

Stacey Bryan Smith

When Smith first toyed with the idea of seeking election, his family suggested an office much higher than County Commission.

He was talking passionately about his Biblical beliefs and his concerns about the nation’s economy and banking system, and his mother — who has since passed away — suggested he run for president.

“It was kind of a joke,” said Smith, who has had a successful career siting cell phone towers for the telecommunications industry. The family all took up the refrain, and for his birthday made T-shirts touting his run for the Oval Office.

Smith knew that wasn’t a realistic goal, at least not as a first effort. But it got him thinking about where he could make a difference. He knew Dailey wasn’t running again, and he initially picked up petitions last fall to run as either a Republican or an independent. With the “R” line already well populated, he opted to go without party affiliation — which he said suits him better.

“I have friends and family who are Democrats, and they wouldn’t vote for a Republican for no reason,” Smith said. “And that same thing on the other side.”

He quotes Stealers Wheel’s 1970s classic “Stuck in the Middle With You,” with its refrain of “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.” “We’re stuck in the middle, that’s us,” he said. “I say that all the time, we are stuck in the middle together. And voting for left or voting for right, you know, the left wing, right wing — the heart of the bird is you’re trying to fly, and these people are not letting us do it.”

Smith is a lifelong South Knox resident. He grew up near Bonny Kate Elementary School and could walk there from his house because there was so little traffic. After graduating from what was then Doyle High School in 1987, he worked in guttering and siding and found that “it was always cold or it was always hot.” He studied film and video at Pellissippi State Community College, seeking an outlet for his desire to write. (He still writes lyrics, poems, short stories, whatever comes to mind.)

By happenstance, he ended up on a short-term job driving around engineers who were subcontracted to what was then BellSouth. They were scouting and siting locations for telecommunications facilities. After a short time, Smith — who said he has “an engineering mind” — felt like he had absorbed enough of what the crews were doing that he could do it himself. He offered his services and was hired temporarily, and then given a full-time job.

He has worked for various companies but has been with T-Mobile for the past 25 years. It has taught him some of the mechanics of local government, because of the layers of zoning and codes approvals that have to be navigated with each assignment.

But it was a spiritual awakening that he said put him on the path toward public office. A lifelong Christian and longtime member of Woodlawn Christian Church, he had a revelation in 2016 and “kind of everything in my world changed.”

“This will sound weird to some, but the spirit of our Lord Father Yahweh corrected me in my thinking and what I really needed to be doing,” Smith said. “Because I was working too hard, everything was about work.”

He began a study of the world around him, reading archaeology and ecology and botany, understanding how what he considers God’s creation actually works.

“People get the idea that science and the Bible don't go together, and they're absolutely one, in my opinion,” Smith said. “And so that rolls into everything that I’ve been doing.”

He drives around in a 1975 white Cadillac convertible, which serves as a handy conservation starter, and spreads the word — about Yahweh, and also these days about his campaign for Commission.

Smith has some strong ideas about government, especially its financial systems. He is skeptical of the federal banking system and thinks the county could do better by essentially starting its own — holding savings and lending money for the good of the community as a whole.

“I think it would work if most people would buy in on ‘That’s really what we need,’” Smith said.

He said that county residents should think of themselves as not just taxpayers but investors in themselves and their community. “I invest in you, you invest in me, we invest in the school system, our roads, for one another to live a decent life,” he said. 

That said, he is opposed to raising taxes. He said the budget should be constrained to necessities that serve the whole county, rather than amenities that communities can probably organize and cooperate on themselves.

He is protective of South Knox County’s remaining rural areas. Like Fox, he appeared at Planning Commission last month to voice opposition to proposed developments, particularly one on Tipton Station Road.

Among his concerns are “the environment, what it’s going to do to the ecology, displacing the animals and that type of stuff. Because you’re not going to get any of that back. That’s why we have bears roaming Walmart.”

He said his family is large and well-known in many parts of the 9th District, which he suspects is why a complaint was filed to try to sideline him. He said the attempt to remove him from the ballot actually brought him attention and support, and reinforced his sense that there’s a need for an independent voice on Commission.

“I think once people get put in a corner and they may lose their power or in some cases their money, they do whatever they can to protect it,” he said. “Well, that shows your character to me.”

UPDATE: This story has been updated to note Park's endorsement by East Tennessee Realtors.