If you want to understand the most pressing issues in Knox County’s 5th District, just drive — or try driving  — down Kingston Pike through Farragut at rush hour. Or Northshore Drive toward Concord. Or Campbell Station Road.

Growth, development and infrastructure dominate the discussion in West Knox County.

And that’s not even mentioning Interstates 40/75, the twinned section of highway that state officials say is one of the busiest in Tennessee.

Growth, development and the infrastructure to serve it are the inescapable concerns of local residents in the district, which includes the Town of Farragut and the communities of Concord and Choto. It is one of the most affluent parts of the county, and — along with the neighboring 6th District — part of its fastest-growing area.

The county is building a new elementary school to take long-standing crowding pressure off of Farragut Primary and Intermediate schools. Solutions to the other problems of a burgeoning population have been harder to come by.

The suburban district is currently represented on County Commission by Commissioner John Schoonmaker, a Republican. He is term limited after serving for eight years. With a background in local homeowners’ associations, Schoonmaker has often been a skeptic of new development in the area, reflecting the concerns of his constituents.

Running to succeed him are Democrat Arthur Moore, a neurologist, and Republican Angela Russell, an accountant who helped lead opposition to an affordable housing development in Choto last year.

The 5th District leans strongly Republican, making it a challenge for any Democrat. Moore has shown himself competitive on the fundraising front, at least, reporting $21,365 in contributions through the end of March. Since he had no primary opponent, he still had all of that cash on hand.

Russell had to fight her way through a five-way Republican primary, emerging as the clear favorite with nearly half the vote. She reported raising $20,708 through the end of March, but had only $1,593 on hand. Her fundraising has most likely increased after winning the primary, but that won’t show up until the second quarter reports, due later this week.

Here’s a look at both candidates. (The profile of Russell is updated from Compass’ primary coverage.)

Arthur Moore

Moore says he’s running for office for the same reason he moved back to East Tennessee after a residency and fellowship at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota — a lifelong bond with the place and the people who live in it.

“You go around the country, you go around the world, and you don’t meet better people,” Moore said. “Knoxville’s going through a lot of changes right now, I think we’ve all seen it. We see overcrowding of the interstates, overcrowding of the schools, overcrowding of our housing market. And I wanted to be part of the solution.”

He’s a native of Greeneville, Tenn., and a graduate of Greeneville High School. He attended Vanderbilt University, earning an undergraduate degree in neuroscience, and then got his M.D. degree at Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine.

After time in Nashville and then at Mayo in Rochester, Minn. — where he met his wife, who was working as a nurse — he returned to be close to his family and to bring his skills and services to the region where he grew up.

“I was able to take my East Tennessee personality and education all the way to Mayo, but I tell everybody the mountains kind of get in your blood,” Moore said. “I always wanted to come back here. I tell everybody I wanted to bring Mayo with me. I wanted to bring world-class health care, because the people of East Tennessee deserve it.”

He is the director of neurology for the Covenant Health system and director of the Neurocritical Care Unit and Tele-Neurology program at Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center. He and his wife and their two daughters live in Farragut.

He has seen first-hand the ongoing growth at the western end of the county, and its impact on existing residents.

“My wife likes to say, ‘The secret’s out’” Moore said. “When we first moved here, she was like, ‘I'm not telling anybody about Knoxville because I don't want a lot of people moving here.’ Well, Knox County has become kind of a go-to destination for people who are looking for a better quality of life for their family, for their children, good education. And that growth comes with its own set of consequences, it comes with its own set of challenges.”

He said that he thinks the county’s Advance Knox process, which has produced updated growth and land-use plans, is “a good start.”

“I would have voted for Advance Knox if I’d been on Knox County Commission when it came up,” he said. “That being said, I think the devil is going to end up being in the details. How do you plan for the infrastructure to support what Advance Knox really wants to do?”

He acknowledged that the county’s capacity to invest in such infrastructure is limited by its budgets, which are already tight even before a new debt burden hits in the next few years. He said the best way to boost the budget is to expand the tax base, which new development envisioned by the updated county plans could do.

But he also said there could come a time when local officials have to ask their constituents what level of services they’re willing to pay for.

“Are we going to reach a point where we do need to raise taxes in Knox County?” Moore said. “I don’t know. I’m certainly hopeful that we can avoid (it) by the expanding population, by seeing increased sales (tax) dollars in some of these areas of interest spelled out in Advance Knox. But I’m also not willing to on the record saying never.”

As a doctor at one of the area’s major hospitals, he has first-hand insights into the challenges facing the county’s ambulance service contractor, AMR. 

“The EMS drivers and your paramedics are some of the hardest-working people in Knox County,” he said. “I deal with them on a daily basis and they are fantastic people out there busting their butt every day.”

He said as a county commissioner, he would make sure AMR is held accountable for meeting the benchmarks set in its contract, and would also push to make sure the company employees are paid sufficiently to attract and retain good workers.

He also said he would look forward to working with Town of Farragut officials. He recently sat down to talk with Farragut Mayor Ron Williams. 

“He’s very forward thinking, and you know what, he’s a Republican,” Moore said. “I’m not one who sees a lot of ‘R’ and ‘D’ barriers, I tend to be very centrist in a lot of my thinking. … I think this can be a very collaborative relationship.”

Angela Russell

Russell is an East Tennessee native, as were generations of her family before her. She said she loves the area — but she has growing concerns about it. 

“I’ve lived in District 5 for 30 years now,” she said. “My grandchildren live in Knox County. And what made me decide to run in the race is the direction that we’re currently taking. I don’t feel like Knox County is as good a place as it used to be. We’re going in the wrong direction.”

She graduated from Lenoir City High School and earned a degree in accounting from the University of Tennessee. She has worked for several decades as a certified public accountant, which she said gives her a strong basis for making informed decisions about the county budget.

Russell serves on the board of her local homeowners association, but it was a proposed development nearby — a proposed affordable housing complex on Northshore Drive — that pushed her into the broader civic arena.

“We can't just continue to add development to Northshore,” she said. “All the traffic from Northshore then goes into Farragut, and Farragut is so overcrowded. But every car on Northshore is another car in Farragut also, because that's where we go do our shopping.”

Russell said local residents were concerned about the density of the development, which would have brought 56 townhouse units to the 12-acre site.

“The high density does not fit into this area,” she said. “People moved to this area to be away from (density). They don't want apartments, they don't want attached units.”

That housing complex was ultimately dropped in the face of fierce community opposition, when a local resident stepped up to buy the property outright from the owners.

But to Russell, it illustrated what she sees as problems with the way growth has proceeded across the district, with new developments straining infrastructure and outstripping the county’s ability to handle it. She said it’s not only a matter of traffic jams creating inconvenience for local residents, it can be a safety issue when emergency vehicles can’t make their way through congested two-lane roads.

“We had an accident down in this area a little over a week ago now,” she said, “and they had to send in a helicopter to get to that, because of the fact that the roads are so crowded that if there’s any issues at all you just can’t get through.”

Of the five Republicans who ran in the March primary, Russell clearly best articulated and connected with the concerns of local residents. She finished first in precincts across the district, winning 48 percent of the nearly 7,000 votes cast — more than double the 22 percent posted by the second-place finisher.

She has some reservations about the Advance Knox planning process, which she said did a good job of collecting community input but has not relied on it sufficiently in drafting recommendations for guiding future growth.

“The problem is the implementation,” Russell said. “I think they knew what they wanted, which is to allow more development. And they took the comments that people made and twisted them.”

Also the plan is supposed to help the county prepare for adding tens of thousands of people over the next 20 years, Russell said she thinks it’s setting up both current and future residents for frustration.

“We're doing people a disservice by building and then they come here and they realize that this is not what they thought they were getting,” she said. “We’re selling them damaged goods that we're not disclosing, because we know that the roads aren't adequate.”

She is also concerned about homelessness in the district and across the county. Russell said she supports efforts to provide shelter and assistance to people experiencing homelessness, but emphasized that those who do not seek those services need to face consequences.

“We need to address that, and we need to have police address that,” she said. “I do believe we give people a chance. But everyone is not going to take that opportunity.”

In the primary, Russell presented herself as one of the more conservative candidates in the race, and she was endorsed by the Knox County Conservative Republicans — a group that embraces “constitutional conservatism” and is affiliated with local political consultant Erik Wiatr’s Knox Liberty Organization.

“I was just humbled that basically they said, ‘You seem like someone who lives the everyday struggles that the rest of us live,’” she said.