The contest for Knoxville City Council’s 4th District seat this year has already narrowed down to two active candidates.

Dr. Jane George has dropped out of the contest.

Mortgage banker Jeff Talman, who ran for mayor unsuccessfully in 2023, and commercial real estate broker Matthew DeBardelaben are vying for the seat currently held by Lauren Rider. After serving two terms, Rider is ineligible to run because of term limits.

Until Monday, a third candidate was in the mix. Dr. Jane George, who lost in a bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett last year, announced she is withdrawing from the 4th District race. The official withdrawal deadline was May 22, so George’s name will still appear on the primary election ballot, but only DeBardelaben and Talman are actively campaigning.

The top two finishers in the primary will face off in the general election. With George not actively campaigning, DeBardelaben and Talman are virtually guaranteed the district’s general election slots. 

The 4th District is anchored in the southwest by Old North Knoxville and the 4th and Gill neighborhoods, runs north along the east side of Broadway into Fountain City and east to the Alice Bell-Spring Hill area before turning south to encompass Holston Hills. Finger annexations extend the district along Tazewell Pike, Rutledge Pike, Asheville Highway and Interstate 40 to Strawberry Plains.

Matthew DeBardelaben

Over a cup in a North Knoxville coffee shop recently, DeBardelaben said he had not considered running for the seat before Rider suggested he give it a try.

He spoke with friends, including Vice Mayor Tommy Smith, and decided to take the plunge in part to help manage an increasing population. “We need a good steward of growth in this town, because it’s coming,” DeBardelaben said.  

Part of that stewardship, he said, would be coming up with creative traffic solutions that fill gaps along corridors in the 4th District and beyond.

“We need more interesting restaurants and retail shops along corridors, more housing along corridors, and we need protected bike lanes,” DeBardelaben said.

When it comes to North Broadway, the main north-south thoroughfare in the district, that would mean working with the Tennessee Department of Transportation to make the state route safer, especially in Fountain City. Decongesting intersections such as the one at Jacksboro and Tazewell pikes should be priorities as well.

DeBardelaben is a member of the board of directors of YES! Knoxville, a local nonprofit advocating for improved choices for Knoxvillians in housing, transportation, and community spaces. He said he joined the group to learn more about how to achieve those goals.

“One of the things about growth is that people get left behind,” he continued. “Wages don’t go up in the same amount as rents. It’s important to take care of the entire city. If one part of the body hurts, the whole body hurts.”

Part of mitigating the pain is housing, which he said is a vital need in North Knoxville. Promoting middle housing is one strategy he would emphasize. “There’s a need for housing and different housing types, but there’s pressure that can put on neighborhoods,” he said. 

DeBardelaben said the sales tax increase referendum, which will be on the ballot in November, would raise revenue for priorities that align with his own.

"If I’m on City Council and the sales tax passes, my goal would be to make sure that this mayor and the next mayor use that (funding) the way people asked, which would be things like sidewalks near schools, greenspaces and things like that.”

He emphasized that the revenue increase would allow the city to tackle infrastructure needs that would take 20 years under current projections in only five years.

“That part kind of excites me,” DeBardelaben said. “I will vote for it personally.”

DeBardelaben, 52, was born in Atlanta and grew up in Miami. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of Alabama and a master’s in divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

He was not ordained, but was a minister for 14 years, serving as a chaplain at the University of Washington, the Chicago Fire soccer club and the Chicago Bears from 2000-2003. He also opened an art gallery in China.

After moving back to the United States, he couldn’t crack into the art world and started selling high-end interior products to large organizations. He fell in love with Knoxville while working with the University of Tennessee, Scripps Networks and the News Sentinel.

DeBardelaben then co-founded Bluhen Botanicals, a Knoxville-based hemp hemp processing company, and after its failure he obtained his real estate license and became a commercial broker in 2020. He also does project management work for the Public Building Authority. And is a member of the city’s Design Review Board. He lives in Olds North Knoxville and has four sons.

DeBardelaben is the curator of PechaKucha Knoxville, a quarterly event held in the Mill & Mine where local entrepreneurs, makers and other share their stories.

“It’s a town hall,” he said. “It’s a place where people and ideas meet.”

North Knoxville has a large Hispanic population, and DeBardelaben would like to see the city create a liaison position in the Office of Neighborhoods to help immigrants connect with resources and community organizations

Familiar with all parts of town through his real estate work, he said he is familiar with the issues facing various neighborhoods throughout the city and would make a special effort to understand what’s going on outside the 4th District.

DeBardelaben has been knocking on doors in North Knoxville neighborhoods and raising money to pay for mailers, which he predicted would play a key role in the primary campaign.

He also pointed to endorsements from public officials. In addition to Rider, At-Large City Council member Debbie Helsley, Knox County Commissioner Courtney Durrett, and school board member Anne Templeton are in his camp.

DeBardelaben returned to the theme of managing growth when talking about the pitch he makes to voters.

“Knoxville’s growing,” he said. “There’s no stop button. And I want to be a steward for positive growth in Knoxville. To me, that’s housing, transportation and quality of life.”

Jeff Talman

When Talman speaks about Knoxville, the words come in torrents of enthusiasm that spill beyond the 4th District’s borders.

That’s not to say he’s blinded by boosterism, however.

“If you’re a property owner, you’ve done OK. Your property has doubled in value in five years,” Talman said. “If you’re fixed income or of modest means, you’re strangled. You have nowhere to run.”

A self-described conservative, he said the city has limited resources and must choose where dollars are spent. “There’s the wanna do’s, and the gotta do’s,” he said.

He’s not a supporter of the sales tax increase referendum. “At the State of the City (address), they said everything was great, then all of a sudden it wasn’t. This shows a certain lack of transparency.”

Talman acknowledged the city’s soaring population growth, but is skeptical about affordable housing.

"There's a mass migration to get here.” he said. “People are coming here from places that are run by nuts … The market’s happening and it’s going to continue to happen.”

Talman said he shares the goal of affordability of housing in the city, but is concerned about how it can be achieved. “The reality is, a piece of sheetrock costs what a piece of sheetrock costs,” He said. “And it costs what it costs to hang it. And anything other than looking at what stuff costs is a fairy tale.”

He continued: “There’s the perfect world, and there’s the world we’ve got to live in.”

Talman also criticized the city’s new digital payment system for on-street parking downtown as being a burden on many residents. “We have disqualified people who don't have a smart phone and don’t want to download an app from participation. It’s the most anti-democratic thing I've ever seen,” he said.

Talman said North Knoxville’s Broadway and Central Street corridors are ripe for redevelopment. He cited the county-owned former Sears Building on Central and Northgate Shopping Center on Broadway as opportunities.

“Thew corridors are where things get sexy,” he said. “You have this built environment that begs for adaptive reuse.”

Talman pointed out that the 4th District wraps around the majority-minority 6th District, but that city and East Knoxville leaders have hampered efforts to revitalize the area.

“Where did the luxury come from for us not to pursue every avenue, to pursue every partnership to unlock the potential of our community? We’ve created an upside-down incentive system where we encourage self-segregation within the Black leadership of the community,” he said. “I don’t care what color people are, we need to work together to unlock the potential of our community.”

Talman refers to the the city’s African American Equity Restoration Task force as the “Reparations task force,” which he said places the focus on bad policies of the 1960s.

“We have too narrowly defined diversity through the prism of race,” he said. “We’ve got geography, we’ve got class and culture. That’s far more fascinating.”

Talman, 67, was born in Houston and raised in Asheville, N.C. He first came to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee. After earning his degree, he worked in television and film production in New York City before returning when his then-wife took a job with Whittle Communications.

He has since become a mortgage banker and active in the community, serving two terms as president of the 4th & Gill Neighborhood Association and tours on the Knox County Tourist Commission, the Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum Board of Directors, and other organizations. He’s married and recently became a grandfather.

Talman ran for mayor in 2023, but lost as a distant second in the primary to Mayor Indya Kincannon.

Talman’s name almost didn’t make it onto the ballot. The Knox County Election Commission held a hearing on his district residency — the city Charter mandates that City Council district candidates live in the district they want to represent, but Talman has been living in Dandridge as he prepares to build a duplex on his property in 4th & Gill. State law, however, grants an exception to residency requirements for temporary relocations.

“I’ve been in that neighborhood for 40 years. I understand the question and I welcomed it to tell my story,” he said.

The Election Commission voted 3-2 to allow his candidacy.

The 4th District is located just north of the area where the city’s homeless shelters and service providers are clustered. For years, the city and the county have followed a “housing first” model to get the unhoused into housing, but Talman disagrees with that approach.

“What I see is addiction and mental illness,” he said. “We need to look at institutionalizing people that are basically not masters of their own body functions. And it’s a state responsibility. What we’ve got now is total chaos.”

Talman said district residents are worried about losing the qualities that make their neighborhoods special. “I’m a common-sense conservative,” he said. “We’re going to focus on pocketbook, pocketbook, pocketbook issues.”