Highway 27 widening project to demolish two businesses

photo Dr. Charles Holt speaks about his concern with a planned U.S. Highway 27 widening project that will force him to relocate his Carter St. dentist business.

Charles Holt can almost see the bulldozers lined up outside his dentist office, but he's not sure when they'll plow forward and knock down his walls.

His office is one of two businesses that will be demolished to make way for a planned Highway 27 expansion. Holt is ready, though not willing, to move his business.

But after years of delays and false starts on the project, he doesn't know when he will have to move off a property he has owned for more than a decade.

"It's hard to do business when you don't know where you'll be in six months," he said. "It was going to be an imminent project and then a few weeks later they say, 'Sorry, It's not been funded for construction.'"

The interstate widening was originally planned for 2010. Budget problems pushed that date to 2012, but the project was stopped in April when local leaders took issue with a few specific aspects of the project.

"It puts you in a real bind. If you don't make plans beforehand, you're stuck," Holt said. "You know you're going to have to move, you make plans to move, and then they don't move you."

First Title Insurance Co. sits next door to Holt's Carter Street office. The insurer would like to make improvements to the building - projects like touching up paint, fixing a squeaky door or two - but don't want to throw money down the tubes on a building that may be demolished in the next year.

"We just don't know. That's the frustrating part," said Jeremy Ames, an attorney with the company. "Nobody's mad, we're just frustrated."

Ames and Holt don't hold a grudge against the state. They love their locations, but understand their businesses need to move to make way for the highway widening.

But neither business is particularly happy to do it. Both sites sit across from the Chattanooga Convention Center, have ample parking, and are easily accessible to their clients.

"This project is needed," Holt said. "It's just very, very inconvenient. It's hard to do business."

The Tennessee Department of Transportation has acquired all but one of the plots of land needed for the project, according to Jennifer Flynn, spokeswoman for the transportation department. The acquisitions were budgeted at $10 million.

The insurance agency and dental office are being acquired for a new exit ramp the state plans to build for northbound Highway 27 traffic to flow on to West 13th and Carter Streets near the Chattanooga trade center.

State officials made offers for the properties. But the landowners rejected the offers, sending the sites into condemnation under the state's eminent domain process for acquiring private property when a landowner doesn't want to sell. Each sale will now go through the courts, where a jury will make a binding decisions on the property's value.

"That's not uncommon," Flynn said. "It's their right. They don't have to accept the offer we present to them."

TDOT is buying portions of 20 other properties for the highway upgrade, four of which also are entering the eminent domain process. First Baptist Church and Brewer Media, among others, will lose some of their parking from the highway project, TDOT officials said.

Holt said a nearby dentist office on a smaller plot of land recently sold for far more than the state is offering him. He expects the deficit between what he wants and what the state is offering to grow even larger due to expenses related to moving his office's high-tech gear and lost revenue from clients he expects to lose in the move.

The project is on hold while architects redesign plans to meet community specifications. Officials will decide whether to fund the project next spring, and Flynn said her department is planning for the project to be ready to begin by that time in case it does get funded.

For now, there's nothing the state or the property owners can do but wait. Holt has been concerned about the fate of his business since he was first notified of the project more than five years ago, and he expects he'll be waiting a while longer before he finally sees those bulldozers actually appear.

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