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ISSUE 35 VOLUME 28
FARRAGUT, TENNESSEE
THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2016
Farragut bids farewell to Aubrey’s Lack of parking led to safety issue for staff, customers
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TAMMY CHEEK tcheek@farragutpress.com
Aubrey’s Café’s flagship restaurant in Farragut will close for business Sunday, May 15. The restaurant — the original Aubrey’s that opened 24 years ago as Aubrey’s Courthouse Café — has been at the same location at 102 S. Campbell Station Road all those years. “Its been a lot of long days and a lot of wonderful people,” Randy Burleson, Aubrey’s Inc. owner, said. Since Aubrey’s Café in Farragut opened, it had won Taste of Farragut twice and Burleson has opened other Aubrey’s locations in Lenoir City, Cedar Bluff, Papermill and Maryville. “Their all close by,” he said. “We’ve been blessed to have been in Farragut all these years but the first part of getting a new
restaurant is selling the old,” he said. Burleson is building a restaurant in Bristol this summer. Another restaurant will follow in Morristown. “We are talking with people in Farragut about a building here,” Burleson said. “We sold this building a couple weeks ago.” He attributed his decision to close the Farragut restaurant to the lack of parking. “No matter how much money we spend on the restaurant, we are never going to have enough parking. In the end, we only have 52 parking spaces,” Burleson said. “We have been hard on our neighbors, and safety concerns are paramount. Our kids are having to walk across five lanes to get to work.” With the closing of the restaurant, Burleson leaves behind memories of good times. “I remember the first time we did $7,000 in sales,” he said. “It
Tammy Cheek
Aubreys’ Café in Farragut will close for business Sunday, May 15, after 24 years in business. The restaurant is owner Randy Burleson’s flagship location.
was the biggest victory. We’ve been such a small restaurant, so having that record day in sales was big for us.” When the old Farragut 10 Theaters still was open, Burleson said he and his crew would watch movies on opening nights.
He was 25 when he opened the Farragut location. “I just got out of school,” Burleson said. “I had been working for Grady Regas. We had said, many times, we were too young and without any experience but with a lot of great people.” “Aubrey’s is fantastic,” Paul
Rook, a Farragut patron, said. “It’s our favorite place. It has been for 24 years. He and his wife, Leslee, come here regularly, and Rook said he is sad to see it close. “Sometimes we come from See AUBREY’S on Page 6A
KCSO opens new Turkey Creek station ■
BEN POUNDS bpounds@farragutpress.com
Knox County Sheriff’s Office unveiled its new location in the Pinnacle at Turkey Creek Shopping Center off Parkside Drive Saturday, May 7. The office on the second floor of Farragut Town Hall still will remain open. “The office at the town of Farragut, we had a lot of clerical things done there,” Chief Lee Tramel said. “You could still meet an officer there but it was inside, upstairs, kind of back around the corner, and we can still do work out of that office, but it’s much easier here with a store front for the public to come in. It’s easy access parking. It’s
frontage to Parkside Drive and then the presence here that it adds.” “I actually think it’s going to be a major improvement for our shoplifting or any other incidents we have on the property,” said Ashley Lynch, director of public safety for Universal Protection Service. “This one’s more geared toward the officers and what they need to do on a daily basis,” KCSO Capt. Rob Lawson said. “It’s going to be a fully functioning precinct.” Darryl Whitehead, general manager of Pinnacle at Turkey Creek, said the new office was his idea in conjunction with KCSO Capt. Brad Hall. “It’s perfectly located to serv-
ice the middle and right in the heart of Turkey Creek,” he said. Various area law enforcement departments and emergency first responders came out to show off their equipment at the opening ceremony. Nick Phillips will work with Organized Retail Crime Unit, based out of the new office to stop crimes, including shoplifting and fraud that involve the area’s retailers. He has 26 years of experience but is new to the Farragut Area. “The retailers are really, really good, and I like working with them a lot,” he said, regarding his thoughts on the area. Lawson said the office would See KCSO on Page 2A
Ben Pounds
Chief Lee Tramel, center, speaks during the ribbon cutting ceremony for a new Knox County Sheriff’s Office station off Parkside Drive next to Hibbett Sports in Farragut.
Hall Tax phase-out impacts Town budget ■
BEN POUNDS bpounds@farragutpress.com
The pending reduction and eventual end to the tax on stocks and dividends in Tennessee will cause a source of state funding for Farragut to drop. Tennessee’s legislature approved a bill that would end the tax on income from dividends and stocks, called the Hall Income Tax, in 2022. This year, it also would reduce the tax from 6 percent to 5 percent. Gov. Bill Haslam has yet to sign the bill. Farragut receives funding from the Hall Tax based on number of residents who pay into it. “The town of Farragut has always worked with limited
resources since the Town’s founding in 1980, and any reduction in one of our revenue sources will certainly have an impact on our ability to provide the level of service our citizens have come to expect,” David Smoak, Town administrator, said, responding to the pending legislation. “These revenues go into our general fund and are used to provide essential services to our citizens,” he said. 5.8 percent of Farragut’s revenues for the current Fiscal Year 2016 budget come from this tax. State Sen. Richard Briggs and State Rep. Jason Zachary voted for the reduction bill. Both said the current tax burdens retirees with 401K and savings plans.
Both said Farragut residents had written to them supporting the tax’s elimination. “People want to decide how to spend their money rather than have the government decide,” Briggs said. He said the gradual phase-out would give towns time to adjust and revenue from Sales Tax might increase. “It’s not just a tax for the wealthy. It affects families who both parents work throughout their working lives, and they’re now in retirement, and whenever there’s capital gains, the state was classifying those as dividends, which was requiring a 6 percent tax on those gains,” Zachary said. Farragut Mayor Ralph McGill also said the Hall Tax was not
fair. “If you’re going to have an Income Tax, it ought to be effective for most people, and this is a case where you take a few rich people and you soak them, but let everybody else go,” McGill said. However, he said the bill would cause problems for towns such as Farragut. “The notion of getting rid of that kind of taxation is a good notion, I think, but the problem is that now we upset the balance of payments to cities and towns like us, and we have to cover that difference, and so now the burden is on us, and that doesn’t seem quite fair either,” he said. Smoak said the Town has averaged $536,000 per year in revenues over the past five years
from the Hall Income Tax. He said a reduction of 17 percent, which is what the estimates are from the legislature, would reduce those averages by $91,260 per year. He spoke about this year’s 1 percent reduction in Hall Income Tax during the Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting on April 14. At that time, the State Senate had approved an earlier version of that budget that had the same reduction for this year. “It doesn’t affect the monies that we would get in this year’s budget that we’re planning for next year, but the following year that’ll reduce it by at least 17 percent of what we would get See HALL TAX on Page 4A