Small landscaping businesses could stay at residence

Small landscaping companies could continue as home occupations in Knox County, but owners might quickly find their businesses have grown to the point they would have to move to commercial property, under proposed ordinance amendments headed to Knox County Commission.

County Commission has been mulling ordinance language to strike a balance between allowing small landscaping operations as home occupations but preventing large commercial landscaping companies in residential neighborhoods. The commission put together a Contractor Review Committee in July, which revised some amendments proposed by the Metropolitan Planning Commission and sent them back to MPC for a vote. MPC approved them unanimously Thursday.

No neighborhood representatives spoke then, but Grant Rosenberg, Knox County director of codes enforcement, urged MPC to approve the request.

"The most controversial use has been tackled," he said. "It's been taken off the table."

The committee had added landscaping companies to the definition of "contractor" and the provision dropped would have allowed contractors to store materials and equipment on property zoned agricultural. Now, these uses would be restricted to rural commercial and general business zones.

When MPC considered an earlier set of amendments in April, Lisa Starbuck, president of the Northeast Knox Preservation Association, said agricultural was a broken zoning category once appropriate for farm communities. She said now the category allows neighborhoods to exist next to portable sawmills, demolition landfills and other incompatible uses.

The flash point for neighborhood opposition was a legal challenge in September by Robert Wilkerson, owner of the Outdoor Designs Professional Services landscaping company, against codes officials who said he could not operate out of his Beaver Creek Drive home.

Wilkerson said the proposed ordinance amendments would likely kill fledgling landscaping operations rather than separate them from the larger companies. He noted that the Knox County ordinance allows home occupations to keep two commercial vehicles and/or trailers on site, giving businesses a chance to get started, but once a business needs more equipment and materials, it will be hit with the order to move to a commercial property. MPC Deputy Director Buz Johnson confirmed this.

"There is a threshold and it would be those two commercial vehicles," he said.

Whether a person had exceeded that limit would be determined by a codes enforcement official, Johnson said.

"I think if the guy has just one or two people, this is not going to affect him," Wilkerson said. "But for the guy who has two or three, this might be too much. They cannot afford to go out and get a piece of commercial property," Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson said he filed a lawsuit in Knox County Circuit Court to block the county's challenges to his landscape operation through the state's Right to Farm laws but lost