New route designed for Pellissippi Pkwy.

Dear Editor:
Disappearing Blount County -- mystery solved!
A recent writer to The Daily Times posed a number of valid questions regarding the Pellissippi Parkway (Interstate I40) project. Among the questions she raised were “What is its purpose?” and “What is its destination?” The state department of transportation would have us believe that the destination is a junction with U.S. 321 in east Blount County, its purpose to move Knoxvillians more quickly to that eldorado of the mountains, Townsend. It is difficult to imagine a flimsier justification for spending another $100 million but, when it comes to TDOT and laying down roads, flimsy justification is more than sufficient.
Is it possible that there is a bigger but more obscure motivation afoot? Let me suggest one. The real goal is to create a magnificent loop or, better said, a dirty ring, by connecting the Pellissippi to U.S. 321, widening U.S. 321 into Townsend, followed by driving a multi-lane expressway back through the mountains to Pigeon Forge. Traffic from all over the western U.S. pouring off of I-40 in west Knoxville would be funneled across Blount County into a new (improved) gateway to the Smokies -- a New Gatlinburg, if you will.
What the completion of the Pellissippi Parkway portends, then, is a large portion of eastern Blount County and western Sevier County garroted inside a pollution-ridden, noisy, scene-wrecking highway which will then give impetus to that greatest of all American values, development. (Blount Countians, do you know that you are underdeveloped--your little ol’ pea-sized brain’s too small to realize that the best use of mountain scenery and pastoral beauty is as a backdrop for a T-shirt shop?).
With the Pellissippi project comes more gas stations, convenience stores, more pharmacies, “shopping plazas”, more budget motels, and that other siren song of development -- more jobs. All the mobs of starving unemployed workers now seen on every street corner and selling apples in front of the courthouse will at long last have Jobs.
And that, by the way, answers another question -- why we have worked so hard to “preserve” Blount County.
John Carlton Templeton
1601 Brahman Lane
Seymour, TN 37865