Just up the road from the entrance to Fall Creek Falls State Park sits a motel.
“You know, this is not a kind of place that you come (to) if you want a spa treatment,” owner Melissa Harmon says deprecatingly.
She and her husband have owned the Way Inn for a decade. It’s your 1950s-style motor lodge: A long row of ground-level, drive-up rooms situated behind a diner and convenience store.
The perfect place for family reunions or parties of hikers to crash after a day in Tennessee’s most-visited state park.
“We obviously are here because of the park. There is no other reason that we would be here because this county only has 5,600 residents and they don’t really have a need for a motel.”
An estimated 1.4 million people visit Fall Creek Falls each year, making it a boon to tiny Van Buren County, the state’s second-smallest. So residents and business owners like Harmon are worried about a plan to close one of the park’s main attractions — the 145-room Inn at Fall Creek Falls.
The Haslam administration proposes tearing it down, building a much fancier replacement and turning operations over to a private contractor.
Harmon has mixed feelings. On the one hand, the inn is her competition. On the other, it’s the centerpiece of the park. She worries that a major reconstruction project will drive away not just overnight guests, but many of the day hikers who stop into her shop for food, cigarettes and gasoline.
“I think probably that inn should have never been built,” she says. “But it was, so now we have this.”
Governor Bill Haslam has promised big savings by turning management of government buildings, college campuses and other facilities over to private operators. But many communities that depend on those institutions say leaner is not necessarily better.
The Inn at Fall Creek Falls will be a test case.
Many people in Van Buren County are ambivalent. The inn is outdated, they say. It hasn’t been well-advertised or maintained. And the architecture is typical of a once-popular style known as Brutalism — exposed concrete, metal doors, every bit a government building from the early 1970s.
But it’s also one of Van Buren County’s biggest businesses, says Mayor Greg Wilson.
“We have about a 9 percent unemployment rate,” he says. “We just don’t have the population of other places. You know when you lose 40 or 50 jobs it means a lot.”
Building a new inn will cost an estimated $22 million and take at least two years. That’s a long time for a major business to be closed, says Wilson.
And it could be just the first state park facility to get outsourced. The Haslam administration is already asking lawmakers to replace a similar inn at Paris Landing. Facilities at Henry Horton State Park, Pickwick Landing and Montgomery Bell could soon follow.
Randy Stamps, the head of the Tennessee State Employees Association, says the administration is moving too fast.
“We feel like there’s a much better solution. In fact, there may be two or three better solutions than what the state has come up with.”
Stamps represents workers in state parks. He favors phased renovations of the inn to prevent layoffs.
And, Stamps argues, there’s no need to spend millions on upscale lodges — in Fall Creek Falls or any other state park.
“When people go to a state park, most of them, the number one reason they go is to be out in nature and enjoy the lake and to go fishing and to go hiking and to go horseback riding,” he says. “It’s not to sit in a Marriott-style hotel room all day long.”
Bob Martineau, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, disagrees. He says visitors have said in surveys they want something nicer than the current inn.
“It looks like a prison,” he says. “You know, it’s concrete block walls on the inside. It doesn’t look very good.”
Plus, the structure itself is crumbling, says Martineau, so cosmetic fixes won’t help.
Opponents aren’t convinced. They say the inn can be overhauled for less than $10 million, and they doubt a private operator will be able to run it without extracting more concessions from the state. Already, they expect room rates to double.
But more worrying to many nearby residents is the potential loss of jobs — even temporarily. Martineau says TDEC will help people who lose jobs at Fall Creek Falls find other work with the state. One possibility is TDEC’s facilities an hour to the north in Cookeville.
But, Martineau argues, building a new inn will mean millions in state spending, which will be good for Van Bureau County.
“I don’t know that there’s going to be a job loss in their county. There may be a job gain,” he says.
“It may be a different job. … A server in a restaurant may not have that job. But an electrician or a person who does drywall or carpentry or construction work, will have that job.”
And on the question of turning the new facility over to a private company, Martineau says no final decisions have been made. Bids aren’t due until March 1.
But he argues, after years of neglecting the Inn at Fall Creek Falls, everyone would be better off with a fresh start.
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