Growing Together
The County in Three Dimensions
A guided walkthrough · 3½ minutes
Fifteen chapters that build the county up in front of you — the ridges and the river first, then the growth boundaries, the rural areas, and what has actually been annexed since 2000. Play it at half speed or skip ahead. Click any ground to see where it stands.
City or County? Find Out Where You Stand
Interactive map · the whole county
Click your property. It tells you which growth-plan area you are in, whether a city may annex there, and what the property tax difference actually is — using the State Comptroller's certified rates. Streets, satellite, USGS aerial and topo basemaps included.
What the plan actually says
Extracted from the county's own adopted map
IN THE COUNTY
GROWTH BOUNDARY
KEPT RURAL
UNANNEXED
Since 2000 the cities have annexed 8.1 square miles, and 95.5% of it fell inside boundaries everyone had already agreed to — growth largely went where the plan said it would. And there are still 52 square miles inside those boundaries that have never been annexed. The room to grow is already there. The question is what it costs to serve it, and that is a conversation to have with the cities rather than at them.
Every figure comes out of the county's own adopted map and the State Comptroller's certified tax tables. The extraction is reproducible and the underlying data is published, so anyone can check the arithmetic — full transparency.
Download it: growth plan · annexations since 2000 · worklist (CSV) — GeoJSON in WGS84, opens in QGIS, ArcGIS or Google Earth.
Read the Framework For the County Commission → For Lenoir City →
News & Updates
The Pole Is the Other Half of the Problem
September 14, 2026
Steve Eimers came to our Commission meeting and raised something on an issue I had spent weeks on without once considering. In 2016 his seventeen-year-old daughter Hannah was killed on I-75 when a guardrail end terminal speared her car instead of absorbing it. He taught himself roadside engineering and got that product banned in every state and every Canadian province. He is not opposed to license plate readers — he has handed footage to police himself, and video he archived was used in a charging affidavit in a Chattanooga homicide case. His objection is to the post the camera is bolted to, and whether it is engineered to fail safely when a car leaves the road.
That sent me to the paperwork, and the paperwork is where this gets local: a plate reader on state right-of-way in Tennessee sits there under a revocable license from TDOT's Excess Land Office — and TDOT's own application requires the county commission or city council to approve the proposal before the application is ever filed. I am requesting the record of what has been licensed in Loudon County and what local approval, if any, was attached to it.
The write-up covers what MASH crashworthiness means, why Florida's DOT revoked every one of these state licenses on August 31 under a statute nearly identical to Tennessee's, and Sections 1307 and 1308 of the BUILD America 250 Act now sitting in the House committee our congressman serves on. It also takes up the resolution submitted to us by GTFOH Loudon County and where I'd push back on it, and lays out a rebuilt version — now in a second draft after I caught an overreach in my own first pass. It governs what the county itself buys, signs, and permits rather than directing offices this Commission does not command; extends the same scrutiny to school monitoring software, aerial imagery contracts, and jail communications; and adds a standing procedure for the Sheriff to bring the Commission a technology request on the record, in public, with a cost and a way to check later whether it worked. Full draft available as a Word file, for anyone who wants to redline it and send it back.
Ban County Use of License Plate Readers
September 7, 2026
The Commission votes Tuesday, September 8, on whether Loudon County follows Knox County and bans county use of automated license plate readers — no county contract, no county cameras, no county feed into a private movement database. I spent thirteen years in county law enforcement IT, and I have read the vendor's standard agreement line by line. I grade it a D+. Its disclosure clause releases county capture data to third parties on nothing more than a good-faith belief that release is appropriate. That is not a legal standard.
The write-up covers what one camera actually stores about a car that did nothing wrong, the seven contract terms that would be the floor if a future commission ever reopens this, the companion resolution grounded in Article I, Section 7 of the Tennessee Constitution, and an honest account of where the courts are — which is not where you have probably heard. Knox County banned it. Hamilton County paused. Sullivan County suspended. Loudon should choose the same side Knox did.
August 2026
Four earlier posts
The FY2026 year-end numbers, twenty-five years with Terra, thank you to District 2, and the Matlock endorsement.
July 2026
Four earlier posts
The growth framework, the Tennessee Voter Guide rating, where I stand on data centers, and the county budget tools.