Rural King Asked Crossville Council To Pull Tuesday’s Discussion

Crossville City Council did not discuss the potential Rural King development during Tuesday’s meeting.

Mayor James Mayberry said current plans are unclear as Rural King requested the discussion to be dropped from the agenda.

“It may be totally dropped. They’ve got their building permits, they’ve turned in all their blueprints for their remodeling, they’re moving walls and adding walls,” Mayberry said. “They’ve been working on getting the building remodeled and ready to reopen. They may have just decided to drop that. I have not personally heard from them one way or the other, they just wanted it pulled from our agenda.”

Mayberry said Rural King’s initial proposal for tax incentives wouldn’t be fair to current businesses in town.

“My concern was they’d be competing with several businesses in this town that received no incentive to open their business,” Mayberry said. “It’d be like taking tax from the existing businesses to supplement this new one coming in. So that was my concern.”

The original plan would allow Rural King to move into the former Kmart location on Cumberland Square.

Mayberry said Rural King had hired a company to assist in finding tax incentives in their effort to locate to Crossville.

“I had checked with another community similar in size, very similar to us as to how they incentivized this company when it was put in operation there,” Mayberry said. “There were none at all, not from the city, the county, or the industrial development board of that particular town. Just a new way of doing business I guess when you’re a big corporation expanding.”

City Attorney Will Ridley reported during last week’s work session Rural King was seeking nearly $300,000 in incentives, which would’ve been considered a grant to a private entity.