Ambre Torbett retiring as Sullivan planner, but to help in planning across East Tenn.

BLOUNTVILLE — Longtime Sullivan County Planning Director Ambre Torbett soon will retire from the county where she has worked for 26 of her 30 years in planning. However, she'll be starting a new chapter working for a newly formed entity that will help local governments, particularly smaller ones, in a 28-county area of East Tenenssee. She said it is basically everything in the Eastern Time Zone from Johnson County westward to around Chattanooga. And she'll still live in Piney Flats in eastern Sullivan County, traveling East Tennessee as needed to help development districts, including the Johnson City-based First Tennessee Development District, that provide planning and zoning services to localities. That could include governments in Johnson, Unicoi and Carter counties, as well as Surgoinsville and other cities in Hawkins County and the county itself, along with larger counties with their own planning staffs such as Sullivan and Washington. She will work for the newly created Center for Local Planning under the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service based in Knoxville as senior planning supervisor. It is under the UT Institute for Public Service, which also oversees the County Technical Assistance Service or CTAS and the Municipal technical Advisory Service or MTAS. She said her new position and those she oversees among other things will help training planning commissioner and zoning appeals board members, as well as help with understanding and following state law and supporting development districts in their mission to provide or help provide planning services to localities. RECEPTION Her retirement reception was held in a second-floor of Sullivan County's Finance and Administration building, the former Blountville Elementary/Middle School campus near the downtown of the unincorporated county seat of government. Luke Meade was hired last year as county planner, but Torbett remained on staff to shepherd through some projects she had started and is to continue doing that through the end of May. During the drop-in reception late Friday morning into early Friday afternoon, folks came by to say goodbye to Torbett, an Oak Park, Illinois, native — from the hometown of architect Frank Lloyd Wright — who moved to Sullivan County for a new job in 2000 after working four years in Middle Tennessee. She married Richie Torbett, a Piney Flats native in a family that runs greenhouses but who runs his own technology business, and had just given birth to their child. Her mother-in-law had seen a newspaper ad for the position in the former Sullivan County News, which no longer exists. The mother in law wanted her to apply, and Torbett had a recommendation from state planning officials that helped get her the job. Torbett recalled she went to work for the county shortly after the "smart-growth" law went into effect, requiring local government work together on state-mandated urban growth boundary planning for non-city areas. The plan, in Sullivan County's case agreed to by leaders of the county, Kingsport, Bristol, Tennessee, Bluff City and Johnson City. A coordinating committee hashed out rural areas that had few if any urban services available and thus were not suitable for extensive development, as well as potential growth areas for annexation by a designated city and/or provision of city services in areas to remain unincorporated. Smart growth was a child of annexation battles across the Tri-Cities, including at one point Johnson City, Bluff City and Bristol trying to annex overlapping sections of U.S. Highway 11E in Piney Flats around the crossroads area, resulting in protracted court battle, as well as the "tiny towns" law that then-Lt. Gov. John Wilder, D-Montery, got through the General Assembly. The law, eventually repealed, made it much easier for communities to incorporate, prompting talk of the Colonial Heights community just south of Kingsport becoming a city, as well anomalies like residents of an apartment complex in Elizabethton trying to incorporate and in effect secede from that city. Out of those two things, as well as annexation battles in other parts of the Volunteer State, the smart growth law emerged from the General Assembly. Torbett further explained that the Sullivan County Regional Planning Commission was formed in 1948, with the County Commission adopting zoning in 1988. She was hired May, 1, 2000, by then-County Executive Gil Hodges as the first planning director after the retirement of County Engineer Joe Yarbrough, who worked to get sewer trunk lines installed that would serve non-city areas of the county. Four years later, she began "flying solo" when the county ended its contract for planning services through Tennessee that Stan Harrison headed. Before Harrison, P.C. Snapp was the state planner for the region and served Sullivan County.