Let's Plan Our SV Downtown

 The Valleyist Papers 

 

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WRITTEN IN FAVOUR OF THE IMPROVEMENT OF STEPHENS VALLEY 

Author – William Ray 

 

Edition 5. Issue 1.

Soon, Downtown SV should become vertical, arising from the mudflat we have been seeing for the past year. It seems now would be a good time to come together and create the SV resident’s vision for what our little walkable town should include. Instead of just a listing of the kinds of retail places we want, let’s concentrate on some of the experiences we would like to come to us through Downtown SV. If you are willing to think that way, and if you are willing to make a few field trips and do research on the kinds of places we want which are already nearby, then come along. 

It seems clear that any neighborhood of our size, which surrounds a little town, ought to have a great little convenience store, a bodega if you will, within walking distance. Sure, we already have some handy places close by that have food, sundries, wine, beer, and a variety of ingredients for whatever occasion we encounter, but what we want out of our Downtown is walkability. It would also be nice if this bodega included a little coffee shop with a few simple breakfast and lunch items.  

If you agree and would like a chance to see such a place already in operation, just to help kindle your imagination, then you ought to go over to Bellevue at the I-40 interchange and visit Sperry’s Mercantile. It is a great example of what we need to be an anchor tenant of Downtown SV. It packs so many items in a small footprint that it really is astounding. When we have a place like this just down the street, we will all be able to reconsider everything we are buying to stock our refrigerators and freezers. Why put it into inventory when it is available in our little town? Check out https://sperrysmercantile.com/ and please just go there and take it in!  

Another essential anchor tenant for Downtown really needs to be a restaurant/bar/music venue, and there are a couple of perfect examples of those nearby. Let’s concentrate of just one of those which is in our existing little town just down the road about 14 miles – Leiper's Fork. Leiper’s Fork is anchored by a place called Fox and Locke. It has a long history there and served as the bodega for the farmers who lived there for many years before its present iteration. Check it out at https://www.foxandlocke.com/ Essentially, it is a small restaurant with a bar and maybe 25 tables, but it is far cooler than that sounds. It is the music that makes Fox and Locke unique, and we want to experience their brand of music in our Downtown. If you need further convincing, then please check out their website and find a music event that interests you, gather some friends, get the tickets, and go there. They even have a weekly open mic night! We’ve got to have some of that! 

It is said that “Man doth not live on bread alone,” and because of that, perhaps our third anchor tenant should be a place that offers something to quench that need. Fortunately, we have such a place just down the road from Fox and Locke that is a great example of what we need in our Downtown. David Arms Gallery is hard to describe, but it is delightful to visit. Check them out at https://davidarms.com/ but really, just go there for a visit. Can you imagine having a place like this to wander around in as you wait for the music to start? That would be magical, indeed. 

Lastly, while not another retail space, we do need our Downtown to include a very cool fire pit surrounded by seating for us all to enjoy each other and the Downtown. The firepit should always be well-stocked with firewood and kindling (Mother Nature has recently provided us with a lifetime supply of that!). There should be fire tending tools and a full supply of s’mores ingredients.  

Give us these three anchor tenants and our community fire pit. We the SV family are anxiously awaiting their arrival!

Revisiting Electric Power Service to SV

The Valleyist Papers 

 

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WRITTEN IN FAVOUR OF THE IMPROVEMENT OF STEPHENS VALLEY 

Author – William Ray 

 

Edition 4. Issue 11.

This issue is a rewrite of a very early issue of The Valleyist. Since every power interruption of any type causes a lot of questions from the SV residents, and since a lot of new folks have arrived in the four years since we last addressed the subject, perhaps it is timely to revisit this.

Everyone in SV gets their electricity from Nashville Electric Service (NES). In turn, NES buys that power wholesale from Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) at several substations around middle Tennessee. We are very lucky to have TVA as the power supplier to NES. TVA has a very diverse set of generation resources they use to supply electricity to its 153 local power companies, like NES. They use area dams to generate hydroelectric power (the original renewable energy resource for electricity generation) and those dams provide about 11% of the power we use here, they use nuclear plants to produce about 39% of our energy, they burn natural gas to get about 26% of our needs, they still burn coal to produce 19% of our energy, the rest comes from wind, solar and energy efficiency programs. It is great to have so much diversity on our supply because if something crazy happens to one source, or fuel, it doesn’t cripple TVA.

TVA was born of the Great Depression and FDR’s intent to make the economy and living conditions of the southeastern US better by seeing to it that electric power was democratized – made cheap and available to all. TVA is also tasked with managing the flow of the Tennessee River system, and the economic and environmental stewardship of the region. TVA is owned by the United States, but they get no financing from the public coffers. They raise their own capital completely apart from the federal government, and they pay their debt service with revenues they generate. You can read a lot more about TVA at www.tva.gov.  NES was created in 1939 and is a non-profit, owned by Nashville Metro. NES policies are set by a Board consisting of five members, appointed by Nashville’s Mayor. You can read more about them and sign up to see their meetings at https://www.nespower.com/about-nes/.

NES is one of the largest municipally owned utilities in the US. They serve 420,000 meters over a 700 square mile area, using 5,900 miles of transmission and distribution lines in the process. But once NES purchases this TVA power and uses its distribution circuits to transport it, how does the power get to our homes in Stephens Valley?

Though NES hasn’t shared their mapping with us, by riding around and observing, we can tell that SV is normally served by a high voltage circuit that originates at the NES McCrory Lane substation. The good part about that is we are not too far from the source substation. The bad part is that a lot of that circuit comes down McCrory Lane, which is completely infested with trees that are looking for an opportunity to fall and damage the overhead circuit! To put this in context, just go down Highway 100 and turn right on McCrory Lane just past Loveless Cafe, and drive a few miles north while looking at the trees. See the problem?

As that circuit comes up Pasquo Road, there is one pole in front of the SV West project where the circuit goes underground to serve us. There is another pole near the original SV entrance on Sneed Road where the other half of the SV underground distribution starts. Both of these points are normally served by the same circuit out of the McCrory Substation, so when that circuit fails, all of SV is in the dark. This is still a good design that NES has implemented. Underground cables can fail, and the repair time can be many, many hours. Having redundant feeds into SV means that NES could reconfigure a failed underground component and get nearly all customers back on while repairs are taking place. This is a good thing! However, these additional connection points do introduce a certain number of potential problems. Many in SV just experienced a several hour outage due to the failure of a switch mechanism within one of those pad-mounted green boxes wherein underground cables connect to each other. Those switches a mechanical devices that include moving parts, and they can fail. But that is rare. In the last 60 months, SV has experienced only one such failure.

We're only discussing about 8 miles of NES grid here around SV. Since NES has about 5,890 other miles of plant to maintain, it is clear we are way out on the edge of their system. For now, being on the edge isn’t what we really want, but as the electric grid changes over the next few years, perhaps we will wind up in a very good position. Maybe we will discuss future possibilities for taking advantage of our remote location in a future issue.

You’ve likely noticed that we do have sporadic power outages in SV. The most common interruption to our electricity is a simple momentary interruption. Those are the events that send us scurrying to re-boot computers and reset the time on our garage door openers. These occurrences are from transient faults on the McCrory Lane circuit. A tree branch, an animal contact (think birds and squirrels), a lightning strike, or a car accident causes fault current to flow to ground. Outages to our power in SV can come from any and all of these hazards, and more. We don't have to be experiencing violent weather for our circuit to trip due to a fault. This fault current is recognized by a relay at the substation and the circuit breaker at the substation opens (just like a circuit breaker in our garages) the circuit to eliminate the overload. Now, when that happens at a substation the relays are fast and smart, and they immediately tell the circuit breaker to reclose. When that happens, and if the fault is gone, we only experience a sub one second blink. Of course, when one of our garage breakers trips, we must go find it and physically reset it. That normally takes a bit longer, but the principle is identical.

The NES record of service reliability in SV is quite good, by comparative industry standards, for a rural community outside of any city. 

The SV Downtown Project Continues

The Valleyist Papers 

 

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS WRITTEN IN FAVOUR OF THE IMPROVEMENT OF STEPHENS VALLEY 

Author – William Ray 

 

Edition 4. Issue 10.

There is one thing all of us in SV have in common – we all see the big construction project for our downtown going on, and we all wonder just what is going on. This month let's try to help some with that yearning for information about the project. While plans are not available to me, it isn’t all that hard to see what is going on presently just by walking around the project.  

A few months ago, it appeared that the earthwork portion of the project was going to last throughout the year. It certainly seemed complicated enough to last that long. However, the present work to install underground infrastructure makes the earthwork portion of the project appear mundane. Presently RAWSO Constructors is fully engaged in the work of installing water, sanitary sewer, electric conduits, and the stormwater management system. The stormwater management system is very complicated, and we will spend some time talking about it in this issue.  

The hard work of stormwater management began long before RAWSO arrived in SV this spring. Months of exacting professional design work had to be done long before a spoonful of dirt could be excavated, or a foot of pipe could be installed. The challenges faced by the engineering team were many. They needed to design a system of water inlets, mixing boxes, piping, manholes, and other infrastructure to drain off surface water coming from rain events impacting the new SV Downtown and also accommodating runoff from other areas above our new downtown (basically all the land on the east side of Natchez Trace which constitutes the drainage area which must be managed).  

It is the management of the stormwater that took lots of thought and calculations. If the task were as simple as just draining rainwater away from the downtown, it would not be so daunting. However, there are a litany of other issues to be dealt with. The system must work today when much of the area is naked earth which has the nasty habit of sending mud into the stormwater system and into the creek that runs through Meriwether Park and eventually into Trace Creek and the Harpeth River. Then it must also work to drain the completed downtown, which will mean nearly 100% coverage of the land by pavement and structures that will convert every drop of rainwater into new runoff. Oh, and it must do everything between now, and when the downtown is completely built, to mitigate damage to everything downstream during the long process of building the homes and commercial buildings that will make up our downtown. All of this is very hard to do. 

Few of us were around a decade ago when SV was first proposed, but the signs that remain on fence posts along Sneed Road inform us that SV endured a lot of opposition before was born. It is certain that some of the fears expressed by the opposition were about dramatic negative impacts on the Trace Creek and Harpeth River watersheds. Those might have been legitimate fears had not Williamson and Davidson County governments stipulated that a sophisticated stormwater management system, like the one being installed right before our eyes, be installed as SV grew. For what we can all see now, it appears that everyone is adhering to those stipulations, and that our neighborhood will not negatively impact the watersheds.  

The methods chosen to accomplish these objectives are revealing themselves as RAWSO makes daily progress on installation of the stormwater system components. A few decades ago, this project would have been far more simple and totally analog. The creek that went through the downtown area would have simply been enclosed in a culvert, the new streets would have been outfitted with stormwater drains to channel the water to that culvert, and that would have been the whole system. The system being installed before our eyes is vastly more capable and complex.  

The existing creek is being re-routed into a piping network that sort of zigzags through the site as it connects to mixing boxes, manholes, and collection piping. It can look a little crazy, but there is clearly genius at work in the design being executed. A lot of the zigzagging and mixing boxes are part of a system designed to slow down the runoff and store some of it during a flood event. The design provides a lot of “friction” to slow down the runoff and protect everything downstream.

One of the largest elements of that protection has just been completed on the west side of Stephens

Valley Blvd at the top of Meriwether Park. I’ve included a couple of pictures of that structure as it was being constructed, and it has interesting features. You can see the baffles built into the giant mixing box in those pictures. That is part of the friction system which should keep all the new runoff from inundating Meriwether Park, because that is where all that new water is headed.  

Although Meriwether Park is a lovely feature of our life in SV, it is more a component of the stormwater management system that it is a park. That will become even more evident as the downtown construction progresses. You will note that the park is already getting more dense vegetation along the boundaries of the central creek in anticipation of the new work it will soon be asked to accomplish. The vegetation will also provide protection for the creek banks, and it will add more friction to slow the flow of excess surface water.  

Some other new technologies in stormwater management are also apparently coming to our project. Some of the stormwater inlets appear to have active filtering systems to help reduce suspended solids and other compounds like phosphorous and nitrogen (mostly components of the fertilizers we apply to our yards) which might increase biological oxygen demand in the Harpeth and Cumberland Rivers downstream of SV. It isn’t clear to we casual observers yet, but there might also be automated valves and weirs incorporated into the management system that reconfigure themselves based on weather conditions. All of this is state of the art in stormwater management. 

Sure, we are all impatient for the downtown to be a reality. Sure, we are mostly tiring of the incessant construction noise. But from what we can see, the results are going to be something astounding. A developer, an engineering firm, excellent construction contractors, and understanding residents are all working together to grow SV intelligently.