Rhea County's plans to ask the Tennessee Valley Authority for coal ash compensation money are forging ahead, though officials have admitted they will need to do some more "figuring" before presenting any numbers to TVA.

December 2008's coal ash spill at TVA's Kingston coal plant was called one of the worst environmental spills in history. Over a billion gallons of coal ash from the plant spilled into the Emory and Clinch Rivers after a levee broke on Dec. 22, 2008, in neighboring Roane County.

In December 2009, County Executive Billy Ray Patton won approval from the Rhea County Commission to petition for money in an attempt to make up for the tax revenue Patton said the county had lost from the bad publicity following the spill. Patton and other officials believed the county had been hurt by a decrease in the sales tax, hotel/motel tax and property tax revenue.

The problem surfacing now, though, is that as officials compile the numbers, the county as a whole is not showing any terrific loss of money. According to Rhea County Finance Director Billy Graham, Rhea County really hasn't suffered compared to other counties in the area.

"We've been pretty steady in the sales tax and haven't had the roller-coaster fluctuations like the rest of the state has," Graham said at a county finance meeting Wednesday, Jan. 6. "It's nothing like the horror stories we've been hearing around us."

That's not to say that certain individual businesses have not been hard hit by the Kingston coal ash spill, along with the negative publicity following it.

Graham stated that numerous resorts and marinas in Spring City had lost up to 30 percent of their business due to the spill, and were struggling to make ends meet after many would-be customers cancelled reservations.

"TVA needs to be held responsible for this lack of planning and engineering," said Graham. "Through no fault of their own, these [resort owners] have incurred these losses."

Graham attributed the county's surprising positive revenue figures to new businesses recently opened in Rhea County, the half-cent increase in the sales tax and the fact that people seemed to be more "spend-happy" than usual.

According to Graham, the hotel/motel tax revenue is also steadily regaining ground "because people have kept coming to Rhea County."

Immediately after the spill, the county experienced a minor dip in revenue, Graham said, but it wasn't long before numbers began leveling out and staying fairly steady.

Rhea County's total sales tax revenue dropped about $33,000 between its 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 fiscal year. Though only halfway into the 2009-2010 period, Graham believes that the total sales tax revenue by the end of the next fiscal year will have gone back up by $9,000.

Graham believes the entire county would have experienced a much more widespread loss in revenue if these factors had not "picked up the slack and made up for those other losses."

Because the negative effects of the Coal Ash spill will be most clearly evidenced through the figures of the resorts and marinas, County Executive Billy Ray Patton plans to contact those businesses for their numbers.

"I'm planning on contacting each and every one of them before I talk to TVA," said Patton. "Hopefully that will give me a better idea of the amount they believe they've lost, then I'm going to take what they tell me [to TVA]."

TVA has invited individual businesses to request compensation, said Patton, but the resorts and marinas will be looking for compensation from lost bookings and other business losses, unlike the county, which plans to concentrate mainly on any tax revenue lost.

Graham maintained that it was not a matter of Rhea county finances somehow still ending up in the black; it was the fact that they could have made more.

"If [the resorts and marinas] lost money, we lost money too," he said. "Our tax revenue would've been even higher and we would be able to do more with that money that we actually don't have."

Elisabeth Hollingsworth can be reached at elisabeth.hollingsworth@rheaheraldnews.com.