My family owns and operates Sail Away Homes and Land in Kingston.

For three years now we have tried to maintain and grow our business while the Watts Bar Lake properties recover slowly from the negative impact of the December 22, 2008 Ash Spill. Our business income dropped over 85% from 2008 to 2009...we have recovered a little each year....about 6 months ago we even bought a new coffee pot for our office...yeeehah!!

We will continue to stay here...we love Watts Bar Lake, Roane County and East Tennessee...we are making progress. We believe Watts Bar's lake properties are a great value and we advertise our enthusiasm to the world everyday with wide ranging internet activities.

Like some other businesses that were uniquely tied to Watts Bar Lake, we felt we had economic losses that TVA should be required to compensate. In fact, our studies of the lake property market clearly show that Watts Bar Lake was enjoying a consistent market share growth from 2004 up through 2008. In 2008 Watts Bar attracted well over 25% of all Lake Front property buyers who were looking to purchase in East TN's lake "Corridor"...this market share had increased consistently every year from below 10% in 2004 to over 25% in 2008.

This trend changed immediately and abruptly as of the Ash Spill event...now dropping consistently every year since the spill....in three years, by 2011 it had dropped to 12.9% and if trends continue we will see year 2012 drop below the 10% level. In other words, today Watts Bar lake's Real Estate popularity has been cut in half....this occurring at a time when the baby boomer retirement floodgates were just opening.

Roane County is suffering a huge and increasing economic loss. These missing buyers....50% of them are now not here, would have paid property transaction taxes, they would have brought money to our local banks, they would have eaten in our restaurants, bought boats from our dealerships, supported our retailers, they would have used our new hospital, and because they are usually retirees, they have no requirement for schools or jobs...they quite simply would have brought their money and enjoyed living here and spending it...now they are missing. They would have had friends visit them all through the year and these visitor's would have added to Roane's economic income...visitor dollars circulating among Roane County businesses.

This morning we received word that a Federal Judge has ruled that businesses like ours that have purely economic losses can not recover these economic losses from TVA. TVA has always promised to make us "whole again", I wonder why they asked a judge to rule that they don;t have to do that ???