City Council to Vote on Detention Center Contracts, 3 Rezoning Requests
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Anderson City Council will tackle five new items of business at Monday’s regular 6 p.m. meeting in council chambers downtown, including a pair of contracts for the city detention center and three land use items.
The Detention Center, which houses men and women for the City of Anderson, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons, and a handful of sentenced inmates serving generally less than three months. The city is responsible not only for the bars but also for bodies: initial health screenings, medications, acute care, and access to a physician at all hours. On Monday, council will be asked to consider a contract with Southern Health Partners (SHP), a Chattanooga-based company that has, for 10 years, provided all medical care for inmates at the facility, including the purchase of medicines.
The Anderson City Police Department sought proposals for a comprehensive health-care delivery system at the jail and received two. SHP’s bid came in at $251,100 annually; while Advanced Correctional Healthcare, based in Franklin, Tennessee, proposed $696,919. Under the SHP model, on-site care for inmates—including those held for other counties or federal agencies—would be the provider’s responsibility, covering nursing and physician services, supplies, and over-the-counter medications. Costs that can be tied to specific inmates—prescriptions, X-rays, dental work, off-site consultations—would be billed back to the originating agency by the city, the provider, or the outside medical office. Staff is recommending approval of a one-year contract with SHP, with the option to extend for a second and third year, framing the benefit as “total turnkey health care delivery.”
Next comes the question of what, exactly, those inmates will eat, and at what price. The Detention Center must furnish “nutritious, wholesome, and palatable food” that satisfies standards from the United States Bureau of Prisons, the American Correctional Association, and applicable federal, state, and local regulations. In June 2023, The city again turned to Trinity Food Services, of Oldsmar, Florida, for that work, approving a one-year term with an automatic renewal if both sides agreed. Ahead of Monday’s meeting, the Police Department went back to the market for inmate food services and received three bids: Kellwell Food Management of Beattyville, Kentucky, at $322,098.30; Trinity at $277,329.55; and Summit Correctional Services of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at $353,252.47.
Trinity’s offer, the lowest of the three, would continue to supply meals that meet all required nutritional standards as a detention-budgeted expense. Staff is recommending renewal of Trinity’s contract for another year, with the same option to extend into a second and third. The vote, if it comes, will not change the flavor of the food so much as ratify the city’s decision about how much a jail calorie ought to cost.
Council will also consider boundaries—what belongs inside, what stays out, and which pieces of the municipal map will be asked to become something they were not before. In the first of three land-use items, council members will be asked to send to the Planning Commission a petition to rezone 1401 South Fant Street and five associated lots, shifting them from R-5, Single-Family Residential, to NC, Neighborhood Commercial. The request is both technical and intimate: the applicant wants to operate a funeral home in a building that used to house one, a site that lived for years as a legal non-conforming use until the business closed and the zoning code quietly reclaimed it.
Neighborhood Commercial is the least intensive commercial classification that still allows funeral homes, a kind of compromise category that recognizes commerce while promising not to overwhelm the houses beside it. If council votes, as staff recommends, to refer the petition, the Planning Commission will take it up on April 7, folding a question of grief and land-use into a public hearing with a case number.
The next map adjustment involves a different species of absence. On Clemson Boulevard, a four-acre parcel has for years been used as an automobile dealership but exists as what planners call a “donut hole”—a pocket of land completely surrounded by the city limits but never annexed into them. The owner now wants to bring the parcel into the city and zone it GC, General Commercial, a category the staff notes is “typical” up and down the corridor and consistent with surrounding properties. Once annexed and rezoned, the site is expected to be redeveloped for commercial uses that conform to that classification, another small recalibration of who pays city taxes and under which set of rules.
The third referral request also lives at the intersection of cars and code. On East Greenville Street, at 1502 and 1504 (adjacent to Sonic), an applicant wants to rezone two lots from NC, Neighborhood Commercial, to GC, General Commercial, in order to build a car wash. Under current rules, NC encourages lower-intensity retail and office uses and does not allow car washes; GC does. Here, too, the path forward runs through the Planning Commission’s April 7 meeting, where the city will have to decide whether the steady thrum of sprayers and vacuums belongs on that particular stretch of East Greenville.
Taken together, the five items on Monday’s agenda offer no sweeping redevelopment, no referendum, no headline-ready tax revolt. Instead, the meeting will likely be spent adjusting the edges of the map, tending to the infrastructure of confinement, and aligning contracts and classifications with the city’s sense of itself: a place that wants its land to be logically zoned, its donut holes filled, its inmates treated and fed, its codes and contracts squared with their own precedents.
After the votes are cast—or deferred—Mayor Terence Roberts will read a proclamation of recognition honoring Hamid and K.D., the husband-and-wife team who for three decades ran Tucker’s Restaurant, an Anderson institution that quietly built its own form of civic infrastructure: a shared table.
Tucker’s closed earlier this year after more than 30 years of serving what the proclamation calls “fine, locally inspired classic cuisine” and providing an event space that has hosted “everything from birthdays and weddings to corporate and non-profit gatherings and community fundraisers.”
The document, drafted in the familiar WHEREAS and NOW THEREFORE cadence of municipal praise, sketches the couple’s biography in the language of public service. It notes that Hamid and K.D. have “faithfully owned and operated Tucker’s Restaurant since its opening in January 1995,” offering “exceptional service to residents, business patrons, and visitors,” while providing “stability to the local workforce” and contributing “significantly” to the city’s economic life. Their “unwavering commitment, integrity, and warm hospitality,” it says, built not only “a distinguished business” but also “enduring relationships throughout the community,” the sort of cross-cutting social fabric that rarely shows up in line-item budgets but makes the rest of the municipal enterprise more bearable.
The proclamation goes further, naming the Mohssenis’ “civic leadership, philanthropy, volunteerism, and steadfast dedication” as a “lasting legacy” in Anderson. After three decades, it notes, they have chosen to close Tucker’s and “begin a well-deserved retirement,” with plans to travel, volunteer, and “continue to contribute to the Anderson community” in a different register. In a single clause, the city manages to both let them go and keep them close.
“WHEREAS, the City of Anderson recognizes that strong leaders set the vision for their communities and are vital to enhancing the overall quality of life,” the text reads, before arriving at its formal conclusion. “NOW, THEREFORE, I, Terence V. Roberts, Mayor of the City of Anderson, together with the members of City Council…do hereby proclaim March 23rd as ‘Hamid and K.D. Mohsseni Day.’”
