KNOXVILLE — Dale Hobbs spent most of Thursday at the TDOT sign shop on a black-on-orange board that reads RAMP CLOSED PERMANENTLY, and he was about to start a job he’d been looking forward to when a second board landed on his bench. It said THROUGH FALL 2027.
“They want both of them up, on the same post,” Hobbs said. “I asked which one’s the real one and the fellow told me they’re both accurate. I’ve done this twenty-six years. A bridge footing, that’s permanent. This is a ramp that’s coming back in a year, and I’d already centered that whole line.”
The ramp is the northbound Cusick Road entrance to Pellissippi Parkway, which closed Friday as part of the Relocated Alcoa Highway project. Drivers are being sent to the new Amazon Connector Road alongside it, and the pattern is scheduled to stay through fall 2027. The project covers 13 miles across Knox and Blount counties, costs $186 million, and has an end date of 2037.
The job Hobbs wanted to get to was a 35 mph sign for a county road in Union County, which he says is the best kind to letter because it’s all numbers. It has been sitting in the rack since Wednesday. Every time he picks it up, somebody comes by to look at the ramp signs. A man from the district office stopped in Friday and asked whether the word could be made a little smaller.
“Smaller than what? I said I can do it, but then it’s a different sign and I start over, and he said no, leave it,” Hobbs said. “I’m also stuck with the board. You can’t peel PERMANENTLY off and put it on something else.”
Hobbs said he has heard the PERMANENTLY board will come down when the ramp reopens and a new one will go up in its place, and that he’ll probably be asked to letter that one too. Nobody has told him what it will say.