Audio: Chattanooga City Council -- Nov. 27, 2007
By Michael Davis
Staff Writer
The Chattanooga City Council on Tuesday night approved the expenditure of as much as $241,000 to design and engineer a portion of the South Chickamauga Creek Greenway.
City Parks and Recreation Administrator Larry Zehnder said the engineering phase will take about six months.
"We won't be breaking ground until early summer of 2008," he said.
The contract will be with Barge, Waggoner, Sumner and Cannon Inc.
This funding will concern design and engineering work for a roughly 3.5-mile portion of greenway that will stretch from the Tennessee Riverwalk up South Chickamauga Creek to the Harrison Pike area, said Rick Wood, director of the Chattanooga office of the Trust for Public Land.
Four miles of the greenway now exists, from Shallowford Road to Camp Jordan, and eventually it will extend a total of about 12 miles from the Tennessee Riverwalk to Camp Jordan, he said.
Mr. Wood, whose organization assisted in acquiring land for the project, said there already are conceptual designs of the greenway.
"That is from a larger and broader perspective," he said. "This gets us down to the detail of the land."
He said this soon-to-be-designed portion of the greenway will include two launch points for canoes or kayaks.
In other business, the council on second and final reading approved an ordinance to change city code so that pet owners are required to pick up solid animal waste on any public or private property, except for the owner's own property.
Failure to clean up after a pet will result in the animal "being declared a nuisance and liable to seizure and disposal" and/or a fine of up to $50, according to the ordinance.
At the beginning of the month, the council approved a related ordinance dealing with animals and parks. That ordinance requires pet owners to pick up after their animals in parks and greenways. It also stipulates that officers will enforce the requirement.
Guide dogs and other service-oriented animals are exempt in both ordinances.
E-mail Michael Davis at michaeld@timesfreepress.com
