To uphold its end of the pact with Volkswagen, Chattanooga and Hamilton County governments must create a comparable vision for the future that hinges on at least two much-talked-about but yet unaddressed tasks: Smart-growth planning, and support for an emphasis on education that will assure qualified workers to fill the jobs this community has sought so long to create.
City and county governments must at last seize the moment to adopt a far-sighted growth plan, not just for Hamilton County, but also for the broader tri-state region that will be channeling commuting workers, shoppers and new home-buyers and businesses to Hamilton County specifically, and nearby counties generally.
Without a concrete, widely embraced growth plan, unplanned urban congestion will take over and make a nightmare of sprawl that will prove expensive and next-to-impossible to revamp and put in order with the infrastructure that got left behind.
Uncontrolled growth will foster a mishmash of roads, subdivisions and commercial areas in the unincorporated north and east of the county that will be built before county government has achieved the authority to write urban codes and ordinances, and before sewer mains, classrooms, firehalls and police precincts are planned or installed. Commercial sprawl will proceed apace without thoughtful land-use planning and zoning. Parks, playgrounds, bike paths and pedestrian needs will be overlooked. Wetlands, heritage farms and greenspace will disappear. And planned regional metro traffic corridors and public transportation will be neglected instead of taking precedence.
Chattanooga's and Hamilton County's mayors have said for the past three years - generally after visiting cities with new auto plants that didn't plan ahead - that they want, and the community sorely needs, a smart county and metro-regional growth plan. But they haven't yet allocated a dime to pay for such a plan, nor have they taken a single concrete step to make one happen.
Indeed, they just recently began talking seriously enough about the subject to let the Chamber of Commerce issue requests-for-qualifications for growth-planning consultants. When and how such work will be financed after a planning consulting team is selected for a contract remains to be seen.
At the moment, the mayors, instead of talking openly about the need for tax revenue to carry out such vital planning, are now begging and cajoling the private sector, foundations and state and federal grant managers to bail them out and pay for the multimillion-dollar, year-long, professional planning work that should have been initiated two years ago. Meanwhile, the mayors themselves waste time angrily fencing over the now-expired sales tax agreement.
Education prospects are just as depressing. The nine county commissioners will not address the imperative of seeking an urban government charter or a home rule referendum that would give the county the ordinances and tools to actually guide and serve growth, or to consolidate countywide urban services, infrastructure and water utilities.
To the contrary, their conservative bloc mainly spins its wheels playing parochial politics and unjustly meddling in the independently elected school board's business. In the latter, it is withholding adequate funding and holding the board hostage to a forced ouster of a qualified, black superintendent whose achievements - in graduation rates and academic progress - go unrecognized.
The commission's retrograde and racist agenda is to install a local white superintendent who will redirect the school systems resources to suburban, mainly white schools, and who will kowtow to the commission's puppet string management of the school board. Such meddling seriously retards the school systems forward progress.
Chattanooga's renaissance, coupled with the state's financial incentives, reasonably gets credit for attracting Volkswagen. But there is much to be done to achieve the hopes of the community - and to make good on commitments to Volkswagen and other new businesses - in this match.
City and county leaders must elevate their vision, their work ethic, their political courage and focus, and their will to serve effectively. The county, particularly, must obtain an urban government charter, as Knoxville and Memphis have done. Unless all that happens soon, Chattanooga and Hamilton County will be lucky to achieve even part of the gains that our recent economic efforts appear to offer.