It's official. Mayor Andy Berke made it clear Tuesday that he will seek re-election.
That's good news for Chattanooga.
Berke came to the mayor's office in April of 2013 with a mandate of more than 70 percent of votes cast in the election one month before. He took over a city that was largely rebuilt from the decline of the 1970s but still in the throes of a recovery spark from the Great Recession of 2008. Jobs and people investments were still lagging far behind.
"The next chapter, I said then, was to empower every Chattanoogan to write their own story," Berke told a crowd of about 150 supporters at Wednesday's announcement. "All of us - businesses, nonprofits, churches, and city government - had to come together to make that happen."
And the work - though sometimes rocky - began.
In four years, unemployment fell from 8.1 percent in May 2013 to 4 percent in May 2016, and the city now boasts the third highest wage growth in the country for a mid-sized city.
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, accompanied by his wife, Monique, left, and daughters Hannah and Orly, announces his bid for a second term at the Development Resource Center earlier this week.Part of that was due to Volkswagen's new auto assembly plant that was announced long before Berke ran for office. But Berke added to it. VW's second manufacturing line and many of the newest suppliers and ancillary jobs here were a direct result of his hard work - they all required team building from city government and city services to come to fruition.
The result has been 8,472 new jobs and a building boom downtown and in surrounding communities that together have given our city the highest rise in home prices in the mid-South - a sign of growing buying power for more Chattanoogans.
"These are great results," Berke said. "No other city in Tennessee - and very few in the country - can claim them. But as important as they are, it's how we got them that matters more."
He ticked off the "hows": Teaming with VW, partnering with Hamilton County and the Enterprise Center to establish an Innovation District that houses 46 companies, working with developers to bring quality affordable housing, partnering with churches to put together an early education reading initiative, pairing with nonprofits to open a new Family Justice Center and setting up new Tech Goes Home computer skills learning classes for parents and a Baby University to help young mothers and fathers with their newborns.
Yes, there are still challenges.
Though violent crime and property crimes have fallen over the past four years, the city still has a gang problem and far too many gang shootings. A police program called the Violence Reduction Initiative has so far had limited success.
Meeting that challenge requires a partnership from the courts and the schools. Those relationships are still in the building stage, but the most promising has taken the form of Chattanooga 2.0, a public process led by the Chamber of Commerce, local foundations and local school officials who are trying to address learning gaps and falling school scores - things that often lead to young people being on the street rather than on track toward higher education or jobs.
How the Chattanooga 2.0 suggestions will play out with the school board and County Commission remains to be seen, but the city took a bold first step more than a year ago when Berke, with a $250,000 investment, created the Office of Early Learning, Baby University and began the work of securing the largest federal grant in the state to enroll an additional 150 kids in early Head Start.
In addition, Berke and the city already had launched an online literacy initiative at all Youth & and Family Development Centers. Currently 66 percent of active participants now read at or above grade level. Countywide, only 40 percent of Hamilton County students read at or above grade level.
Andy Berke, though he served in the state Senate from 2007 to 2012, is not your typical Tennessee politician. For one thing, he's a Democrat, and for another, he's shy. Those two things together often mean he is pegged among local leaders as being somewhat arrogant. This is an incorrect assessment.
Rather, Berke is studious, something of a policy wonk, and most of all truly interested in and serious about making this city better, stronger, faster, leaner, more open, more successful and even more fun.
He believes that's done with people, not bricks and mortar. He isn't interested so much in building monuments like 21st Century Waterfronts (unless they improve lives).
What Berke instead is building are better people, better citizens, better kids, better workers for tomorrow's better jobs.
Others, surely, will throw their hats in the ring for mayor before the March 2017 election, and some already have.
But one with more heart and soul and qualification than Andy Berke will be hard to find.