Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke.Chattanooga has made unmistakable progress in the four years that Andy Berke has been mayor.
That progress hasn't come easily, nor has it been painless. And certainly Berke and his administration have faced criticism.
But the fact remains that on nearly every scale, overall Chattanooga life is better today than when Berke took office in April 2013.
- In Berke's time, unemployment has fallen from about 7 percent (the all-time high was 9.6 in 2011) to a low of 4 percent in May 2016. Along the way, Chattanooga experienced the third highest wage growth in the country for a mid-sized city.
But in Berke's eyes, progress hasn't just been about giving Chattanooga a stronger economy, but also a fairer one.
While we gained thousands of jobs from big companies like Volkswagen and its expansion, the Berke administration's Growing Small Business initiative helped 16 small businesses create 156 new jobs. He also oversaw the creation of the Innovation District to foster entrepreneurship and worked with community partners to create a city workforce development initiative that is helping local companies and the county school system grow new talent and give at-risk students and drop-outs the needed skills to land jobs and pull out of poverty.
All-told, the Berke administration tallies almost 8,000 new jobs, while increasing the share of city contracts awarded to minority-owned businesses from 1 percent to more than 14 percent.
- For all the talk of gangs and shootings, the reality is that Chattanooga has seen a 10 percent decrease in violent crime since 2014, and property crime is at historic lows. Still the gang shootings are very public - albeit generally concentrated among a small percentage of the population in a single corridor of the city. Still, one gang shooting is one too many, and Berke has tweaked his Violence Reduction Initiative with a plan to raise the city's total sworn police officers to 500 - the most in the city's history.
Berke also brought to our city a man who is arguably the most professional police chief Chattanooga has had in several decades.
- Overlapping the gang and jobs issues is education, and the Berke administration has stepped forward to do whatever the city can to help with the blatant shortcomings in our county's public education system - despite the fact that education is the sole purview of our county and state governments.
Berke led the city to invest in expanded Head Start services, the Office of Early Childhood Development, early learning scholarships and Baby University, which helps new and young parents understand the importance of reading to their babies and toddlers. Berke also led the city to make summer camps free and add reading and learning programs in the city's Youth and Family Development Centers.
- Berke and his employees are often criticized by citizens and news organizations - including this one - about a perceived lack of transparency, but consider this:
No other city administration (and certainly no Hamilton County administration) has ever offered up city data and records for open perusal online. In 2014, Berke signed an executive order to increase transparency in city government through development of an open data policy and creation of an online portal. In September of 2016, that online portal, dubbed Chattadata, contained 202 city and community data sets. City officials said page views at Chattadata were up five times those of the year before. Further improvements are planned to continually add more information and make the site more user-friendly.
Further, in response to citizens who rightfully decried the non-transparent nature of city and county tax incentives to lure new businesses and industry here, Berke - along with County Mayor Jim Coppinger - changed the policies for tax incentives known as PILOTs. The change requires new PILOTs to include claw-back provisions to recoup taxpayer money if the firms don't live up to their end of the agreements. Just this month, the new owner of one such company agreed to pay back $6 million to the city and county.
There is no question that Chattanooga has done better, grown, and moved forward under Mayor Andy Berke.
Is all perfect? Of course not. And Berke acknowledges this.
"There's more to do," he says. "One of my jobs is to create urgency. We want to do things better, quicker. But it takes a long time to get things done in government, and sometimes, the sacrifice you make is for inclusion: We want to engage the people in decisions."
Berke faces opposition from two men who have council experience, as well as a local businessman.
Larry Grohn, the incumbent councilman from District 4, has been a frequent Berke critic. But Grohn too rarely does his homework, and equally rarely seems able to find ways to be a team player when looking for solutions to city problems.
David Crockett, a former three-term council representative for Hixson and the director of the Chattanooga Office of Sustainability that former Mayor Ron Littlefield created and later closed, has lots of big ideas and plenty of vision. But some of those big ideas are so forward-looking that its hard to match today's immediate needs with this good man's ideals for the city he truly loves.
Businessman Chris Long charges that Berke's city hall view of Chattanooga is "the emerald city." Long says that view is out of touch with ordinary people. His solution is knee-jerk: Strip away many city regulations.
Such complaints and approaches belie the progress Chattanooga has made in four short years - even if we're all impatient for more.
To keep moving ahead, Andy Berke is the clear and correct choice for Chattanooga.