Chattanooga has always been a special place. Growing along a wide inviting river in a valley nestled by mountains and ridges, both our blessings and our sins have mirrored our striking geography.
We’ve nearly suffocated in the air pollution our factories made, until we insisted on change. We’ve used nature’s divides to let us be insular and to widen our social, economic, racial and cultural gaps. In more recent years, we’ve built a monument of fun, beauty and entertainment at the 21st Century Waterfront while we still have children who can’t use their school-assigned iPads at home because their families are too poor to pay for Internet service.
Just this week, WalletHub rated Chattanooga one of the best cities in America to start a business, yet a little over a year ago we had to begin a Violence Reduction Initiative to bring down what was quickly becoming an epidemic of gang-related shootings.
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Yet Chattanooga, in the words of Mayor Andy Berke, “has never accepted that we are not in control of our fate.” Instead, he says, we’re a community that is at its best “when private industries, churches, nonprofits, government and families come together trying to change the course of our city.”
That, and his own persistent, if understated, leadership is why Chattanooga has experienced the 6th largest economic recovery in the country since the great recession.
Now he is pushing us again.
In his 2015 State of the City address, Berke is again showing that Chattanooga won’t stand still for shortcomings. And he’s showing exceptional leadership by, once more, not taking the easy way out — raising or pledging city money for the next shiny building or monument. Instead, he continues to tackle the hard stuff of changing and improving people’s lives.
Against last year’s backdrop of securing partnerships and a location for the Family Justice Center, hiring a top-notch new police chief, launching the My Brother’s Keeper initiative to obtain a 19-percent drop in gang shootings, the city also has gained 3,341 jobs — most from the “hard-fought” announcement that Volkswagen will build a second auto manufacturing line here.
In addition, Berke and his administration obtained a federal grant to enroll an additional 150 kids in early Head Start, and shepherded a 22 percent increase (now 4,052) in students participating in a reading initiative that now boasts half of the youngsters reading at or above grade level. He launched the TechHire initiative in Chattanooga, and his Growing Small Business effort recently awarded incentives to four small companies to expand their workforce and create 53 new jobs.
That’s just a handful of the things now checked off of his bucket list.
In short, he’s been investing in people — not buildings. He wants to make people feel safer, find jobs, gain basic building blocks of learning.
And neither he — nor Chattanooga — is done.
In the coming year, Berke has four more major things on the to-do list.
* Chattanooga will work with EPB — the city-owned but board-run electric distribution utility — to provide true high-speed internet at a reduced cost ($26.99 a month) to city families whose children qualify for free- or reduced-price school lunches.
* The city will launch an Auto Workforce Development Task Force to prepare more Chattanoogans for the newest wave of VW and auto supplier jobs. These will require special technical aptitudes that Chattanooga schools and tech institutions haven’t prepared for. But Berke knows Chattanoogans should get these jobs, not folks from elsewhere. And the learning curve must be quick — weeks and months, not years.
“We really need this, but nobody really knows exactly what ‘this’ is,” the mayor says. That’s what the task force must figure out.
* The mayor will establish a Mayors Council for Women, lead by City Council Chairwoman Carol Berz and state Rep. JoAnne Favors, D-Chattanooga, to advise on policies to address the economic impact of insufficient education, health care, childcare, protection from violence, and parity in the workplace.
* Chattanooga police and the Family Justice Center will partner with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to tackle sexual assault on campus — including times when those assaults might not occur on campus but involve UTC students.
Since Berke took office in 2013, he has been fond of saying, “If something was easy, it would already be done.”
But that’s just his normal deflection routine. What he’s not saying is that are still plenty of easy things he and we could do to just drift along. But drifting is best left to the river.
Changing Chattanooga’s skyline is flash-in-the-pan politics for would-be legacy builders. Changing the lives of Chattanoogans for the better — sometimes even when we don’t see the short-term benefit — is true leadership.
Once again, Chattanooga is blessed.