As one candidate, Republican Weston Wamp, stressed alongside friends and family the importance of boosting voter turnout for county races, his opponent in the election for Hamilton County mayor, Democrat Matt Adams, lashed out Tuesday over Wamp’s relationship with the Chattanooga Lookouts – and sought to recruit an unlikely ally.
“As you all know, my opponent has been hellbent on derailing a yearslong bipartisan effort to revitalize Chattanooga’s long-suffering South Broad corridor even though not one dollar of current taxpayer money will go toward the project, which is expected to yield more than a billion dollars in investment,” Adams said during a news conference Tuesday outside the Hamilton County Courthouse.
Plans to construct an almost $80 million stadium for the Chattanooga Lookouts on the old U.S. Pipe/Wheland Foundry site in the South Broad District have become a last-minute point of contention in the mayoral election, which will be Thursday.
Wamp has been a consistent skeptic of the project, citing the timing so close to an election and questioning the financial feasibility of the plans, but Adams has been more receptive.
Emails released Friday include a message that Lookouts managing owner and Hardball Capital CEO Jason Freier sent in 2018 accusing Wamp of making a racist and sexist comment during a meeting with company executives in January 2015, which Wamp has forcefully denied. The email does not describe the alleged comments in question, and Wamp’s former employers at the Lamp Post Group have also come to his defense.