Mayor Andy Berke speaks to supporters Tuesday, March 7, 2017 in the Revelry Room.Chattanooga will keep its good mayor Andy Berke.
That’s a plus for us because Berke is the kind of mayor who builds a city of people, not a city of monuments.
That’s not to say Chattanooga hasn’t had some monumental growth in Berke’s first four years.
We have booming downtown condo construction, a new and improved approach to zoning, a much touted “innovation zone,” trendy new bike lanes to “calm” traffic and a plan to improve some of our most public parks.
But on Berke’s watch, we’ve mostly seen the kind of hard-fought, street-level, neighborhood building that leads to the kind of growth that makes those condos rise: We’ve gained about 8,000 new jobs. 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. The city upped the number of contracts awarded to minority-owned businesses from 1 percent to 14 percent.