Attendees at a public growth planning meeting Oct. 28 will have the chance to share their concerns about related topics and see what the best scenario for controlled growth looks like in the East Hamilton area.
“This is not going to decide a land-use plan,” noted Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency senior planner Bryan Shults. “It’s going to ask them what they prefer. [They should come] to provide input about the future growth and development of Hamilton County.”
The meeting is a follow-up to one held in August which gathered similar feedback from 60 attendees. The scenarios which will be presented at the 6 p.m. meeting in the Ooltewah High School cafeteria, from no growth to preferred growth, will draw upon those previous comments. The process is anywhere but complete, according to organizers, and the upcoming meeting gives the public a chance to still get in on the front end.
“There are going to be some next steps we have to look at,” said Shults. “We’ll determine our next steps after the meetings next week.”
An estimated 20,000 new houses are expected to call East Hamilton home by 2035, according to Gresham, Smith & Partners consultant Kevin Tilburn, who is conducting the study and compiling the results in cooperation with Tennessee Department of Transportation and the local Transportation Planning Organization.
The public feedback gathered on topics from infrastructure and mobility; community resources; and growth, land use and natural resources will be used locally as the area moves forward. The CHCRPA recently purchased software that can plug in different growth possibilities and show implications all the way down to related and unrelated costs.
“We purchased the scenario-planning software so we can the take information coming out of the study and use this to inform our decision-making process – what are the implications of land use here on bus trips, car routes, school enrollment?” Director Karen Rennich explained. “This is is the first [project] we’ve been involved in in Chattanooga and Hamilton County that is really going to this depth to look at infrastructure, land use and transportation and is very robust in how it ties all those things together.”