IF YOU GO• What: Chattanooga Neighborhood Association Council• When: 6 p.m. Jan. 24; codes and enforcement meeting at 5:30 p.m.• Where: Development Resource Center, 1250 Market St.• Information: http://www.cnacforyou.com
Chattanooga Neighborhood Association Council members are trying to talk residents into participating more this year in the panel’s meetings.
“Sometimes the only people who come are those of us who work for the city,” said Lana Sutton, a CNAC governing board member representing East Brainerd. “So it’s kind of ridiculous to come and pretend we’re representing the public.”
The group will host its first meeting of the year at 6 p.m. Jan. 24 in the Development Resource Center.
The council is supposed to be made up of at least three neighborhood representatives from each of the nine City Council districts. That’s at least 27 people, but only five usually come to meetings and at least two of those are city employees, said Sutton.
CNAC is trying to get across-the-board participation from all neighborhood associations and community development groups, said Vice President Aaliyah Hakeem.
“A lot of neighborhood associations don’t know that CNAC exists or what we can do to help them,” Hakeem said.
The meeting Jan. 24 is kind of crunch time for the group to rejuvenate itself and get new life since this is the last year before CNAC is scheduled to elect new officers for 2012, said Gary Ball, a founding CNAC member.
“At this meeting we’ll get our executive board energized again,” said CNAC President Kenneth Smith.
Smith said his goals include hosting a crime summit and a housing summit this year.
The CNAC’s goal is to serve as a unified voice in communicating the needs of a community to city government.
“This was set up as an activist group,” Sutton said. “We’re supposed to be a go-between with the neighborhood association and the government. It’s really a shame when this accountability tool breaks down.”
Part of the problem is that residents believe if they’re nice and ask for help, they have a better chance of getting their problem solved than if they become a troublemaker, Ball said. But the bottom line is that there is power in numbers, he said.
CNAC started back in 2001 after a group of neighborhood leaders got together to solve the city’s brush and trash pickup problems, Ball said.
“Because we were able to do that as a group, it caught fire and the question was: Could we do this on a bigger scale and help the city resolve bigger issues?” he said.
So the city paid for facilitators to help the group set up bylaws and get started. Jon Kinsey, the city mayor at the time, gave $10,000 to initiate the group’s formation, according to the CNAC website.
Hopefully, the group will refocus its direction, said Cynthia Stanley Cash, a founding CNAC member.
“We started being too much of a social group, having too many guest speakers,” Cash said. “Entertaining guest speakers took away from our mission, time away from the collective concerns of bettering our community.”