To uphold its end of the pact with Volkswagen, Chattanooga and Hamilton County governments must create a comparable vision for the future that hinges on at least two much-talked-about but yet unaddressed tasks: Smart-growth planning, and support for an emphasis on education that will assure qualified workers to fill the jobs this community has sought so long to create.
City and county governments must at last seize the moment to adopt a far-sighted growth plan, not just for Hamilton County, but also for the broader tri-state region that will be channeling commuting workers, shoppers and new home-buyers and businesses to Hamilton County specifically, and nearby counties generally.
Without a concrete, widely embraced growth plan, unplanned urban congestion will take over and make a nightmare of sprawl that will prove expensive and next-to-impossible to revamp and put in order with the infrastructure that got left behind.
Uncontrolled growth will foster a mishmash of roads, subdivisions and commercial areas in the unincorporated north and east of the county that will be built before county government has achieved the authority to write urban codes and ordinances, and before sewer mains, classrooms, firehalls and police precincts are planned or installed. Commercial sprawl will proceed apace without thoughtful land-use planning and zoning. Parks, playgrounds, bike paths and pedestrian needs will be overlooked. Wetlands, heritage farms and greenspace will disappear. And planned regional metro traffic corridors and public transportation will be neglected instead of taking precedence.
Chattanooga’s and Hamilton County’s mayors have said for the past three years – generally after visiting cities with new auto plants that didn’t plan ahead – that they want, and the community sorely needs, a smart county and metro-regional growth plan. But they haven’t yet allocated a dime to pay for such a plan, nor have they taken a single concrete step to make one happen.