Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke was the bulls-eye at the mayoral forum Monday night at Greater Tucker Missionary Baptist Missionary Baptist Church, and the three contenders for his job all had a quiver full of arrows.
The question for the packed crowd in the church’s fellowship hall was whether the arrows hit their mark or whether Berke left unscathed. On the line is the city’s chief executive job, which will be contested on March 7 (with early voting beginning Feb. 15).
To be sure, each of the contenders, former Councilman Dave Crockett, Councilman Larry Grohn and businessman Chris Long, had his remedies for what ails the city, but they also had Berke on a level playing field. And they didn’t hold back.
Crockett referred to the current mayoral administration as “amateur hour” and “as transparent as the bottom of a Coke bottle.” And where trustworthiness is concerned, Crockett said any other business “would have cleaned out management.” He further said it would “take Solomon with an MBA to see what’s going on in this administration.”
Grohn cited the “failure of the current administration” and concluded by asking the largely black crowd if their neighborhood was better off than it was four years ago. In between, he said the administration only attacks the symptoms of specific problems, criticized it for lack of affordable housing and workforce development, said it should be spending more on paving, claimed the administration’s minority business numbers were fuzzy, blasted its transparency and faulted it for paying early childhood workers low wages.