Take the survey
All Hamilton County residents are being asked to go to the visioning website, www.velocity2040.com, where they can complete the visioning survey created by user experience experts. The survey — available in English and Spanish — will be open until Nov. 1. Video promotions will run on Facebook and television.
“Visioning is a part of our DNA,” says Christy Gillenwater, CEO of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.
She’s right, of course. We started it with a project called “Vision 2000” over a four-month period in 1984, bringing about 1,700 people together to take part in city planning. Result? About 40 goals, 223 projects and programs and an investment of $800 million in the community, bringing us the Tennessee Aquarium, the Environmental City slogan and the Moccasin Bend Task Force that developed a plan for resurrecting the downtown riverfront area. Then, some years later, we undertook the “Revision 2000” process with about 2,600 participants in nine meetings.
Those efforts spurred further the nationally celebrated physical renaissance of Chattanooga’s downtown, and are still drawing visitors who seek a guide book for city rebirth.
Now we’re at it again. Gillenwater has worked with Charles Wood, the chamber’s vice president of economic development, to recruit both the city and Hamilton County mayors and all the city’s major foundations in an effort they are calling Velocity 2040. All together, the effort involves more than 100 partner organizations.