New Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp challenged county office-holders who’d just been sworn in Thursday to follow a path of civic courage.
Closing out the two-hour ceremony at the Trade Center after his own swearing-in as only the county’s fourth mayor and youngest at age 35, he suggested elected officials have a choice of following the path of fear or the path of civic courage.
“My ask,” the former entrepreneur and nonprofit founder said, is that “you follow the path less traveled of civic courage.”
A day earlier, Wamp told reporters and editors at the Times Free Press that the path he planned to travel was different from the one the county had been on for decades.
“It’s time we stopped putting lipstick on a pig,” he said at the newspaper.
His challenge, Wamp said, was “modernizing county government,” which he said would be “a multi-year process.” In many ways, he said, the county is “stuck in the 1990s.” Some things are done “exceptionally well”; some thing are “behind the times.”
He said it was time to take an “honest and sober” look at the mechanics of county government and that we ought “not fake it” anymore.
“We’ve come up against our ceiling,” Wamp said.
He said he would be bringing “a new attitude, a new approach” and “a new sense of urgency. It’s coming whether [county employees] like it or not.”
Wamp said, among other things, county salaries are 10% to 30% below Chattanooga city employees with commensurate jobs, that county technology is woefully out of date and that the Hamilton County legislative delegation had been underused in trying to accomplish things for the county.
But county schools are where he said he’d like to have his biggest impact.
Right now, Wamp said, “they don’t serve students well.”
He returned to schools briefly in his remarks at the swearing-in, including O.C. Kirkman among four examples of past Chattanoogans who displayed civic courage.
Kirkman was a Quaker educator who believed strongly in the benefits of vocational education. A downtown Chattanooga school offering such an education was founded in 1928, was named in memory of Kirkman following his death in 1943 and was in existence until 1991.
Wamp, during his campaign, returned again and again to the need for a downtown comprehensive vocational/technical school.
Schools today “are stuck in a bygone era,” he told the Times Free Press Wednesday. They need to “redefine success” not necessarily as ready for college but “as ready for life.”
For many years, this page similarly has said that not everyone is cut out for college but that a trade or skill could stand high school graduates as well or in many cases even better than a college degree.
Wamp said he has met with Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Dr. Justin Robertson and would have an announcement in the next several weeks about the county’s facilities.
Meanwhile, he also hopes to ramp up county business CEOs who claim they support public education.
“We’ll see how serious they are,” Wamp said.
In addition to Kirkman as examples of civic courage, the new Republican mayor also named in his remarks two late area Democratic lawmakers, Estes Kefauver, a former U.S. House and Senate member from Chattanooga, for his leadership in fighting organized crime in 1950-1951, and Wilkes T. Thrasher, a county judge under whose leadership the county built 13 new schools.
He also referenced the courage of Civil War-era Hamilton County resident Daniel Trewhitt, a Whig/Republican who had been a one-term state House member and had been elected to the state Senate in 1861, but upon the state’s secession from the union, favored abolition of slavery and left instead to join the Union Army.
Many people assume since Tennessee was a Confederate state that the entire state supported the cause. But Southeast Tennessee was not a hotbed for slavery. Indeed, in a state secession referendum in 1861, Chattanooga residents voted for secession, but Hamilton County residents voted against it.
In introducing Thursday’s program, outgoing Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger laughingly told all those elected who would take their oaths of office that “you’re as popular as you’re ever going to be today.”
Wamp, in a pledge to modernize government that many may not see as needing modernization and with remarks like not wanting to put any more lipstick on a pig, soon may know what Coppinger meant.
But if he can find the sweet spot of improving schools, lowering violent crime and keeping the county economically strong by following a path of civic courage, what he said on the day before he took his oath won’t matter in time.