Hundreds of pages of emails, texts and architectural reports obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press show Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp knew moving the Chattanooga High School Center for Creative Arts to a new Westside campus would cost more than $80 million when he gave documents to the county commissioners in August estimating the project at half that cost.
Wamp and his staff had known since May, when a local architect hired by the county finished calculating the cost of pursuing the school board’s No. 1 priority: creating Chattanooga High School: Center for the Creative Arts and High Tech Institute at the former BlueCross BlueShield Golden Gateway building on West M.L. King Boulevard.
Even when asked for it by a county commission member in June, Wamp withheld the information about the total cost for weeks, records show.
“Since he took office, Mayor Wamp has held private meetings, secretly hired architects, delayed funding and provided misleading information to manipulate our community into supporting spending that doesn’t address our most pressing needs but instead focuses on projects that boost his political career,” Commissioner David Sharpe, D-Red Bank, told the Times Free Press by phone on Saturday.
When asked why Wamp told the commission the estimate was $40 million and not $80 million, his spokesperson, Mary Francis Hoots, said by email that the amount was intended to reflect the cost of a general high school that an architect hired by the county had been directed to study, not for the school board’s priority project to move CCA to Gateway.