Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp on Tuesday used a public speech to lay out a vision for the area that includes new partnerships with smaller communities, a council on career and technical education and, potentially, a county history museum.
Wamp in his third State of the County speech told a crowd gathered at Soddy Daisy Middle School that Hamilton County’s communities make it exceptional.
“By many metrics, we appear average: income, some educational outcomes, crime,” he said. “These are communities with great schools, with virtually non-existent crime and communities that have endured the test of time.
“Our futures are totally intertwined,” he said. “For Hamilton County to thrive, our small communities must thrive.”
Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp highlights small communities in annual speech
PARKS PARTNERSHIP
Smaller communities — cities, towns and unincorporated areas — are among the county’s most vibrant, he said. Increased county support could help intensify the success of those communities.
Hamilton County and Chattanooga, the county seat, have historically had what Wamp touted as an especially productive, successful partnership on public parks. It’s an arrangement that should be mirrored between the county and its nine smaller municipalities, he said.
He announced during the speech the creation of a one-time, matching grant program that would offer the county’s small cities and towns up to $250,000 from the county to improve parks, recreation and community quality of life.
“In Hamilton County, we’ve got an opportunity to support and bolster these thriving communities at the same level of commitment that we have historically operated in a partnership — that should continue — with the city of Chattanooga,” Wamp said. “We should be open to the same sorts of commitments with the small towns.”
Signal Mountain and Walden’s drive to fund a new middle-high school years ago was inspirational, Wamp said. So is Collegedale’s investment in its airport and its own parks, he said.
The county would also support the city of East Ridge’s efforts to expand and improve Camp Jordan Park, he said.
And finding ways of controlling growth, especially in the county’s more rural areas, would also help communities maintain their unique ways of life, he said.
(READ MORE: Rural Hamilton County residents trying to slow growth)
SCHOOLS COUNCIL
His remarks come as county officials prepare their next set of budgets. Hamilton County public schools have been a focus for such discussions in recent weeks, and the school administration has said it will need to find a means of trimming between $16.5 and $18.5 million to make up for rising costs and lackluster revenue collection.
Education was a focus for Wamp Tuesday.
He told his audience that the Soddy Daisy Middle School lunchroom was a deliberate choice, since schools are often the hearts of smaller communities. Soddy Daisy Middle School, he noted, is slated for a renovation.
Initiatives designed to support education have also been a major focus of his time as mayor. The county last year passed a historic bond to support school facilities projects, and placing a career and technical education-focused school downtown has been both a signature goal of Wamp’s and the source of controversy concerning its projected cost.
He said the county would create a council on career and technical education to advise the community and the county as it opens the downtown school and invests in existing programs. It’s planned as a temporary council, he said, and should issue recommendations between its establishment and the end of 2025.
There have been major increases in career or college readiness among Hamilton County Schools students over the past few years, he said. The new council should amplify that progress, he said.
HAMILTON HISTORY
The mayor said that he felt the 1991 closure of the downtown Kirkman Technical High School — now the site of the AT&T Field and the home of the Chattanooga Lookouts — was a major mistake.
“It is frankly the sort of history that ought not be repeated,” Wamp said. “But in order to ensure that, we’ve got to know our history, and we’ve got to actively teach our history.”
Hamilton County’s history is rich, and its stories should be better known, Wamp said. To facilitate its telling, he directed the county’s historian and others to determine whether a museum focused on Hamilton County’s regional history would be plausible.
The group will report its findings back to Wamp and the County Commission, he said.
There are museums in the Chattanooga area concerned with regional history, including the African American Education and Heritage Museum in Alton Park, the Good Old Days Museum in Soddy-Daisy and Battles for Chattanooga, a Civil War museum, but there isn’t a museum dedicated to the county’s general history. A plan to create a Chattanooga-centric museum stalled years ago amid a funding crunch.
Contact Mariah Franklin at mfranklin@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.