Growing pains: Why we need community planning, and what happens when it breaks down

"Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot." - Joni Mitchell

You've worked hard to find just the right countryside, the right community, the right neighborhood, the right home.

Maybe you're a newcomer, or maybe you've lived there all or most of your life, but suddenly one day you awake and learn there's big change coming.

Maybe a new "village center" anchored by yet another grocery store, pharmacy and gas station is planned on what was once an idyllic green space on the main artery you travel to reach your home.

Or perhaps your nightmare is to learn that a proposed new sewage treatment plant is being drawn up just a hop, skip and jump from you.

Maybe the once quaint suburban street that led you home has gradually become a concrete jungle of mismatched signs and not-so-family-friendly businesses.

Chances are, no matter what your address, sooner or later you'll suddenly see your paradise - or at least a piece of it - seeming to slip away.

This is true today in Walden on Signal Mountain on 23 acres where Lines Orchids was a quiet agricultural business tucked off Taft Highway behind a wide expanse of grass in a mom-and-pop kind of community. But come Tuesday - upon the second reading of a new zoning ordinance - a new crop of stores (the developer and town officials prefer to call this a village center) is likely to take root. The center will be anchored by a grocery store of unknown brand (the third in a 6.3-mile stretch of U.S. 127 that runs over Walden's Ridge, through Signal Mountain's lone stop light and the Sequatchie/Hamilton County line).

Also mentioned in the plan would be the mountain's third pharmacy and fourth gas station - all within that same 6.3 miles. By most estimates, there are about 8,500 residents in the plateau community that includes the towns of Signal Mountain and Walden, as well as the unincorporated areas of Fairmount and Lone Oak - altogether perhaps 3,500 households.

Many Signal Mountain, Walden, Fairmount, Lone Oak and other plateau residents already have voiced opposition to this plan. They fear that if Walden leaders place these stores - and their tax revenues - ahead of a collaborative land use plan, residents will gradually begin to see the Dayton Boulevard-ization of Taft Highway, the main artery through the idyllic and largely rural/residential Cumberland Plateau community that stretches into Sequatchie County before dropping off the mountain toward Dunlap.

This paradise-lost tale also has played out in the past year in the Mahan Gap community of Ooltewah where the Hamilton County Commission found itself at total loggerheads with residents who were thoroughly outraged at the thought of a proposed new north Hamilton County sewage treatment plant being plopped down in their midst.

We could think of the Ooltewah situation as a perfect and understandable example of NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard - thinking.

Brainerd residents came too late to the idea of zoning and community planning. Long ago, some village center-type development there gave way to increasing construction, and now Brainerd residents and their representatives on the Chattanooga City Council find themselves playing catch-up to halt the degradation of decades-old strip centers - especially from payday loan shops that for a time popped up seemingly in every block.

And when's the last time you tootled down Dayton Boulevard, which in places is now in danger of beginning to look like Rossville Boulevard.

The death spiral doesn't stop on the thoroughfares: In too many places, the homes in neighborhoods behind those once-proud passages have come to be tallied among the county's lowest property values.

And don't be fooled. This really is all about money.

How did we get here?

Just over 22 years ago, the Walden's Ridge Plateau neighborhoods had an area land use plan.

That 1997 plan, prepared by the Chattanooga/Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission, started like this: "The Walden's Ridge Plateau Area Plan represents a collaborative effort among the local elected officials of Hamilton County, the Town of Signal Mountain, and the Town of Walden to address growth and other related issues that face the plateau area. This plan covers a portion of the Walden's Ridge area from the Tennessee River Gorge north to the North Chickamauga Creek headwaters."

Are you asleep yet? Of course you are. That's the trouble with plans. All that collaborative effort is exhausting.

The "vision" of the plan was slightly better:

"To be a community that attracts families who can live here through the phases of life, provides for an orderly and cohesive development pattern that maintains a small town atmosphere with rural character and green spaces, and preserves pristine natural areas for the enjoyment of its residents."

That's more like it. Now we're happy to slip off into dreamland. Paradise will remain paradise.

Until we wake up and realize that our town or city or county officials are looking for new revenue.

In Walden's case, blame it on the lost Hall income tax. Long the state's only income tax, it levied a 6% tax on the investments and dividends of the wealthier among us. About a third of its revenue is returned to the city or the county in which the taxpayer lives. But the Tennessee General Assembly voted to end it, beginning in 2017. It will be completely phased out in 2021.

Walden officials have said that the Hall tax has provided 40-60% of the town's revenue. In June, the town council passed a 10 cent property tax increase - on top of a 2 cent hike the year before.

But earlier this month, in passing the new zoning to accommodate a developer's plan for the village center, Walden Alderwoman Sarah McKenzie was quick to list added revenue as an advantage for approving change.

"The local option sales tax and property tax from the development should be considered not just as a replacement for the Hall tax but also allowing Walden to continue to provide the services and improvements to amenities without an undue burden on the homeowners," she said at the Oct. 8 Walden town meeting.

As for Ooltewah's dreaded waste treatment plant? Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger and county commissioners are counting revenue pennies, too. Without proper sewers and someplace for them to empty, development in the north end of Hamilton County is severely slowed. Without that development, and the added property tax revenue it brings, county budgets are held hostage to status quo. Commissioners bowed to community pressure in December, but they're still looking to site the plant somewhere.

And for streets like Ringgold Road, Brainerd Road and Dayton Boulevard, finding a way back to rising property values presents its own special set of challenges.

How do we fix it?

So you wake from your nightmare and find that paradise is not just a nightmare. It's also a maze.

Who knew: Community planning needs care and feeding far more often that once every 20 or so years.

It isn't just about beautiful countrysides and tasteful business development and clean roadsides and sidewalks. It's also about money. And money never rests.

Roads don't repave themselves. Police and deputies don't work for free. Your garbage and your flushes really don't magically disappear. Schools eventually fall down, and the same arithmetic of 50 years ago doesn't teach a kid to program the robots that power today's manufacturing. Even the elected officials who run our towns and counties eventually should get raises.

That means that if we value our own little piece of paradise, we have to get involved and push planning - early and often.

Looking again at Walden, the question isn't just about a grocery store, and mountain residents are hugely divided.

Speaking of the many concerns, Vice Mayor Lee Davis cast the only "no" vote among three aldermen during the first reading of the proposed zoning change. He said he thought the town should create a new land use plan first.

Davis ticked off his concerns: What's being called a village center isn't a village center, but rather three commercial buildings that are all considerably larger than what the current zoning allows on a smaller plot than zoning requires; the developer hasn't shown how waste will be treated on a mountain top where the soil doesn't perk and the community has no sewer line; and without a traffic study, the development has only one curb cut onto a two-lane road with no traffic light but plenty of fog.

And what of police protection in a town that currently has no dedicated police, relying instead on Signal Mountain and Hamilton County Sheriff's Department?

"That parking lot's going to be lit up till 11 o'clock at night. Where does trouble happen after 9 p.m.? Where the lights are, right? The only lights from the Sequatchie County line down to Pruett's will be sitting right at the front out there. Top of the W Road to the top of Taft Highway. So if we're thinking about what are going to be the revenues to the town, we've got to think about what are the unintended consequences and costs to the town. If we have a store that's selling liquor and/or wine/beer and it's selling gas and diesel, you're going to have people up there. You're going to have trouble," Davis said.

None of the challenges for revenue and none of the concerns of unintended consequences are insurmountable. But they need thought and discussion and negotiation and planning. That's true whether its Walden trying to land a very big-box grocery store, or Ooltewah fighting or accepting a waste plant, or Brainerd grappling with a 1970s retail strip that has outlived its usefulness in the age of Google and Amazon delivery.

Walden's Davis, in repeating his plea to slow down and plan better, succinctly states the obvious:

"If this is a good idea, it will be a good idea a year from now or six months from now."

John Bridger, executive director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, said communities prosper best when they use a place-based perspective for planning. He points to Chattanooga's North Shore as an example of reinventive growth.

Starting with Coolidge Park, the Walnut Street Bridge, and an early start-up business - the Mudpie restaurant - one street corner sparked a change that now has spread to become a corridor on the once-decrepit Cherokee Boulevard.

It can work in any ZIP code, Bridger says.

"We create connections to our town's story, bringing to the fore things we like about our past that we want to see carried forward in the present. That's how you start a plan."

Contact Pam Sohn at psohn@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6346.