Chattanooga City Councilman Yusuf Hakeem said the council needs a disparity study that might be used in establishing city government policies.
Such a study, he said, would allow the city to have "skin in the game" as it bases some of its policy decisions - in the areas of health care, education, jobs and starting businesses, for instance - on recommendations from such a study.
Just how that might work Hakeem did not explain, and a divided council earlier this week voted not to invite a disparity expert to consult with members over the issue.
Hakeem did say "the best move on our part would be limited to [government] contracts and items of that nature."
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke already has been at work in that area.
Just last month, he said the city over the past two years has increased the amount of business it does with minority owners from about 2 percent to more than 13.5 percent, a nearly 600 percent increase.
The mayor also signed an executive order to start a minority business owners task force that could consider such items as seed money to minority businesses and changes in the city's purchasing department that would allow for increased purchasing from minority owners.
What else Hakeem would want a disparity study to uncover is unclear, but similar studies done about Chattanooga during the two presidential terms of Barack Obama - the nation's first black president whose policies in the last eight years have done relatively little to improve the lives of minorities - provide a blizzard of numbers.
Most Chattanoogans, without seeing the findings, could tell you what's in them.
The gap between rich and poor has widened. Too many people still live in poverty. Educational attainment has improved little, if at all. The worst performing schools are in poorer neighborhoods. The majority of single mothers in the county live in poverty. A child growing up in a poor family in Hamilton County will make less than a poor child who grows up in the average American county. The percentage of minorities on the Chattanooga police force is smaller than the percentage of minorities who live in the city.
Disparities in Chattanooga have been analyzed at least a dozen times in the last five years:
- The December 2015 Chattanooga 2.0 study
- The January 2015 "Blacks in Chattanooga" study for the NAACP
- A May 2014 study of the Chattanooga Police Department
- A 2014 study by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program
- The 2013 "State of Chattanooga Region Report: Education" by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies
- A 2013 study of wage data by NerdWallet.com
- A 2012 gang assessment by the Ochs Center
- A report card by The Urban Institute, and
- A New York Times analysis, and statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center.
Unfortunately, few of the negative findings can be radically affected by Hakeem and the City Council. They can - and may want to - use government contracts to tinker at the edge of some of the economic disparities. But as well-intentioned as they might be, they will have little impact on the complicated overall situations of poverty and education in the Scenic City.
So another study to learn what we already know - especially one that might cost $100,000, as one city official has estimated - is unnecessary.
Does that mean City Council members should throw up their hands and say they can't fix it so why try? Of course not.
Instead, they should concentrate literally at the beginning, as the Chattanooga 2.0 community-driven movement is doing. If the birth-to-school readiness continuum can be strengthened, the dominoes of improved K-12 students, more post-secondary graduate and certification attainment, and a better trained - and better paid - workforce will follow.
Here again, Berke had already moved to improve the city in that area with the creation of Baby University and other school readiness initiatives.
That doesn't mean the rest of the population should be left behind, though. And there's plenty of information available, as mentioned above, that describes in stark numbers who is. But a costly study and subsequent government contracts will hardly move the needle.
However, education, jobs and personal responsibility will. If Hakeem and the City Council come across a way that will ensure Chattanoogans cross that Rubicon, they should fund it.