With the announcement last week that the owners of the East Ridge property where the planned Splash Valley Water Park was supposed to have been built had defaulted on their payments, another great idea has fallen into the dustbin of history.  East Ridge Mayor Mike Steele was both surprised and highly disappointed at the news, as he had seen the park as a major step in revitalizing tourism and business in the Ringgold Road area.

The park was originally slated to have opened last Memorial Day, but a series of environmental and financial issues kept delaying the project, to the point where it now appears that the piece of land across from the Groome Transportation lot will remain vacant for the foreseeable future.

Chattanooga and surrounding areas have long toyed with ideas for creating more tourist draws.  While Lake Winnepesaukah has been drawing visitors for decades, as have Rock City and Ruby Falls, it took the construction of the Tennessee Aquarium to really kick-start tourism in the region.  Even so, there are many who believe there is no such thing as too many attractions.  This is why the idea of a water park was met with such enthusiasm and interest.

Underlying the excitement was another, quite valid, point: We need more attractions that are not either downtown or on top of the mountains.  There is a lot more to Chattanooga than downtown.  City Council member Carol Berz, who represents Brainerd, held a summit meeting last Friday to review ongoing changes and planned improvements to her district, in attempts to draw more people to Brainerd.  Among them are plans for sidewalks, making the levee far more user-friendly with green spaces and public art, and so forth.  More than 50 people attended the summit, which was encouraging to the civic and community leaders of the area.

However, there doesn’t seem to be any push to create new attractions not based around retail shopping or green spaces.  Many of us enjoy shopping, and many of us love all the things one can do outdoors with a bicycle, hang glider, kayak, or a stout pair of hiking shoes, but there are many people who would like an entertainment destination to be a part of the vacation decision-making process.  And communities such as East Ridge could really benefit in getting those tourists to pull off Exit 1 on I-75 instead of just continuing on to I-24 and heading downtown.

With the current economic downturn causing a severe drop in vacations (officials in Las Vegas and Orlando report sharp drops in hotel and resort bookings for the upcoming winter), there seems to be little financial incentive to lay out the amount of money it would take to build a water park, a race track or an outdoor concert venue similar to Lakewood or Starwood.  Unless, perhaps, someone with a nice family inheritance and free time on their hands would like to try to emulate the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy that made Walt Disney an entertainment visionary.