Chattanooga Pulse

There’s a good reason why the phrase “growing pains” is used to describe nearly all growth, of a person, a company or a city.  Chattanooga has experienced a number of often-difficult growth periods from its start as a small trading settlement along the banks of the Tennessee River in the early 1800s.

A succession of mayors, both famous and nearly forgotten to all but historians, have steadily expanded the boundaries of the city limits, with nearly every effort met with opposition.  Looking through dusty archives of the daily papers from the various eras shows controversy, condemnation and sometimes outright castigation of the leaders of the time who endeavored to enlarge the city and expand its reach both geographically and economically.

In politics as in life, the more things changes the more they stay the same.  Like his forebears, Chattanooga’s current mayor, Ron Littlefield, faces the same opposition to his plans to grow the city.  The Urban Growth Plan was adopted a decade ago in consultation with city, county and state leaders, yet, despite this, when the reality of annexation emerged during the last several months, individuals such as County Mayor Claude Ramsey and groups such as Hamilton County Residents Against Annexation (HCRAA) joined the chorus condemning and challenging the city’s latest expansion.

With the arrival of companies such as Volkswagen and Alstom Power Group, alongside a host of other parts suppliers and manufacturers that will be moving in to the Enterprise South megasite to service Volkswagen, Chattanooga is facing a major growth spurt.  So the question before city and county leaders is how to best prepare the region to deal with the growing pains.

Pulse News Editor Gary Poole sat down with Mayor Littlefield for a wide-ranging interview covering annexation, police and fire manpower issues, his recent call for the creation of a metropolitan government, and related issues such as the homeless campus and the library system.

The Pulse: There have been a lot of questions about how we can afford the expansion of city services during a time of economic downtown and budgetary cutbacks. How do you answer those people who say Chattanooga doesn’t have the money?

Mayor Littlefield: Chattanooga does have the money.  The capital projects are financed, just as anyone would do when you build onto your house, and they’ll be paid off over time.  We finance a certain number of capital projects every year to enable the city to grow.  Some of those are road projects, some of them are sewer projects, and some of them are fire stations, which we will be addressing in the coming budget.

TP: Where is the money going to come from to pay for providing services for the annexed areas?

ML: The money will come from taxpayers, and we have calculated that the areas that we have annexed will pay their own way.  The taxes generated by those areas, even today, will pay their own way. It’s notable that many of the areas we are annexing on Hixson Pike and Highway 58 are commercial areas, areas that will develop commercially. By taking them into the city now, the city will benefit from all of the future growth that will take place in those areas.

TP: There’s been a lot of confusion, especially when dealing with commercial properties, about how tax revenue will come into the city after annexation.

ML: If it’s commercial now, for example a retail operation, the sales tax will continue to go to the county for ten years. The county will still get their property taxes like they do from the rest of us who are county residents.  However, if that business ceases or if the property is undeveloped and something new is developed there, the city will receive the sales tax.  And that’s one reason why we need to annex property that might not be developed right now, or might be a candidate for redevelopment in the future.

TP: You’ve talked in the past about increasing the size of the police department.  You’ve said that you want the department to grow to 500 officers.  How?

ML: It doesn’t really take us all that long, once we see the light at the end of the tunnel with the present economic circumstances that every city is in right now, to schedule an academy.  People always say, “You’re short-handed in fire and police” because of the training cycle we have to go through. And you’re constantly losing people to retirement.  It’s a relatively short career as a police officer or a firefighter. So we are constantly having to refill the roster of people in both of those departments.  But we have a long-term goal, a short-term goal and a mid-term goal of adding five police officers per year until we pass 500.

We’ve taken a period of hiatus now until the economy recovers a bit, and then we will schedule an academy of 30 to 35 individuals and hope that we graduate most of them.  Then we’ll schedule another academy of roughly the same size because in the 26 weeks that we will have trained those police officers, we’ll have lost some others to retirement. It’s going to take a couple of academies to catch up and them move ahead, but our plan is still in effect.

TP: Annexation has been, by and large, highly unpopular with the people being annexed. However, recent polling by The Pulse and others show that about 60 percent of people are in favor of some form of metro government.

ML: I’m not surprised. I really think it is much more popular than people realize, and it’s timely because people now see that the other alternative for this community to grow is annexation. If people are going to resist annexation, which they inevitably do, then the other alternative is unifying the governments.  In my opinion, that is the course that we need to take.  If people are ready to go to the table and talk about metro, I’m ready.

TP: Why are you bringing this issue to the table, so to speak, right now?

ML: I know that as people wake up to the fact that the city is growing, we have an opportunity before us right now with all that is happening with Alstom and Volkswagen and such to put this community into the right structure for the future.  The thing that people really resist is change.  When we changed to the council form of government, there were grave predictions that if we did it things were going to fall apart, taxes would skyrocket, and so forth.  What happened?  Things got better.  So we learned that we can change the form of government, even one that had been in place for 78 years, to a new form of government and things get better.

TP: County Mayor Claude Ramsey and several other members of the county commission have gone on record as saying that they’re not in favor of the idea of metro government.

ML: I don’t expect them to rise up and support it with quite the same enthusiasm that I might, because traditionally the county commission just doesn’t do that.  They don’t like annexation and I’m sure a lot of them are still thinking it’s 1984 and it’s just after the last metro vote so let’s don’t bring it up again.  They forget it’s been 25 years.  I think that, given time, they will find that it’s acceptable.

Someone from the county has proposed to me that the city give up its charter.  Well, the county doesn’t have a charter.  It doesn’t have ordinance powers.  It can’t do a lot of things that the city can do by ordinance.  And that’s important.  They have to go to the state legislature to gets things done that the city can do itself.  Chattanooga is a home rule city.  We can put up traffic signals but they don’t have the authority to do that, they have to go to the state to get a traffic signal.  So why would we hamstring ourselves that way?

TP: Some commissioners have said they are interested in talking with the city about consolidation of various departments and services.  Others, though, have referred to this as the “camel’s nose under the tent” theory, in that the more services get consolidated, the easier it would be to merge it all into a metro government.

ML: Again, if we merge the governments completely, that issue goes away. Let me say this about the small departments and the camel’s nose: we can merge the tax offices and the court clerks without too much of a problem.  That involves just a few people.  When you get to something like public works, though, that’s when the public confidence issue comes into effect.

When my friends at the county talk about merged services, it’s always merge in their direction.  “Let’s have the county do it and have them pay us to do it.”  I don’t mind a contract for sending out the tax notices or for collecting the fees at the court clerk’s office.  But when it comes to filling potholes and taking care of the day-to-day needs that our public works department does, I don’t know a way to turn that over to the county and give the city council members who are elected by the people who benefit directly from those services, the confidence that that service will go on.

TP: What are some of the benefits of becoming a metro government?

ML: We are growing now.  We are 170,000 people in the city, which means we are 139th in the ranking of cities by population.  If we become a metro government, we move up to about 60.  Right up to Pittsburgh, right up into the top 100.  Is that important?  Yes, it is.  Because when businesses and enterprises look at investment, they tend to look at the top-tier cities, and that would put us in the top tier.

TP: During your most recent campaign, there was a lot of talk and interest in developing a homeless campus on the grounds of the old Farmer’s Market.  What progress has been made in that regard?

ML: We had an opening down there a few weeks ago at the IHN building.  They raised $600,000.  I was roasted and raised $150,000 towards that total.  They have a beautiful new facility down there and they represent 45 Christian and Jewish congregations working together to minister to homeless families, which is primarily women and children, the fastest growing part of the homeless population.

Immediately behind that, the SETHRA regional transportation system is finishing their new facility, which is about a $1,500,000 facility.  It includes a training center and will be their hub for bus operations. SETHRA provides transportation for a number of purposes under contract.  They’re a federal operation and, incidentally, provide transportation for IHN.

A new police precinct is planned to replace the three that we have closed.  I use the term “closed” guardedly, because we’ve had all sorts of people call and say we’ve closed their precinct.  If they haven’t noticed, they’ve been closed for a long, long time.  Having the precincts there, I think, gave the people a false sense of security.  But we still need a downtown police station.  And that’s what we’re going to do down here in the middle of the Farmer’s Market.

The other thing is the homeless heath care facility that is anticipating expansion.  And the Chattanooga Community Kitchen opened up their day center and respite care facility. To me, that’s pretty dramatic improvement over time, and it’s been quiet simply because nobody wanted to talk about it.

TP: The library system has been in and out of the news over the past several months.  It’s been a bit of a touchy issue over expansion, development and basic funding of the system.  Libraries are something that has been a bit of a cause of yours over the years.

ML: The unifying factor here is unifying.  It’s a city and county operation.  And the sharing of cost and such for the library is part of the old sales tax agreement which goes back to the 1960s when Ralph Kelly was mayor of Chattanooga and Chester Frost was the county judge, what we now call the county mayor.  They fashioned an agreement where the city gave up a portion of its state sales tax for the county to take over responsibility for certain functions.  There is a list of those in the agreement.  There are others where we agreed to support 50-50 on things, and the library is one of those.

The next step, after we get through annexation, is to set up committees with the city council and some people outside to talk about tax equity and to talk about refashioning that old sales tax agreement.  By law, the same law that sets up annexation, we have to renegotiate the sales tax agreement between the city and county by May 23, 2011. And believe me, that’s going to require a lot of difficult negotiation.  We might just throw up our hands say, “Forget about it, just give us our sales tax, we’ll support the things we want to support and the county can support the things they want to support.”

TP: What is your vision of the future of Chattanooga?

ML: I have always believed, and I have said it many times in past years, that Chattanooga has more unrealized potential than any comparable community that I know of.  As a city planner I visited a lot of other cities, and I can gauge pretty well what they have to look forward to.  I’ve always felt that Chattanooga has a lot to look forward to.  We were blessed with this beautiful setting—I drive in every day through the ridge cut and I look down and the sun is splashed across the valley, sometimes the clouds are floating around the valley, and it’s just breathtaking, it’s beautiful!

With what we’ve accomplished on the riverfront and keeping our downtown from going down the black hole of urban decay which affected so many other communities, we have managed to survive the worst of the economic transition that this whole nation has been going through since the 1960s.  Now if you had asked me a few months ago what the missing element was, I would have said big job generators.  But now we have Alstom Power, which is underappreciated in my opinion for how much positive effect that $300 million investment can have on this community. It brings the nuclear industry back to Chattanooga just when nuclear power is beginning to take off again.  And then there’s Volkswagen.

So my personal view for Chattanooga is that it is a community that will finally realize its potential. Our challenges are getting our education system advanced to where it is second to none, taking advantage of our university to make sure that it is not just a stepchild to Knoxville but a major university that stands on its own, and then that the community has a quality of life that attracts people here simply because they like the city.  We’ve got to protect that because, as I told a group recently, when you used to talk about quality of life and tried to relate it to bringing blood and muscle type of jobs to the city, the old captains of industry would say you don’t want to talk about that.  With both Alstom Power and Volkswagen, though, it was the quality of life in Chattanooga that closed the deal.

I think that there is no city in the Southeast that has more promise right now and more likelihood of realizing that promise than Chattanooga.  And for that reason, I think we need to look beyond our differences, embrace change, show that change has improved this city. We’ve gone through some dramatic changes, but changing the form of government could be the last step in assuring the future of our children.