BERKE’S SCATTERSHOT APPROACH
When Andy Berke was elected mayor in 2013, Chattanooga was a city on the move, a city regaining the jobs it lost during the Great Recession, a city known as a rising tech leader, a city whose downtown was thriving again and a city that was beginning its battle against violent crime with a well-regarded gang task force.
On Tuesday, when the mayor announced his re-election bid, he touted a city on the move, a city that had regained even more jobs, a city putting to work even more of that technology, a city with “a building boom downtown” and a city still trying to get a handle on “public safety.”
It’s hard to argue with a 4 percent unemployment rate, the third highest wage growth in the country for a mid-sized city and the highest rise in home prices in the mid-South. But something isn’t quite right. Many Chattanoogans don’t feel whatever progress has been made in the last four years has been made with them in mind. They see the downtown area and urban core getting showered with improvements, segments of the population being catered to and the wealthy getting enough of what they want to make them happy.
City Councilman Larry Grohn, in announcing his bid for mayor last week, made his slogan “Believe in Better.” As in, things are good but not quite as good as they ought to be.
Berke and his administration seem to have the philosophy that we’ll make a good show of listening, but we will do what we believe is best because we know better. But citizens want to believe they have had input.
Bike lanes and curbs, the Lincoln Park throughway and affordable housing are just three examples where the public has felt their voices weren’t heard.
Another is the Violence Reduction Initiative (VRI). When Berke came to office, he scrapped the previous administration’s gang task force and went with a program he said had worked in other cities.
“We have to work hard to keep the numbers down, understanding there will be moments that there are spikes, but the trend line has to continue downward,” he said in January 2014. “And it has to occur over the course of years. Not just four months.”
In 2013, the year before the VRI was put into place, Chattanooga had 19 homicides (one justified). In 2014, the city had 27 homicides (one justified). In 2015, it was 30 homicides (four justified). So far in 2016, the city, with nearly four months left to go, has had 25 homicides.
Berke noted in his re-election announcement that overall violent crime and property crime have fallen in the last four years, but he didn’t mention overall shootings, homicides or the VRI.
Yet, he said, in naming one his three second-term priorities, the “challenge before us now is the scourge of gun violence.”
Although Chattanooga is not a city in which the average resident has to fear being out after dark or walking on most streets, improvement was promised in that area but not delivered.
Many of the items on the three-page list of “First Term Results” handed to members of the media by the Berke administration would have happened no matter who was mayor — an increase in jobs, a second line at Volkswagen, more people living downtown, more guns off the streets, a maintained bond rating and no tax increase.
Indeed, there are so many items on the list that we’d like to compare it with a list of the same items in 10 years. How many jobs will be created and sustained in order to diversify the technology sector? How many of the small companies given incentives through the Growing Small Business initiative will still be thriving? How many firefighters added by a federal grant will still have their jobs in 10 years? We could go on for a while.
Unquestionably, though, accomplishments such as reforming the police and fire pension plan, launching the Miller Park redesign and forming a foundation to manage the Tivoli Theatre and Memorial Auditorium will pay dividends.
A second term, according to Berke, would prioritize keeping illegal firearms off the street, early learning and increased access to middle-class jobs. The latter two items go hand-in-hand with goals for the burgeoning Chattanooga 2.0 movement.
If he is re-elected — and a $275,000 war chest and only Grohn as an opponent so far give him a good shot — we hope he’ll concentrate on those three priorities. If they can be checked off at the end of a second term, instead of the scattershot laundry list from the first term, he’ll have truly moved the city forward.