(bright music plays) - [Presenter] You're watching highlights of the Chattanooga City Council meeting, a production of WTCI PBS.
(bright music continues) - Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to our Tuesday, August 23 City Council business meeting.
I will now call the meeting to order.
Do have two special presentations this evening, and if Councilwoman Jenny Hill, you have the floor, ma'am.
- Thank you, Chairman.
This is an exciting day for District 2.
We have two really neat things to celebrate with some of our youngest constituents and also with one of our oldest, most respected establishments or organizations within my district.
So I thank you for the privilege to stand before you tonight.
So first I would like these boys, the Rivermont Thunderwave, to please stand up.
You'll notice these young boys in blue, they are the Dizzy Dean World Series champions for 9u.
They are an All-Star team from Rivermont Park, and this is kind of a big deal, you guys.
Y'all know sportsball is not my thing.
so I've read up on this.
(crowd laughs) And what I want you to know is that this summer, these boys, with the help of their coach and a lot of sweaty moms and dads, they captured this championship, which has never been done in the history of Rivermont Park.
Furthermore, Rivermont's victory is the first time since 2007, that Chattanooga has brought home the Dizzy Dean baseball World Series title for any kid pitch division.
So I'd like to give them a round of applause.
(crowd applauds) And I wanna read, I'd also like to read everybody's name, and I'm gonna give your coach this box.
These are special city council mechanical pencils, so you can take them and use them at school.
I know everybody's back in school now.
So we have coach Keith Ralston.
We have starting pitcher Jared Holloway, catcher Hudson Wadley, shortstop Levi Durrow, first baseman Luke Phillips, second baseman Mays Ralston, third baseman Hank McDaniel, right fielder Patrick Donnelly, center fielder Eli Loveless, left fielder Liam Wonderlich.
Can we take a pause for how awesome that last name is?
Outfield Barrett Spadey, catcher Luca Aragon, and first base Connor Gibbs.
So, what a season!
That is an exciting summer for you guys, so congratulations.
(crowd applauds) Okay.
And now, something that I am just genuinely honored to be a small part of the history of Hurst United Methodist Church.
I have this beautiful proclamation.
This is the first proclamation that I have made as the city council representative for District Two, and I am just genuinely honored.
This is Mr. Gary James, who is a lifelong member of Hurst United Methodist Church, and when I got the opportunity to sit down with him and a group of leaders from the church, we talked a lot about the Beck Knob Cemetery, which I hope that in the future will become something that every Chattanooga student and every Chattanooga resident knows the story of because it's a vital, important, and beautiful piece of our city's history.
So this proclamation reads as follows.
Whereas Hurst United Methodist Church is celebrating 140 years of celebrating the, of serving the Chattanooga community, founded by a few pioneer families from Hill City, TN, Jackson Chapel was the original name of the church, followed by New Hope Methodist Church, New Church on White Oak Road, and Hearst Memorial ME church, all before it was established as New Hearst Memorial Church in 1946.
Whereas Jackson Chapel was originally organized on White Oak Hill under the leadership of Reverend W.A.
Jackson.
Whereas in 1906, Reverend John Isbell was called to serve.
The membership grew greatly under Pastor Isbell's leadership.
A site on White Oak Road was acquired and the building was started.
Whereas in early 1860s, Joshua Beck saw the need for a burying ground, and deeded the property to the church for use by the African American community, creating the first organized cemetery for African Americans in Chattanooga in 1888.
Whereas on May 19th, 2021, the state review board determined that Beck Knob Cemetery was eligible for listing in the national register.
Now, therefore I, Councilwoman Jenny Hill of the Chattanooga City Council, do hereby congratulate Hurst United Methodist Church on your 140th anniversary and recognize the contributions to this city by your leadership and member families.
Your church has been a true friend to the Chattanooga community, as demonstrated by your genuine love of people and inclusivity for all.
Signed, Jenny Hill, councilwoman, District 2.
- [Gary James] Thank you.
(spectators applaud) - Thank you all very much.
Oh, it looks like we've got some folks that wanna say something, Mr. James.
- Well.
- Oh.
- Go ahead, Councilman.
- Well, first I wanna congratulate the pastor for an outstanding job, and for serving the community like you have.
We certainly appreciate that.
Also, do I see a trophy peeking over the chairs right here that... - You do.
- That piqued my interest as well.
- It's very, we did take a picture before council, but would you like one of these would boys to hold up the trophy?
- Yeah.
Would one of the guys like to pick it up and show everybody?
- Okay, Councilman Henderson wants to see your trophy.
- Looks like it's as tall as they are.
(spectators laugh) (spectators exclaim) - Wow, look at that.
- Almost.
- All right.
- There's a little brother over here that I've confirmed is, in fact, shorter than the trophy.
- Thank you, ma'am.
All right.
Thank you, guys.
- Okay.
Thank you all very much.
- Thank you, councilwoman.
Congratulations.
Next on our agenda this evening is a public hearing on the Area 11 East Brainerd plan, and I believe Ms. Karen Hunt is going to give us a short presentation.
For some of you that may not know, the Area 11 plan has been in the works since, I feel like since 2012, but it's been 2018.
- [Karen Hunt] It's not quite that long.
- And covers the, Area 11 is code word for City District 4, in case any of you are tracking that online.
And Karen, you want to go ahead and start?
- [Karen Hunt] Sure.
- And tonight we will have the public hearing before we take a vote.
And just so that you all know, I don't wanna steal your thunder, Karen, but this has been through several years now in the works, and through the planning commission, and now is at city council, and we've had a very lengthy time to review it.
- [Karen Hunt] Okay, well, thank you for having us.
So, this is the East Brainerd plan or Area 11 plan, as you sometimes hear us referring to it.
You may recall that a couple weeks ago, Eric Matravers from our staff gave you a presentation on this.
He went into a little more detail, so I'm just gonna kind of go over some of the highlights of our public input, and just talk about our general approach to the plan.
The plan, the full plan is on our website.
If you see the address here on the screen, if you'd like to take a look at that at any time.
And just to orient you, or maybe for those in the audience that haven't seen this, this plan study area is bordered by Interstate 75 and South Chickamauga Creek on the west side, by the Georgia-Tennessee state line at the south, and then on the east and northern sides, it's goes along the city limit line.
When we first started this process, we sent a direct mail letter to all 6,881 property owners in the area.
And then from that, we have generated an email list with, at last count, we were up to 760 people on the email list.
And throughout the whole planning process, we counted, we've had 3,000 different individual responses.
So that's either, you know, someone has taken the survey or they participated in one of our discussions we had online, or they came to an open house, that sort of thing, or even watched our walkability video, which by the way, I'd just like to put in a quick plug for that.
I think it's good.
It's also on our website, same place you can find the area plan.
And even though it focuses on how to improve walkability, focusing on Gunbarrel Road, it really applies to any corridor throughout the city where you may think we need a little improvement in that respect, so I'd encourage you to take a look at that.
Top issues.
(clears throat) These were the things that rose to the top when we polled the community and asked for their input.
In regards to transportation, as you might guess, congestion was at the top of the list.
They also had some issues with road maintenance.
When we look at commercial development, again, they were concerned about the lack of walkability along Gunbarrel Road and around Hamilton Place and all of the the corridors really.
(clears throat) Excuse me.
They were also concerned about all the strip commercial development up and down the corridors.
They just felt it was too much.
They didn't wanna see any more of it.
They were also concerned about the way that the commercial development looked, and wanted to see some improvements there.
In terms of housing, I think people in the community certainly did recognize there was some need for more housing diversity throughout the city, including Area 11, and certainly everyone would like to see more affordable housing, but they were also very concerned about preserving the single family neighborhoods.
They didn't want them to be encroached by high density residential or commercial development.
They wanted to keep that single family character.
And then finally, when it comes to some of the natural resources and open space, we heard a lot of concerns about flooding and development in the flood plain.
Davidson Road, for those of you who are familiar with the area, might not be surprised that that got a lot of attention.
They also said they wanted to see more active green spaces throughout the area, and better access to the ones that they already have.
So really the general approach we took to all this follows what we're calling a centers and corridors approach.
And we're using this for all of our area plans, and it really has three essential concepts.
One is that you have walkable clustered centers, where we will try to concentrate new retail and commercial uses.
And you can see those identified on this map of Area 11 in the red circles.
So you see the big red circle of course is Hamilton Place, there at Gunbarrel and Shallowford, but then you see some smaller ones, and some key intersections.
And the idea again, is to try and cluster new commercial and especially retail development, in these areas rather than spreading it all up and down the corridors.
The second key concept is that you have transit support of corridors that have a mix of uses, including multi-family.
Again, remember, folks in a lot of areas, not just Area 11, say they wanna preserve that integrity of their single family neighborhoods.
And so by clustering some of the higher density development along the corridors, it helps to do that.
And the third thing is to make that higher density development, housing development, sufficient so that it can support transit in the future or make the transit that we have work more efficiently, and to support the businesses along there.
So that's kind of the approach that we're taking, and again, you can see, in addition to the red circles, you see some kind of blue lines.
Those are the corridors along Gunbarrel Road, parts of Shallowford Road and parts of East Brainerd Road, where we really want to, in the future, try to limit that new commercial growth to those areas.
And then I am going to skip through some of these slides that I think Eric already showed you and just jump to the place types map.
So this is basically what we refer to as land use maps in previous older plans.
But this basically follows what I just described, that centers and corridors approach.
You see the, everything in yellow is the single family neighborhoods, which we're proposing to just pretty much leave the way they are, and then focus some of that new commercial development, or redevelopment, in the areas that you see in the red and orange and blue at the centers and in the corridors.
So that is basically it.
Again, if you'd like to review the whole plan or look at that walkability video, they are located on our website.
And I will stop there and see if you have any questions.
- Does council have any questions?
I know we have seen this multitudes of times and gone over this, and I'm seeing no lights for you, Karen, but let me say, please, thank you to your staff.
This was a lot of hard work.
This has taken several years, you involved a tremendous amount of people from District 4.
And when you look at that map, I want you to notice that you listened to the folks in District Four as well, because you'll see suburban residential as a large, large portion of District 4.
And I think that's a testament to just how well you did listen.
Growth is going to happen, and we understand that.
We are the most heavily populated district of all nine, but the way that you have focused and helped craft it, the land use plan moving forward, which we were 25 to 30 years behind, now supports suburban residential in the vast majority of District 4, and intelligently placing your hired entity near the corridors that can support it.
So I wanna thank you for all the hard work, you and your staff, and for listening to the folks at District 4.
- [Karen Hunt] You're welcome.
- So with this, I will now officially open the public hearing on the Area 11 land use plan, and we will allot 30 minutes for this portion of the meeting.
And each speaker will have three minutes, as we decided last week at council the rules for this.
So that will officially begin now.
If anybody would like to come forward, the Area 11 public hearing is now open.
Karen, you must have done a really good job at promoting this.
I'll ask one more time if anyone would like to speak on the Area 11 land use plan.
- I'll speak.
- Okay, please, sir.
- My name is John John, and I don't technically live in the area, but I live adjacent to it in Highland Park, and I drive through there almost every time I get in my car.
- [Chairperson] Highland Park's not adjacent to District 4.
- Or sorry, I drive through the East Brainerd area almost every day in my route.
And one of the things that I plan on showing up to these city council meetings to talk about, is walkability and pedestrian access and equal opportunity to businesses and food throughout our city, and building strong neighborhoods to do that.
The first time I came to a city council meeting, it was very reactionary.
So I wanna start being more proactive.
I believe in UGC and what's happening here, and the zoning that allows for this, but part of what troubles me is some of the access for people to help speak into these zoning changes.
Right now, it seems like a lot of contractors and people with money.
But in particular about this plan, what gives me pause is that these things are at odds.
It feels like half of this area is asking for a horse, half is asking for a car, and when you try to give both, you give neither.
When you create centers that are centered around a car that you can walk to, that's not the same as walkable.
Walkable is when you can go from your house to food without the reliance of a $700 car payment.
Walking around an area that is a strip mall or a dense area of population isn't quite the same thing.
And so what that means is that you want less congestion, but you're building something centered to arrive at strictly in a car.
Now I understand there's multiple forms of transportation that are coming into play, and I'm optimistic about that.
But if you drive to and walk around to a place, that isn't the same as walkable.
Single family housing isn't affordable housing.
Even with dense populated areas, we need more infill and missing middle housing.
I applaud the ADU developments that are gonna be coming to different parts of downtown.
But I think that if we stick too tightly to our guns to try to hold onto this single family housing, housing prices is gonna go up, and the dense housing, these five-over-ones, despite some being allocated for affordable housing, are overall gonna be priced out by a lot of the people there.
So when you drive to a place, you make it congested, you increase lanes.
And when you don't put a pedestrian focus, but try to put a pedestrian spin, it doesn't always accomplish that.
So what I'm saying here is, I love where this is going.
I think that there are gonna be some real problems in accomplishing everybody's wishes.
And in particular, the survey that surveyed 6,000 homeowners.
If I lived in the area, I wouldn't have been accounted among those two years ago, because up until two years ago, I was a renter.
And there's a big portion of the population, especially those in need of affordable housing, who do not own property in that area.
So I wanna make sure that their voices are represented.
That's not even why I came here tonight, but it is something I'm passionate about.
And I hope that you take into consideration that that survey left out a big portion of that population.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
Karen, we did have a mechanism in place for renters in the apartments.
Since that was brought up, I wanna make sure that that we cover that a little bit here.
- We tried our best.
I will say, admittedly, that it is difficult.
We don't have ready access to those addresses.
We did go to several of the apartment complexes, call them, asked if we could come put flyers out at their central mailbox or something like that.
Some accommodated us, some didn't.
- [Chairperson] Sure.
And one of the... - So we admittedly we didn't get a lot of renters.
- And one of the efforts that I took personally, was on my Nextdoor profile, I can reach about 4,000 people with the click of a mouse.
and it's interesting because if you watch a platform like Nextdoor, you can get an opinion on about anything in about 10 seconds.
So that information was put out there, and I think that the response could have been better.
Obviously we can always do better, but I do appreciate the gentleman making the comments.
Then that's something as we move forward to the Area 10, I believe, is next on your list.
- [Karen Hunt] All of them, all of them.
- All of them, yes.
That we can learn from this because no process is perfect.
None of us are perfect human beings, but I think we did a pretty good job that we could move forward from this and learn a little bit more as we move into area plans in the future.
- [Karen Hunt] Mm-hmm.
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
Anyone else would like to make a comment and speak on the Area 11 plan?
If not, then I will close the Area 11 public hearing.
- Good evening.
And I do hope, considering what's coming out of our police department and my commitment to coming down here for six years, I have a little bit more than three minutes.
If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not ask or question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or protected members of the middle class.
One goes to the unprotected, those precisely who need the law's protection the most, and listen to their testimony.
James Baldwin.
I stand here on behalf of a young person that I love, who is a part of the mayor's youth council.
He is a Hamilton scholar, second in his class at Brainerd.
His name is Marquez Thompson.
Marquez wants to be a federal judge, and is driven to do so because his brother, Unjolee Moore, is currently in prison, because of the Chattanooga Police Department, for a crime he did not commit, as a byproduct of what we are discussing right now, lies and untruthfulness.
At the time, Captain Edwin McPherson talked to his niece, who set up this particular murder in which he was implicated, discussed the setup of the murder, before, during, and after.
He disappeared and failed to collect a phone from the murder.
This is all listed in an Internal Affairs investigation.
He lied about it to Internal Affairs, and that's listed in the Internal Affairs investigation.
This happened almost 10 years ago, and that same man, who would ascend through the ranks later on down the line, would become our assistant police chief and suppress the rapes of women, of Desmond Logan, and the sexual assault of a UTC employee at UTC.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the number one crime that lands people wrongfully convicted into jail is perjury and false accusation.
Since 1989, they have exonerated 3,215 people all across our country, which equals 27,000 years of life lost because of police official misconduct.
It goes without saying, many people have misunderstood my drive, my passion, my love for this city, and even my accountability towards leadership in the police department.
It is not that I hate police.
I do not stand for corrupt officers.
And imagine how many hundreds of potentially people, because some of these officers that have been listed by David Tulis, go all the way back to Chief Parks and Bobby Dodd.
We're talking about a police chief who was in power before I graduated high school.
This is potentially hundreds of cases and people who could be locked up and wrongfully convicted because of what was said against them in a court of law.
I could go to jail, and every one of us in this room, for perjuring ourself on the stand.
- Good evening to the council.
- [Chairperson] Evening, ma'am.
- My name is Anne Pierre.
I'm president of Chattanooga Hamilton County branch of the NAACP.
Today, I released a press information sheet, and that sheet says based upon information reported in the various news media related to the Chattanooga police officers who were placed on desk duty, and the rebuttal comments from the Fraternal Order of Police, we ask for a review of every case in which these officers provided testimony.
This issue is not about Police Chief Murphy, who has been on the job less than six months.
It is about treatment of the citizens of Chattanooga.
No police officer or any other person has the right to lie in response to questions during a proceeding.
The people of Chattanooga are due fair policing and testimony in every instance.
The information that we have thus far is information listed in the press and word of mouth from various groups and individuals in our city.
The citizens are due explanations from Mary Kelly and the entire city council, or should the citizens ask the Department of Justice for a federal review of the police department?
The NAACP will not stand by while the real issue is being hidden behind the new police chief.
She did not lie, the police officers by information and their stated records lied.
Therefore, a process should begin immediately to review the judicial cases to which these officers testified.
Thank you.
- [Chairperson] Thank you.
Ma'am Anyone else wishing to address council this evening?
We are adjourned.
(gavel pounds) (bright music begins) - You've been watching highlights of the Chattanooga City Council meeting, a production of WTCI PBS.