Mayor Littlefield Looks Ahead

(In March, Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield won re-election by a wide margin. The week following the election, Trend caught up with Mayor Littlefield to talk about what’s next.)

The Volkswagen Project represents an unprecedented opportunity for our community, but it also comes with challenges. What do your foresee?

Volkswagen, Alstom and now Wacker are investing billions to create thousands of high-wage, high-quality jobs of the kind we’ve dreamed of for decades. The real challenge for the city, county and state is to deliver the infrastructure and educational resources to make them successful. Helping Volkswagen and these other companies succeed will lead to additional growth and more new jobs for our community.

How is city government responding to the economic downturn?

So far -- and a large part of this is probably due to the economic injection because of Volkswagen, Alstom and others and because of the level of confidence you still find in this community -- we have not seen drastic reductions in revenue. But, if the downturn continues, we have contingency plans to take it in stages and steps to do what we have to do to live within our means. We are not planning to raise taxes.

You have done a great deal to promote environmental sustainability both in the way the city operates and in the community at large. What are your thougths about the next steps in those efforts?

I am very engaged in creating a new Office of Sustainability within the city administration. The new office will be responsible for acquiring new federal funding, which is being directed to this issue and using it to implement new ways to recycle, build on our tree planting initiatives, and take other steps to ensure Chattanooga’s continued leadership on environmental stewardship.

Tell us about any "lesson learned" or "best practices" you plan to employ over the next four years.

In the early 1980s, we learned how to gather people to do large-scale brainstorming sessions. Recently, we used those same skills in engaging 250 people to talk about how to improve the library system. Getting community input is one of the best practices that has made Chattanooga what it is. We were doing visioning before visioning was cool, and we plan to keep doing it over the next four years.

If you could do anything for the city, what would you do?

I would help to identify and prepare the next generation of leadership. I wrote a letter to the editor not too long ago, and I said, "It’s not really about what’s next, but who’s next." Every community needs quality leadership to step up and take the reins of government in future generations, and that’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s something that we have to make happen. Hopefully, we will have some community dialogues that are not personality driven, but deal with real issues. Participating in a process like that will teach emerging leaders how to engage in community debate and how to become a part of the leadership and perhaps part of the government in the future.

What’s your long-term vision for the future of Chattanooga and what are you doing to bring that vision closer to reality?

In the not too distant future, Chattanooga will be the anchor for a multi-county region that incorporates counties in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. My long-term focus is on how to make that happen in a way that doesn’t just encourage sprawl. Chattanooga has the opportunity to be the golden region with a strong economy and an outstanding quality of life. I’ve already had meetings with leaders in surrounding communities to talk about how to make the best things happen for the Chattanooga region. I look forward to continuing that process.