Weston Wamp
County Mayor Weston Wamp told the North Chattanooga Chamber Council Tuesday that his long-term priorities continue to progress in the right direction, if slowly: the Gateway career and technical school, The Bend development, the Business Development Center, and the McDonald Farm property which will host the County Fair this weekend.
Without giving numbers, County Mayor Wamp said he petitioned state officials last week for funding for the new Gateway school on West Martin Luther King Boulevard. He also hinted at plans to invite the state into the city-county partnership surrounding The Bend development, whose TIF will help fund the Gateway school.
County Mayor Wamp has said throughout his campaign and first year in office that today’s education is tomorrow’s economy. He told the Chamber Council that the county’s opportunities are not equal for urban black students in public schools and for rural white students in public schools, though both are low-income.
“You don’t have a career pathway open to you,” he said to black students. “We continue to … suffer from some realities in our public school system,” he said.
He said the county pledged 25 years ago to send all students to college.
“That is not going well,” he said. The county’s average ACT score for former city public high schools is 13.5 to 19 out of 36, he said, but students who don’t make the cut for college are not attending the Tennessee College of Applied Technology at Chattanooga State, either. Of the county’s 13,000 high schoolers, just 163 are enrolled in the Chatt State program.
“That is dreadfully low,” he said.
He said the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency reported that downtown is the fastest and largest-growing sector of the county - 10 years ago and 10 years from now. Families moving downtown and just north of the river are zoned for the Howard School or Red Bank High School, he said.
“We are simply not positioned from a public education standpoint to provide for that,” he said.
He said the Gateway school and new TCAT leadership at the state level could make up for some of the shortcomings, offering middle and high schoolers marketable skills.
Addressing the state’s retention law, he said a child’s third-grade reading level is more connected to the child's first year of life than to the second-grade year in school. He credited Lesley Scearce, president and CEO of United Way of Greater Chattanooga, with the idea.
“We invest in parents,” he said. “They’re the first teacher.”
The speaker said the Hamilton County Business Development Center at Cherokee Boulevard and Manufacturers Road is one of the largest public incubators in the world.
He has reminisced lately about Chattanooga’s strong history of entrepreneurship that becomes family legacy, “one of the through lines of every great community,” he said.
“That’s the story of Chattanooga, in so many ways,” he said.
County Mayor Wamp said the county committed $4 million this year for BDC maintenance. The BDC houses the county’s director of community economic development, and he said the property will play a key role in the coming months as he seeks to rekindle that entrepreneurial spark.
“It’s wonderful to have companies come here and invest, but I don’t think you get the multiplier effect,” he said.
On the other hand, he told the Chamber Council that he’s already imagining a “culturally relevant” industry to bring to the McDonald Farm property north of Sale Creek.
But first, he said, he’ll find state money for water and sewer infrastructure, a phase that may take four or five years.
He said the 2,170-acre farm will be an “open homestead,” the county’s country getaway, a mix of development including industry, residential, conservation and recreation.
Residents of North Hamilton County want to take it slow, he said, but neighboring counties Roane and Rhea seem enthusiastic about the large-scale employment that a manufacturer would bring.