Atomic City Talk

Report on Ann Coulter's talk:
Attended by all the Council and the City Manager and several members of city staff and about 20 citizens, Ann Coulter, of Kennedy, Coulter, Rushing, and Watson, gave a 40 minute talk on how Chattanooga revived itself followed by a series of questions mostly from the Council.

Her model is that the process involves 3 tiers. Visioning forms the foundation. Planning is layered on top of Visioning and Implementation is layered on top of that. To make the visioning product last it must be a distillation all the ideas expressed, ranked by popular support, ending up with the expression of ideals underlying the unified community vision for their community, developed through interaction with fellow citizens. Planning then picks up on the ideas from the visioning and those suggested by developers or other sources and applies the values expressed by the vision statements to help evaluate and guide the development of all applicable plans.

For example, in Chattanooga, one of the central values to come from their process was that their riverfront should be accessible for everyone. When applied to their existing riverfront at the time, projects like relocating a naval reserve unit to free up park land and relocating a state route (their Riverfront Expressway) away from the river to slow the traffic, increase the intersections, provide parking, and add sidewalks fit that value. Someone wishing to build an office building down by the river would be helped to find a more appropriate location.

Implementation of the larger projects on the scale of the efforts seen in Chattanooga were managed by a private non-profit formed for that purpose. Public officials served on the board of directors of that organization to provide the public control of that effort. Ms Coulter strongly recommended that a job be created to be the focus for these activities. Someone whose full time job would be to see the project move forward. Anyone needing information or seeking status would know who to ask.

I thought that this was a good talk to hear right now. It put the whole process in context with the visioning being just the first step toward real change through public consensus. The visioning is not the end product, but it is the vital step that enables and makes sense of all that follows.

CN

Good summary of the meeting. I though her presentation was inspirational. I especially appreciated the discussion regarding implementation. Not something we as a community have been the best at in the past.

I agree that we have not done well there and that is the prize after all. And ultimately if we can lay the right foundation we should be able to build up to that point of actually seeing what we want come to life.

That was the point that I liked best last evening. She had pictures of before, the planned, and the after. I was touched by how well the planning was done and that the final pictures were exactly as envisioned. Their success was inspirational.

Next to the City Council, the City Manager is the highest hirer/firer. I have mixes views on this at the scale of Oak Ridge. Anderson County is only about 1/4 the size of Hamilton County. It may be handled as a part-time assignment as long as it is the top priority. What we don't want is for this process to be put on the shelf before it can bear fruit.

I know they have a lot of Tennessee experience including Chattanooga. They also seem to be competitively priced.

What do you think?

Remember two things:

1. They cost substantially more.
2. They used graduate students at places where it would be best of we could have local residents involved.