Mayoral election

As the chief executive of the City of Chattanooga, the mayor oversees all municipal departments, including Housing, Wastewater, Public Works, Parks & Outdoors, and more. Mayors decide how to spend residents’ tax dollars by crafting a city budget each year, subject to City Council approval, and they often submit ordinances, which may become local laws, for a vote by Council members. Chattanooga’s mayor is responsible for creating and pursuing citywide policy initiatives.

Well, I’ve never aspired to be a politician. I came back here after college, started my businesses here, raised my family here, and got very involved in the non-profit community here, and really believe that this city has the potential to be the best city in America. But it needs leadership.

It needs strong leadership, and that’s why I ran. Presumably, that’s why I won last time, and that’s why I want to do it for four more years.

So the top three issues facing Chattanooga are really first affordable housing, and the homelessness that comes with it. Because we’ve got work to do with affordable housing. We have a homeless issue here in Chattanooga that we are addressing, but, and we’ll continue to address better.

We’ve made as much progress as any city in the country on affordable housing, and I think you’ll continue to see this year a lot more new housing, a lot more affordable housing going up. 

The second issue really is public safety. The Chattanooga Police Department has done a great job driving crime down in Chattanooga. We’re actually down by 20-some-percent over the course of the last two years. But, the perception of safety, particularly in our downtown area, is still a little iffy. And so we’ve got a lot of work to do to restore confidence that downtown is entirely safe and bring people back downtown.

Lastly, we need to continue to invest in infrastructure, in roads, and sidewalks, and potholes. We’ve done a tremendous amount of job — we spent more in the last four years than I think was spent in the previous eight years total on paving and potholes and sidewalks, but we’ve got more to do. And in a second term, I will continue to invest in local infrastructure.

So the role of the mayor in city government, very frankly, is to be a steady, calm, wise leader. Ours is a strong mayor form of city government, meaning we don’t have a city manager like smaller cities like Eastridge and Red Bank. The mayor here is the chief executive of the city, and although we have help, in the form of COO and chief of staff, the mayor really has a tremendous amount of responsibility in Chattanooga to lead from the front. Particularly at a time like this, stable, experienced leadership is really, really important.

So when you’re looking at any candidate, please look at their resumes and look at what they’ve done, what organizations they’ve led, and whether they have any experience at all in organizational management because it’s the key quality to being the mayor of Chattanooga.

So, as someone who came out of years and years, decades in fact, in retail business, making it easier for people to engage with city government in a retail sort of way, is a real passion of mine. So we are about to realign our resident services into a department. So that whether it’s a phone call, a text, or an email, we will have the same group of people looking at that data and using the data to respond, and tell what we should be looking at and respond more quickly to fixing problems.

We’ve already redone the city’s website. It is vastly improved. We will soon be relaunching 3-1-1, so the app that you can communicate with the city with, will be much improved. And so you will continue to see progress on this through city government if I’m elected to a second term.

Finally, I would just say we’re using artificial intelligence here, specifically Google Gemini, to basically give people better answers faster through city government. And you’ll see that work continue to accelerate in the second term.