Dalton Roberts

Dalton Roberts

--from the
Chattanooga
Times Free Press

AOL is making it so difficult for me to send my columns out that henceforth I will post them on my website: www.daltonroberts.com. my Sunday Journal will be posted on Sundays and my Times Free Press column will post on Tuesdays. The advantage is you can read them at your leisure.

YOU CAN BE PART OF THE “CREAM”
1-26-10

I never quit playing with ideas and when a column idea wakes me at 3:00 in the morning, I figure it may be something that needs to be said.

Ideas are important and perishable things. Just as an individual’s progress depends on how well he or she acts upon ideas, a city’s progress depends on how open it is to ideas, the quality of its ideas, and how efficiently it coaxes them into reality.

Somewhere I heard or read that the wealthy and the sons and daughters of the wealthy are the “cream” that rises into leadership roles in cities experiencing the kind of renewal we have experienced here in Chattanooga since the 1980s. While there is truth in that statement the more complete truth is that anyone can be a part of the rising cream and the cream will not rise at all unless there is community-wide respect for town-changing ideas.

The hardest place to get the cream to rise is in the political leadership of a city. Politicians tend to lay low. The thought that dominates them is re-election. They fear controversy and change always involves controversy.

I have a tape of a Morning Show program during the time period when the Aquarium was under discussion. Almost all the calls to me that morning belittled the project, referring it as “Jack’s fish tank.” If the project had failed, it is entirely possible that my political goose would have been cooked.

Mayor Roberts and I could not have been a part of making the project happen without our legislative bodies (county commission and city council). The cream had to rise almost simultaneously in the economic and political power structures of the community.

Ideas are like dominoes. A good idea can result in another idea -- sometimes a more powerful idea. Mayor Rose and I wanted to see something good happen on the hundreds of acres of property the city and county owned at Moccasin Bend.

We appointed a Moccasin Bend Task Force to explore those possibilities. Soon Chairman Rick Montague asked if they could look at the whole waterfront and it was their exemplary groundwork that resulted in the Tennessee Riverpark and later in adding Moccasin Bend to the national park system. Other groups were involved, of course, as the dominoes kept falling.

Illustrating the point that anyone can become part of the cream, Sally Robinson served on the MBTF, got the community development bug, and later ran for the city council. Her husband, Sam, had been an excellent idea man on that first dynamic county commission. I have often said if I could have kept that first commission, I would have never retired.

Donnie Jenkins, Time Free Press technical columnist, recently told me that he daily goes to as many as 55 websites just to keep up with developments in his field. We need a similar attitude toward city building.

Josh McManus invited me to meet with his CreateHere group on Main
Street. He has a sparkling group of bright, mostly young people who play with great ideas for our area’s growth and enrichment. Josh himself was awarded a Marshall Fellowship and was able to visit and study Europe’s great cities.

Our future progress will depend on how well we use the cream that rises out of groups like this.

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