Big Towns Episode 1

Johanna Divine  00:10
Hey and welcome to Big Towns, where mid-sized cities find ideas that fit. I'm Johanna Divine with The Current. Our first episode, a conversation between Dean Baquet and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mayor Tim Kelly, was recorded April 24, 2025 at the Big Towns summit in Lafayette, Louisiana. Big Towns is a two-day gathering in downtown Lafayette where we talk about mid-sized city stuff like housing, economic development, civic engagement, arts and culture. If you've never been to Lafayette, it's one of a kind, just like pretty much every other mid-sized city in America. Think Lexington, Grand Rapids, Buffalo, Tulsa. While each big town has its own special something, we also have a lot of the same problems, and we've learned a lot by listening to one another. So once a year, big towns convenes leaders, planners and big thinkers to share what's working and put our heads together around what's not. In 2025, we were lucky enough to host mayors from around the country, including Mayor Kelly. Tim's interview with journalist Dean Baquet is too good not to share, so we've dressed it up a little and split it into three episodes for your listening pleasure. The first includes a proper introduction of Tim and Dean by Big Town's host and editor of the current Christiaan Mader, the second and third include questions from our live audience. Fair warning, some folks are mic-ed and some just talked loud. You may not hear every word, but we think you'll get the idea. In any case, thanks so much for joining this Big Towns conversation. Let's jump in. 


Christiaan Mader  01:36
Good morning. Good morning again, everybody. Thank you so much for sticking with us here on day two of big towns. Again. I'm Christian Mader, editor, current one of the co-hosts here of Big Towns with United Way of Acadiana. So you guys have probably noticed that Chattanooga has been around this conference a lot like, Okay, well, what's, what's the deal with that? So I've been kind of secretly obsessed with Chattanooga for a long time, because it actually has this weird link with Lafayette and two pieces of it. One, we're both the fourth most populous cities in our states. Something interesting, and about 20 years ago, and also the best cities in our respective states, I presume, yeah, eat it Nashville. So the other thing is, we also both started a fiber optic, municipal fiber optics around the same time, sort of connected the two communities in a way that's pretty interesting. So LUS fiber was started in 2004 it's now LFT Fiber. EPB added their telecom a few years after that, 2009 so eat it Chattanooga. We did it first, but it's kind of connected us, right? So I'm really pleased to introduce this conversation. It's something I'm really psyched about, just being a journalist, like we have Dean Baquet here. That means anything to you guys, if you're in journalism, it should. If you're not, it also should. But Tim Kelly is the 66th mayor of Chattanooga. He was first elected in 2020 and was just re elected to a second term with 85% of the vote. He grew up in Chattanooga, attended undergraduate school at Columbia University, returned to Chattanooga, expanded his family's automobile dealership, launched several successful ventures, including co founding Chattanooga professional soccer club. Soccer has been a theme all week. And Mayor Tim spearheaded the one Chattanooga plan. It's a ranging platform built through public engagement. In 2024 his office completed the city's first comprehensive plan and city wide zoning update since 1961 the goal is to make Chattanooga more affordable and prosperous. It also passed its Council nine to zero. It's pretty impressive. Interviewing Tim is Dean Baquet, one of the nation's eminent reporters and editors. Dean began his journalism career in New Orleans, first with what was then called the New Orleans States Item, which merged later with the Times Picayune. He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism at The Chicago Tribune and led the newsrooms of some of America's most storied newspapers. He retired as Executive Director, excuse me, Executive Editor of the New York Times in 2022 now leads a fellowship program at the Times dedicated to training young journalists in local investigative journalism. And in Louisiana, you might actually not know Dean so much by his name, which is Baquet. By the way, you hear people say Baquet and it is Baquet. I checked it with him, and he confirmed that to me, it's very important, but by his work, right? So I'm going to say something you may, so "the only way I lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy," right? That's Edwin Edwards' most famous quip, and he said it to a young Dean Baquet in 1983. So let's see what he'll get out of Tim. You guys enjoy.


Dean Baquet 04:25
I always make sure people repeat that quote, because I want it in my obituary. Thank you for being here. So I have a whole bunch of questions, but because we started a conversation in the back about localism and what, how you see it, how you define it. Would you just riff on that for just a little bit to start?


Mayor Tim Kelly  04:47
Yeah, well, thank you, and thank you all for being here. It's an honor. It's my first time Lafayette, but the parallels with Chattanooga are very strong. And you know, I never thought, I never ran for student council before I ran for mayor. The 2016 election nationally, really spun me, as it did a lot of people. And it seems quaint retrospect, but, but I read a book by Bruce Katz called the new localism, and it was a bit of a recipe for for sanity for me, and that that's the suggestion, was that maybe we had the political Pantheon inverted, the cities now all cities, because of revolutions in technology and finance, have more power to shape and better the lives of our citizens than they've ever had, right? You think about all the time and energy and headaches, not that the National stuff isn't important. It does affect our lives state too, but the local stuff matters a lot, and it's just very, very, very unappreciated, particularly in mid sized cities. So that was when I decided to run for mayor, when I realized, like, again, it's a bit like the Serenity Prayer. You want to focus on what you can't control, let God worry about the rest. 


Dean Baquet  05:59
Why? Why more than ever? Why does, why do local governments, you think, have more influence, power to shape people's lives than before?


Mayor Tim Kelly  06:08
Well, it's too bad. If Bruce Katz was here I would probably throw that question to him, but you know, look, I think through communications, through finance, through again, under the Biden administration, we certainly got a lot of infrastructure dollars. Infrastructure dollars to help. I think we're able to I mean, look, cities are the seat of 90% of our GDP, the vast majority of innovation. Again, you know, the ancient Athens was about the size of Chattanooga and Lafayette. I mean, again, it's cities are the seats of there. In some ways. They are our most important human invention and we can just do more now than we used to be able to do. A city well governed, you know, is a really, really great place to live. And that's true. One of the things I've learned in going to Harvard, Bloomberg Mayor school is, I mean, it's true in every country in the world. It's, it is a global phenomenon.


Dean Baquet  07:10
You know, I think, in some ways, I think buried beneath the current Washington news story and the current, whether it's Elon Musk and DOGE or is, is, if you sort of strip away a lot of it is a real debate over the role of government, with the with the farthest reaches of the right saying government's gotten way too big. Government does things it should it shouldn't do, whether it's abroad, whether it's domestically, talk a little bit about your view of the role of government period.


Mayor Tim Kelly  07:45
Well, you know, I mean, I grew up in a moderate Republican family, and got cured of that, you know, at some point, because, you know, I read a book by John Cassidy, who you might know, what writes for the new, my sister worked for the New Yorker. He still writes on economics for the for the New Yorker, which is, to me, a bit wasted, because he's a brilliant guy, and nobody reads the New Yorker for the economics, I don't think, but he wrote a book called Why Markets Fail, and it's a really eloquent exploration of why the free markets are a myth, right? So, I mean, look, markets solve a ton of problems, most problems, I think, for in human society. But they, they are, they're asymmetrical. They are designed to fail. I mean, if we didn't have antitrust law, we would just have monopolies in this country, which in essence, we, we kind of do at this point, but, but we, you know, government has to be there to intervene to make markets work. So this is kind of the mantra of a classic moderate but, but I do think my comms guy is going to laugh, because we talk about Goldilocks problems a lot, but it is a question of getting it, of getting it just right, of wise regulation, not, not ham handed regulation. We, you know, I don't think government, I say all the time, particularly relative to again, you guys have a very healthy nonprofit community as well. We're not there to intermediate, to jump in. And when I say markets, I don't necessarily mean economic markets. I mean if we have a nonprofits doing something well, we don't need to be competing with them. We need to be catalyzing and facilitating them.


Dean Baquet  09:18
So do a, do a just to bring people, make people familiar with your city and its issues. Do a little bit I listen to your state of the city, but do a little bit of a quickie, state of the city. What's going well, what are your biggest issues? Talk a little bit about what you feel you've accomplished, and we can go into some specifics. 


Mayor Tim Kelly  09:36
Well, thank you. Chattanooga, we are starting to make some progress economically. I do think we again like Lafayette, you know, jumped on the fiber thing. And I think one of the unexpected things about COVID is we had a lot of people move to town for remote work, and we managed to start to get some economic momentum. I will say, when I moved back from New York. York in 1989 we had the worst longitudinal growth rate of any city within 500 miles of us, probably including Lafayette. Y'all have got, you know, have had, for better or for worse, a healthy oil and gas industry? We had nothing. We had Coca Cola Bottling, two different forms of black gold, I guess. But that eventually went away, and so we were just casting around for, you know, we brought Michael Porter to town, the famous Harvard professor, you know, who basically said, Go fish. I don't know, you know, good luck. I mean, it was, it was a bad time. And so we kind of scraped it together and reinvented ourself and really started trying to lean into quality of life, as I've heard a couple of times from other speakers and really put a much bigger focus on turning our attention towards our riverfront. Built the world's first freshwater aquarium, which, at the time got a lot of grief. It was like the biggest ball of twine, like, who's gonna go see that? But people did. It's been very successful, and so we've managed to get a lot of momentum again. That comes with another set of negative externalities. Affordable housing is a huge issue. Megan miles, with the city, is here somewhere who, I think, talked about that yesterday. We are, unlike Lafayette for better for worse, wedged between two major metropolitan areas in Nashville and Atlanta. And I used to really cuss them because they they drew off a lot of our growth in the same way New Orleans probably does for y'all but now realize that may not be a bad thing. You know that if our stock and trade really is our quality of life, they're almost like exhaust valves for us. So again, it is, you know, it is a balancing act. We are not as hot as Nashville. We're getting a lot of people who are actually fleeing Nashville for what used to be Nashville. I hear all the time, Chattanooga reminds me of Austin 30 years ago. And I'll be like, yeah, the trick is to keep it Austin 30 years ago.


Dean Baquet  11:54
What drives the economy? What are the biggest economic drivers in the city? 


Mayor Tim Kelly  11:58
So traditionally, and again, probably not unlike a lot of mid south, Southern cities. One of the books, another book that really inspired me run for mayor, was called the New Geography of jobs, right? And that described this aggregation, and Robert Reich's written about this of of, you know, the intellectual and creative economy into larger metros, and that's where the money is right, and that's where the talent is, and Chattanooga is really kind of in Lafayette, arguably. I mean, although you have a healthier University, kind of on the wrong side of that line. And so what we were, until very recently, was basically a light manufacturing town. And if you play that out, it's, it's kind of a dystopian future for mid size cities. But to this point, you know that the pivot for us, to be fair, was when Volkswagen put a big assembly plant in Chattanooga in about 2010 and that's when our longitudinal growth rate changed, because that and all the supplier base around it really kind of gave us a leg up in terms of economic momentum, and kind of got the flywheel spinning. Since that time, we have developed a pretty healthy cluster around third party logistics and logistics generally. And then COVID was another kind of leg up for remote workers, which is a really hard thing to get your mind around, because you're just bumping into people who moved in from Brooklyn or from Chicago or from California, who work for Boston Consulting or Spotify, and they're really talented, smart people, but, you know, and they're growing the tax base, but it's not like a company you can recruit and go, kind of get them all to the Rotary Club or to the United Way, or whatever else. 


Dean Baquet  13:42
Do you think they'll stay? And paint a little bit of a picture of the city post COVID. How many, how many people moved in? What are you going to do to keep them? I mean, on the I mean, they may or may not have to go back to Boston.


Mayor Tim Kelly  13:57
Yeah. So, you know, I go to New York and do kind of a tour every year and go talk to Bloomberg and and at the time, you know, a couple of years ago, people in Manhattan were panicked, you know, because people, they thought everybody was going to move out. And, of course, that's silly. They haven't. I do think most of them, most of them, have stayed and are staying. Interestingly, that experience of anecdotally running into people led me, shortly after coming into office in 2021 into having our electric utility do a survey EPB that also does our fiber knows, of course, where all the people who moved in signed up. Well, I asked them to send a survey out to everybody to come from a service address more than 50 miles away, which they could do anonymously. And it was 10,000 people, which doesn't really agree with the census data, but there it was right. I mean, it was a lot of people that moved in, and then we surveyed them and asked them, Why did you come, and what would make you stay? And it was proximity to fame. Family, which tells me that's a proxy for that situation between Nashville, Atlanta and Knoxville, Birmingham, because you know you want to be close to your in laws, but not necessarily next door and outdoors, right, which you know, our parks, our river, our mountains, our trees, our urban our canopy, super important, and again, like Lafayette, the fast internet, so it's a big deal for remote workers.


Dean Baquet  15:26
So what's the every city that I've lived in or reported from has one powerful, intractable problem. If you go to I spent a big chunk of my time in Los Angeles, and homelessness, it feels like it is defeated, one government after another. What's your most intractable, difficult problem?


Mayor Tim Kelly  15:50
Well, the racial inequality. I mean that. I mean I was just at the Philadelphia Fed because, I mean, if you I wrote, you know, again, I came to my job through being, having been the chairman of our Community Foundation, and again, that was another thing that inspired me to run for mayor. Because if you there's some foundation people in the room, you know, it's a bit, it's like, it's, it's a bit, bit like, you know, public policy by proxy. You're sitting in the front row of the, you know, of the stadium, or in front of the stage. But, you know, you realize at some point doing that work, the only place to step is on the stage or onto the field, which is how I kind of felt the calling to run. But doing that work, you know, became more and more obvious that the gaps between very specifically black and white communities in Chattanooga were just grotesquely large. I mean, the data is shocking. It's shocking


Dean Baquet  16:42
Talk about the data a little bit.


Mayor Tim Kelly  16:45
Well, I mean, again, it's incredible, right? And again, not a mystery. It's, I'm both befuddled and bemused and disgusted by a lot of the debate about DEI these days, because it's like, you know, I don't worry so much about just teach history, right? If you teach history faithfully, you will not be, you know, confused about how we got here, like the way we got here is very, very clear. And so we have to work to fix that, right? And so, yeah, if you want to banish the word equity, great, right? But the work's not going to change. It's about access and opportunity. For people, frankly, whatever the color of their skin, which turns out, well, I'm not, we'd be here the rest of the time. It's just also ridiculous. But that is a huge issue. Divided economies do not work. And both the history of, you know, obviously, from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining, and the way that unpacks with schools and, you know, look at the schools in Chattanooga that are underperforming in the, you know, the rates of poverty both, you know, economically and culturally. It's not a mystery, right So, but it's not as simple as economics and better jobs. It does have to do with support for families, it has to do with things like just letting people know you want them to succeed, you know, and that this is not just Lucy pulling the football away for the 100 and 15th time, you know, which is what the white community has done so often, so that that is the the big issue that we have to just continue to chip away at. And you know, again, I ran as a nonpartisan, I think it was Stephen King who once said, The only reason to write a book is because you can't not write it because it's like a baby. You have to, like, get out and, and that was, you know, my campaign. I talked a lot about that in my campaign. Look at me right, like, white Rotary Club guy and it worked, right? I figured, if I lose, I lose great, but at least I can sleep at night. But I didn't lose, and so I and then I just won again by a pretty hefty margin. So I feel like I have a license to keep doing the work.


Dean Baquet  18:54
 That's not your legislature, though, right?


Mayor Tim Kelly  18:56
No, it is not, in fact, at all, which is such an interesting and bizarre reality.


Dean Baquet  19:01
Have you encountered any with me of a particularly conservative, vocally conservative, legislature? Have you run into any issues where you've had fights with them over this? Have you? Have there been anything with school funding? What's taught in schools, etc, etc?


Mayor Tim Kelly  19:17
Yes, there's, there's a ton of things. I mean, just yesterday they passed a bill, essentially a DEI act, asking us to which, again, just misunderstands the concept. Fundamentally, I'm very, very careful not to pick fights and not to, you know, not to sort of indulge the nonsense. I think if I have a skill, it's, it's taking a deep breath and a step back and saying, Okay, what's the long game here. What's the work I do? Think building a better city again, if I have a theory of change, it's definitely economic, and so it is ultimately about access and opportunity, and I think particularly focusing on workforce development, you don't get into these arguments, right? Because it's about a group of people who you want to make productive and useful in one analysis, right? So ultimately, I'm just really careful. It's easy. I think we really struggle in this country with this false duopoly, which is straight out of George Orwell's 1984 in so many respects, and that there is a third path, right? And I do think running a city is essentially a non partisan thing, and you just have to think in extremely practical terms, not take debate and just keep the you know, keep your eye on the sparrow.


Dean Baquet  20:38
Do you have a when, when I've talked in recent months to politicians who would consider themselves moderate to the left. They're expecting some sort of fight right, that it's inevitable that somebody will say, you know, I talked to the head of a philanthropy who says, I know that the government is going to come after this thing I do in your case, when you think about not only Washington, but the legislatures, are like one thing, that when you and your staff talk, you say they're going to come after us for this. Let's just be ready for that. We may even compromise on these other five things. What's the this?


Mayor Tim Kelly  21:17
Well, in this case, I mean, when I came into office, I appointed a chief equity officer, right? And so they're definitely coming after that. I mean, they just, they just did. They just passed the law yesterday, right? So we may very well we're having that debate now. Again, it's a semantic argument, because whether we, whether we choose to rename that, you know, the Department of Access and Opportunity, you know, we may. I mean, the work is what's important. And the governor himself has said, like, yeah, we're not arguing about the work. I mean, in so many cases, this is just genuflection to, you know, one guy at the national level. So yeah, we're just trying to kind of keep our wits about us and keep the end in mind.

Johanna Divine  21:59
We'll pause here to wrap up our first episode, stay tuned to hear the second part of our conversation with Dean Baquet and Mayor Tim Kelly. This episode was produced by The Current. Save the date for Big Towns 2026. You can read all about it bigtowns.org.