Johanna Divine  0:10  
Welcome back to Big Towns, where mid-sized cities find ideas that fit. I'm Johanna Divine with The Current, back with the third and final part of our conversation between journalist Dean Baquet and Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly, recorded April 24, 2025 at the Big Towns summit in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you didn't hear parts one and two, go back and give them a listen. It's great context for the rest of the conversation, including the audience question and answer, which we jump right into here. And if you're back for more, welcome and thanks so much for being part of this Big Towns conversation. Let's jump in. 

Alena Maschke  0:46  
So, here in Louisiana, as you pointed out, we rely very heavily on our petroleum industry as an industrial tax base, and there have been questions about the sacrifices we make as a result of that in our environment. I think driving down I 10, you can tell where we have fallen on that position scale. But I wonder you mentioned that Chattanooga used to have at least live manufacturing, and that was an important industry. I wonder where that going away put Chattanooga in terms of that tax base going away, especially having a lot of remote workers whose companies are not motivated in the town and are not part of that industrial tax base has that created funding challenges? And if so, how?

Mayor Tim Kelly  1:28  
Everybody hear that question? Oh, well, okay, so it's essentially about the incumbency the oil and gas industry here being, you know, the core of the tax base and how, you know, again, I'd see that as a bit of a conundrum, and but that we didn't really have that in Chattanooga. So did not having that, did losing our kind of big cash cow hurt us in terms of funding? The answer is, yeah. I mean, it's such a conundrum, right? Because you, when you have one big, dominant industry as you well know, you really need to try to diversify. It's really hard to do that when you've got, you know, Daddy Warbucks that's paying the bills and calling the tune and that, and that ain't a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, it's, but it's, it's hard to get away from that and and be intentional about diversifying an economy, you know, in in the midst of that, we didn't have a choice. I mean, we just, we just had nothing. By the early 80s, we just were, you know, we just had to kind of figure it out. And I think that had a lot to do with with us being forced to reinvent ourselves, but, but to sit here and retrospectively kind of romanticize that period of time would be a lie, because it was not a good time in Chattanooga, right? I mean, Chattanooga for between 19, you know, 80 and 1990 was a pretty terrible place, until, really the mid to late 90s. I mean, it was a economically and culturally, a pretty miserable place. Maybe 95 started turn the corner. I mean, again, it was Coca-Cola money that built our aquarium, that in many ways, is what kind of spurred downtown growth and redevelopment, which now downtown Chattanooga is really great. But at the time, there was, like one restaurant in downtown Chattanooga, right? And no hotels. And I notice y'all don't have any downtown hotels, but it but in a way, it was a parting gift from, from Jack Lupton, who was the heir of that Coca-Cola money and and it worked. You know, a parting gift of sorts.

Speaker 1  3:44  
Thank you all for being here and for having this session? Mayor, I'm curious, you mentioned local control, and I'm a Louisiana native, but I've spent my 23 years in public service in city management in Texas, and over the past probably 10 years, there's been a real attack on local control at the state level. And it's almost this weird hypocrisy of Washington. Stay out of Texas. We know what we're doing. But hey, cities, listen to Austin. And by the way, Austin is extremely overpriced, overblown. You know, it's San Marcos now, but anyway. So I'm kind of curious if, kind of what your thoughts are, if that's a nationwide trend. And then secondly, you mentioned that you kind of have an executive leadership focus, rather than a legislative leadership focus. I'm curious kind of what you think about the differences between the council manager form of government and the strong mayor form.

Mayor Tim Kelly  4:45  
Great questions. And, you know, yeah, it's not almost like they're being hypocritical. They're being wildly hypocritical. And this is, this is an issue in in Texasand Florida and Tennessee and Louisiana. The irony of it is. Is, you know, if you study political philosophy at all, one of the most basic, you know, conservative tenants is, is the government closest to the people is the best, right? And local control is the thing. So it's not lost on me at all. And it is ridiculous, and we just have to kind of fight it, you know, tooth and nail. I think part of the problem is that a lot of what we're talking about these days isn't so much conservative politics as reactionary politics, right? And so it's real easy to have these model legislation conferences, and instead of imagining how the world might be better, rolling out a lot of you know, models as to just don't change. It's easy, you know, again, that is one old William F Buckley quote about like, conservatism standing up toward history and yelling, stop, right? It's just easy to just say no all the time. Who was that guy in Congress? It was Dr, No. I mean, it's just, it's, it's much easier. So I think we just have to continue to remind them of their hypocrisy and fight it. I mean, we have had a couple of instances where we managed to get state preemption rolled back around affordable housing policy, and because, a lot of times again, because they're legislative politicians and because most of them haven't run anything except their mouths, they don't know, right? And so it's up to us to preserve the relationships and explain to them, be the adults in the room, and explain to them in patient terms why this doesn't make sense. Again, in Tennessee, it's a sales tax driven state. We [cities] produce 90% of the state's revenue, if you know, if I mean, at some point, they've got to understand that if cities aren't healthy, they're not going to be healthy. So it's just a game to see if they can get themselves on 10 minutes of Fox News, and hopefully that worm will turn at some point, somehow, and we can get out of this, you know, off this silly merry-go-round. To your second question. I spend so much time thinking about that. It really is one of the few things that keeps me up at night, and that, to restate it, was the difference between the council-manager, form of government, what's called weak mayor, and strong mayor, which is what we have in Chattanooga. Strong mayors typically are term-limited, and there's a very strong feeling that everybody wants to be a strong mayor, because you have all this executive power, and you do, but you don't have continuity. And so cities like Chattanooga tend to porpoise from, you know, from good to bad, from good to bad, and so on. If you don't have that, you better have some other form of cultural continuity to ensure that council-manager, I have a lot of friends in council-manager Government, the mayor of Savannah, for example, and then he's like, no, no, no, you don't want this because my council is a goat rodeo, you know, and they, you know, they all answer, you know, city manager answers to them like, I'm constantly so I've spent a lot of time talking to my friends at Brookings and Bloomberg about, like, is there a middle path, you know, that is kind of a perfect mixture. I think it comes down to the finer points of control. And I don't know of a city, maybe Kansas City, which has council-manager, but a but a strong-ish mayor, but I do think it's really, really important question for cities to answer.

Dean Baquet  8:17  
Would you say you get more done in the way, in the form of government?

Mayor Tim Kelly  8:21  
I'd say you do get a lot more done. But the irony of it is, I spent the first four years fixing shit that I wouldn't have had to fix. You know, from from prior mayors that were lousy, that if we'd have had continuity, and there's, there's often some implicit trade off, that if you're a weak mayor and you have a city council, you don't have, you don't have term limits, and I don't know that I could do more than eight years, honestly, just constitutionally, I mean, personally, constitutionally, but, but, you know, but, but, there have been studies that shown that that the major cities in South Carolina, for example, you have better longitudinal outcomes with the council manager model. Greenville, for example, they've had the same mayor for about 16 years. Charleston just turned over. But you tend to have better growth over time with that continuity, continuity is the main thing.s

Dean Baquet  9:10  
Is there another question back there? One right over here, right here.

Oscar Perry Abello  9:18  
Hi, thanks mayor, and thanks Dean for facilitating this conversation. I'm Oscar Perry Abello. I'm with Next City. It's an Urban Affairs magazine. And I'm curious about, I read a lot of writing and reporting about community banks and credit unions. And I'm curious... You have nine community banks in the Chattanooga metropolitan area. Two are inside city limits. Where are these community banks in regard to some of the challenges you're talking about in the One Chattanooga plan, that's the first question, where are these community banks? And the second question is, I see the city of Chattanooga has around $700 million deposited in banks. Where are those $700 million $700million in its bank account, deposited in banks, and where, where are they? What kind of banks?


Mayor Tim Kelly  10:07  
So shout out -- unpaid endorsement. I bought Oscar's book earlier, because this is one of the things that you know, it's kind of a groundwater issue I do think faces mid-sized cities is this hollowing out, not only of the media environment and mid-sized cities, but of the capital environment and the, you know, the aggregation of capital in, again, in major markets. And, you know, I tell the story about Chattanooga was the smallest city that's been involved in this Harvard Young American Leaders program. I did that program. I mean, the next smallest city, this was probably Minneapolis, and you'd be standing around talking to people, and they would say, oh, you know, we're talking about education reform or workforce reform. And, oh, you know, yeah, my kid plays baseball with the guy who runs, you know, CSR for Bank of America. And, you know, they just wrote a check. And I'm standing there thinking, stuff like that doesn't happen in in Chattanooga or Lafayette or, I mean, that it's a different planet, right? And so, you know, we were talking a little earlier. We've got, you know, four or five CDFIs, but they don't, it's not, you know, not only is it a capital misallocation problem, it's a, it's an expertise thing, right? We don't have the minds in finance. They're in Charlotte or Atlanta, you know, and so there's just no expertise there, and the muscle memory is not there. So, you know, the 700 million in deposits, you know, great question. I mean, I think the biggest bank in terms of market shares, Truest, you know. I mean, the City of Chattanooga has got money at Truest, which doesn't even have, I mean, we have to call Knoxville to get somebody on the phone to do our banking. I mean, what's wrong with that picture? And meanwhile, we need to work with the state legislature to change it. We can't even bank with the local credit unions, which, in theory, might be a way to kind of more localized capital. But there are literally laws on the books in Tennessee that prevent the city from banking with credit unions. So this is something I'm glad you wrote the book, and I think everybody should read it, because we need to wake up to that and be way more intentional about localizing capital.

Dean Baquet  12:13  
Again is that a summary of some of the downside of this size cities? We're talking about access to capital, but also access to talent, absolutely. And how do you deal with those two things?

Mayor Tim Kelly  12:24  
Well, I mean, again, read the book. No, I honestly, I don't, I don't know. I mean, I do think we were talking again a little earlier. I mean, the laws that were written around community the Community Reinvestment Act, didn't anticipate the consolidation of power, the monopoly consolidation of power. I mean, again, different speech, different topic. But you know, we haven't had any-- trust enforcement has been asleep at the switch in this country for 30 years, asleep at the switch. And you know, again, that consolidation has left those seats of power and capital in larger markets. And I don't think it's an active conspiracy. They're just not thinking about us. They're thinking about themselves, right? And so I think, I think it's going to require some legislative action. God bless those legislative politicians, to realize, okay, well, you know, we've got to figure out how to shift those CRA dollars in more specific and intentional ways and or shift the capital itself back to smaller markets.

Dean Baquet  13:31  
What's your relationship with the press, local press? 

Mayor Tim Kelly  13:35  
I mean, look, I'm an old kind of journalism guy myself, as we were talking about backstage. I wrote for the college paper, my high school paper, interned at the Nation and till I realized what journalists got paid. Well, actually, you know, but now I got, you know, rooked into running the family business, or I probably would be doing that. But now I think I have a good relationship with the press. I mean, it's funny coming into office, they didn't trust me, because they saw me as this wealthy white guy, which I guess in some respects, is is fair and accurate. But I think they, they, they mistrusted my motives. And I think they, I think, you know, they, we have a better relationship with them now because they've seen I've had plenty of opportunities to to to screw it up and to do self serving things, which I have not done. 

Dean Baquet  14:24  
What's the worst press you've gotten the story that the story you woke up in the morning and said, Jesus Christ?

Mayor Tim Kelly  14:36  
Well, probably around I hired a black female police chief who was an eminently qualified person for the job, who who was just absolutely railroaded out of her job. She didn't do herself any favors. And so there was a lot of really negative press around that, around the way that it was handled, on both sides. It was a no win situation. It was a really just. Bad and tragic situation, but that was a very difficult one.

Dean Baquet  15:03  
Did you think the coverage was fair?

Mayor Tim Kelly  15:07  
Hmm, I think that it was just a bad situation. Yeah, I really have been lucky in that. I haven't...you know, Walter husband out of Little Rock, owns our paper, and that can, it presents its own problems, but I should, I'm told I should, thank God every day that we don't have a Gannett paper. So I try to thank God for small blessings.

Speaker 3  15:28  
We talk a lot about affordable housing, not in my backyard and the Cato Institute said that 80% of Americans think that manufacturing jobs should be brought here, butonly 20% of people would actually consider working so when you think about your constituency, your city, your area. 

Mayor Tim Kelly  15:36  
The first question was affordable housing and how we deal with NIMBYism, is that correct? And then the second one was really about, you know, 80% of the people want manufacturing jobs back here, but only 20% of them want to work in it, and how we built the economy, right? Well, on the first one, it is a it's a real thing. I do think there are some very specific YIMBY campaigns that are starting to kind of happen. I noticed in the bio y'all mentioned zoning. It was a big deal. Policy wonks know that rewriting your zoning code is a very difficult thing. We managed to do it. And, you know, it sailed through. I talked to a lot of other mayors, like, how did you do that? And and trust, right is the thing. Right? You have to earn trust and not betray trust. And we did it. And the main thing was densifying. You know, the areas that that need to be densified. So, you know, we had some unlikely twists and turns. One particularly influential, older black woman who has a huge following on an email chain, really believes that, you know, R1 is the ticket for the black community to finally, you know, get climb the ladder of net worth, and we're trying to take it away from them, you know, at the time at which it is becoming a real opportunity. And she has a point. But we're so, we were careful not to, you know, radically change things. You know, again, Chattanooga is not New York City in terms of size or scope, but, but I do think inside the city, in in more people do self select. So the the NIMBY stuff is really a bigger issue in the suburban areas, which tend to be in our case, in the county, and so not really so much our concern. But I do think it's important the mayor of Jackson Wyoming, you talk about a terrible affordable housing problem. She's a friend of mine, and you know, there's some lessons to be learned about standing up, you know, YIMBY groups, so that, you know, a young person can show up at a planning commission meeting and say, Hey, what about me? Right? If you guys don't densify, how am I going to afford to buy a house here ever? Right? So it's important. I think these two questions are related, because they had to do with one group of people dominating the conversation. You didn't really ask this, but I'll say it anyway. One of the things that shocked me about running for mayor was having never run for mayor before. I just treated it like another startup, because I've done a bunch of startups, and, you know, so and I'm a marketing guy, so, you know, you go look at what's the message, what's the product, what's the plan. And you know, how are we going to reach all these demographic slices? And so we're talking about social media and OTT and things like that to reach a younger audience. And the political consultant was like, no, no, just just erase that. He said, Yeah, you're just wasting your money. Young people don't vote. And I'm like, Well, yeah, but like, seriously. He's like, no, no, seriously, but we still do polling on the telephone, and it works. And the reason it works is because the people that vote are 60 plus. Well, that's so screwed up, but it has so much to do with the politics, because half the battle is showing up. And I think we're in this doom loop where politicians listen to their political consultants, which, frankly, which, again, I didn't, I said, the hell with that. We're, we're spending the money, you know, to engage younger voters. Because if we continue with this and just speak to the older voters, then the younger voters feel disengaged, like they're not talking to me. Why do I care? And then, you know, the it's a vicious cycle. So to your point, you know, who is it saying they want manufacturing jobs here, but don't want to do it. It's the, you know, the old guy sitting in his arm chair wearing the MAGA hat. You know, there was a the big ICE raid that happened during the first Trump administration was in White House, Tennessee, ironically, was a big meat packing plant. They came in, cleaned it out, hauled everybody off in handcuffs. Do you think there was a line out the door the next day of guys wearing MAGA hats to take those jobs? They had to close the plant. They just closed the plant. So I mean, again, to some extent, I think it's just a question of political leadership. I mean, people elect leaders to lead and and to, you know, to explain the, you know, the realities in terms that people can understand, you know, and kind of bring them around from time to time. And I think that's been sorely lacking. 

Christiaan Mader  20:15  
Think we're gonna have to leave it there. Big Towns -- come for the conversation, stay for the cognitive dissonance. Mayor Tim thank you so much for spending time with us. Dean Baquet, thank you guys for joining this conversation.

Johanna Divine  20:29  
Thank you for joining this Big Towns conversation with Mayor Tim Kelly. This episode was produced by The Current. Save the date for Big Towns 2026 -- get more details at Big Towns.org.