Business Casual

Here’s a shocker: More national analysts say speculators are responsible for the current rise in prices, at a time when gas prices historically fall.

Funny how the nonsense about supply and demand has died down, isn’t it?

I’ll say this for the long-struggling WaterWalk development: Its latest call to the bullpen has summoned the Mariano Rivera of Wichita entrepreneurs.

And we’re going to find out soon how much fastball Jack DeBoer has left, because the bases are loaded down there on the east bank and WaterWalk has nobody at all out. And the fans in the stands are hot under the collar, pointing fingers all the way.

DeBoer’s got a ton of challenges on his plate: The public’s angry about their investment and the lack of progress at the development, retailers and restaurateurs are running, not walking, from leases in this credit environment. His one retailer down there  has a front door pointing the wrong way.

And perhaps most significantly, as we’ve seen this week, the only support he’s going to get from City Hall – the same building where the 2003 budget cuts that doomed the project got their start – is moral. This city council certainly wants DeBoer to succeed. But they’re out of money.

City Manager Bob Layton on Friday professed his confidence in DeBoer, which is more than some of the city’s commercial development crowd voiced this week. Some fear that the development will fail, leaving a financially strapped City Hall on the hook for $41 million in infrastructure scheduled to be paid back by the tax revenues WaterWalk has yet to generate.

DeBoer is a brilliant man, a fountain of ideas that he maps out on his trademark legal pad.  He’ll need all of them to strike out the side down on the east bank.

But don’t bet against that happening quite yet. It’ll be fascinating to watch DeBoer’s work in the bottom of WaterWalk’s ninth inning.

One of the interesting themes emerging in this morning’s discussion in Chattanooga is the cooperative hospitality effort to recruit convention and corporate business.

“We truly work together, and we’re always interested in bringing new business to Chattanooga rather than fighting back and forth,” said Tom Cupo, general manager of The Chattanoogan, the city-owned hotel and convention center.

“We’re interested in making the pie bigger rather than stealing marketshare.”

There’s a lesson there for Wichita, in hospitality business recruitment and on a broader downtown revitalization scale.

We’re nowhere near the end of a whirlwind first day in Chattanooga as I write this, but wow.

Just wow.

What we’ve seen in less than a day on the Tennessee River is the culmination of 40 years of planning. From a tightly constructed arts and entertainment corridor that connects the river with a historic American arts complex to a green housing development to a double-pronged transit plan that makes the city easy to navigate, it’s not hard to see why Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer said at midday,  “This is what we want to be.”

Chattanooga has transformed itself in four decades in a massive public-private investment partnership that’s run into the billions. City leaders here consider it a success, and who can doubt them? New, modern private development is everywhere. Volkswagen and two other major industries have signed on, thanks to the quality of life the city has created and its willingness to give those companies incentives.

That’s not to say that Chattanooga doesn’t have its rundown areas. But city leaders have ideas in place for the most moribund areas, and they’re able to chuckle at some of the long-forgotten businesses there, such as the “State of Confusion” frontage on one downtown street.

One big dream here is a plan to use passenger rail to connect a billion-dollar development project in the south part of the city with downtown and UT-Chattanooga.

If there’s a message in what we’ve seen today, it’s that dreaming isn’t a junket and it isn’t a boondoggle. Because without dreams, progress is impossible.