It’s a terrible football analogy, but the central theme of Thursday’s Visioneering Wichita presentations applies: Chattanooga isn’t building a modern downtown by reading the market and reacting; they’re running a full-scale blitz.
We’ll have more on the theme in Friday’s Eagle, but one fascinating example is partially hidden in a south Chattanooga storefront: Create Here is a one-stop shop melding the arts and business education that’s all about “talent retention,” according to Helen Johnson, one of the founders. It’s goal is to give Chattanooga residents the tools to profit from their creativity, growing the city’s talent base and thus its economic foundation.
Create Here doesn’t have anything that Wichita doesn’t: the arts, business education, community activisim.
But what it does remarkably, as Johnson puts it, is fight the perception that all those functions need to be “siloed,” or segregated as separate community institutions.
“What we do, instead, is encourage people to think across all these disciplines as a platform for community change,” Johnson said.
Create Here won’t be around forever, Johnson said. She has no interest in perpetuating it as an institution. But she intends for its wide-ranging programs, from artist recruitment to business planning classes, to live on.
Bill Wilson has been taking a few snapshots on the Visioneering trip to Chattanooga. Wednesday’s tour included a trip to the city’s aquarium.
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.
Keith Lawing, head of the Workforce Alliance for South Central Kansas, says that he didn’t spend all of his federal stimulus summer jobs money last summer so he’ll have a good bit of money left for another jobs program next summer. I don’t know exact numbers.
He had meant to spend $2 million to hire hire 500 young adults to do various jobs, but he said many who applied didn’t meet the income requirements or simply didn’t follow through on the applications.
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.
There’s something a little unnerving about blogging while your van goes hurtling by the Olympic Torch in Atlanta. Nonetheless, a few highlights as the Visioneering Wichita trip to Chattanooga lands on the extremely wet ground in Georgia.
- Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, and council members Janet Miller and Lavonta Williams paid their own way on the trip. And Brewer, for those of you keeping score from past Visioneering trips, sat in coach. No free upgrades here.
- The van I’m blasting through Atlanta in is driven by Visioneering chairman Jon Rolph. So far, I can conclude that Jon’s as good a driver as he is a businessman. Although, there were some tense moments at the HUGE Atlanta airport as most of the tour group left on a bus with no sign of Mr. Rolph and our van. Somewhere on Nicole Howerton’s iPhone is a photo of all of us contemplating a hitchhiking venture to Chattanooga. Or worse, three days of partying in Hotlanta.
- Finally, the first scare of the day. Howerton has commandeered our van and we’re heading for a Starbucks, conveniently located, as Jon put it, at a “boondoggle exit.” He has to stop. She has a frighteningly determined look in her eye.
Come back to Business Casual for the next three days. I’ll keep you posted on the backstories.
- From Bill Wilson
One of the most interesting bits from a wind energy conference I went to last week came from a workshop on how local manufacturers could get into the wind makers supply chain. Some of our aircraft suppliers would match up pretty well in some ways — makers require a wide mix of parts at low volume with a high degree of precision.
But there’s one big difference: profit margins. Aircraft is traditionally a pretty fat business profitwise, and that profit is spread to some extent over the supply chain. On the other hand, turbine manufacturing is already a world-wide industry. US companies would be competing against established Chinese and European turbine makers and suppliers, tightening up the margins. The upshot, said one of the speakers, is that aircraft suppliers may find it difficult to adapt to the price pressure.
FierceHealthcare bills itself as “the leading source of healthcare management news for healthcare industry executives” and has picked nine movers and shakers to watch this year. Most are industry leaders, but No. 9 on the list is former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. “While at the moment, you can’t think of healthcare without thinking of President Obama, Sebelius’s name should be just as synonymous,” FierceHealthcare says.
We oil speculators must rejoice today, since prices rebounded after a rather steep fall over the last few days.
Our friends at Goldman Sachs – those fellows who tried to sell the notion a few weeks ago that natural gas prices should triple this winter, despite unprecedented inventories and sagging demand – get some of the credit. Amazingly, the GS folks think that oil is headed to between $85 and $90. What were the odds?
I think the problem we speculators face is where we speculate on oil: At the gas pump, where the speculation is how much more we’re going to pay next week because of the real speculators.
Ran across this this survey from CareerBuilder. High “ick factor,” but pretty funny:
Given the following embarrassing situations, which of your co-workers you would tell the following:
1. Your zipper is undone
a. Same level co-worker – 67 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 62 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 50 percent
2. You have something in your nose
a. Same level co-worker – 51 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 46 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 33 percent
3. You have food in your teeth or on your face
a. Same level co-worker – 66 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 60 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 49 percent
4. Your hair is messy
a. Same level co-worker – 33 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 30 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 13 percent
5. You have a stain on your clothes
a. Same level co-worker – 51 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 47 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 34 percent
6. You need a breath mint
a. Same level co-worker – 33 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 29 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 14 percent
7. You need a shower
a. Same level co-worker – 28 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 28 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 11 percent
8. Your apparel is not appropriate for the office
a. Same level co-worker – 32 percent
b. Lower level co-worker – 37 percent
c. Higher level co-worker – 10 percent
WICHITA — I love the Census Bureau because it sometimes comes up with kooky, but revealing stats. This month it revealed that Kansas is in the top 10 states for workers who drive to work alone, with 81 percent riding alone. That means we’re among the least users of carpooling and mass transit in the US, or maybe they’re just less tolerant of neighbors and coworkers. One look at our anemic bus system would confirm that.
The states (or territories) with the highest percentage of more than one commuter per car: as you’d expect, the one’s with big cities. Washington DC, New York, Illinois, California. But, strangely, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho are also on the list.
I just this morning received a nifty little packet — what we in the newspaper business call a press kit — from FedEx Ground.
The packet touts the virtues of the FedEx Ground system and how that system allows nearly 13,000 people to be independent business owners working as contractors to FedEx.
What’s most interesting about this is not necessarily the packet, but how it came to me.
It was by way of the U.S. Postal Service’s Priority Mail.