Chattarati Articles in Economy

Planning Across Boundaries

2011-10-27T08:00:00Z

When we think about public planning, we tend to think on a small scale: the zoning of a neighborhood, road construction or a citywide sewer system. These planning functions are essential to building a livable community, but they're mostly limited to a local area within a single jurisdiction.

Armando Carbonell thinks about planning on a much larger scale. He thinks in terms of megaregions — large, interconnected areas of urban cities and natural systems that cross county lines and, often, state boundaries.

Carbonell is the chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., where he's worked on national, regional and urban planning policies since 1999. He's also a co-chair with America 2050, a national initiative to prepare for population growth over the next four decades.

On Nov. 1, Carbonell will be in Chattanooga as the second speaker in the George T. Hunter Lecture Series. Earlier this week, he and I spoke by phone about the concept of megaregions, some basic goals for strategic growth plans, and the challenges cities will face in the future.

Q: In the forward to Megapolitan America, you write about the origin of the megaregion. Population growth is a common theme in many planning discussions, but in 2004, you started looking at clustering population growth — that is, trends around specific geographic areas. Is that a fair way to describe it?

A: The first thing we did that was unusual was we picked the year 2050, and that's a lot further out than people tend to look, although the census bureau does have projections out that far. But to get into the cluster thing, we took more specific data for counties. This was at the University of Pennsylvania. We had them buy the Woods & Poole data and projections. We sort of extended that out to 2050, so we would have a sense of where the relative growth and shrinkage was going to be in the country.

I think you get a picture out of that that shows that some parts of the country are going to grow a lot more. Some are probably going to continue to lose population. That has implications for urban form, cities, the environment, and how we use land. We used that as a starting point.

Q: How do you define the megaregion?

A: It's a relatively new way of thinking about regions and space. I see it as including metropolitan areas, the regions around cities, in particular looking at the linkages among metropolitan areas — so that you get more than one city or metro, you get bunches of them — but within some natural context. The map of megaregions that I would use is a bit fuzzy, but they include cities, they include metropolitan areas, and they include large natural systems. What we try to do is not separate the urban function from the natural function. We try to see how they relate to each other.

To pick the one that's closest to home for me, a classic megaregion is the whole northeast of the United States. That stretches from the Appalachians to the Atlantic Ocean. It includes all the big cities of the eastern seaboard and all the spaces in between.

Q: When you start to look at planning in this larger context — it goes across different boundaries in terms of cities, counties and states — what kind of new planning policies stand out as priorities that may not have been as obvious on a more traditional scale?

A: The most obvious has to do with what we call governance, as a part from government. Governance is how we make decisions across various boundaries. It's the way most regional planners now like to think about the whole policy process. So for example in a multi-state megaregion, the first issue is that each state has a lot of control over land-use policy and, to a large extent, over transportation policy. These are two big drivers of development patterns and infrastructure. There is really no easy way to get states to work together across those boundaries that exist today.

We've been interested in the inner-city rail system and especially high-speed rail. Any time a rail line is going to pass through many states, many governors have something to say about it, but also many states' departments of transportation. There's opportunity for things to get uncoordinated. What one needs to think about are the methods by which people get together and work out their needs, that may be different in different states, in some compatible way that leads to a system that works. There's sort of a built-in challenge to anything at that scale that's essentially jurisdictional.

There is no entity that has authority over a megaregion, and we're not proposing that there should be. It's not like a super state. It's a way of thinking across those boundaries about the things that need to be considered at that scale. And there are a few things that just seem obvious, like large transportation systems, large water systems, large energy systems that need to be thought about. Really the insight is that to plan effectively for certain needs, we need to get better at working across boundaries. I'd say that's one of the specialties we've developed at the Lincoln Institute, is how to do that.

Q: When you're working on projects that go across boundaries, like transportation or water quality, do they have to happen at a federal level? Or is there a way that cities can coordinate these policies in an effective way?

A: I think it goes in both directions. When we started thinking about this, we had an ambitious goal to think about national-scale plans. [But we] quickly stepped back from that and said, "That's not really tenable."

I think we learned something the more we looked at the situation: that the country's not homogeneous. Megaregions probably represent the biggest scale that you could think about getting real consensus around in terms of real planning. So we started with a more bottom-up process where megaregions really need to get together and think about their needs and present those to the national government. But we really don't see the national government telling megaregions what to do or creating the national directive to do this.

On the other hand, what we did see happening was that national government has the ability to spend money, or at least it used to. That is a great incentive for people to get together and do things. At different scales, we've seen this recently. The regional sustainability grants that have come out of HUD have brought together people who otherwise weren't getting together to plan — in some cases across state lines. And that's something we encourage them to consider: to think as big as possible in terms of federal inducements to large-scale regional planning. I think that can be a very positive role. And in the stimulus package, there was funding for high-speed rail development that made a big difference in terms of stimulating interest across state lines.

I'm not saying there is no federal role, but we generally would say that the most effective planning should come from the regions. There should be some consideration of national consequences and implications, and there's certainly still great importance to national policy. But especially in difficult times like this, you can imagine more happening at the regional level than will happen at the national level.

Q: Right now, we're in the process of putting together a large strategic growth plan that includes 16 counties across three different states. This kind of initiative has been done in other parts of the country. Your book, Regional Planning in America, highlights a few. In terms of doing that scale of planning, what are some basic goals that stakeholders, government and citizens should hope to get out of the process?

A: The very first thing is getting people to believe that they actually have some influence on the future, and that the thought of planning for a long time is even feasible. I think you have to break down a kind of resistance to the thought that the future is out of our hands — that citizens don't have much to say about it or that planners don't have much to say about it.

That's the difficulty in any one of these initiatives, because there is a kind of fatalism and even a kind of negativism that sometimes creeps in — a sense that things are not going to be as good as they were in the past. I think it's important, because there's no reason to believe that's true, to put that aside and give people a sense of the potential to have a positive effect on the future and to actually do things that will make life better in places, which is the overall goal that planners have.

Some of that has to do with what I'd call visualization. This amounts to showing the possible outcomes of different choices that people can make, often called scenarios, and helping them to see the better and the worse possibilities and the pathways that might lead to the better ones. This has to be conditioned by an understanding that we're operating in an uncertain environment. There are a lot of ways of describing scenario planning, but one of them includes a sense that you can't just pick the scenario you want. You really need to be prepared for different things to happen and consider what the most robust choices are that you can make — to open you up to the best opportunities, but also protect you from some of the worst things that could happen. It's a little bit like hedging your bets.

I think the most sophisticated versions of this kind of long-range, large-scale planning include not just, "let's just pick our favorite scenario and hope we can make it happen." Which, you know, there's some value in that actually. But I think even more valuable is to say, "What happens if energy prices go through the roof? What happens if the housing market stays down?" Consider some of the good or the bad things that might happen, and consider how different paths will fare if those things happen. Then say, "Hmm, maybe I might want to guard against that in some way."

We've done some work on planning for climate change. One of the real challenges there is that nobody can say exactly how much or how quickly climate will change; we're seeing effects of different sorts around the country. Helping people to think about how they can make the best choices — it's not the right choice, because no one knows what that is — in terms of having the fewest regrets in the future with the path that they take. This really is a recognition that communities have different preferences for risk and assess things in different ways. You can't really dictate a kind of mechanical solution to this. It's not strictly a science and engineering problem. It's a social activity to decide how to manage risk and how to think about some of the challenges in the future. Once communities can develop a vocabulary to talk about it, they can do great things in terms of getting people together to address things which otherwise might be scary or that you might just want to ignore.

Q: There's been a resurgence of interest in cities over the last couple decades. Alex Krieger was here recently, and he talked about how Americans are moving back to cities. I want to ask about their role in these bigger systems, specifically the kind of challenges cities will face in the future.

A: I don't know if we want to call it the Seinfeld phenomenon, but it seems that the popular cultural idea of cities — the stock has gone up tremendously.

I think there is a resurgence. I think there are demographic factors that will continue to feed that. I'm a classic baby boomer, and I walk to work. I went to a lot of trouble to live close enough to my office to do that. And I know lots of people who are like me, and there's going to be bunches more. That's one demographic feed going into cities. It's a lifestyle choice, and it makes sense for us.

But there are also a lot of young people who have really been attracted to cities, in certain cities more than others. New York has just had this tremendous boom in young people coming in, rediscovering neighborhoods, and creating real estate value. And that affects one of the challenges: Desirable cities are very expensive places to live. That starts to limit their accessibility to people with ordinary means, and they really need to be accessible to lots of people. Housing is going to be a challenge in cities. Even cities like New York, which are thought of as pretty dense places, are thinking about how to increase intensity of use in places that are less so.

So finding space for people as cities continue to be popular is a challenge. And making housing affordable is a big challenge.

There's also this differential [in that] some cities are growing, but some cities are still shrinking. The statistics out of the last census suggest that the Detroits and the Clevelands and others actually had done worse in between the two censuses than they thought.

The places that haven't grown so much — and generally what is going on now is an acceptance that some of these places are not just going to grow back to their highest population numbers — need to think about an opportunity to reconfigure themselves around smaller population and think about how to better use the space of the city.

In Cleveland for example, things related to urban agriculture are going on in a pretty significant way. [They're] dealing with empty lots and thinking about how to consolidate development as much as possible. I think there's a new realism in some of the cities that have yet to completely stabilize that they'd be better off, in a sense, accepting the smaller population, trying to rework the infrastructure that they have, and think creatively about more green space and about more compact neighborhoods and encourage people to move into more logical clusters where they can do that.

People are working at this in serious and creative ways. I think it's a new attitude, and it's the realistic approach.

Another major challenge is climate change, which I think is the biggest challenge. It's going to require us to rethink how we do a lot of things. Some places are going to be better prepared than others that haven't taken it into account. I think this will be an inescapable phenomenon, and one that we've encouraged people to think about sooner and not later.

Q: Could you give us a preview of what to expect in your lecture next week?

A: Well, I don't want to give it away too much, but I have been thinking about it. It'll be a kind of excursion through a number of scales, so be prepared to get a little dizzy as I zoom up to the level of the planet and then down to something fairly microscopic. That's kind of one of my themes. It may help as you embark on a regional initiative to think about how to think big and think small in a way that's connected. I'll also try to carry through my main idea, which has to do with the integration of cities and urbanism with natural systems. And I might end up on some suggestions on some pathways to a good life, which I think is not too much to ask that planners help us to build a good life for ourselves.

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Introducing: Urban Design Challenge

2011-07-11T22:00:00Z

River City Company:

River City Company announced today the launch of the Urban Design Challenge, a year-long series to showcase new concept plans for sites key to the future of downtown. The Urban Design Challenge is part of the nonprofit downtown development firm’s 25th anniversary celebration.
The public is invited to a free kick-off event of the Urban Design Challenge on Wednesday, July 27, at 5:30 p.m. at the Chattanoogan Hotel in downtown Chattanooga. The kick-off event will feature a special presentation by well-known architect and urbanist Alex Krieger.
The Urban Design Challenge will apply the talent of local urban designers in visioning the highest and best future use of key downtown sites.
“River City was created to turn visionary plans for our downtown into real places and these real places paved the way for the vibrant and beautiful downtown we have today.” said Kim White, president of River City Company, “With the Urban Design Challenge, we’re looking in a new way at future opportunities for high quality development downtown."
Beginning in the fall of 2011, design teams led by local architects will develop concept plans for six downtown sites (see map below):
700 block of Market Street
Civic Forum block
Patten Parkway
4th Street corridor at US 127
Vine Street corridor
Block between Main and 13th, Broad and Chestnut streets
Eric Myers, owner of Elemi Architects in Chattanooga is hoping to be on a team selected to do one of the concept plans. "Chattanooga's downtown is a remarkably special place because it exhibits certain values about the urban environment." he said. "This Urban Design Challenge can help us have a public conversation about things that are fundamental in the rebuilding of our city."
Selected design teams will each make public presentations about their site plans at two month intervals during the year. The selected teams and their site assignments will also be announced at the public event on July 27. At the end of the year, concept plans will serve as a knowledge base for future discussions about development and improvements to downtown.
The architect, planner and urban designer, Alex Krieger, is a principal with Chan Krieger NBBJ based in Boston. Krieger is one of the world’s foremost urban planners, winning awards in recent years for plans in Dallas, Detroit, post-Katrina New Orleans and Shanghai, China. He is also a professor and former chair of the department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His talk will begin at 6 p.m. on July 27 at the Chattanoogan.
The Urban Design Challenge is possible thanks to grants to River City Company from the Benwood Foundation, Lyndhurst Foundation and Maclellan Foundation.
River City Company is downtown Chattanooga’s economic development company, leading the charge for positive and sustainable economic growth. For more than 20 years, River City Company has played an integral role in the revitalization of downtown Chattanooga. Through partnerships with local government and the private and philanthropic sectors, the organization works to attract, expand, and support efforts to advance downtown because it is essential to the way our entire region works, lives and plays.
For more information, please call River City Company at (423) 265-3700 or visit www.rivercitycompany.com.

Eds. note: This post was updated on July 12 to correct two biographical errors on Alex Krieger — the name of his firm and his position at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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Video: A Gigabit in Every Pot

2011-07-07T15:15:00Z

A segment of the Council for the New American City at the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ annual meeting on June 17, 2011. It features Mayor Ron Littlefield discussing the 1 gigabit fiber network that EPB has deployed throughout the Chattanooga metro area and Norman Jackins via Vimeo

Speaking at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Baltimore last month, Mayor Ron Littlefield talks about technology and EPB's 1 Gbps Internet service in Chattanooga.

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Fancy Film Work

2011-07-07T14:30:00Z

Drew Belz and Isaiah Smallman are doing more than the average film company. Rather than just creating commercials, Fancy Rhino, a video production company, helps its clients identify and communicate their stories.

“The idea is that everybody has an inner beast, and every company has sort of this energy that’s pent up, and they don’t necessarily know how to put it in a tuxedo, send it to dinner, and make it sell their idea. That’s what we’re trying to do for people,” Belz said.

Fancy Rhino became official in October 2010 doing freelance work for the nonprofit organization CreateHere. Through small projects at CreateHere, Belz and Smallman realized that there was a vast, untapped market for the kind of videos they were creating.

“We kind of stumbled into business through the back door,” Belz said.

Business started to pick up when Belz and Smallman won $10,000 from the Covenant College Seed Project, a competition among Covenant students and recent grads looking to start small businesses. The capital allowed the two entrepreneurs to take the next step with Fancy Rhino. “We had to think about it as a business,” said Belz.

Through the seed project, the company also came in contact with the Lamp Post Group, a venture incubator which invests in small businesses that are just starting out. The Fancy Rhino office is in the same building as Lamp Post, though it's not an official member yet.

“We’re sort of living together right now is really the best way of describing it,” said Belz.

The growing process started an explosion of creativity. “Our biggest struggle right now is having a lot of ideas that are a lot bigger than what we can handle,” Smallman said.

While it’s taken them awhile to get the ball rolling, their way of doing things has had its benefits. The company is almost entirely debt-free, and while profits have been slow, business is picking up.

The team consists of Belz, creative director, Smallman, director of photography, Bethany Mollenkof, documenting and editing, and Kelly Lacy, motion graphics design. They also have two summer interns.

Andrew Mollenkof, an English and philosophy double major at Covenant is one of them.

“I think Fancy Rhino is interesting because, as far as the video world in Chattanooga goes, they have a pretty fresh perspective. A lot of the other video companies in Chattanooga don’t have the same eye for detail. Fancy Rhino has a lot higher class production than a lot of the bigger companies and a lot higher quality image. It’s been really good because they have the expertise and a keen attention to story and detail,” he said.

That passion for story began in middle school, when they would spend their afternoons creating short clips on iMovie.

In high school, the two, cousins and best friends, became serious about film as a career. “It really is a calling. I think if I wasn’t doing this I’d just be terribly miserable,” said Smallman. “Making stuff that people will see and care about.”

“That’s the high for me — if we work hard at an idea it can become a reality on film,” Belz said.

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Tracking Stimulus Dollars in Hamilton County

2011-07-05T10:00:00Z

Interactive map tracking stimulus recipients for Hamilton County.Chattarati via Web

Map: Stimulus dollars for Hamilton County, Tennessee.

It's been three years since Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and since then, the $787 billion stimulus plan has been hotly debated, discussed and analyzed across the country.

Much of that conversation has centered around the legislation's broad impact on the United States economy, but we wanted to see its impact on the local level.

Under the legislation, more than $249 million dollars has gone to organizations, businesses and projects in Hamilton County as of October 2010.

That amounts to $738 per capita for Hamilton County — slightly higher than the per capita dollars that went to Shelby and Knox counties. Davidson County received significantly more ($8,396 per capita).

The nonprofit news organization ProPublica tracks stimulus spending throughout the U.S. and has compiled a comprehensive, easy-to-use database of projects funded by the Recovery Act. Using their data, Chattarati created the interactive map above to show where local stimulus recipients are located.

Where Has the Money Gone?

The funds have gone to more than 300 local spending items that consist of contracts, grants and loans.

Overall breakdown:

Contracts	$17.8 million
Grants	$231.2 million
Loans	$316,000
Total	$249.3 million

Additionally, we found that $213.6 million, or 85 percent, of the total went to businesses and organizations that are either based in Hamilton County or have offices here.

Local awards:

Contracts	$10.9 million
Grants	$202.4 million
Loans	$316,000
Total	$213.6 million

The Public Sector

Local public entities received substantial awards under the federal legislation.

The largest went to the Electric Power Board, which received a $110 million grant to build out its fiber optic smart grid last year.

Around $20.6 million funded a Pell grant program at area institutions. Chattanooga State received $10.5 million. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga received $6 million. Private institutions make up the remainder.

Local governments received a combined amount of $15.4 million under 40 different grants:

City of Chattanooga	$8.9 million
Hamilton County	$2 million
City of East Ridge	$1.9 million
City of Red Bank	$1.3 million
City of Collegedale	$629,000
Town of Signal Mountain	$463,000
City of Soddy-Daisy	$100,000
City of Lakesite	$89,000

The Chattanooga Housing Authority received $6.3 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Half of these funds will go toward the Fairmount development in North Chattanooga, according to previous reports.

The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) received $5.4 million. The bulk of those funds are for purchasing six buses and security and support equipment, as well as rehabilitating some of its properties.

The Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport Authority received $3 million.

The Private Sector

Another portion of the federal funds went to businesses, primarily through construction contracts or small business loans. Our research found that while some of the recipients are not based in Hamilton County, they may have local offices or are working on local contracts.

A reported $58 million went toward the Chickamauga lock project overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported in October that the project has cost $630 million since it began in 2003. Some of the contractors that received funding under the stimulus include:

C.J. Mahan Construction Company	$6.4 million
The Judy Company	$5 million
Miller Electrical Contractors	$714,000
Aquaterra	$409,000
Bob Smith Construction Company	$399,500
Hatch Acres Corporation	$287,000

Loans, either through the Small Business Administration (SBA) or the Department of Agriculture, make up $44.6 million in local stimulus dollars. The loans were as high as $2 million to the Stein Construction Company and as low as $57,000 to Compassionate Health Care.

In between are a range of businesses that received SBA loans, many of which are in the service industry. Examples include: $1.7 million to Pin Strikes, a chain of bowling alleys; $797,000 to Kobe Steakhouse and Sushi Restaurant; $612,000 to Surf's Car Wash; $537,000 to Massengill Tire Company; and $486,000 to Comfort Inn.

Nearly $12 million in loans are bundled together under "multiple recipients" and are administered by the Agriculture Department under the Rural Housing Service.

Nonprofit Organizations

A smaller portion of stimulus grants went to area nonprofits. A combined $3.6 million is shown in this data. Some of the organizations received funds from a federal arts program administered by the National Endowment for the Arts. Here is a list of some of the nonprofit recipients:

Chattanooga Homeless Coalition Inc.	$1.3 million
United Way of Greater Chattanooga	$820,000
Chattanooga Goodwill Industries	$299,723
Tennessee Gang Investigators Association Inc.	$199,380
Episcopal Commission of Southeast Tennessee	$155,294
Partnership for Families, Children and Adults Inc.	$128,974
Chattanooga Endeavors Inc.	$110,000
Hope for the Inner City Inc.	$77,647
Chattanooga Room in the Inn	$76,612
Legal Aid of East Tennessee	$56,000
Re:Start - the Center for Adult Education	$51,900
Allied Arts of Greater Chattanooga	$50,000
Boys & Girls Club of Chattanooga	$42,500
Orange Grove	$39,032
The Chattanooga Hamilton County Public Education Fund	$35,240
Childrens' Advocacy Center of Hamilton County	$35,000
Volunteer Behavioral Health Care System	$27,953
Association for Visual Artists	$26,000
Arts & Education Council	$26,000
Hunter Museum of American Art	$25,000
Chattanooga Symphony and Opera	$25,000
The Little Theatre	$25,000

Data for this story was compiled by ProPublica, whose complete stimulus coverage can be found here.

For this story, Daniel Ryan contributed Web development, and David Morton contributed research. To suggest an idea or report an error for this project, email editors@chattarati.com.

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Smarter Parking

2011-06-25T13:15:00Z

Drivers can now use their smartphones to pay for parking at several surface lots and one garage in and around downtown Chattanooga, transportation officals said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday.

A free mobile app, Parkmobile, is available for iOS, select Blackberry models and Android handsets. Registration for the service takes about 5 minutes online and requires submitting billing and contact information and a vehicle's license plate number. Multiple vehicles can be listed under one account.

Currently, Parkmobile only works at locations owned by CARTA, including the lot under the Olgiati Bridge on Riverfront Parkway, parking lots at Coolidge and Renaissance parks, a parking lot near the Incline Railway in St. Elmo, and the North Shore parking garage, the Times Free Press reports.

More downtown parking lots, including those run by Republic Parking System, are slated to start using the technology in four to eight weeks, [Parkmobile USA executive Laurens] Eckelboom said. Between 2,500 and 3,000 parking spaces in the central city could be available for the service by late summer, he said.

CARTA is beginning to play a bigger role in Chattanooga parking services. The transportation authority partnered with the Atlanta-based app maker, Parkmobile USA Inc., earlier this year for one of many initiatives to make a sometimes frustrating experience — parking downtown — less so.

"We are excited to bring the pay-by-cell technology to Chattanooga," said Brent Matthews, CARTA parking director, in a statement last month. "Parkers are going to be able to pay and get to their destinations quicker. This is the first step as CARTA continues to implement new technologies to make downtown parking more convenient and accessible."

The mobile app works in select cities across the country. A list is available on the company's website.

Here's how to use the Parkmobile app. Park in a supported area and enter the zone number printed on a sign above the space. When you return to your vehicle, let the app know. Parkmobile calculates the time you were parked and bills your credit card accordingly.

In parking areas with a time limit, the company will send you a text message 15 minutes before your time expires.

Chattanooga drivers will be charged a service fee for each transaction, Nooga.com reports.

The service, which is offered free of charge to the city, will require drivers to pay an extra 35 cent service charge for every transaction made using the technology. Parking can purchase time through a smartphone app, or by calling a toll-free number.

And though the app could make parking downtown a little more convenient, driver beware. Could you still get a parking fine when you use the service? "In a word, yes," the company's FAQ says.

Double parking, for example, because there's still not an app for that.

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Crowdsourcing: Where the Chattanooga.gov Redesign Began

2011-06-24T15:45:00Z

It was the price tag that caught most people's attention. The city of Chattanooga planned to spend $328,000 redesigning its website, Chattanooga.gov, but when it came up for a vote on the City Council this past Tuesday, residents had already started questioning the cost.

The project began with a slightly higher price tag, however, $378,000, and its scope was much narrower. The city's Office of Sustainability requested bids last December for Web and marketing services to put together a comprehensive website to promote itself, the initiatives of Chattanooga Green, and the Planning and Design Studio inside the Regional Planning Agency.

The city awarded the contract to Chattanooga-based design firm Maycreate. The company was not the lowest bidder on that specific project, but it was one of only a handful of firms that submitted a proposal. (See below.)

In the months that followed, the project grew to encompass the city's entire website.

On Wednesday, Chattarati requested documents related to the redesign of Chattanooga.gov under the Tennessee Open Records Act. The city of Chattanooga released documents to us on Thursday, and we are publishing part of what we have via DocumentCloud today.

So far, the documents relate specifically to the original project through the Office of Sustainability. They include Maycreate's proposal (embedded below), the original RFP and proposals from other firms.

Council member Andraé McGary posted a copy of the proposed contract between the city and the design firm on Thursday, and we've included it in our collection of documents.

City Council members got their first look at the contract on Tuesday and plan to vote it up or down next week.

There's a lot to take in with these documents, and we thought it best to put them in front of as many eyes as possible — with a challenge to savvy readers and local technophiles. Read through and help us identify and better understand the parts you feel are important. We’re especially interested in whether specific line items merit their associated costs, as well as the parts you think can be improved.

If there’s a section you can help explain, please let us know in the comments. We’ll be reading through, adding annotations and answering readers’ questions. Based on our findings and user feedback, we’ll post updates as needed on this page.

Comparing Bids

Updated June 27 at 3:15 p.m.
We've added a table comparing all the bids for the Office of Sustainability's RFP. Over the weekend, we added copies of some of the alternate proposals on the DocumentCloud project. We were unable to upload two of the proposals, but will post them here if readers want to read through them.

	2Smartt	Avanara	Civic Plus	Known Quantity	Maycreate	mRELEVANCE	Whats Up
Estimated Total	$146,800	$702,750	$80,113	$140,545	$377,700	$237,574	$115,000
Annual Software License(s)	2,400	0	0	0	3,200	0	0
Project Management	9,600	30,550	25,254	40,120	20,000	46,366	6,600
Implementation Support	0	196,300	25,680	3,000	12,000	46,366	62,400
Training	9,800	3,900	9,800	6,000	7,000	20,475	0
Travel Expenses	7,400	0	0	2,600	3,500	0	1,000
Marketing & Other Expenses	0	0	777	26,825	120,000	60,000	0
Annual Maintenance & Support	5,400	429,000	0	20,600	12,000	18,000	45,000
Conversion of Existing Content	25,000	5,200	18,602	12,700	50,000	0	0
Software Customization	9,200	32,600	0	26,500	150,000	46,367	0
Reports	78,000	5,200	0	2,200	0	0	0

Not every proposal followed the specified structure the RFP asked for; those proposals have been mapped to the rubric using our best judgment. Some proposals had variable pricing for some line items; in those cases, the highest amount has been used.

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Council to Vote on Website Redesign

2011-06-20T10:30:00Z

The Chattanooga City Council is set to vote on a contract with local firm Maycreate tomorrow on redesigning the city's website, Chattanooga.gov. The contract is divided into two phases costing $328,000 in all. From the June 21 council agenda:

A resolution authorizing the Chief Information Officer to enter into an agreement with Maycreate, LLC for web design services to create a new Content Management System and migration of all applicable data to a completely new database, with Phase I projected cost of $128,000.00 and Phase II projected cost of $200,000.00 based on $85.00 per hour, subject to appropriation. (Revised.)

The project has been in the works for some time. We alluded to it briefly in April, and today, city hall spokesman Richard Beeland said the project's request for proposal (RFP) went out several months ago.

The last time the city overhauled its website in 2004, it cost $163,000, according to Chattanoogan.com.

The City Council vote is Tuesday at 6 p.m. Download a copy of the agenda (PDF).

Take the poll in the sidebar to let us know what feature you want most from the new Chattanooga.gov.

Updated June 21 at 8:50 a.m. | Additional details from Nooga.com:

Councilwoman Deborah Scott said she has received numerous complaints from residents about the difficulty of using the city's website.
"It doesn't have the information where people would anticipate finding it and there's not enough public information," she said. "It needs a search mechanism that allows for (the differences in) how people search. Like garbage; some people call it garbage, some call it trash and some call it refuse."
According to Jana Lowery, assistant director of the city's Information Services Division, Maycreate proposes completely redesigning the the website, which includes 30 sub-sites for individual departments. She said the search function will be improved, the site will be more interactive and the city's IT staff will have more flexibility to make the site meet customer demands.

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Tax Increment Financing Could Aid Southside Site

2011-06-14T13:00:00Z

Redevelopment hopes for the Wheland Foundry and U.S. Pipe sites on Chattanooga's southside may benefit from a new tax financing incentive law signed by Governor Haslam.

Via timesfreepress.com

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Riverfront Parkway at Human Scale

2011-06-14T09:00:00Z

Christian Rushing writes that Riverbend makes an area typically experienced by automobile more human; and it highlights one of the advantages of living in the urban core — walkability.

I think that the Riverbend experience changes one’s perspective on the city. Ordinarily, people experience the Riverbend venues from the comfort of their cars. It is not often that one can go strolling about unmolested in the middle Riverfront Parkway or Chestnut Street. Being able to get in those places and experience them at human scale instead of through the lens of a car establishes a totally different connection. Cruising a 12’ wide travel lane as a pedestrian and as the driver of a car are two completely different experiences. That place is not made for a single individual, it only feels comfortable during the festival because there are (thousands of) other people there. Hopefully, even if subconsciously, it conveys the point that the city should be designed for the person, not the machine.
The festival also helps inform people about walkbility. It is a walking festival, and hopefully, for those who don’t ordinarily embrace pedestrianism it underscores the ease and common sense behind the practice. A lot of our visitors live the suburban lifestyle and drive from front door to front door to front door throughout their days. Even though it’s a festival and not “real life”, one would hope that the process of parking the car, walking from music venue to food vender to restaurant to bar, would shed some light on just how easy it is to be a walker when the environment is designed to accommodate that activity. (Not to mention that walking helps burn off funnel cake, deep-fried onions, turkey legs, and other various foodstuffs on a stick.)

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