Archive for December 2015

On July 16, 2015 disaster struck Chattanooga, Tenn. That morning, a gunman opened fire on two military installations in the city. First at a recruitment center, then at a U.S. Navy Reserve post. Four marines and a sailor were killed. A Marine recruiter and police officer were also wounded during the attack. While the city…

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Bassam Issa stepped in front of a crowded classroom of students this month at Southern Adventist University, a Christian college near here, for a presentation on being Muslim in Chattanooga — recently named America’s most “Bible-minded city.” Mr. Issa, a real estate developer and the president of his local mosque, was struggling…

Last week, 44 mayors and city officials nationwide, including Mayor Andy Berke, partnered to send a letter to the Federal Communications Commission calling for reform that would bring broadband and Internet capabilities to underserved segments of society. Next Century Cities filed this letter supporting modernizing the federal Lifeline program to include broadband on behalf of…

Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke is a Waffle House kind of guy — single waffle, scattered hash browns, that’s his jam. But today he’s showing me his hometown’s Innovation District, an up-and-coming neighborhood of startups and incubators he’s helped engineer, so instead we’ve hit a trendy breakfast spot with brick walls, savory biscuits and, by 8…

“An empty building is a dangerous building,” Andy Berke, the mayor of Chattanooga, told HuffPost. “Illegal activity happens there, people get hurt there, fires happen there, residents know that those buildings devalue the properties in their neighborhoods.” — When he was mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg used to quote statistician W.E. Deming’s famous saying:…