The City Council of Chattanooga, Tennessee, convened on November 18, 2025, for a regular business meeting that included a presentation from the sister city trip to Wuxi, China, a department report from the Chattanooga Public Library, extensive discussion of the Northgate Mall Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and sales tax proposal, and votes on several resolutions addressing the SNAP benefits disruption. The meeting also featured public comments on stray dogs, pedestrian safety, park preservation, and homelessness.
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for being here. I am now calling to order the City Council of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for Tuesday, November 18th. Please join me. We will have would you mind doing the Pledge of Allegiance? Oh. Pledge of Allegiance will be led by our vice chair. Pledge of allegiance of the United States of America. Would you like to do that? By heads, please. Life at Historant. Thank you for granting us chaplin mercy. Without accidental incident from point A to point B. We ask that you be with this council family and all of those that are represented here today. These words we ask in thy name Amen. In October, Councilman Jeff Davis and I had the honor of visiting Wuxi China, which is a sister city of Chattanooga. And so we're going uh Councilman Davis is going to do a presentation, and we have some gifts from our sister city to give to representatives of the administration. All right, well, hello everyone, or Nihao, as they say in our sister city of Wuxi. That's one of exactly two Chinese words or phrases that I knew in China. The other one is she she, which means thank you. Um and before we get too far into the presentation today, I want to give a big, a very big she to uh Melissa and our council office uh for all of her uh outstanding work preparing the trip and making sure all the arrangements were in place for us. Um we certainly appreciate that very much. So thank you. Um so obviously chairwoman Hill is here with me, she was in our delegation, and then Karen Claypool, um, who's the president of our local sister cities association is here with us as well. Um so we'll get into kind of a little picture show here. Um the first half of our trip was spent in Whooshi, which is our actual sister city. Um roughly seven million, which is um also about the population of Tennessee. So if you can imagine putting the entire population of our great state into one city, that's Whooshi, and you kind of have an idea of the scope of the population and how it differs from what we're used to. Um up in the um kind of going from the top left there, um, the picture in the top left and in the middle. Um those were taken at a local uh automotive manufacturing plant, uh similar to to Volkswagen, like we have here. Um this plant, however, they make um vehicles for any number of different automotive brands. So on the day we were there, I believe they were making um compact pickup trucks to send to South America. Um the next day they would be making something completely different. And their assembly line is very highly automated and they switch very quickly from one product to the next. So it was interesting uh to see that. Um in the top right corner uh is a picture of our delegation with some officials from the Wuchi University of Technology. Um there on the far left of that picture is Kim, who is one of the members of the local foreign affairs office in Wuxi, um, who helped guide us around. Uh we're certainly very appreciative for her. Down in the bottom uh left corner there. Uh again, that's our delegation. In that picture, we are with some local school officials from a local high school, which had, I believe, was it 2600 students? I believe. Yeah. And it was interesting, it was kind of partial, partially boarding students and partially Dave students there at that school from around the Wuxi region. In the middle there, you have yours truly, and also Chairwoman Hill. We're actually in a classroom. That's an English classroom. And at that point in time, we were just interacting with the students as they were having small group discussion about a book that they were reading through as they worked to learn English. And that was that was a great experience there. In the bottom right, again are these are all official pictures.