The Chattanooga City Council met on April 28, 2026, for a regularly scheduled meeting. The agenda included a special presentation from the Risk Management Department, first and final readings of ordinances, resolutions, purchases, committee meetings (Affordable Housing and Legislative), and public comment. Key topics included the creation of a new Southside Cowart neighborhood parking district, a proposal to amend landscape architecture requirements, and updates on affordable housing programs.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'll call to order the April 28th meeting of Chattanooga City Council and recognize Vice Chairman Elliott to lead us in our Pledge of Allegiance and invocation. Please join me. So they're probably for which it stands. All right. And welcome to everybody. For anybody who might be new, just a reminder as we get started here, please check your cell phones, make sure they're off or silenced. And I'll just give kind of a brief overview of how our meetings run so everyone knows. We do have a special presentation that we'll do right off the bat here in a few minutes from our risk management department. And then after that, we'll go through and approve our minutes from our last council meeting. From there, we'll look at the agenda for this week's meeting to answer any questions or concerns, address any concerns anyone might, any council members might have. And then we will look at our next week's agenda and do the same thing, addressing any questions and and comments as they arise about items on next week's agenda. Following that, we'll look at the purchasing items that are on our agenda for tonight. And then finally the future considerations items. So ordinances or resolutions that are coming up three weeks from now. So we'd like to work ahead and make sure we're well prepared. And so we go through that process every week. After we do that, we do have a couple of committees that will be meeting today. And then the legislative committee, which will be led by Vice Chairman Elliott. From that point, we will take a brief recess. During our recess, a lot of times we'll have an attorney client meeting with our city attorney. After all of that, at the end of our meeting, we do have a period for public comment. We're happy to hear from anyone and everyone who might be here to talk to us about any given issue today. So when we get to the end of our meeting, I'll just ask for folks to line up at the podium down here up front. We'll have our city attorney read the rules for our public comment session, and each member of the public will have three minutes to talk to us about whatever they would like. So from there, let us start with our presentation from our department of risk management. Greg Wisnap, uh City Risk Officer since December 1 2025. So I've been in it for a while and I'm enjoying it. Can't wait for more. And some of the tools that I'll talk about today will make will make an impression on how we're going to be able to do that moving forward. So we want to do everything we can to make sure those things are happening. The rest team pursues subrogation. Make sure I keep up with my slide here. Subrogation aggressively. In 2024, we recovered 243,000. In 2025, recovered 126,000. And remember, sometimes these accidents are not fully developed. So that means recovery from 2025 will still be coming in as we move forward. So sometimes it's six months, sometimes it's a year before we recover some of those funds. So we'll see that as we continue on. In 2025, we negotiated lower insurance premiums with the savings of 262,000. So when we go to market with our insurance, we've got our broker, and we sit in there and we talk about he helps us work on all the different types of insurance carriers that are out there and let's just come in with the lowest cost so we can uh save money in that area. For example, one settlement negotiation included $53,000 auto claim. The demand was $53,000, but we were able to settle it at $45,000, which is it's a fair and consistent process of how we go through handling those claims. And they they do uh my team does a very good job, I think. Currently, COIs are handled by each department. Risk management is proposing to bring them all into one digitized system. Uh you'll hear me talk about digitizing the enterprise. I uh I want us to I'd love for us to move more and more closer to using electronic uh programs uh that can that can help us share all this information across the board. The COIs uh basically certificate of insurance.