CBA Press Release From CALEB Leaders

The South Broad Community Benefits Coalition is a group comprised of The South Chattanooga Community Association, The Community Association of Historic Saint Elmo, The Mary Walker Towers Residents' Council, The Bethlehem Center, The Chattanooga Building Trades, The International Association of Bridge, Structural, Architectural and Reinforcing Ironworkers Local 704, The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 175, The Chattanooga Area Labor Council, green|spaces, Service Employees International Union Local 205, and Chattanooga in Action for Love, Equity and Benevolence.
For over a year, our Coalition has been negotiating a Community Benefits Agreement with the Chattanooga Lookouts and the developer and property owners for the new Lookouts Stadium to address how construction of the stadium and surrounding development will benefit the South Broad community in Chattanooga. A Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) is a legally binding agreement generally between a developer and local community groups that serves to ensure residents impacted by large infrastructure projects and other types of development share in the benefits of such developments in their community. CBAs have been used across the country, including in Nashville, Atlanta, San Diego, and Las Vegas, among other communities, to secure benefits including commitments to hire directly from the community, contributions to economic trust funds, local workforce guarantees, environmental initiatives, affordable housing, and more.

After more than a year of negotiations, we have been unable to obtain an agreement with the developer, property owners, and Lookouts on issues of critical importance to the Coalition.  These issues include local and diverse workforce and apprenticeship guarantees, affordable and equitable housing, funding and benefits for local schools, diverse business enterprise requirements, and various community services.  In a final analysis of the CBA, the scale of the enforceable benefits offered by the developer was not commensurate with the scale of the disruption this development will bring to the South Broad community. While we were given verbal commitments from the developer on several of our requests, the Coalition is not willing for the CBA to be simply unenforceable promises. Accordingly, we have decided to end the negotiations for what would have been Chattanooga’s first CBA. 

In the last couple months, we have also been working with the City of Chattanooga to obtain a Memorandum of Understanding to address specific issues and benefits surrounding construction of the Stadium by the Sports Authority. Unfortunately, due to budgetary restraints and state contracting restrictions, many of our requests, including commitments for expanded safety standards and worker training, have proven impossible.
This process has been frustrating for the Coalition and we believe will be disappointing for the community at large. The negotiation process has involved an immense commitment of volunteer hours, but our negotiators have held to our commitment to obtain real material benefits for the South Broad community.

We have never been interested in a CBA merely for its own sake. We are interested in the benefits themselves. If the goals we laid out in the winter of 2022 can be achieved by other means, we support the full exploration of those avenues. A CBA is an accountability mechanism, by which we hoped to give communities long accustomed to broken promises a robust legal recourse; however, its absence does not mean that these goals are unachievable or that the community should give up on accountability and transparency. Our advocacy is needed more than ever.

At this point, only negotiation of the Development Agreement between local government and the developer remains to clear the way for this project to break ground.  We are calling on the City and County to ensure that the Development Agreement includes significant provisions for workforce housing (a commitment of at least 30% of units to be permanently affordable at 60-100% area median income), sets environmental standards for construction similar to those recently established for new development in The Bend's tax increment financing (TIF) district, requires the involvement of disadvantaged business enterprises in construction activities, and requires the donation of two acres of land in an appropriate location within the development for the creation of a CARTA mobility center.

Despite the end of the Community Benefits Agreement process, we will continue to advocate for the stadium development to provide meaningful benefits for the South Broad community.