For decades, civic delegations from around the country have been traveling to Chattanooga to learn about our city’s remarkable renaissance. The principals at KCRW have had the privilege and, in most cases, the pleasure of helping to host these groups and to play a part in sharing our story.

Without exception, the groups that come to learn about what we have done are excited about what they see. But unless they ask another question, they will return home no closer to their own revitalization than when they left.

In addition to asking us what we have accomplished, they need to ask how we accomplished it. To me, it’s the how of Chattanooga’s resurgence that really separates us from other cities that endeavor to achieve similar things.

Process is certainly part of it – the community engagement that Baylor School Headmaster Bill Stacy coined “the Chattanooga Way.” Good planning is critical, no doubt. But it’s the next step that many communities either leave out or simply cannot figure out: someone needs to be in charge.

A little more than 20 years ago, Chattanoogans participated in a public process that birthed the Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan. It was a helluva plan: 22 miles of mixed-use development over 20 years that would result (we hoped at the time) in $750 million of new investment downtown and along the river. The problem was – there was no logical place for the plan to live. So we created one.

In 1986, the RiverCity Company was created as the steward of the Tennessee Riverpark Master Plan. They were capitalized with $13 million in unrestricted contributions from a dozen local financial institutions and charitable foundations, and they went to work. Focused, financed, lean (and at times mean), RiverCity began assembling land, engaging architects and planners, hiring contractors, and making the Tennessee RiverPark Master plan into one of the most impressive riverfront realities in the Southeast. Well over a billion dollars has been invested along the way.

RiverCity was and still is a private, not-for-profit development company with a representative board comprising city government, county government and the private sector. But there is no public funding, so it operates with the agility of a private concern backed by public/private consensus. It was an ideal mechanism for getting things done. Quickly.

Whether other communities duplicate the model is not the point. Rather, the important thing is to have something in place. Civic visioning and planning is fun; people love the process and are energized by it. Making the vision come true is really hard work. It takes lots of attention and lots of resources, and it takes someone waking up thinking about it every day.

Chattanooga had a great vision. It had an awesome plan. But above all, it had one organization with the mission, the money and the mojo to make it work.