Technically Public, Never Actually Known

On January 14, 2026, a woman from Hixson named Erikka Johnston stood up in Room 402 of the Hamilton County Courthouse and asked the county commission for one thing.

Not to kill the project. Not to run the developer out of town. She asked them to hold a public meeting.

A week earlier, Urban Story Ventures had presented a plan to lease the old downtown jail and convert it into film studios, music production space, an amphitheater, classrooms, artist lofts, a helipad, and a data center with Oracle. Johnston started a petition. By the night she spoke, several hundred people had signed it.

What she told commissioners, as Local 3 News reported it, was modest to the point of gentleness. Whether or not the fear was valid, the public needed reassurance that the benefits outweighed the risks. "We ask that you create a public input opportunity."

I have spent weeks reading every document I could find about that building. County resolutions, city resolutions, federal tax filings, a state appointments database, a budget, an oath of office. Everything below comes from those records. Her request comes first, because it is the smallest thing anyone in this story asked for, and because six months later I still do not know if she got it.

I live in this county. I pay the same 9.25 percent sales tax you do on groceries, and I open the same electric bill.

The pattern that bothers me: our taxes go up, tax breaks for large companies go up faster, and what we are told before decisions get made keeps going down. You are welcome to disagree, and plenty of reasonable people here do. My job below is to keep opinion separate from documents and let you sort it out.

Because most people in Hamilton County are not disengaged. They are outmatched.

Johnston's petition gathered 612 signatures in its first week and sits near 1,250 now. In March, a dozen residents spoke at the vote, about half on each side. In June, when the county adopted Plan Hamilton, people drove in from Ooltewah and Sale Creek to pack the chamber, and as the Times Free Press reported, few got to speak inside the ten minutes allotted for public comment.

Apathy does not look like that. What they are up against is an architecture that is genuinely hard to see. The lease is a county document. The tax exemption is a state statute. The foundation's finances are a federal tax filing. One appointment sits in a Secretary of State database almost nobody knows exists. The utility answers to a board most residents could not name. Every piece is public. None of it sits in the same place, so nobody ever holds it all at once.

Commissioners voted unanimously on March 18, 2026 to lease the old jail at 601 Walnut Street to Jailhouse Properties LLC, a subsidiary of Urban Story Ventures. Company president Jimmy White is personally listed as guarantor.

The plan deserves a fair description, because a lot of people are excited about it and their enthusiasm is not unreasonable. Film studios, music production, an amphitheater, classrooms, artist lofts, with White floating names like Samuel L. Jackson and Kane Brown for the suites. He told commissioners that talent leaves Chattanooga and this would keep it here. Talent does leave.

Eight stories, 142,000 square feet, empty since 2021. Terms: $375,000 a year, rising 3 percent annually, for thirty five years. Renovations estimated at $80 to $100 million. A separate agreement assigns 35 parking spaces next door, for ten dollars.

Year one works out to $2.64 per square foot. A Community Voice column in the Times Free Press put the market rate after renovation closer to $30.

The lease has an escalator: a rent increase set ahead of time on a schedule, requiring no vote, with each raise building on the last. Rent begins at $375,000 and finishes around $1,024,000.

A figure circulating around this county leaves that out. The same column calculated the county's total take at $13,125,000, and from there roughly $61.7 million in rent never collected. I have not printed that number, because I do not print numbers I have not rebuilt myself. $13,125,000 is $375,000 times thirty five. It ignores the escalator entirely. Run the actual series and the county collects about $22.7 million.

Still low. At $30 a foot, that space would earn $4.26 million a year, meaning the county's entire thirty five years fits inside the market's first six.

Rent is only one side of the deal. Urban Story Ventures is spending $80 to $100 million rebuilding a structure the county owns, and reporting indicates that investment is discounted against rent across the life of the lease. Standard practice for a rehabilitation this size. No tenant gut renovates someone else's eight story building and then pays market rate to sit in it.

Which means the low rent, by itself, proves nothing. Should the county end up owning a fully renovated downtown property in year thirty six, on top of $22.7 million collected along the way, this is a good deal. Possibly a very good one.

Here is the problem. None of that is established anywhere a resident can check. No improvement schedule. No amortization. No answer on who owns the improvements when the lease ends, what the building will be worth then, or whether a renewal option pushes that reckoning further out.

Hamilton County has never published a net present value analysis of this lease.

Proving we got fleeced is beyond what I can do. Showing that nobody in county government has put the math in front of the public, either way, on a thirty five year disposition of public property, is not.

Groceries in this county carry 9.25 cents of tax on every dollar. A facility qualifying under Tennessee's data center exemption, T.C.A. section 67 6 206(c), pays 1.5 cents on every dollar of electricity, and nothing on its computers, software, cooling equipment or backup power. Qualifying takes $100 million invested and fifteen jobs.

Fifteen.

Only the Tennessee Department of Revenue can say whether that exemption has been claimed for any Chattanooga site, and nobody appears to have asked them.

By Urban Story Ventures' own account, the jail is the first of three planned Oracle data center sites in Chattanooga. The other two are slated for The Bend, the larger development the same company is building. Data centers already operate here: Airnet, DC BLOX, Scipio, MCA.

Johnston's petition caught the scale early, noting that presenters had touted Chattanooga as a new frontier for big tech and signaled more to come. Her line: "we are not interested in becoming the next Silicon Valley."

Her husband Noah helped organize the response. He told NewsChannel 9 that the growth from this project gets exported to other cities and to the CEOs and shareholders of these companies, not to the people who live here. He had done his own homework on how this plays out elsewhere. "I have heard accounts of Oracle establishing itself in other parts of the country, and it seems that they all have one thing in common, which is that things move very rapidly without input."

His sharpest warning, to NewsChannel 9, was about pace rather than any single project: "If things are coming in incrementally, that it's meant to not cause alarm. I think that many people are not going to notice it until it's too late." To WDEF he put the whole thing more fairly than I could. Were this simply a music and film studio, he would be thrilled. He grew up an art kid. His worry is that there are not a lot of specifics.

He is not against development. He is against being told to trust it.

Mayor Weston Wamp proposed a one year pause on new data centers June 30. Commissioners passed it unanimously July 15, covering facilities drawing a megawatt or more in unincorporated Hamilton County only.

Asked why the downtown facility proceeds while the rest of the county waits a year, Wamp called it "a very, very small data center." Urban Story Ventures says the project spreads computing across many smaller sites and uses 1 to 5 percent of the power a large center requires. Hold onto that phrase for next week.

Three data centers are going into the city center. None are touched by the moratorium.

One more item about the mayor, publicly reported, which he has answered. His January filing with the Tennessee Ethics Commission lists investments including Palantir, whose cloud partnership with Oracle sits underneath this entire buildout. Wamp told Local 3 News he owns a small number of shares in a publicly traded company, has no other involvement, and opposes data centers. Community Voice reporting notes that Stuart McWhorter, the state's deputy governor and chief economic recruiter, appears on state disclosure filings as a Palantir holder too.

That does not prove a conspiracy. It shows two officials with a financial stake in an industry are among the people writing the rules for it.

Commissioner David Sharpe of Red Bank introduced an amendment at the March meeting, in two parts. Data processing and storage capped at 12,000 square feet, with anything beyond requiring county approval. And 1.5 percent of net profits directed into arts and entertainment workforce development, handled by the Songbirds Foundation.

Unanimous, both parts. So was the lease.

Residents who had been fighting this treated the cap as a victory, understandably. The constraint is real and carries an enforcement hook, and Sharpe said its purpose was to stop anyone from turning the building into only a data center.

Then I read his account of how he got it. Sharpe told the Times Free Press he had already discussed the terms with Urban Story Ventures over the previous couple of weeks, and that company officials were amenable. They put their heads together, he said, and he asked for written agreements in the lease "to give a level of comfort to our community."

So the protection residents were told they had won was worked out privately with the developer, agreed to in advance by the company it was meant to restrain, and carried to the dais as a finished product. None of that is illegal, and a commissioner talking to a developer before a vote is doing his job. But a limit the limited party approves in advance is a different object than a limit imposed over objection, and only one of those was described to the public that night.

Functionally, the amendment is what made a unanimous vote possible, giving eleven commissioners a way to vote yes while telling constituents that protections had been extracted. Comfort was Sharpe's own word for the purpose. Comfort is what was delivered.

Two months before the vote, Urban Story Ventures announced the people behind Jailhouse Studios: Jimmy White, who would sign the lease as guarantor, and Kessler Cuffman, identified in that release as "Executive Officer for the Songbirds Foundation." Data Center Dynamics described him as a partner on the project.

So the public benefit attached to this lease flows to an organization the developer publicly identified as being led by one of the two men spearheading the deal. A few paragraphs down, that title turns out to be thinner than the press release suggests. Even so, the basic shape of it is not in dispute, and it sat in public two months before anyone voted. No record I can find shows any commissioner raising it.

Square feet get capped. Megawatts do not. Water use, power draw and sewer capacity go undisclosed. "Requires county approval" means another vote by the same eleven people who just approved everything unanimously. And none of it reaches the two other planned sites at The Bend.

Then comes the part most people have not registered. Money changes hands as a share of net profits, not revenue. Revenue is what arrives at the door. Net profit is whatever survives the accounting, and whoever defines the expenses controls the result. Salaries, debt service and management fees come out first. Projects of this size can operate for years without ever showing a net profit.

No published definition of allowable expenses exists. No audit provision. No floor. No sunset.

One and a half percent of a number that may never exist.

Directing that benefit to one named private foundation, rather than to the school system, a county fund, or any process another arts organization could enter, was also a choice.

Songbirds is a well regarded Chattanooga institution. Guitars for Kids, Write to Rock, a Southside venue holding a collection of rare guitars, including one of Dolly Parton's. All of that belongs on the record ahead of the numbers, because the numbers are going to sound like an attack and they are not one.

The foundation's IRS Form 990 for fiscal 2024 reports $16,371,109 in total assets and $15,709,599 in net assets.Running its entire operation cost $805,012 in 2024, meaning it could operate at that pace for roughly nineteen yearswithout raising another dollar.

Losses show up every year: negative $185,081 in 2024, $583,533 in 2023, $96,452 in 2022, $403,624 in 2021. Net assets have slid from just over $17 million in 2020 to $15.7 million in 2024. Investment income made up nearly 44 percent of fiscal 2024 revenue, while every program service combined brought in $33,024. The endowment came from a few large early gifts: $2.4 million in 2016, $8.7 million in 2017, $6.3 million in 2020.

A foundation holding $15.7 million in net assets received the community benefit carve out from a public lease.Perhaps there is a good answer. Nobody on the dais asked, and no document explains why this organization rather than the schools or an open process.

Then the thread kept going. Songbirds also leases city property for one dollar a year. City Resolution No. 32796, adopted February 10, 2026, authorizes a third renewal at the South Chattanooga Community Center through March 14, 2027, at annual rent of one dollar. Less than the sales tax on a sandwich.

Five weeks separated that renewal from the county attaching a profit share to the same organization. Two governments, two subsidies, and neither transaction mentions the other.

Follow the money far enough and you end up following names.

The 1.5 percent led to Songbirds. Songbirds led to Kessler Cuffman, whose name the developer had placed beside Jimmy White's, with a title at the foundation receiving the money. So the next question became simple. Who is he, and where else does his name appear in a public record?

Start with the foundation itself.

IRS filings say something different than the press release. Cuffman does not appear as an officer, director or key employee on any Songbirds 990 through fiscal 2024. Those filings list John Dooley as executive director, Johnny Smith as president, William Aiken as secretary, and W. Thorpe McKenzie, Donick Cary and Josh Scott among directors.

His actual role was executive director of Dynamo Studios, which merged into Songbirds in September 2025, as Chattanoogan.com and the Chattanooga Pulse both reported. That press release title has not turned up in any filing. Fiscal 2025, the first return that could reflect the merger, is not public yet.

Accuracy requires the narrower sentence: a named partner in the project holds an executive title at the recipient foundation, according to the developer's own announcement. Songbirds can settle it, and should be asked to.

Searching his name brings up a state page that looks official.

The Tennessee Entertainment Commission hosts it, state seal and all. Anyone in a hurry would call it a board seat.

It is a talent directory, where industry people register their own profiles so productions can find and hire them. His entry still describes him running Dynamo, which tells you it has not been touched since the merger. Citing that page as an appointment means citing a self submitted resume, and I nearly did.

City records turn up something real.

Resolution No. 32300, adopted November 5, 2024, confirms Mayor Tim Kelly's appointment of Cuffman to the Community Advisory Committee for Region 5, the South region, running through November 2027. That body is a volunteer neighborhood committee organized around community centers, carrying no power over leases or zoning. Inflating it would be dishonest.

Worth noticing anyway: the region is South, and the community center Songbirds leases for a dollar is the South Chattanooga Community Center. Whether Region 5 covers that facility is something the city clerk can confirm. Whether committee members carry any recusal obligation is a question for the city attorney. Neither has been asked publicly.

And the state appointment turns out to be real.

Tennessee maintains a database called Open Appointments at oa.tnsos.gov, public and searchable, which almost nobody knows exists. Position 5391 lists Kessler Cuffman, appointed by the Governor to the Tennessee Music Advisory Council as representative for the Chattanooga Region, term running April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2028.

His Oath of Office, sworn in Hamilton County on April 13, 2026, reached the Secretary of State on June 3.

What survives: a named partner in an $80 to $100 million film and music complex holds the governor's Chattanooga seat on a new state council, the same season that council's parent commission received $25 million for exactly that category of grant. His foundation holds a dollar a year city lease and a share of county lease profits. He sits on a city committee for the region containing the building.

City. County. State. Eighteen months. One name.

Should you read nothing else here, read this.

A public building went out for thirty five years at roughly a tenth of what the space could earn, and Hamilton County has never published an analysis showing whether that was a good trade.

The community benefit attached to that lease was negotiated privately with the company it was meant to restrain, then routed to a foundation holding $15.7 million, whose executive officer the developer had publicly named as one of two men leading the project.

Every fact in the preceding two sentences came from documents that were sitting in public the entire time. County resolutions. A city resolution. A federal tax filing. A press release. Nothing was locked away. The pieces were simply scattered across enough agencies and filings that assembling them took weeks.

Which is the actual finding. Not corruption, which I cannot demonstrate and am not alleging. What I can demonstrate is that the disclosure system worked exactly as designed and told us almost nothing, because being technically public is not the same thing as citizens being in the know.

This week, a round of questions goes out to Commissioner Sharpe, the other ten commissioners who voted yes on March 18, the county mayor's office, Songbirds Foundation, Urban Story Ventures, and several state and city agencies. I am not printing the questions themselves. Some of the people receiving them read this publication, and a fair answer is worth more than a rehearsed one.

Whatever comes back, including refusals and silence, runs here next Tuesday in full.

Separate from anything above, here is what nobody in six months of public meetings appears to have asked out loud.

None of those require a source inside government to answer. They require someone to ask.

Early voting runs through Saturday, August 1. Election day is Thursday, August 6. New commissioners take office September 1, which means the people elected next week vote on the data center rules due by March 2027.

Before you do, spend an hour with the record rather than my summary of it. The county streams and archives its meetings: watch the January 7 presentation, roughly minutes 5:36 to 50:54, and the March 18 vote. Read the two one page city resolutions linked below. Open the Songbirds Form 990 on ProPublica, free, no account required, and look at the officer list and the balance sheet yourself.

Then ask whoever is on your ballot the question this piece turns on: have the elected officials on your ballot been transparent with you?

Primary documents

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Nothing described above was hidden.

Every lease was voted on in public. Every appointment sits in a database anyone can search. Every tax filing is online, free, waiting. Every budget line was printed and passed. I did not break into anything or persuade anyone to leak me a file. I read.

Sit with that a while, because it is the part that should bother you most.

Three governments touched the same project and the same handful of people inside eighteen months. A neighborhood committee seat in November. A dollar a year lease on public property in February. A thirty five year lease on a public building in March, at a fraction of market, with a share of the profits routed to a foundation holding sixteen million dollars. A governor's appointment in April, three weeks before the commission that council advises received twenty five million.

Each of those was legal. Each was documented. Not one of them was ever spoken aloud in the same room as the others.

The records were public the whole time. They were just scattered across enough agencies, filings, databases and Wednesday night calendars that no one person was ever expected to hold them all at once. So no one did, and the vote was unanimous, and the room was quiet.

That is what this looks like in a mid sized American city. No smoke filled room. A filing cabinet nobody opens.

The cabinet is open now.

A woman from Hixson stood up in Room 402 in January and asked, as politely as anyone has ever asked a government for anything, whether the public might have a meeting. Whether she ever got one is among the questions going out to the county this week.

Good government does not happen because officials are good. It happens because people engage and fight back.

— Marie

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