David Johnson appeared to be as busy and almost as active as a youngster at a playground during a recent interview at the Outdoor Chattanooga Center by Coolidge Park between darting to and from a full day’s schedule of meetings.

But maybe that is appropriate for his new position as the administrator of the city of Chattanooga’s Parks & Outdoors department.

It is definitely a job he is excited about and one that he says fits perfectly with his lifelong passions. “I love the idea of being outdoors and spending time with people,” he said. “These kinds of places (like city parks) and programs make a community cohesive and beautiful and wonderful.”

City officials certainly hope he stays put in town awhile amid the busy scurrying and continues to use his already accumulated local knowledge and relationships from his previous positions. That is in part because the department has had several administrators in recent years who have departed for a variety of reasons.

“This department has gone through many transitions,” he said. “I’m trying to provide a level of consistency. We are working to become more professional and increase the knowledge and skills to become more responsive.”

Mr. Johnson has actually been tied in with the local outdoors in some form of leadership for the last 15 years, despite still looking almost young enough to be mistaken by a visitor to the building for a mid-level supervisor before one hears his parks vision full of ideas.

Despite Chattanooga’s reputation as an outdoor city and his interests in that realm, he arrived here, he said, simply because this is where his wife, Valerie, found her job in speech therapy before she also developed a small business in home interiors and sewing.

“We moved in 2010,” he said, saying that they decided to move to the community where one of them found a job first. “I got connected to the parks department then and started doing data collection.”

It was a foot in the door for this man who used to enjoy putting his feet down plenty in the outdoors as a child, including enjoying a stand of pine trees around a lake in his home of Angier, N.C., not far from the Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh areas.

He also liked being around people as well as nature and throughout high school worked in an afterschool youth program. “I loved spending time with kids and being outside and meeting people,” he said, adding that he had early on thought about being a teacher.

Mr. Johnson then moved to the mountains to attend Western Carolina University in college, where he majored in parks and recreation management. He later received a master’s degree in public administration from N.C. State.

He went on to become assistant director of parks for the city of Chattanooga from 2014-2017 and then began working for the Trust for Public Land, most recently as Tennessee Parks and Schoolyards program manager.

In his overall realm with the non-profit TPL, he was involved in various ways with parks projects ranging from the South Chickamauga Creek Greenway enhancements to the new East Side Elementary community schoolyard, to the opening of a new Godsey Ridge Trail at Red Bank.

In his new position with the city, he hopes to focus at least a little on his earlier passions by having growing park spaces and programs for children, adding, “I love seeing kids have a good time.”

But he hopes to have a park system where every Chattanoogan and every park user of every age finds a park space or activity, including near that person’s home. He said city parks that do this well and are the center of their communities are Riverview Park (where he jokingly said he and his family have attended plenty of children’s birthday parties), St. Elmo Park and East Lake Park.

“Every neighborhood should have a great public space,” he said. “We need places families can visit every single day. And we should be able to provide programming for every single resident and visitor to the community, including all ages and abilities. We want to create a high-quality public space in every community.”

He added that his department and city officials are still going through the updated city parks master plan unveiled under former administrator Scott Martin and are hoping to continue getting feedback on it and implementing its various facets.

Part of the plan is to add park space a variety of ways, through purchases, easements and donations from developers and others. He added that all of this is important at a time when the greater Chattanooga area is seeing plenty of pressure from developers capitalizing on a perceived demand for housing and taking over formerly undeveloped land.

Overall, though, he feels very optimistic about how the city’s Parks & Recreation division can help improve the quality of life for Chattanoogans over the near future, despite a limited number of financial resources.

“It’s great to hear about all of our wonderful programs and spaces,” he said. “It is extremely overwhelming and we have so many large projects that are in the middle (of being completed) or are soon to be wrapped up.”

Among those is the Walnut Street Bridge restoration. “It is going to be spectacular to go over it again,” he said.

Other projects being anticipated are the rebuilt skateboard park near Finley Stadium, the Provence Street Park in Brainerd and the Alton Park Connector greenway path.

Because of those and other ideas, he thinks Chattanooga can continue to capitalize on its recent status as a National Park City while still finding ways to improve the city parks system where needed.

“I think our reputation is fantastic,” he said. “We are the outdoor city, but we still have places where communities don’t feel a sense of connection to the outdoors. We’ve got to be more focused and strategic in what our parks system looks like and what our programming looks like and who feels they can go and enjoy those spaces.”

In short, he wants to use his passion for parks to help people find theirs.

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Those wanting more information on the city’s master park plan can go here.

https://chattanooga.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/Parks-and-Outdoors-Plan_230620.pdf

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net