The TPO is a legal board of representatives that acts on matters of planning, programming, and project implementation involving federal funding for transportation. The membership is multimodal and includes all 19 local governments from within Hamilton County and portions of Dade, Catoosa, and Walker counties in Georgia. The cities specifically in TN are Chattanooga, Collegedale, East Ridge, Lakesite, Lookout Mountain TN, Red Bank, Ridgeside, Signal Mountain, Soddy-Daisy.  By the way...Bakewell, Lookout Valley, Hixson, and Ooltewah are not local governments, only places of reference which are recognized by the postal service.  There are five Georgia cities; they are Chickamauga, Ft. Oglethorpe, Lookout Mountain, Ringgold, and Rossville.  This board of individuals is accompanied by a set of technical representatives known as the Technical Coordinating Committee who make recommendations to the board.

The Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency (RPA) provides the professional staff to carry out administrative, professional planning, technical, and programming tasks to meet federal requirements that enable our local governments to accept and receive funds for activities and actual construction projects.  Some major projects currently underway by the planning staff are the Multimodal Transit Center Study in partnership with CARTA, Chattanooga, and the Benwood Foundation, an update to the Coordinated Public Transit - Human Services Transportation Plan to advance transporation programming and project implementation specifically for people with disabilities and seniors, air quality compliance, the greater Chattanooga area Green Trips incentives-based alternative commute program, a few staff are also partnering with the Chattanooga Department of Transportation on the Complete Streets and the Chattanooga Open Data policies, and a variety of grant management activities such as Congestion Mitigation Air Quality, Multimodal Access Fund, and Transportation Alternatives program.  Some of the staff is also contributing to the RPA's new integrated land use and transportation planning framework for Growing Forward.