Month: February 2004

Charles Morris wants to rehabilitate his neighborhood one lot at a time, starting with the place next door. Literally.

Morris, a longtime North Memphis community leader, went to the City Council’s Housing and Community Development Committee this week because he is interested in buying the vacant lot next door to his home on Alaska Street. The lot is currently owned by the city and Morris plans to build a small house on it.

“I’m encouraging people in the neighborhood, if there’s a vacant lot next to them, to buy it and put a house on it. That’s where [redevelopment] starts,” he said.

In the Klondike neighborhood where he lives, he estimated there are about 50 vacant lots nearby, where rundown homes have been demolished, but nothing has been built in their place. Instead, the lots are tangles of weeds and trash.

“They tear the houses down, but they don’t put anything else back up. It takes out voter strength; it takes out the tax base,” he said. “If [the lots] had nice houses on them, they would have nice people living in them and it would help improve the look of the community.”

Morris, now 83, grew up in the construction business and in the 1930s actually helped build most of the houses that still stand on Alaska Street. Now he plans to build a new brick home, with two or three bedrooms, whichever the city wants. “I don’t fool with no siding or anything like that,” he said. “If you’re going to build something, you want it to last forever.”

What the neighborhood really needs is a big cleanup. He said there are a couple of blocks that look like a junkyard. The Klondike neighborhood association, of which Morris is a member, organizes events a couple of times a year to clean up the vacant lots, but it’s not enough.

“We’ve gotten to the age where we can’t do all we used to, but we keep on working,” Morris said.

A nearby church also expressed interest in purchasing the lot to expand their parking area, but Morris said he’s not going to “stand by and watch while they build a parking lot around my house.”

When the house is finished, Morris doesn’t know whether he’ll rent it or sell it to a low-income family. All he would want out of it, he said, is what he put in it.

“If I had the money,” Morris said, “every poor person with a house in Klondike that needed rehabbing or whatnot, I’d do it.”

E-mail: cashiola@memphisflyer.com

Last week Shelby County came one step closer to benefiting from health initiatives under a Bush administration plan designed to assist medical facilities serving the poor and uninsured.

The governing board of the Regional Medical Center at Memphis (The Med) named a committee to proceed with the application process which, if approved, would designate the county’s 10 Loop Primary Care Clinics as “look-alikes” of federally qualified health centers (FQHCs). The changeover means the clinics would receive reimbursement for TennCare and Medicare patients and participate in the federal drug pricing program for medication discounts.

“The [‘look-alike’ designation] is good because there are so many people who just don’t have the money, and with our limited funding we can’t continue to endlessly provide care to people who can’t afford to pay,” said loop clinic executive director Elizabeth Bradshaw. “If Bush provides the resources, it would make sense that we would take advantage of it.”

Health centers applying for the look-alike distinction must meet a variety of requirements including being a nonprofit entity, serving underserved areas, and being overseen by a governing board consisting of a majority of consumers of the clinics’ services.

The majority of a center’s nine- to 25-member board makes decisions on funding and programs, which initially concerned members of The Med board, who questioned the consumers’ knowledge of health policy.

Since applying for their “look-alike” status in 2001, the Christ Community Medical clinic, serving 20,000 patients yearly, became a full-fledged FQHC last year, making them eligible to receive additional grants and other funding. Although the Christ Community system already had a board in place similar to look-alike requirements governing its two clinics, community outreach location, and mobile unit, executive director Burt Waller still addressed the issues raised by The Med.

“If you’re thinking about structuring a board, those are reasonable concerns to have,” he said. “A board needs to be composed of concerned, interested, knowledgeable people. If [the distinction] strengthens [the loop clinics], that’s good for the community, because if we weren’t out there in those communities, there would be no one else to provide care.”

Bradshaw wasn’t sure about the possible savings from look-alike status but said the reimbursement funds would help underwrite the $2 million paid to them by The Med. Since their designation three years ago, Waller estimated that Christ Community medical clinics have saved about 25 percent in drug costs.

Bradshaw hoped to have the application process completed by April. Members of the governing board have not been named but are due at the time of application submission.

E-mail: jdavis@memphisflyer.com

It’s not quite the emergency, is it? A man at Platinum Plus on January 28th owed a dancer $40 for a two-for-one dance, but when he gave her a $100 bill, she kept it. He complained to the manager and got $20 back, but that wasn’t enough so he called 911.

The operator informed him that it was a civil matter; he filed a police report to prosecute the club and the manager.

Like taking candles from a baby: On January 30th, a teacher at Peabody Elementary School reported a theft after her students raised $740 by selling candles. The teacher gave a suspect money for the candles, but the so-called buyer told the teacher the candle company was closed for the holidays. Later the suspect told her that the order came in, but everything was broken. The teacher finally called the candle company and was told no one had even placed the order.

That’s not how the Boy Scouts do it: On February 1st, police responded to an arson call on Handy Mall: “Someone had taken two smoke detectors from the apartment, placed them in the oven, then turned it on. Someone had also taken clothing, put it in the bathtub, and poured a flammable liquid” on it.

Sometimes those free-trial offers don’t work: A man walking on North Watkins on February 1st was stopped by an older male trying to sell him a pistol. The older man handed the gun to him to check it out, but while the younger man was looking it over, he accidentally shot himself in the hand. The older man then grabbed the gun and ran away. — Compiled by Mary Cashiola

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) has done nothing about several industries that have not followed proper sampling procedures required to drain storm water runoff into Cypress Creek and the Wolf River Harbor, according to the Water Sentinels, a division of the Sierra Club.

In January 2003, the Water Sentinels issued a report naming facilities that were found to be draining storm water into Cypress Creek without Tennessee Multi-Sector Stormwater Permits (TMSP). In April, a similar report was issued with regard to facilities illegally draining into the Wolf River Harbor. In June, the Flyer reported that TDEC had issued several notices of violation to those facilities operating without permits.

The latest report addresses facilities that had permits but were not following guidelines that require water discharge samples from 2002 to be sent to TDEC by March 31, 2003. The report states that 12 of the 15 permitted facilities in question had not sent their samples in by the deadline. When the files were checked again in November, several facilities — including Velsicol, Mr. Complete Chrysler Recycled Parts, Iskiwitz Metals, and Metal Management — were more than 200 days overdue, yet there were no enforcement actions on file.

“We understand the lack of funding and staffing [at TDEC’s local Division of Water Pollution Control office], but going and shining a light on the problem is about all we can do as citizens,” said James Baker, project director for the Water Sentinels. “What does it take to get the agency to do something about it? Based on the public files, not much was done.”

According to Terry Templeton, manager of the Division of Water Pollution Control at TDEC’s Memphis Environmental Assistance Center, the office was understaffed until about two weeks ago. Although he had not studied the Water Sentinels report at press time, he said the TMSP program is “just one of the many programs we have to perform duties in.”

“I’m not trying to dispute the larger principle of protecting our waters, but with respect to alleged lack of activity on our division’s part, I think the TMSP program needs to be put in context with all the other things we are simultaneously trying to do. … I hope if we retain our current level of staffing, we’ll be able to undertake these activities this year.”

E-mail: bphillips@memphisflyer.com