Beginning in January, the city court clerk’s office will begin booting and towing cars belonging to people with three or more outstanding parking tickets. Bianca Phillips has the story.
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Month: November 2011
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World AIDS Day Events
There are currently more than 7,500 people living with HIV/AIDS in the Memphis metro area. Thursday, December 1st marks World AIDS Day, and there’s plenty going on to raise awareness and commemorate local lives lost to HIV/AIDS.
* World AIDS Day NAMES Ceremony, First Baptist Church of Memphis (200 E. Parkway N.), 10 a.m.
This annual ceremony pays tribute to the 2,911 people whose lives have been lost to HIV/AIDS in Shelby County from 1985 to 2010. White sticks with red ribbons have been placed on the lawn of the church to commemorate those victims, and their first names will be read aloud at the ceremony.
* World AIDS Day Service, Christ Missionary Baptist Church (480 S. Parkway E.), 7 p.m.
Sponsored by the Red Door Foundation and the HIV/AIDS Ministry of Christ Missionary Baptist Church, the service features music, testimonials of people affected by HIV, a prayer by local pastors, and a ceremony remembering victims who have passed. Attendees are encouraged to wear red. Free HIV testing will be offered in the lobby between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m.
* Free HIV Testing and Rapid Counseling, Packer Clinic (814 Jefferson) and Cawthon Public Health Clinic (1000 Haynes St.), 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Preliminary testing results will be ready in one hour at these events sponsored by the Shelby County Health Department.
* Shelby County Health Department World AIDS Day Event, Northside High School Auditorium (1212 Vollintine), 12:30-2 p.m.
Community-based HIV/AIDS service groups and organizations discuss HIV prevention activities and programs.
* Free HIV & Syphilis Testing, Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region (2430 Poplar), 9 a.m-6 p.m.
No appointment necessary. HIV test results will be ready in 30 minutes, but syphilis tests results will take about a week. Volunteers will lead free zumba classes in the lobby.
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Football Prophecy
When Tommy West was fired as football coach at the University of Memphis in 2009, he predicted that “history will continue to repeat itself.”
He was right, except that things got worse than they were under West and his two predecessors, and the decline happened sooner than almost anyone thought it would.
Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson fired his third football coach this week. Larry Porter completed two years of his five-year, $3.75 million contract. His record was 3-21. By the time he gets his buyout, Porter will earn $1.25 million per win, part of it paid by boosters. Only banks get better bailouts. Johnson and president Shirley Raines will hire a search firm to help find the next coach.
“I’m not going to give you a dollar figure,” said Raines. “But we are committed to getting the best possible coach for this community.”
Two years ago, that was Porter, a former Memphis player with no head-coaching experience. Nevertheless, he was hailed as the right man to turn the program around after West was fired.
Porter was “the obvious guy” for the job and “makes all the sense in the world” because of his Memphis connections and recruiting record, wrote Commercial Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins.
After firing Porter, Johnson praised him.
“I can’t thank Larry Porter enough for the time he gave us, the energy he gave us. It didn’t work out but it wasn’t because he didn’t give everything he had.”
Here’s how Porter’s predecessors did.
West coached for nine seasons, compiling a 49-61 record. He won nine games in his best season but did not win the Conference USA championship. The last straw was a televised home loss to East Carolina in front of 4,100 fans, which seemed as low as a crowd could go until Porter’s team finished this season in front of fewer than 3,000 fans. West was fired with three years left on a contract that paid him $925,000 a year. In his farewell press conference, he made his prediction and let his anger out about the program.
“Put something in it or do away with it,” he said.
West replaced Rip Scherer, who was fired by Johnson after six seasons. His record was 22-44, including a win over the University of Tennessee and Peyton Manning. Scherer had two-and-a-half years left on his contract and got a $485,000 buyout.
“Put more money in the budget,” Scherer said after being fired. “Do it for the next guy so that you are not sitting here five years from now with the same kind of meeting. That’s the only way this cycle will stop.”
Scherer replaced Chuck Stobart, who went 29-36-1, including wins over USC, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Arkansas. He was 6-5 in each of his last three seasons in the days when that didn’t qualify a team for a bowl bid. He was blamed for being boring and unable to excite fans.
“I never turned down a speaking engagement,” said Stobart, who had two years left on his contract. He was 60 years old, and Memphis was his last head-coaching job.
So Memphis has tried the old guy, the nice guy, the tough guy, and the alumni guy. Four coaches in 20 years is about par in college football. Ole Miss and Alabama have each had five and Vanderbilt six. How can Memphis thwart Tommy West’s prophecy?
Some say by hiring a big-name coach with lots of experience. Two such coaches fired this year are Houston Nutt at Ole Miss, which lost 31-3 to Mississippi State last week, and Rick Neuheisel at UCLA, which lost 50-0 to USC. An alternate approach would be to go after an up-and-comer such as Hugh Freeze at Arkansas State, which beat Memphis 47-3 this year. Freeze makes $210,000 and has won nine games with a much smaller budget than Memphis.
Two options that are not under consideration and were not even brought up at Monday’s press conference are moving to a lower division or building an on-campus stadium as Central Florida, Louisville, Houston, and UT-Chattanooga have done. The 62,000-seat Liberty Bowl is too big to fail, and Raines has other priorities.
Memphis isn’t getting out of football, but it isn’t going all-in either. By its own measures, the university is doing well academically and in other sports. Enrollment has grown to 23,610 students, and the footprint has expanded to the law school downtown and the Lambuth campus in Jackson.
With three wins in two years and 7,000 fans total at the last two home games, football has nowhere to go but up.
Last month, Memphis roots/garage-rocker and sometime one-man-band William Stull released a fine new LP, Self Titled Record, on the new-ish local indie label Soul Patch Music.
Stull spoke to the Flyer this week via email about his new record, his fierce-yet-musical scream, and the new material he’s got in the works.
Flyer: How did you get into writing and performing music?
Stull: Well, I come from a musical family where everyone plays something. I started playing the drums first because my grandpa taught me. Then later I got into playing the guitar through my dad.
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Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge
Mrs. Bob Crachit’s Wild Christmas Binge offers a twisted retelling of the Dickens’classic at Circuit Playhouse.
Beginning in January, the city court clerk’s office will begin installing boots on cars belonging to people with three or more outstanding parking tickets. After booting, if tickets and the $75 booting fee aren’t paid in full within 48 hours, the car will be towed to the city impound lot.
The new Boot and Tow Program is expected to be approved by the Memphis City Council on third reading at its next meeting on Tuesday, December 6th.
Tickets are considered outstanding after 60 days. If violators wish to avoid having their vehicle booted, they’ll have the month of December to work out a payment plan with the court clerk’s office. Once a vehicle has been booted or towed, payment plans will no longer be offered. If a car is towed, the booting fee is dropped, but tickets and impound lot storage fees must be paid in full before the car can be retrieved. A person with more than $500 in unpaid parking tickets will be towed without booting.
“The city court clerk’s responsibility is to collect money owed to the City of Memphis for parking violations,” said city court clerk Thomas Long. “It is not the objective of the city court clerk’s office to boot or tow vehicles, but we will do what we must do.”
Delinquent parking fines will also begin increasing after the first of the year. Tickets not paid after 60 days will increase from $20 to $40, and after 30 more days, they will increase from $40 to $80.
These changes are a way to recoup some of the nearly $1.5 to $2 million lost annually in unpaid parking fines, Long said. There’s a one-year statute of limitations on unpaid parking tickets, and Long said many people simply don’t pay, hoping they won’t get caught for a year. Others circumvent paying tickets by making false claims about stolen tags, but Long said they’re working on a solution to that problem.
The Memphis Police Department will use its license plate reading cameras to seek out those with three or more delinquent parking tickets, and special event officers will apply the boots. If boots are removed or damaged by the car’s owner, criminal charges may be filed.
Chris Herrington takes a detailed — very detailed — look at what the new NBA collective bargaining agreement means for the Memphis Grizzlies.
9th District congressman Steve Cohen, whose three terms to date have generated impressive national attention, is apparently not going to avoid challenge in the Democratic primary from local Urban League head and School Board member Tomeka Hart.
Hart, whose announced campaign had long been dormant, is finally on the move. She was the beneficiary of a Monday night fundraiser at the Joysmith Gallery on Huling, and she has plans to open her campaign headquarters near the Hollywood/Chelsea intersection on Thursday.
Hart was, along with Board colleague Martavius Jones, one of the prime movers behind the Memphis City Schools board’s decision to surrender its charter last December — a circumstance that launched the ongoing merger between MCS and Shelby County Schools.
Since his first election to Congress in 2006, former state Senator Cohen has comfortably turned back successive Democratic Party challengers. He defeated Nikki Tinker in the 2008 primary and former Mayor Willie Herenton in 2010 — both by margins of 4 to 1.
Both contestants will have to wait to see the exact confines of the 9th District, the lines of whch will be re-drawn by the General Assembly in January.
When the NBA finally gets underway next week, it will be under a new collective bargaining agreement — the rules that manage player movements, contracts, team finances, and other basketball-related activity. Before we get into details of what moves the Grizzlies might make during the compressed run-up to the season or what might happen on the court, we’ll start by taking a look at the new rules and what they mean for the Grizzlies.
In a general sense, the new agreement is comprised of two types of elements — financial system changes and “system” changes the league says are geared toward ensuring better competitive balance between large and small-market teams. Unsurprisingly, the league was firmer on the financial side, securing a significant pay cut from the players while relenting on a host of system issues to secure a final deal. The result is a CBA that should help all teams on the financial side and — provided the promised major enhancements in revenue sharing actually comes through — could significantly stabilize small-market teams. On the system side, the changes are more minor, but shorter, cheaper contracts with bring less overall risk and a bevy of restrictions should have at least some impact on the ability of big-market teams to horde talent.
If you want a good general overview of CBA changes, you couldn’t do any better than cap czar Larry Coon, who breaks the major changes down here.
Rather than explore every detail of the new CBA, I’m pulling out eight changes that seem most relevant to the Grizzlies and speculating on how each change could specifically impact the team:
Issue 1: BRI Split: After getting 57% of basketball-related income in the last deal, players will receive 51.15% this season and between 49% and 51% for the rest of this CBA. Because of the reduction this season from 82 games to 66 games, players salaries will be prorated accordingly.
What it Means for the Grizzlies: There are two relevant numbers when it comes to player salaries: Their listed salaries for cap purposes and what teams actually pay them in real dollars, and these numbers aren’t always the same. This season, all players will get have their salaries cut by 19.5% off the top because of the reduction in games. Further, the across-the-board cut from the BRI share reduction — a 10% cut this season and 10.5%-14% in following seasons — will mean teams as a whole will be spending less on player salaries relative to their revenues going forward. In real terms, this will put more cash into the Grizzlies coffers. A combination of reduced player expenses, increased revenue sharing (a non-CBA component we’re still waiting to get details on, but the league has promised to at least triple the current paltry rev-sharing system), and increased gate receipts (from having a good team and a better season-ticket base) should combine to add, at minimum, an additional eight-figure bonus to the team’s bottom line each season. This may well make the Grizzlies profitable and should at least mitigate losses, making the team more stable financially and increasing owner Michael Heisley’s willingness to keep payroll high enough to compete. For all the talk of “competitive balance,” the biggest issue for small-market teams like the Grizzlies is financial viability, and the combination of lowered BRI share for players and increased revenue sharing should bring significant help in that area.
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The Light Thief
Check out the Kyrgyzstan film, The Light Thief, at the Benjamin L. Hooks Library Wednesday.