Month: January 2016

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News News Feature

Byhalia, Mississippi

If Trayvon Martin were your son, would you want him presumed innocent and given the benefit of the doubt? If confronting your community’s prejudiced past boosted the odds of a more equitable future for black residents, wouldn’t you embrace the lesson? These questions and themes of empathy, honesty, and forgiveness form the foundation of playwright Evan Linder’s latest work, Byhalia, Mississippi, which has its world premiere at TheatreWorks in Memphis, and three other cities, January 8th.

Linder, co-artistic director of Chicago’s New Colony theater, always knew he’d write what he calls a “red-state show.” And what better place to locate such a show than the town down the road from his parents’ Collierville home, a place with a painful and mostly overlooked racial history?

When Linder wrote Byhalia, Mississippi in January 2014, he had 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and and the black boy’s killer, neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, on his mind.

On a drive through the tiny Byhalia town square, Linder snapped a photo of a black teen outside a barbershop. The boy wore a hooded sweatshirt like the one Trayvon had on when Zimmerman fatally shot him. The photo, which is on the play’s website, frames a central question for the character Jim Parker, who is white.

Wrote Linder: “What would it take (and was it even possible) for Jim to see a boy in a hoodie walking across the street in Byhalia and immediately register that young man as someone else’s child before seeing a young black male? And could he ever see that child as his own?”

The play begins with Jim and his wife, Laurel, also white, expecting their first child. To Jim’s surprise, the baby is born with brown skin. The child is the product of Laurel’s brief affair with Paul Price, the married black principal of Byhalia High School.

As the Parkers’ marriage reels and Ayesha, Price’s wife, grapples with the proof of her husband’s infidelity, she confronts Laurel, who is naïve about what it means to raise a black boy in Byhalia.

Laurel knows about Byhalia’s best-known decedent, author William Faulkner, Ayesha snaps, but does she know about Butler Young Jr. or Alfred “Skip” Robinson?

Here Linder whets the audience’s appetite with a bit of history from the 1970s, when Byhalia was the scene of what Time magazine called “one of the longest civil rights boycotts in Mississippi history.”

The boycotts of white-owned businesses were sparked by the death of Young, a 21-year-old, unarmed black man shot and killed under questionable circumstances by Byhalia police in the summer of 1974. Robinson led the protests as president of the United League of Marshall County.

Then, like now, black residents demanded that the officers involved be charged with murder. Then, like now, black citizens used the only power they had — economic — to try to force the white power structure to give them a measure of justice.

Then, like #blacklivesmatter activists today have found, justice was elusive.

According to a 1974 Harvard Crimson article, “The population of the town is 750 persons, and although 70 per cent of them are black, the mayor, the town leader and all the merchants are white.”

And while Faulkner, who merely died in Byhalia, gets a shout-out on the town’s website, the boycotts, which could be a source of pride and a testament to black citizens’ resilience, are unmentioned.

“People have been fine with letting that history slip away,” Linder said.

The play is not meant to be an indictment of Byhalia specifically, Linder noted, but of our collective selective memory and how our failure to reckon with it honestly hamstrings our future.

As Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Linder, who is white, wants to do his part to deal honestly with race, and this play is a start. “The only way things change is if people are forced to look at it.”

Editor’s note: The world premiere of Byhalia, Mississippi is January 8th in Memphis, Chicago, Toronto, and Charleston, South Carolina. Readings will occur in Los Angeles, Boulder, Colorado, and Birmingham, Alabama, in mid-January. On January 18th, audiences from all seven cities can participate in an online conversation. Go to wpconvo.com/online-conversation to join. Byhalia, Mississippi runs January 8-31 at TheatreWorks in Memphis.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1402

Treasons Greetings

Nothing screams “patriot” like trying to take down the U.S. government. Tennessee Representative Andy Holt (R-Palookaville) made national headlines in 2015 after penning an op-ed describing original Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest as “one of the South’s first civil rights leaders.” Holt started the first week of the new year with a little game of tweet-and-delete. The controversial pig farmer posted a message reading “#Bundymilitia Where can I send support for your effort?” Then he bravely took it down. He also posted a message comparing the Bundy militia’s armed takeover of government property to the Bernie Sanders campaign: “Funny that all these Bernie supporters claim peaceful protest is treason, but don’t believe a socialist taking over US Gov is.”

Neverending Elvis

Elvis Presley died in August 1977, only three months after the original theatrical release of Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Thirty-eight years later Star Wars: The Force Awakens dominates the box office, and the King of Rock-and-Roll died a little more when a U.K. band dubbed Darth Elvis and the Imperials released a holiday single titled “Sithmas on Hoth.” Darth Elvis is both a cease-and-desist order waiting to happen and a tribute act performing Star Wars-themed songs primarily in the style of Elvis Presley. “Sithmas on Hoth” is a rockabilly number chronicling a Tauntaun-backed hunting expedition and traditional Sithmas meals of barbecue wampa and Ewok.

We’re Slow

Everything moves a little slower in Memphis. It’s part of our charm. Take, for example, the guitar that’s lowered over Beale every New Year’s Eve. This year’s drop was broadcast live on CNN and marked the arrival of 2016 about 30 seconds after midnight when a Beale Street reveller accidentally tripped a safety feature preventing a timely descent.

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News The Fly-By

Bartlett Pole Fitness Studio Offers Classes for Men

Nicki Dark spins around a pole. She’s using deep, sculpted, and meticulously worked muscles to control her movements. There’s much more to it than stripper-style pole dancing; what she’s doing, based on her muscle movement, is a feat of strength. It’s pole fitness.

Dark, whose real name is Nicole Bennett, is one of the few instructors in pole fitness who teach co-ed classes, much less have an all-male class. Since her studio in Bartlett, Nicki Dark Fitness, opened just over a year ago in 2014, her classes have grown to more than 50 students, many of them men.

Dark got into pole fitness, which builds upper- and lower-body strength through exercises performed on a vertical pole, about five years ago and quickly became enthralled.

“The difference between what I teach in pole fitness and pole dancing is technique,” Dark said. “I show my students how to build their foundation in order to create a beautiful home. Pole dancing is more how you decorate. It’s how creative you are with your technique.”

The Dark Spartan class at Nicki Dark Fitness is just for men.

That technical foundation she teaches — which Dark says is based on techniques developed by men in Russia — can lead students to national pole fitness competitions with the American Pole Fitness Association, which hosts national championships every year, or the Pole Sport Organization, which features competitions that can branch off into aerials and complex maneuvers.

“When I got into pole fitness, there weren’t really guys [doing it] in the city of Memphis,” she said. “We live in the Bible Belt, so pole fitness is already unorthodox. When I sought to get my certification, the majority of my trainers were male. So when I saw that, I said, ‘Wow, there are men who do want to do this and not look at it in a negative light.'”

The Dark Spartan classes cater to Dark’s male students, who develop muscles differently based on their physiology. It’s not unheard of for pole fitness classes at other studios to turn men away, particularly when female instructors may not be able to teach them correctly.

“Guys want to do it as much as girls do,” Dark said. “I do not discriminate against guys. They’re so welcome. My guys love it, because a lot of places are very uneasy about guys. On top of that, they don’t know how to actually teach them, because they’re not strong enough to accommodate what they need to learn based on their strength.”

The all-male classes focus far more on upper body strength than the all-female classes. During the co-ed classes, things are broken down for both.

“Believe it or not, pole fitness does not [require a lot of upper body strength],” she said. “The way I teach it, no, because I actually teach you how to build it during the classes.”

Since Dark has started her Dark Spartan classes, the number of men who have signed up has been slowly growing.

“It took a little while, because a lot of them were not allowed in certain places to do pole,” she said. “It’s amazing watching men do pole, because in Russia and Asia, they actually have more male polers than female polers. The pole I teach is more the strength and athleticism of it, not the seductive side of pole dancing.”

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News The Fly-By

Q&A with Former City Council Member Bill Boyd

Six brand new members joined the Memphis City Council this week in what newly elected Mayor Jim Strickland called the “biggest shake-up in Memphis leadership in a quarter century.”

In a swearing-in ceremony last week, Council Chairman Kemp Conrad said he was excited for the future but noted that his excitement was not a criticism of those who served in the past. In fact, he said the former Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and outgoing council members achieved “remarkable results” and should be proud.

Bill Boyd was a member of that previous council, most of which took office in another major shake- up in 2008. In that time, Boyd only missed one council meeting and a portion of another.

He battled Willie Herenton on the former mayor’s plan to close libraries and community centers and stepped in many times to offer compromises in big council debates. We asked Boyd about his term on the city council.

— Toby Sells

Flyer: What are the accomplishments you’re most proud of?

Bill Boyd: Getting the term limits for Memphis City Council. Also, I believe I spent as much or more time as a council member in the service of the annual city budget. I was able to recommend and gained approval of deleting many of the expenditures each year but particularly in in the first four to five years of my service.

When I was first assigned to be the council’s liaison with the Center City Commission (now the Downtown Memphis Commission), I could not help but notice that the commission was, in my opinion, overloaded with too many elected city, county, and state officials, so much so that I thought they had too much influence over the citizen members of that board. So I set out to reduce the elected office holders on the commission … and reduced the number of politicians by four.

You also helped change the way the city collects parking fines?

I had been told that the city has lost millions of dollars over the years because many of those who received parking violation tickets would simply “wait it out.” Upon looking into the situation, I felt that I needed to change this ridiculous law.

I learned that the city already had the right to collect the fee on their unpaid tickets beyond the 12 months and that it would only require setting up a new process that included the city court clerk’s office, the municipal judges, and the Memphis Police Department.

I managed to get those people together, and we revised the process. Now, the city is in a position to bring in more revenues. I expect this revenue line item to increase in the future years with the cooperation of the police, judges, and the city court clerk’s office.

Did you leave anything undone?

One particular law that I introduced to the council would have required all persons applying to be on a city ballot for office to fill out a disclosure form at the same time they turned in their qualifying petitions to the Shelby County Election Commission.

Information that would have been required for them to provide would be such things as city, county, state, or federal taxes owed or delinquent; [whether they have been] found guilty of any laws broken; [if they have] lawsuits pending against them; [if they’ve filed for] bankruptcies, and things of this nature. I felt that the voting public had a right to know somewhat about the character of the people on the ballot as well as their business backgrounds, since they would be handling the public’s business if elected. I regret that I lost that proposal on a 7-6 vote.

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News The Fly-By

Clean Memphis Takes Over Project Green Fork

Back in 2007, Margot McNeeley noticed most local restaurants were still using Styrofoam takeout containers. Upon further inspection, she also realized most weren’t recycling. So she set out to do something about it.

McNeeley founded Project Green Fork (PGF), a restaurant sustainability certification program that helps restaurateurs commit to recycling, using Earth-friendly takeout boxes, and green cleaners.

It’s grown to include 75 PGF-certified restaurants, catering companies, and coffee shops across the city. Since 2008, those restaurants have recycled more than four million pounds of plastic, glass, aluminum, cardboard, and paper and more than 200,000 gallons of food waste.

But as of the first of the year, McNeeley is stepping down as PGF’s executive director, and the organization, which was previously a stand-alone organization, is being merged into the programs at Clean Memphis, a grassroots nonprofit that organizes volunteer cleanups and does sustainability outreach education in schools and in the community.

“I’m ready to take on something new. And I think I’ve taken Project Green Fork as far as I can take it as a one-woman show,” said McNeeley, who has operated the organization by herself since its 2008 founding. “Clean Memphis has a much larger budget and more resources than we ever did, and they have a bigger staff and the capability to take it further.”

PGF certifies restaurants that promise to adhere to six steps: 1) convert disposables to compostable, biodegradable products; 2) recycle all recyclable items; 3) develop a composting process; 4) use nontoxic cleaning products; 5) make efforts to conserve energy and water; and 6) maintain grease traps and kitchen hoods to prevent overflows and emissions to sewer and storm systems.

Under Clean Memphis, McNeeley says PGF will maintain the six steps to certification.

“I don’t want people who have supported this for so long to think it’s going away,” McNeeley said. “It’s continuing and will be taken to the next level, whatever that next level may be.”

Janet Boscarino cofounded Clean Memphis in 2008, along with her neighbor Darrin Hills and his boss Mark Lovell, to organize volunteers to pick up litter. The organization also does outreach education work in schools, and they developed a Sustainable Schools program to certify schools in much the same way that PGF certifies restaurants.

In the program’s 20 certified schools, students volunteer for cleanups, plant vegetable gardens, learn about watershed health and water quality, and participate in other sustainable initiatives.

“When we were developing that program, Margot was one of the people I reached out to because of her work with sustainability in restaurants,” Boscarino said. “We grew our understanding of each other’s missions and vision of what we would see Memphis becoming with restaurants and schools moving toward more sustainability.”

Boscarino said, when McNeeley approached her a few months ago about merging the organizations, she knew it would be a good fit. The boards of directors for both organizations discussed the matter, and a decision was reached to pull the PGF program into Clean Memphis’ fold.

“At this point, we don’t see any changes to the program,” Boscarino said. “It’s been very successful, so especially for the first year, we would bring that program under our umbrella and get to know it and understand the ins and outs, as opposed to making any changes.”

Clean Memphis is currently searching for a program coordinator to run PGF. That person will run the day-to-day operations, like McNeeley did, but Clean Memphis will handle the administrative tasks associated with PGF, something McNeeley had to manage on her own before the merger.

“The new program coordinator can just focus on building the program and promoting the restaurants and sustainability,” Boscarino said.

As for what McNeeley will do next, she won’t say yet: “I have three things I’m working on, but I’m not ready to announce any.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Pending Matters in Shelby County

Newly inaugurated Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland kept himself on solid ground with the electorate, and may have expanded his beachhead somewhat, with a post-swearing-in address on New Year’s Day that added significant new terms to the lexicon of his political rhetoric.

More so than in his campaign speeches, which hewed to his themes of public safety, action on blight, and employee accountability, Strickland made a conspicuous effort to broaden his constituency. His key passage: “Here on this day of renewal, this time of celebration, we must recognize that we are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.”  

The mayor’s implicit commitment to social action was reinforced by specific promises “to expand early childhood programs,” “to provide greater access to parks, libraries, and community centers,” and “to increase the number of summer youth and jobs programs.”

• The year-end resignation of long-beleaguered county Election Administrator Rich Holden creates an opening that the Shelby County Election Commission must fill. Final deadline for applications to the newly vacated position is next Wednesday, January 13th, according to Janice Holmes, deputy administrator of Shelby County government.

One of those actively campaigning for the position is Chris Thomas, an employee of the Redwing public strategies group who has served previously as Probate Court clerk and as a Shelby County commissioner.

• In the ongoing movie series based on the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, there was a never-ending stream of new challengers to Rocky’s championship title, each one with a plausible case to make for beating the champ, each one a loser finally, though usually after a bruising and suspenseful struggle.

The difference between Balboa and 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, who, since first winning his congressional seat in 2006, has also faced a different contender for his title in each successive election season, is that Cohen has hardly ever been forced to raise a sweat in disposing of his opponents.

Nikki Tinker in 2008, Willie Herenton in 2010, Tomeka Hart in 2012, Ricky Wilkins in 2014: Each of these would-be Democratic primary claimants to the 9th District seat came into the race against Cohen with a show of credentials and a fair degree of ballyhoo. Each went down hard in the end, with Cohen’s edge against them on election day usually turning out to be somewhere between four to one and eight to one. (Wilkins fared better, losing only 2 to 1.)

Now here — as first reported in the Flyer‘s wrap-up edition of 2015 — comes another worthy looking to take the seat away from Cohen: State Senator Lee Harris, who previously served most of a term on the Memphis City Council and who had been, Cohen says, formally endorsed by the congressman both in his 2011 council race against Kemba Ford and his 2014 win over then-incumbent state Senator Ophelia Ford.

Harris has confirmed his interest in seeking the 9th District seat. If he runs, it would be his second try for the office. The University of Memphis law professor was, along with Cohen and a dozen or so others, a Democratic primary candidate for the seat in 2006, the year incumbent congressman Harold Ford Jr. vacated it to run for the U.S. Senate.

Harris didn’t fare so well in that maiden effort, finishing near the bottom among the 15 primary contenders, but his status was considerably enhanced by his council and state senate victories, the latter allowing him to become leader of the five-member Democratic Senate caucus.

If he enters the race, Harris has indicated his campaign would be of the generalized it’s-time-for-a-change variety, though he has taken issue with Cohen on the matter of the congressman’s opposition to Governor Bill Haslam’s Tennessee Promise program of subsidies for community college students, funded by using proceeds of the Hope Lottery. Cohen, who objected to the diversion of funds as favoring higher-income students over lower-income ones, was the guiding force behind the creation of the state lottery as a longtime state senator.

• The ongoing power struggle between the administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and an apparent majority faction of the county commission was apparently not subject to any time-outs during the holidays. Indeed, it seems to have intensified over the break — to the point of open warfare.

Two matters in December have pushed the combatants to the brink: 1) a December 18th hand-delivered letter from commission chairman Terry Roland to Luttrell  threatening the mayor with “removal procedures” if he persisted in resisting a commission resolution appointing former Commissioner Julian Bolton as an independent attorney responsible to the commission; and 2) a bizarre circumstance whereby a Roland resolution seeking a transfer of the county’s budget surplus — a disputed amount running somewhere from $6 million to $20-some million —from the administration to the commission’s contingency fund reached the state comptroller’s office in a form that seemed to call for the transfer of the county’s entire fund balance of some $108 million.

The latter situation is being denounced by allies of Roland as nothing short of forgery committed somewhere in the administration before being transmitted to Nashville. After Sandra Thompson of the state comptroller’s office responded to Luttrell that the resolution featuring the larger sum was illegal, Roland sent a letter to Thompson charging that alterations had been made in his resolution, not only in the amount sought in the transfer, but in the enabling language of the resolution.

Roland’s letter included copies of both his original resolution, which — given a longstanding dispute between Luttrell and the commission — omitted any sums whatever, and what Roland called a “blatantly altered” copy that was sent to the comptroller’s office, which seemed to spell out a request for the transfer of the entire fund balance, which would be an astonishing demand, and which, noted Thompson, would leave the county without cash available to support spending in its General Fund and in potential violation of state law.

According to Roland’s letter, “When the altered document was brought to my attention I immediately contacted Harvey Kennedy, CAO, to address the issue and clarify my intentions. Mayor Mark Luttrell confirmed via a conversation with me that he was aware the document was altered. … I would never place Shelby County in [a] position where insufficient resources would be available to provide the cash flow needed for operations.”

Meanwhile, conversations and correspondence have flowed back and forth between commissioners and the administration, with the latter contending that a clerical error accounted for the apparent alteration in the resolution and Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a Roland ally in the struggle, concurring with the chairman that conscious skullduggery was involved.

Shafer sees a silver lining to the imbroglio, however. She believes that publicity concerning the matter has put the administration so clearly on the defensive that Luttrell will be willing to compromise with Roland on the independent-attorney issue — despite his statement, in a November 19th letter to Roland that he would stand by “a clear, unambiguous opinion from the county attorney that Resolution #16A [calling for Bolton’s appointment] violates the county charter.”

Roland and his supporters on the commission maintain that the charter mandates that the mayor is bound to implement the requirements of the resolution, which Luttrell vetoed but which was sustained in an override vote by the commission. The case of the altered resolution has earned itself a place for “discussion” on the commission’s committee agenda for Wednesday.

And at some point, even should the independent-attorney issue be resolved in compromise, the original point of rupture between the contending branches of government remains — a suspicion on the part of the commission that the administration is playing fast and loose with the fiscal totals it issues and refusing to submit to regularly scheduled audits.

That issue was apparently at the root of Roland’s wish for the transfer of surplus monies to the commission’s contingency fund.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Memphis Inequality: A Vicious Cycle

It is axiomatic that, after one week of a new year, most people will have long since forsaken their chief resolutions and gone back to spooning up that extra bit of sugar for their coffee or blowing off that planned get-in-shape regimen as being too much to worry with.

We can only hope that, with a new Memphis city government freshly sworn in, its members will be the exception and will hold steadfast to all the resolves they made in our name (or at least to get our vote) during the recent election. We certainly have a right to hope that our new mayor, former Councilman Jim Strickland, takes proper care of the litany of issues that he intoned so often during the mayoral race — public safety, blight, and accountability. But, after hearing him speak at the Cannon Center on New Year’s Day upon his inauguration, we are even more hopeful regarding his fidelity to a new set of ideas he announced apropos the social welfare of his city-ful of constituents.

As was noted in the “Politics” column this week, one sentence of Strickland’s was especially striking. It bears repeating here: “We are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.”

Not only did Strickland not speak so succinctly of what may be our most pressing problem during the campaign; neither did any of his opponents. “Inequality.” That is certainly the elephant in our room — and in our streets and workplaces. The new mayor reminded us that, on election night, he had promised to employ “new eyes to solve old problems.”

The social and economic inequality of which he spoke on Inauguration Day is certainly the oldest of these problems — and the most difficult to resolve. Yet all of the other problems facing the city and its mayor are inextricably tied to that one.

As Strickland also said: “We have debt that must be paid, a pension that must be funded, and a tax base moving away.” Clearly, the persistence of a large underclass of impoverished citizens excacerbates all of those conditions.

And there was this statement in the inauguration speech, an echo of similar ones made over and over during the campaign year, not only by Strickland, but by a variety of council candidates (for some of them the solitary plank in their public platforms): “We will focus on the goal of retaining and recruiting quality police officers and firefighters, knowing public safety is at the forefront of rebuilding our city.”

That’s all very well, but the several hundred police officers who left the city’s service in recent years made it as clear as could be that the slashing of their benefits was their single most pressing reason for dissatisfaction. They haven’t gone home to collect unemployment; in significant numbers they have found kinder niches in other departments elsewhere.

Inequality means a reduced tax base, which means a shrunken budget — which means a harder task to recruit first responders and more incentives for an uneasy middle class to decamp. And that, of course, means further reduction in the tax base.

It’s what you call a vicious cycle, but we’re glad that Mayor Strickland has taken note of it, and we wish him all the best in tackling these issues over the next four years.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

State AG Says Shelby County Schools Not Liable for MCS Post-Employment Debts

CREDIT: JB

JB

Commissioner Reaves announcing Slatery opinion

A bombshell from the state Attorney General’s office could open the way for fiscal relief for Shelby County Schools and saddle the City of Memphis with an expense that city officials thought they had been delivered from after the end of the city/county merger crisis.

Attorney General Herbert Slatery, responding to an inquiry from state Senator Brian Kelsey on behalf of Shelby County government, ruled that debts relating to the OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits) obligations of the former Memphis City Schools do not devolve upon the post-merger SCS, as had been generally supposed, but, — potentially, anyhow —upon the City of Memphis.

OPEBs involve obligations for post-employment health care, insurance, disability payments, and various other non-pension benefits.

The operative paragraph of Slatery’s opinion is as follows: “Where there is any school indegtedness owned by the town, city or special school district at the time the transfer of administration is effectuated, the indebtedness shall remain the obligation of the town, city, or special school district…”

The opinion goes on to say that “existing arrangements for the retirement of the indebtedness shall be continued until the indebtedness is retired and paid in full, unless the county legislative body, by resolution adopted by a majority of the members, agrees to assume the school indebtedness owed by the town, city, or special school district.”

Reaction from members of the Shelby County Commission, who learned of the ruling from education chairman David Reaves while meeting in committee on Wednesday was generally one of relief — coupled with assertions that the Commission was in no danger of volunteering itself as a funding source.

“I’m the happiest man here, except for you,” exulted Commission chairman Terry Roland to SCS superintendent Dorsey Hopson, who had just concluded testimony about a variety of school matters.

Roland’s Commission colleague Heidi Shafer congratulated Roland on his prescience months ago in having raised doubts about the liability of SCS (and thereby Shelby County government) for the portion of the county OPEB liability formerly owed by MCS. Reaves estimated that that amount, which SCS had provisionally assumed responsibility for, amounted to some $30 million annually– or, as others were estimating, as much as $1.1 billion overall.

“They [SCS] could use that money for operating expenses. They could use it for iZone schools or whatever,” Reaves said.

Shafer stated an obvious caveat, however —— that an opinion from the state Attorney General’s office is merely advisory without the powers of legal mandate. AG opinions normally are acted upon as de facto rulings, but in this case, given the fiscal stakes for all parties, court action would almost certainly have to precede any resumption of financial responsibility on the part of the City of Memphis, which had been responsible for annual payments of $70 to $80 million overall, including OPEBs, to Memphis City Schools before the merger and surrender of the MCS charter.

County Attorney Ross Dyer said it was possible, as several Commissioners immediately theorized, that the City of Memphis might become the liable party for the MCS OPEB sums, but said he didn’t “feel confident speaking to it” before the City itself responded.

The first inkling of that response came later Wednesday from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s press office, which issued this statement:  “It’s important to note that Memphis City Schools was a special school district, and was separate and apart from city government. The attorney general was not asked if city government is responsible for the special school district debt. The attorney general was asked if Shelby County government was responsible for the special school district debt.”

A possible complication is the relevance of court rulings that held the City of Memphis to “maintenance of effort” obligations toward Memphis City Schools prior to the MCS charter surrender and the school merger.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Celebrate the 38th Anniversary of the Sex Pistols in Memphis with a Taco, a Concert Bootleg, and Anarchy

via GIPHY

Celebrate the 38th Anniversary of the Sex Pistols in Memphis with a Taco, a Concert Bootleg, and Anarchy (2)

On Jan. 6, 1978 the Sex Pistols, a boy band assembled by Malcolm McLaren to perform punk rock music and look good doing it, played Memphis’ Taliesyn Ballroom. It was one of only seven successful stops on the influential band’s disastrous U.S. tour.  The defunct venue was located at 1447 Union Ave. It has since been torn down and replaced by a Taco Bell that was subsequently torn down and replaced by a different Taco Bell. 

As we do every year at this time, Fly on the Wall encourages fans to visit the concert site to enjoy a taco, or a burrito, or an enchirito, and play the following video as loudly as their mobile devices will allow. 

You may also want to read Chris Shaw’s interview with Peabody Hotel enthusiast, John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Celebrate the 38th Anniversary of the Sex Pistols in Memphis with a Taco, a Concert Bootleg, and Anarchy

Categories
Music Music Blog

Photo Recap: Memphis Dawls’ Last Show

The Memphis Dawls

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