Month: January 2018

Google Maps

A court hearing will determine whether or not this former hotel site at Union and B.B. King is a public nuisance.

The Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) is taking the owners of a highly visible hotel site to court Thursday to, perhaps, deem the property a public nuisance.

In November, the DMC filed a lawsuit against the owners of of the Benchmark Hotel, located at the corner of Union and B.B. King. The former hotel building has been vacant and stripped to the floors and posts for months, visible to any local or tourist visiting AutoZone Park, the Peabody Hotel, and more.

“There have been no substantial improvements made to the property in years and local businesses are concerned with its appearance and other problematic conditions,” said Danny Schaffzin, an attorney representing the DMC.

The DMC wants the building to be declared a public nuisance and will argue that it is “not fit and habitable for human occupancy or authorized use, and perpetuates various public health and safety concerns.”

The court hearing comes after what DMC officials called “repeated failed attempts” to come to an agreement on appropriate next steps with its property owner, Nashville-based MNR Hospitality, LLC.

The lawsuit alleges MNR has failed to properly secure the property, allowed unsafe or unsanitary conditions, and promoted urban blight Downtown. Legally deeming the property a public nuisance will require MNR to create a development plan and a timeline to clean up the property.

“The Benchmark occupies one of the most high-profile corners in Downtown Memphis,” said Jennifer Oswalt, DMC president and CEO. “In addition to being an eyesore, the blighted property creates significant safety concerns.”

The current state of the hotel, “negatively affects the perception of our entire Downtown,” said Doug Browne, president of Peabody Hotels & Resorts.

“We owe our citizens, guests, and tourists a better experience as they walk through this historic neighborhood,” Browne said.

The hearing will be heard Thursday in Shelby County Environmental Court at 1:30 p.m.

Explore Bike Share – Facebook

Sevens trucks loaded with equipment for the bike-share system launching here in the spring will arrive in Memphis on Thursday.

Explore Bike Share, set to launch this spring, will provide 600 high-tech bikes stationed at 60 locations around the city this year, followed by another 300 bikes in 2019.

“Six hundred state-of-the-art BCycle Dash bikes, which collectively make up the largest system of this technology caliber in the country, will be arriving this week in over six hundred boxes,” Rajah Brown, Explore Bike Share’s operations director said. “And those six hundred boxes need to be unpacked.”

Explore Bike Share staff is inviting the public to help unpack those boxes in two-hour shifts between Tuesday, Feb. 6 and Thursday, Feb 8.

In return, volunteers will get drinks, snacks, and a free one-month bike-share membership. Bike knowledge and skills aren’t required.

“This is a system designed by Memphians for Memphis and, as such, we are always seeking opportunities to get more people involved,” Sara Studdard, the nonprofit’s community engagement and marketing director said. “Plus, this is the first opportunity to see and interact with the bikes that will physically and culturally transform Memphis’ transportation landscape.”

The unpacking process will take place in Uptown at Explore Bike Share’s staging warehouse on Keel. To sign up for a shift, go here.

Brown said this marks a milestone in the system’s implementation timeline. Still, an exact launch date hasn’t been decided.

Explore Bike Share staff is in the process of finalizing where the initial 60 stations will be located based on public input and collected data.

A coal ash pond at TVA’s Allen Fossil Plant.

An environmental group said the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has, again, delayed the release of tests results from its wells drilled into Memphis’ drinking water source but a TVA official said they don’t have the results and are awaiting them to compile into a state report.

TVA drilled five wells into the Memphis Sand Aquifer last year. The agency planned to draw 3.5 million gallons of water from the aquifer to cool its new $975 million natural gas plant, which will replace an older coal-burning plant.

That plan was halted last year after a local group, Protect Our Aquifer, filed a lawsuit to stop TVA from using the wells. Then, TVA announced its researchers had found high levels of arsenic and lead in groundwater under a coal ash pit close to the wells drilled into the aquifer.

Tennessee Valley Authority

TVA workers install water quality monitoring wells near the Allen Fossil Plant.

After that, TVA said it would not use the wells until an investigation proved they were safe to use. The agency hired the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the University of Memphis (U of M) to conduct parts of the investigation.

In early October, TVA ran the wells for a 24-hour period to test the water from them for any contaminants.

Amanda Garcia, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said TVA promised at the time to release the results at the end of the month. They didn’t, she said. The agency, then, delayed the release of the results until January, she said.

Through a state records requests, Garcia found a document that says TVA won’t release the results until March.

“We are concerned that the public — and especially regulators — are not being made aware of the results of this test that is suppose to provide insights on whether the cooling water wells at the gas plant are safe to operate,” Garcia said.

But Scott Brooks, a TVA spokesman, said, simply, they don’t have the results.

“(The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation) has asked that we put all the results together at once, including U of M and USGS,” Brooks said. “We’re still awaiting the final results.”

“It would be hard to push back a “timeline” by 5 months when the initial discovery of the arsenic was barely 6 months ago. We just contracted with USGS and U of M in August.”

But the SELC’s Garcia said TVA has known “for several years” that there was arsenic in the groundwater under the coal ash ponds at the Allen Fossil Plant. Though, TVA found extremely high levels of arsenic in a groundwater well in fall 2016, she said.

“At least our understanding is that they did not provide that information to (TDEC) until May of 2017,” Garcia said. “The public didn’t know about it until July of 2017. Meanwhile, they were planning to operate gas plant wells, which could potentially pull contaminated groundwater into the city’s drinking water source.”

Ward Archer, president of Protect Our Aquifer, said the fact that the results of the tests have no yet been made public was “concerning.”

“If the test isn’t complete or something else is going on, just tell us,” Archer said. “Tell us something. To just be completely silent about it seems odd to me. It doesn’t instill trust, which I think we could use some of, I think.”
[pullquote-1]When asked to clarify whether or not TVA had the test results, Brooks said, “U of M and USGS still have their tests, from what I understand, and we are still compiling ours. TDEC has asked for it all to be presented at once.”

SELC’s Garcia said her group has requested the test results from TVA through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and “TVA denied expedited treatment of the request despite the potential risk to the city’s only drinking water source.”

“That TDEC allegedly asked for TVA to present all of the information at once wouldn’t prevent TVA from informing the residents of Memphis who rely on the Memphis Sand Aquifer for drinking water sooner rather than later,” Garcia said.

Kenneth Rorie – Facebook

Entergy’s Independence Power Plant near Newark, Ark. is polluting the air in Memphis, according to Sierra Clubs in Tennessee and Arkansas.

Coal-fired power plants in Arkansas are polluting Memphis’ air.

That’s according to a new report released last week from Sierra Clubs in Tennessee and Arkansas. The groups hired California-based Sonoma Technology Inc. to review the impacts of emissions from the White Bluff and Independence power plants, operated by Entergy, Arkansas’ largest utility.

The study found those two power plants — one south of Little Rock, the other in north east Arkansas near Newark — “emit enough pollution to raise the levels of unhealthy ozone smog in the Memphis area,” according to a news statement from the the Sierra Clubs.

In 2008, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said they Memphis’ ozone levels were too high and out of compliance with federal air utility standards. This put more stringent rules on local companies and agencies to pollute less.

The pollution was bad enough that the city was deemed the “Asthma Capital of the U.S.” by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, according to Scott Banbury, conservation program coordinator with the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club.

But the EPA said the city had cleaned up its air enough in 2016 to remove its noncompliance status. This meant, among other things, that the air was cleaner to breathe and that local companies could, once again, apply for air pollution permits.

The air in Memphis will also be cleaner soon thanks to the retirement of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-burning energy plant here, which is slated to happen sometime this year.

“Now this improvement is undercut by evidence that pollution from the smokestacks of Entergy’s Arkansas coal plants is blowing east over the state line, directly into Memphis communities,” Banbury said in a statement.

The report used data from 2011. Banbury said the said it was the same data set  “EPA used the last time they did modeling for ozone attainment in 2015. There’s no reason to believe it’s any better now.”

The report found that the Arkansas energy plants impact Memphis ozone layers “around 32 days every summer.” In general, the ozone levels at the plants themselves are about four times “the amount public health agencies qualify as a significant amount,” the groups said in a news statement.

The resolve the issue, the Sierra Clubs said Entergy could should install pollution controls that have “been around for about 20 years.”

“These dirty coal plants are some of the largest coal-burning units in the entire country that lack modern pollution controls,” said Glen Hooks, director of the Arkansas Sierra Club. “We’ve been battling Entergy’s pollution in Arkansas for years.

“To see this same pollution from the White Bluff and Independence coal plants contributing to smog not only to our state but also to the communities of Memphis and St. Louis is even more outrageous.”