Author: Cheri DelBrocco

No light yet at the end of the tunnel.

That was the message of Governor Phil Bredesen to the lawyers and judges attending Wednesday’s luncheon of the Tennessee Judicial Conference at The Peabody.

Noting that he had just guided state government through unprecedented budget cuts and austerity during the legislative session concluded at the end of last month, Bredesen left little doubt there was more to come.

“The reality is that we are going to have to do more with less,” said Bredesen, warning of “long-lasting challenges,” made worse by “pressure on the downward side of the tax system.” The governor said that the emphasis of the Bush administration on tax cuts would inevitably create similar pressures at all levels of government.

An amateur pilot, Bredesen likened the situation to advice he was given as he was learning to fly. “When things go to hell, you’ve just got to fly the airplane, I was told. Well, we’re just trying to fly the airplane.”

One of the few upbeat notes was struck when Bredesen mentioned the prospect of “new and better technology” to ease the processes of state government.

Asked afterward about lottery legislation enacted in the late session, Bredesen expressed satisfaction with the outcome in general, though he continued to express concern that guidelines for awarding student scholarships might have been relaxed to the point of straining available lottery revenues.

Of the now-famous compact between himself and state Senator Steve Cohen (D-Midtown), which resulted in the governor’s getting authority to appoint all seven members of the lottery administrative board, Bredesen said relations between himself and Cohen, who had been critical of Bredesen during the session, had “leveled out” but added, “I haven’t forgotten what was said.”

For her part, state Representative Kim McMillan of Clarksvile, the House Democratic leader who was one of several legislators in attendance at the luncheon, said she was willing to consider Cohen’s verbal criticism of her (as a “chastising Harpy”) as merely owing to the “heat of battle.”

The Midtown senator, who labored for almost two decades to secure the enactment of a Tennessee lottery, contested various points of the lottery legislation right down to the final day of the session.

Soon after signing Tennessee’s lottery legislation — one measure to establish the lottery, the other to set up lottery-funded college scholarships — Gov. Phil Bredesen admitted some fine-tuning is in order.

Bredesen didn’t say so, but the first bit of tinkering involves the disparity between scholarship requirements for children who graduate from public and private high schools versus those who are home schooled.

Quite simply, home-schoolers are being cheated.

Under the legislation Bredesen signed into law, traditional high school graduates need only achieve a 3.0 average or a 19 on the ACT college entrance examination to receive lottery-funded scholarships beginning in fall 2004.

The lottery scholarship legislation sets a much higher standard — a 23 on the ACT — but no grade point average for home-schooled graduates.

“That’ll change. It was just an oversight on the House’s part,” state Sen. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, said amid the din of the jam-packed old Supreme Court chambers, where Bredesen signed the legislation on Wednesday.

A conference committee of House and Senate members resolved differences between Senate and House versions of the lottery legislation on the final day of the legislative session last month. The 23 ACT requirement apparently was to have been lowered, but somehow it never made it into the final product.

The House lottery sponsor, Chris Newton, R-Benton, said Wednesday that he planned to pre-file legislation on Friday to correct the deficiency. Newton, an able legislator, said he expected the matter to be settled early in next year’s legislative session, thus assuring home-schoolers they would not be discriminated against in lottery scholarships.

Then he added, “there’s some opposition to lowering the requirement.”

Uh-oh. Who’s the opposition?

No one will say publicly.

The Tennessee Education Association is on record as opposing lower standards in the first place because every lottery dollar that goes to scholarships is one less dollar that could be spent on early childhood education.

TEA representatives did not return phone calls for comment.

Could it come from the Black Caucus, whose members succeeded in lowering the original 23 ACT test scores and 3.0 GPA because, they argued, inner-city schoolchildren do not fare as well as suburban students on standardized tests?

Rep. Ulysses Jones, D-Memphis, who was actively involved in the grade point and ACT debate, did not return a phone call for comment.

Even Bobbie Patray, who heads the conservative Eagle Forum and is a staunch advocate of home schooling, declined to point a finger at the opposition, whoever it may be.

“There’s just a small group of people down there concerned about home schooling,” Patray demurred.

She noted home-schoolers often are high achievers. She pointed out that teams of home-schooled high school students have won the American Bar Association’s National Mock Trial championship for the past two years. One of those students is headed for Harvard this fall, she said.

Newton said he is determined to level the playing field for home-schooled children and give them a fair chance at receiving the $3,000-a-year scholarships, which can be the difference between students going to college or asking, “you want fries with that?”

“I intend to change it,” Newton vowed.

He may just do that. But in Tennessee’s General Assembly, that’s often easier said than done.

First, he has to identify the opposition.

MEMPHIS 2005

The partnership between city and county government and the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce is not exactly over, but it is a shadow of what it was when the ambitious Memphis 2005 plan was launched in 1996.

The partnership is a casualty of tight budgets, political opposition, mixed results, and the Shelby County government credit-card scandal that brought down former mayoral aide Tom Jones. Jones pleaded guilty two weeks ago to federal and state charges of misusing public funds funneled through Memphis 2005 and is scheduled to be sentenced in August.

When the city and county approved their annual budgets last week and this week, the chamber and Memphis 2005 were conspicuously absent. The city will chip in $350,000 next year, while the county contribution is zero. Each government contributed $750,000 a year in the first years of Memphis 2005, and the chamber raised an additional $1.2 million from the private sector.

Marc Jordan, president and CEO of the Memphis Regional Chamber, said Memphis 2005 was cumbersome and dependent on political support which began to lapse after the first few years.

“It did a world of good, but it was pretty complicated,” he said, estimating that the chamber had at least eight partners and 250 people involved in all in Memphis 2005 activities. “It was administration-driven. You would have to say it was mayorally driven.”

The scope of Memphis 2005 went beyond the chamber’s traditional role of business recruiting to include crime reduction, anti-poverty programs, public school improvement, “livable” communities, and minority-business growth — all in the name of economic development.

Consultants and politically correct committees thrived in the climate of Memphis 2005, but some elected officials thought public funds were being wasted or that accountability was difficult to measure.

As the City Council put the finishing touches on its budget last week, Councilman John Vergos noted that there are politics involved in funding swimming pools or golf courses in members’ districts “but at least the public gets a swimming pool.”

Memphis 2005 will continue with limited public funding and a new focus on regionalism, job growth and personal income growth, a railroad “super terminal,” and a third bridge across the Mississippi River. Its sexiest component is the “talent strategy” aimed at recruiting people instead of companies. Nashville has overtaken Memphis as the state’s largest metropolitan area, and the chamber’s analysis indicates that most of its growth is due to in-migration rather than births.

Bottom line: New people with job skills have more money than new babies.

“We’re not getting people saying Memphis is a neat place to live and a great place to get a job, although obviously we think it is,” said Jordan.

Jordan was candid in assessing the problems of Memphis 2005, including his own health problems (he had heart surgery), too many goals, and unstable leadership. Willa Bailey was first hired to run the program, then after two years she gave way to Carol Crawley. Crawley, a longtime member and officer of the Center City Commission and a consultant to the Public Building Authority on FedEx Forum, held the job for less than two years and was not replaced after she left.

Local government support had already waned when the news broke last fall that Jones had spent thousands of dollars of Memphis 2005 funds on personal and family expenses while misleading Jordan and the chamber. From 1998 to 2001, Jones was the point person for $466,355 in Memphis 2005 payments (excluding credit-card payments) ranging from $1,221 for 50 copies of the book The Livable City to $7,650 of travel expenses for Jones and former Mayor Jim Rout to $60,000 to establish the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission.

“Our relationship with the county is different now,” said Jordan. “The contact is the mayor. There is not an individual that has stepped in like Tom did. It spreads the mayor a little thin. I think over time the chief administrative officer [John Fowlkes] will do more.”

The chamber’s setbacks are apt to be temporary. It can still pluck talent from city government and Memphis Light Gas & Water — former Planning and Development Director Dexter Muller and MLGW energy buyer Bill Bullock for example — as well as consultants like Carol Coletta who is leading the talent star search.

And organizations fall in and out of favor with politicians all the time. Just this week, grant requests from MIFA and WKNO came under fire from county commissioners who wanted to make a point about tax increases. A few years ago, the Center City Commission was on the hot seat due to revelations of misspending my executive director Ed Armentrout.

Armentrout was replaced, first on an interim basis and then permanently, by former City Councilman Jeff Sanford. Today, the CCC’s stock has never been higher. It’s a major player in the rebuilding of downtown via the tax favors and fees that fund its operations.

Politicos like City Councilman Rickey Peete and state legislators Larry Miller, Steve Cohen, and John Ford clamor to get appointed to it. The genial Sanford showed up at both city and county budget hearings to make his case but barely had to say a word, leading County CFO Jim Huntzicker to marvel in mock amazement, “How’d you do that?”