Author: Editorial

A survey can be a dangerous thing. But in the case of the Memphis Bar Association survey on local judges, it is a good thing and a useful piece of information for citizens to have about a class of public officials who deserve more scrutiny than they usually get.

At a time when anything from public schools and private colleges to hamburgers and television shows to political candidates and tax programs can be boosted or broken by a survey, the measuring tool itself needs to be looked at carefully. A few basic questions: Who is doing the survey, is it reasonably objective, and does it add useful information to public discussion?

The Memphis Bar Association includes some 2,900 members, one-fourth of whom took part in the survey. Political polls and “scientific” surveys are often done with smaller samples. Yes, there was the possibility of ballot-stuffing in the bar association poll, but we think lawyers are at least as conscientious in their remarks about judges as, say, people who agree to take part in a telephone poll of political opinions or television viewing habits while they’re trying to fix dinner.

The survey itself is a pretty painstaking thing. Each judge is rated on 10 specific criteria and an overall assessment. The questions are about things that should concern the average person as well as the average lawyer — punctuality, temperament, impartiality, efficiency, and open-mindedness.

The charge that this is no more than a popularity contest doesn’t stick. For example, one of the least popular judges in recent local history was U.S. District Judge Robert McRae, who authored the school busing decisions. An opinion poll taken in 1973 might well have found 80 percent or more of Memphians opposed to him or in favor of removing him.

But there is no place for that sort of political opinion to easily find its way into the bar association survey. The questions have nothing to do with the substance of particular cases.

In the news business we’re almost always going to be on the side of more disclosure, and this is no exception. Federal judges are appointed for life by politicians. If a judge has failings of temperament, intellect, or bad habits — or develops them after serving for several years — the public needs to know it. Only a tiny percentage of the electorate has first-hand experience with the federal courts.

Internally generated reports by the courts are too often overloaded with statistics and wind up on the filing shelf. The ratings of more than 300 lawyers gives both the public and the judges themselves useful feedback, even if some lawyers do use the opportunity to vent their spleen.

When it comes to elected judges, the survey is long overdue. As with most surveys, the extremes are the most telling. The judges with “unsatisfactory” ratings, like the 26 Memphis public schools with “failing” ratings, can gripe all they want, but there are, for the most part, solid reasons for those ratings. If the declining percentage of voters who take part in judicial elections takes note, so much the better.

If a judge is lazy, chronically absent, a tyrant, or an idiot, the public needs to know it. No system is perfect, but the Memphis Bar Association survey is a big improvement on the scanty information about judges that we currently have.

What’s wrong with this picture? The Memphis City Council just last week dispatched a letter to members of the Shelby County legislative delegation asking their financial approval for a new arena to house the NBA’s Grizzlies franchise in Memphis. Now a committee of the same city council has turned down the funding for a proposed new animal shelter.

The shortfalls of the existing animal shelter were extensively documented three weeks ago in a cover story by Flyer staff writer Mary Cashiola, who described a smelly, overcrowded, disease-ridden, and inefficiently run facility where animals — often people’s pets which had been snared while temporarily running loose and not kept for the requisite time to allow their being reclaimed — were subjected to a painful form of “euthanasia” sans benefit of anesthetic. “Shelter,” indeed!

Many of the excesses, it seemed clear, were the inevitable consequence of the outmoded facility’s having entered its dotage. At a time when the obsolesence of the 10-year-old downtown Pyramid is being taken for granted, the shelter, going on two generations old now, should be clearly seen for what it is: hopelessly outmoded.

Accordingly, Mayor Herenton included in his new budget a call for a new shelter to be built on a site and acreage twice as large as the present ones at a cost of $7.7 million — of which $1 million would be committed in the next fiscal year. (That compares to the $250 million which the proposed new NBA-worthy arena would cost — $24 million of which is to come from local taxpayers.)

Yet the same council which has apparently put aside all doubt and unanimously endorsed the call for the new downtown sports arena balks at building the new animal shelter. Speaking for the prevailing majority in a 6-3 vote against the project by the council’s budget committee for capital improvements, council member Barbara Swearengen Holt said her understanding was that “this was supposed to be a flat budget year.” (As against a roundball budget year, we presume.)

Her council colleague Pat VanderSchaaf had what we thought was the perfect rejoinder to that. “It’s a public health issue,” she was quoted by The Commercial Appeal as saying, and to delay acting on behalf of the public health would be “reprehensible.”

That’s part of the issue, we grant. The other part is that the community has at stake in this case not only its good health but its good name. It is no accident that the adjective identified historically with a society’s efforts to keep its animal population in good order is “humane.”

The fact is that we as a species have long defined ourselves at least partly by the manner in which we treat the other species of the earth. In allowing the continued mistreatment of itinerant animals while finding it so tempting to coddle the proprietors of itinerant athletes, we in Memphis and Shelby County risk a fundamental redefinition of who we are.

We urge the budget committee to reconsider its vote or, failing that, ask the full council, in all conscience, to reverse the action.

As any veteran basketball fan can tell you, many an important game is lost
in the last quarter, when nerves or a loss of focus or maybe just an imperfect
game plan can do a team in. At this writing, only weeks remain before the
National Basketball Association and Vancouver Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley
will make a decision on whether or not to relocate the Grizzlies to Memphis
for next season. We’re in the last quarter, all right.

It is impossible to say how Memphis’ latest quest for a major-
league sports franchise will come out, but the local would-be owners’ group
and its associated booster organization, NBA Now, are making the kind of
adjustments that could end up putting enough points on the board to build a
new arena and bring the Grizzlies here.

For one thing, the local pursuit team’s principals, notably
including its tireless spokesperson Gayle Rose, have opened up their game a
bit, practicing candor with the news media, local government bodies, and the
community at large. We, all of us, now know a good deal more then we did about
the separate funding sources proposed by the ownership group and Mayors
Herenton and Rout and how they’re intended to generate a revenue stream for
the arena.

We know enough, in fact, to be reasonably certain, as we
suspected in the first place, that some substantial private money is going to
be needed to defray the costs of building a new arena from scratch. Enough
static has come out of Nashville, where the General Assembly has so far not
even decided on revenue sources to meet the state’s basic needs, that the $40
million the ownership group was hoping to get from the legislature now seems a
remote possibility at best. At least $20 million, and possibly more, will have
to come from as-yet-unknown sources to flesh out the entire $250 million
package.

We therefore welcome the announcement this week by one of the
principals, J.R. “Pitt” Hyde, that the ownership group is
“trying to put something together” that would cover the expected $20
million shortfall with private funding. Hyde was just a mite coy about it —
suggesting various solutions short of an outright commitment from himself and
other members of the ownership group to put more money in. They’re already
investing generous sums to acquire equity in the team, but this money stays in
the family, so to speak, and doesn’t filter directly back into the community.
The proposed arena would become a tangible asset, an enduring part of the
city’s infrastructure, and the need for private money there is not just a
financial reality, it is a symbolic one.

Some doubts remain about construction of a new NBA-worthy arena,
not just in the councils of state government but in those of city and county
government as well. Many citizens still need to be convinced of its value, and
virtually everybody who’s looked into the matter is somewhat suspicious of the
arena’s price tag, wondering if the costs can’t be lowered a bit.

But, on the evidence of the last couple of weeks, the proponents
of an NBA franchise are keeping their heads and making some right moves. They
have a far better chance of both success and community support than they
started with.

“It is history. It serves as a sounding board, and everybody I talk with has been overwhelmed by it.” That’s the quotation from Memphis photographer Ernest Withers with which Flyer staff writer Chris Davis began a profile/review in March of last year, on the eve of a national tour of Withers’ “Pictures Tell the Story” exhibit.

The exhibit, which was just then getting under way in Norfolk, Virginia, has passed through several American cities since then — leaving hosts of overwhelmed viewers in its wake, you may be sure — and has finally arrived home for an extended showing at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Withers is one of those indigenous artistic greats — some others, historically, have been Elvis, Carroll Cloar, Burton Callicott, William Eggleston, and, of course, that near neighbor, William Faulkner — whom the outer world began to celebrate long before we caught on to what we had with us. People everywhere owe their visual sense of what the civil-rights revolution was all about to some poignant or powerful Withers image. He is the photographic chronicler of the movement that transformed America and regenerated the country’s most noble dreams. Withers’ work is history, all right. It captures the pain and suffering of the time, along with the grandeur.

Many an eminence stands fully revealed in one of Withers’ candid snapshots — Martin Luther King, B.B. King, and the pitching genius Satchel Paige are just a few — but the most telling photograph the master ever took was probably one of massed picketers all holding signs reading “I Am a Man” during the valiant and troubled sanitation strike which eventually brought Dr. King to Memphis — and to the last tragic chapter in the Nobel Laureate’s destiny.

No more profound statement of the aspirations of Everyman to claim a fair share of life’s possibilities has ever been captured. Not in words. Not on canvas. Not on TV or in the movies.

Be sure of one thing. Withers himself, that witness to history, is properly overwhelmed by it, but he has never, not for a second, been overwhelmed by himself. No more modest a man exists than this gallant patriarch who in his own being encompasses so much of Memphis’ past and present (among other things, he was — way back in the 1940s — the city’s first black policeman) and who raised several children to maturity and distinction, all to make a daddy proud.

Two of Ernest Withers’ children died unexpectedly within months of each other a few years ago — his namesake oldest son and his son Teddy, who had been one of the founders 10 years ago of that political milestone, the “People’s Convention,” which would coalesce a new voting consensus and produce the city’s first African-American mayor, Willie Herenton.

Ernest Withers grieved and staggered under the burden of such an unkind double blow, but he never went down. Indeed, he kept on working and has continued to take the photographs that will document some of the pivotal moments of our time.

For now and for some while into the future, we trust, we have one in our midst who truly has the right to say, “I am a man.”

In case anybody wonders why so many people are suspicious about the

public burdens to be borne in the case of a proposed new NBA arena, all we need do

is remind them that the citizens of Shelby County have been had, and had

quite recently, by a large entity that supposedly exists for their welfare.

And this is no private enterprise that would supposedly benefit everyone

by catering to the entertainment appetites of a relative few. This is a public

agency that is, quite literally, responsible for the comfort, safety, and even survival

of the entire community.

We mean, of course, Memphis Light, Gas & Water, better known as

MLGW. The Flyer‘s Rebekah Gleaves has looked behind the numbers doled out to

the media by the giant utility after the astronomical rate hikes of the winter

and found them superficial and misleading. Indeed, MLGW seems to have

misled not only its customers but perhaps itself in its efforts to justify the squeeze

it imposed on the consumer.

As Gleaves pointed out last week in an exhaustive study of the matter

(updated in the current issue of the Flyer), MLGW ignored its own expert’s

advance estimates of the winter’s drastically higher natural gas prices, lulled

rate-payers (and, again, perhaps itself as well) into complacency with

announcements of a relative rate decrease that would theoretically offset the price

increases, then slapped them hard on their frostbitten cheeks with bills that

were literal budget-busters to most households.

Rates would have gone up astronomically in any case because of the

free-market factors that drove gas prices up. But, in the end, local rate-payers were

charged a full 25 percent more than the national average for December and January.

Why? Because of MLGW’s poor estimates, followed by its willingness to be

disingenuous and to overcompensate itself at the expense of its customers. Readers

interested in just how local rates were manipulated by MLGW are advised to

consult Gleaves’ article, “A ‘Perfect’ Storm,” in the

Flyer‘s April 12th issue. Her cost-accounting is far more revealing than anything the utility itself ever released.

All this is bad enough, but MLGW then made promises to the public it

could not, or would not, fulfill. It offered a variety of rate-payment and

rate-reduction plans, one of which did not take effect until the natural gas emergency was over

— a fact that greatly minimized its impact. Worse, many customers were told

by MLGW office employees that certain plans did not exist.

Worst of all, while it was still officially winter and with cold days potentially

yet to come, MLGW sent technicians around to households throughout its

service area threatening immediate cutoff unless the company’s extravagant and

unexpected winter bills were paid on the spot, to the penny.

Many factors went into this sad performance, including a documented

lack of gas futures purchasing experience on the part of MLGW’s current

leaders. But perhaps the foremost one was the utility’s willingness to leave its

customers in the dark, so to speak, even after it had caught on to its own

mistakes. There has been a Newtonian result of sorts: MLGW’s cold-blooded

behavior has produced a seething response in its customer base, and it is no

wonder that other professed benefactors — such as the city’s NBA arena proponents

— are feeling the heat.

If NBA boosters in Memphis want the city and state to spend some serious money, they should make a serious argument.

So far they haven’t done that. The detailed financial package given to the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission last week relies too heavily on “found” money — new money spent at the new arena or within the special taxing zone around it. That presumption is overly optimistic if not deceptive. At least some of the money spent on the NBA is “transfer” money that would have been spent somewhere else in Memphis and Shelby County.

Other parts of the presentation lacked substance. A higher tax on rental cars? Then tell us how many cars are rented, and what the current taxes are. A refitted Pyramid would cost $192 million? Then show us the documents and the architectural studies — if they in fact exist. And why are we being asked to pay $250 million for a new arena when other cities have built them for considerably less?

There’s a better source of money for a new arena. Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley, we read, is a billionaire. The annual interest on $100 million at 5 percent is $5 million. That would service a substantial amount of debt. Heisley keeps his billion. All he gives up is the interest on one-tenth of his wealth. It’s not too much to ask. Repeat the process until private investors foot the bill for half the cost of the new arena. Then ask the public sector to match it.

It’s hard to see how a new arena will win approval otherwise. NBA owners are losing $40 million a year in Vancouver and Charlotte. It appears to be a business where expenses and revenues are simply out of balance, and it would be foolish indeed for Memphis and the state of Tennessee to invest $250 million in such a venture without laying off some of the risk.

The “NBA Now” team is not helping its cause by being impenetrably close-to-the-vest on the location of the proposed arena. The south side of Union Avenue between Danny Thomas Boulevard and the bus station seems like the best one. Paint this picture: An arena will do for the south side of Union what AutoZone Park did for the north side.

Finally, in this necessary matter of making sense of the proposal’s nuts and bolts, where are the salesmen? Where are investors Staley Cates and his partner Mason Hawkins of Southeastern Asset Management? Why are we hearing from Gayle Rose and Marlin Mosby? Pitt Hyde and Rose are giving it a good shot, but they’re not the most dynamic speakers around. And it’s disconcerting that they’re not really hardcore basketball fans. They don’t seem to recognize how troubled the NBA is right now. One of the things that made AutoZone Park successful was Dean Jernigan’s lifelong love and knowledge of baseball. That’s missing in the NBA Now team.

Where is the demand for the NBA? There has been no appreciable demonstration of public support. This deal looks strangely artificial, as though all the “support” has been drummed up from public relations firms and people with a vested interest.

Even in state government, where first reports indicated a clear disposition to support an NBA franchise for Memphis, serious doubts have set in. They, too, are of the “Show-Me” variety.

NBA Now needs to put the first team on the floor and give the public the information it needs to make a decision. Now. Or no NBA.

The news this week that the National Basketball Association is interested in relocating its Vancouver team to Memphis had the city buzzing. It was trumpeted by some as the last best chance for Memphis to obtain “major-league” status. Local sportswriters, fans, and government leaders seemed amazed at the prospect. One almost expected them to pull a collective Sally Field and proclaim to the National Basketball Association, “You like us. You really, really, like us.”

Well, of course they like us. Why shouldn’t they? The NBA’s own studies show that we’re the best city available. We have some profitable large corporations, a booming economy, and there are no other major-league sports franchises within 200 miles. In fact, the closest NBA team is in Atlanta.

To all this, we say, Fine. Bring us your team. The problem is: How to pay for it? Shelby County is already facing a budget crisis. The city, while not in crisis mode, would be hard-pressed to toss $250 million at a new venue for a team, however big-time, without solid guarantees of long-term tenancy

Meanwhile, there’s The Pyramid — not a perfect venue, to be sure — but we might suggest to the NBA: If you don’t find this venue (only 10 years old) adequate for your purposes then why not consider helping us out with the financing for an alternative? Maybe we could go 50-50 on it or find some equally creative solution. Tax breaks? Possibly. And we could even find some state money for the project if we can guilt-trip the legislature and the governor into matching what they did for Nashville’s major-league bids.

Let’s stay open to all prospects. But as a city, let’s make sure that whatever we undertake is feasible. We don’t want to be a hard sell, but we’ve been spoiled by the example of Dean and Kristi Jernigan, who managed to figure out how to give us a hot new baseball stadium and a team worth rooting for — a publicly owned one at that! — without breaking our public bank. We’re all for going big-league, too — but not if it’s a sucker deal. Let’s be prepared to welcome this gift horse, but let’s not be reluctant to look it in the mouth until we’re sure we can accept it with long-term security — in every sense of that term. While we’re checking out the NBA and they’re checking us out, let’s note some ancillary material.

Last week’s edition of Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal included a study of 172 possible markets for expansion or relocation of professional sports teams, and the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce helpfully provided us with some highlights of the survey. Gratifyingly, Memphis is listed among the top NBA contenders, with the note that the city has enough money and at present has a lack of professional competition. Believe it or not, Norfolk, Virginia, may be an unsuspected rival. The chamber’s figures identify Norfolk as the largest metropolitan area without a big-league franchise of any sort. And we thought we were! That’s the bad news. The good news is that Norfolk sounds like somebody we can beat. Provided, as spelled out above, the game turns out to be worth playing.

Right now, school consolidation — the subject of a controversial state bill which is floundering, or about to — is an idea without a constituency, and that’s a recipe for irrelevance. The only person who might be able to change things is Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton.

If there is a case to be made, Herenton, the former city schools superintendent, and his friend Johnnie B. Watson, the current superintendent, are the people to make it. They need to explain three things: what the cost savings would be from city-county school consolidation, where those savings would come from, and how classroom instruction would be affected.

Herenton needs to say more than what he has said — that, without consolidation, school costs are going to bankrupt this city and its school system. Where is there duplication in the city and county systems? How many administrative positions could be cut, and at what savings? How would the two school boards be merged? Would the 45,000-student county system become an adjunct to the 116,000-student city system? That seems to be one of the fears of the county administration and school board, who maintain — not unreasonably — that any aggregate containing 20 percent of the student population of Tennessee might become an entity too unwieldy to manage.

It’s understandable that Herenton may not want to come out with a detailed plan for consolidation. He has done so before, only to find himself leading a charge without any troops behind him. The problem back in the mid-1990s, when Herenton was focusing on governmental, not school, consolidation, was that black politicians in the city feared loss of their power, while white suburbanites dreaded the thought of being involved with what they imagined as crime-ridden, defective inner-city schools.

Back then, Herenton attempted to defuse the consolidation issue by separating the schools from it, constructing his consolidation pitch around the maintenance of independence for both the city and the county school systems. Now he’s coming at the issue from the other end, professing a desire to consolidate the schools first and the rest of the two separate governments later.

To be sure, he has cut the base of resistance in half, but as was made obvious from the intensity of county school board members’ reaction, the suburbanites who doubted consolidation almost a decade ago when its chief specter was concealed are bound to be more adamant than ever now that the disguise is off.

Herenton, now in his third and presumably final term as mayor, is at an optimum time politically to make a new bid for consolidation. Considering how easily he won the most recent mayor’s race against several opponents (including one from the rival Ford political clan), the mayor might be inspired by the apparent determination of George W. Bush to push an agenda that his hairbreadth victory hardly gave the new president a mandate for.

If Herenton can pull off consolidation, or any important component of it, during his third term, that fact could become even more of a legacy than his being the city’s first African-American mayor.

Incontestably, the consolidation issue is Herenton’s baby.

Reserving Judgment

This week was the occasion (as our Web site, www.memphisflyer.com, was first to report) for a visit to Tennessee by President George W. Bush, whose intent was to focus attention on the details of his education plan, one which stresses educational testing and a series of incentives as a means of improving student performance.

Accordingly, the president selected the venue of Townsend Elementary School in Blount County. This is a school where low-income students and high recent test scores happen to intersect, and thus Bush thought it appropriate as a place to proclaim the gospel of his results-oriented approach.

We happened to favor the somewhat more expensive and conventional approach of Bush’s recent election opponent, former Vice President Al Gore, and we remain distrustful of all those polemicists who like to dump venom on the nation’s teachers’ unions, most of whom supported Gore over Bush. These organized teachers may constitute an entrenched lobby, as their critics claimed, but we remain convinced that their hearts are in the right place.

Even so, there is something to be said for “thinking out of the box,” as the current phrase has it. And Bush’s plan, to its credit, does not commit the sin, common to many “conservative” plans, of substituting rhetoric for bona fide fiscal supports. The administration is prepared to commit more funds than have heretofore been available to most school districts, and we have no knee-jerk opposition to the plan’s emphasis on maximizing local control or its application of the carrot-and-stick approach to matters of future funding and teacher rewards.

We are pleased, too, at intimations coming from Washington that the controversial “school voucher” component of the Bush plan has been dropped. We can only hope so. It is simply wrong, however well-intended, to take taxpayers’ money and route it out by whatever formula to private institutions, some of them highly sectarian.

On balance, we are prepared to reserve judgment on the Bush plan, a stance which is in part just good fatalistic sense. For, like it or not, the plan — or something like it — is on the way. And who knows? Maybe it will marry well with the educational reforms Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist is proposing.

Reserving Judgment II

Questions about the XFL are as plentiful today as they were when the gaudy new football league, co-owned by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation, first announced it would make Memphis one of its eight charter members. After three weeks, the TV ratings have settled down to the low expectations that the league itself had before getting the first week’s unexpectedly good viewer totals.

Memphis Maniax general manager Steve Ehrhart tried to stem the tide of bad press this week, issuing a press release proclaiming Memphis as the “number one” UPN market. He spun reporters at the team’s weekly press conference to the effect that things are better than the national media make them out to be, that the Memphis TV market in particular is doing better than expected, and that the two local games drew well, especially considering the weather.

The jury is still out on the Memphis Maniax and the Xtreme Football League. But the combination of NBC’s bucks and the WWF’s chutzpah could give the league real staying power — a la the old AFL and the current MSNBC, two similarly endowed hybrids. Here, too, we’ll reserve judgment.