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Editorial Opinion

TVA Wells

On Wednesday morning of this week, a meeting of true moment for Memphis-area residents was scheduled to be held in the county-government complex on Mullins Station Road in Shelby Farms. The purpose of the meeting, at the Construction Code Enforcement Office building, was for the Shelby County Water Quality Control Board to hear an appeal by Scott Banbury of the Sierra Club of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s intent to drill two wells into the Memphis Sand aquifer.

However the Board should rule on this, one of the two entities contending in the matter — either TVA or the members of the local environmentalist movement associated with Banbury — will be certain to appeal the finding. So the saga will continue until some kind of ultimate resolution is achieved.

That being the case, our point here is to regret that the ground rules for Wednesday’s hearing were unduly restrictive, in that the meeting, at TVA’s request, was not to be held under the Tennessee Administrative Procedures Act, which would have allowed the appellants the right of discovery and the ability to subpoena witnesses. Moreover, the appellants were denied in their request for a modest continuance so as to allow several of their pre-arranged expert witnesses to return from a professional meeting that was being held in Ecuador this week.

The circumstances of the hearing were thus not ideal for either a full presentation of facts nor a sense of what we see as a clearly mounting community sentiment questioning TVA’s intent to use water from the aquifer to cool its forthcoming natural-gas power plant. At issue is whether TVA’s plans are a) unnecessary in light of other available coolant possibilities and b) possibly hazardous to the aquifer’s supply of famously pure drinking water. 

Both matters go way beyond mere legalistic concerns and deserve the fullest possible even-handed public vetting. We trust that such will be allowed to take place.

 

The Recounts

While we have made our peace with the presidential-election results and don’t foresee any likelihood of overturning them, we find no harm in the ongoing efforts by the Green Party’s Jill Stein and others on behalf of official recounts in three key Midwestern states where the vote outcome was unusually close.

Given the anomaly of a relatively large popular-vote margin — 2.2 million and growing — for defeated candidate Hillary Clinton over electoral-vote winner Donald Trump, the need for the fullest possible accounting is both obvious and, as we see it, necessary to put to rest the ongoing doubts and recriminations. 

That President-elect Trump does not see things in that light and has resorted to ill-tempered and ad hominem tweets against the recount process is, we think, unfortunate and likely to further the sense of political divisiveness in the country. We can only hope that whoever it was in the Trump campaign that got temporary control of the candidate’s tweeting finger in the last stages of the presidential campaign can now prevail on the president-elect to cease and desist in his objections until the counting is over and done. That’s in his interest, too.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis Offers Sanctuary

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to settle in to his forthcoming status as leader of the free world, much of what he is signaling that he has in mind to do is proving unsettling to citizens in this or that locality, including our own. 

A case in point is Trump’s recent post-election reaffirmation of his intent to carry out a purge of undocumented immigrants residing within the nation’s boundaries. To be sure, Trump is now insisting that he isn’t targeting for deportation the entirety of an estimated 11 million persons in this category but only “2 or 3 million” who have committed crimes or otherwise proven themselves undesirable. But even that lesser number seems excessive and overstated as a gauge for the kind of extraordinary action the president-elect seems to have in mind.

Allow us, then, to commend Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who, like an increasing number of local-government officials in the United States, has in effect declared his opposition to such a Draconian over-reach by the federal government. Asked last week to respond to possible anti-immigrant actions by the soon-to-be Trump administration, Strickland gave the following forthright answer:

“The Memphis Police Department is not in the business of enforcing federal immigration policy, nor do we believe that is MPD’s function or mission. It’s not something that we do, and it’s not something we intend to do. Memphis is a welcoming city that values diversity and each and every one of our citizens. And it will continue to be that way.”  

Strickland was not the only representative of Memphis to affirm the city’s reputation as a place of welcome. At least two local college presidents — John Smarrelli of Christian Brothers University and William Troutt of Rhodes College — signed a public letter this week calling for support of the federal Deferred Action for Children Arrivals program, which protects students who were brought to this country by their parents from the prospect of deportation. President Obama authorized the program four years ago by executive action after the Republican-dominated Congress blocked the so-called Dream Act, designed to achieve the same purpose.

The students covered by the program could become vulnerable if Trump should act on a campaign pledge to revoke all of Obama’s executive actions by an executive action of his own.

We think that Obama and defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton struck the right note in calling for Americans to give the new Trump administration every possible benefit of the doubt, but where there is legitimate ground for genuine doubt as to the president-elect’s good intentions — as in the present case — the aforementioned local officials have also spoken wisely and well.

The ultimate irony of President-elect Trump’s threatened overkill on the immigration issue is that we are, as has so often been stated, a nation of immigrants (as have been two of Trump’s wives), and not only have the regular infusions of newcomers over the centuries enriched our national stock, but the whole process of their coming has given the United States its essential reputation to the rest of the world as a beacon of liberty and a place of welcome.

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News The Fly-By

Strapped

Dozens of staffers with Memphis-area colleges and universities are now fully free to pack heat on campus without anyone ever knowing.

State lawmakers gave full-time employees at state-run schools permission to carry a concealed handgun on campus this year with a bill Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam wouldn’t sign but allowed to become law. However, those employees had to have a state license and register with their school’s security office before they could secretly carry their sidearm to, say, teach class, clean the grounds, or type a memo.

Registration began at Tennessee schools right around July 1st. So far, the University of Memphis (U of M) said 36 staffers have registered to carry handguns on campus. At the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC), 22 have registered. Southwest Tennessee Community College (STCC) officials said 17 have registered to carry guns.

These figures are tiny fractions of the overall hundreds of employees working at these three schools. But all of the figures represent 100-percent more guns possible on the campuses from the year before.

None of the institutions offered comment on the number of gun-carry permits they’ve approved so far. However, a U of M spokesman said the university stood by its July statement on the issue.

“I don’t believe the presence of more weapons will make our campus safer,” U of M president David Rudd said before the policy was implemented. “The University of Memphis campuses have consistently been among the safest in the state, which is critical to student success. We believe our exemplary safety record is due in part to guns being prohibited with the exception of those carried by highly trained police officers.”

The bill was opposed by the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) and the University of Tennessee (UT) system. The two organizations now have to manage the gun-carry programs at the 46 institutions they oversee.

“Our police chiefs and public safety officers will face greater challenges when responding to emergency situations with the complexity this law adds to their responsibilities,” TBR interim Chancellor David Gregory said in May.

UT chancellor Joe DiPietro said, “I understand strong feelings exist regarding guns on campus and want to assure you of our unwavering commitment to the safety of our faculty, staff, and students as we implement this change.”

The law does come with a few stipulations, however. Handguns cannot be carried into stadiums, gymnasiums, or auditoriums while school-sanctioned events are in progress. They are not allowed in meetings about student or employee discipline matters or in meetings about faculty tenure.

At UTHSC, handguns cannot be carried into a hospital, student health or counseling center, or into an office that provides medical or mental health services.

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Editorial Opinion

It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

So, all right, what happened? Hillary Clinton was supposed to win. And we mean that word in its original sense — as a close cousin to the word “assumed.” Everybody so supposed — not just Democrats, but a substantial number of Republicans, as well, including Donald Trump himself, who in his day-after photo op with President Obama in the Oval Office, had that deer-in-the-headlights look that we associate with the rudest of shocks.

Let us posit this as a truism: If you’re the Democratic nominee running for President, you should not only use previous presidents of your party as surrogates on the stump, you should — very clearly and seriously — take their advice on strategy.

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, it got leaked about that her very husband, former President Bill Clinton, had advised strongly that she hit the rust-belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, et al. hard in the last days of the campaign, not only with her physical presence but with specific reference to the hardships of economic privation and depressed wages and job opportunities in those states and with even more specific remedies for those circumstances.

To their everlasting discredit, the powers-that-be in her campaign dismissed this advice — presumably as something old-fashioned and left over from Bill Clinton’s own former successes with those themes in those states.

Remember, “It’s the economy, stupid”?

Well, it was the economy, still. Nobody in charge seemed to remember that Secretary Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, defeated her in those states with those issues. Nobody in charge seemed to imagine that her Republican opponent could defeat her in the same states with the same issues. But he did.

Instead, the Clinton campaign seemed fixated on the concept of Donald Trump as misbehaver and sexual marauder and devoted her late TV advertising almost entirely to that idea — hoping, it would seem, that the suburban professional classes that the campaign was focused on instead would be affronted by evidence of Trump’s boorishness and could thereby be weaned away from their Republican voting habits.

As an example of just how amnesiac the Clinton campaign was, nobody seemed to recall that daily accusations of sexual impropriety, followed up with an actual impeachment, had failed utterly to dent the public popularity of the aforesaid President Bill Clinton in 1998. That was the year, post-Monica Lewinsky, when the Democrats went on, after all the GOP’s fuss and moralistic bluster, to run up numerous successes in the off-year congressional elections.

This was just one mistake by the Hillary Clinton campaign, but it was a fundamental one. Not all the largesse from big-money donors in the world (and her campaign got much of it, vastly more than Trump) could substitute for the kind of focus on working-class economic issues that has guided every victorious Democratic national campaign from FDR on. The section of the voting population that Mitt Romney so arrogantly called “the 47 percent” is still the source of Democratic victories.

There is no “Stronger Together” without this component. There is no Together at all.

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Editorial Opinion

Two Parties, Please

With so much attention focused on the overriding drama of the Clinton-Trump presidential race, relatively scant attention was paid in many quarters to developments on the Tennessee political scene. Though it was always highly unlikely — oh, let’s call it impossible — that the current Republican super-majority in the General Assembly would be appreciably modified, it was encouraging to see what remains of the seriously weakened Tennessee D

emocratic Party try to regather itself and make challenges in a goodly number of legislative races.

We say this not for the sake of any party allegiance but in homage to the largely forgone virtues of the two-party system. There was a time, not too many decades ago, when that principle was run up the flagpole and saluted by all Republicans running for office in Tennessee — everywhere, it should be said, except in large pockets of East Tennessee, where there was no need, since GOP loyalties had dominated there since the Civil War. But in the state at large, Republican loyalty was something of a novelty — literally so in the case of fiddlin’ Roy Acuff, the country music great from points east who became the token GOP gubernatorial nominee in 1948. But ol’ Roy’s Night Train to Memphis was, as everybody knew, destined to stall out somewhere well the other side of Nashville.

Times change, people change, and now it’s Democrats who are trying hard to beg a ride to the state capital. There are only three counties among the state’s 95 — Shelby (Memphis); Davidson (Nashville); and Hardeman (Bolivar) — where the party can be counted on to generate a consistent majority vote for its statewide and national candidates. There are 26 Democrats in the 99-member state House of Representatives; there are five Democrats in the 33-member state Senate.

There are numerous reasons why this state of affairs bodes ill for Tennesseans, even those who lean Republican. And they are the same reasons why exponents of the Tennessee Republican Party used to crow so hard for the existence of a two-party system back in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It is no accident that there were streaks of progressivism and reform in the state GOP of that time. One-party government had left serious dissidents nowhere else to go, and corruption, which would find its full embodiment in the regime of Democratic Governor Ray Blanton in the late 1970s, was a fact of life beyond ideology. 

Such circumstances as the arrogant primacy of the NRA in state-government affairs and the matter this past year of the now expelled Representative Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin), whose conduct exposed the long-standing toleration of predatory sexual conduct in the legislature, demonstrate that a serious challenge to the status quo of the current GOP super-majority is in order, and a regenerated Democratic Party could and should be part of the reform process.

In that context, it is encouraging to note the early signs of what would appear to be serious 2018 gubernatorial campaigns on the part of two notable Democrats, on the part of former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and another respected mover and shaker from that city, businessman Bill Freeman, who made a foray into Memphis just last week.

We say, have at it, guys! A little competition is in order.

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Editorial Opinion

Trump/Clinton: Chaos vs. Competence

So you want to be president, do you? Consider this: The two most popular presidents of the previous century were probably Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Ronald Reagan. Each possessed a fan base in the American electorate that was positively adoring, and both are still regarded as iconic leaders now, long after their service.

Yet for every day of their public lives as president, each was publicly vilified in the crudest and most disrespectful way. This is something worth remembering in these last days of the presidential race between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a campaign that has been contentious to the point of sordidness.

The fact is that, even given the customary no-holds-barred nature of a presidential race, this one has been unprecedentedly nasty, with charges raining back and forth: Trump promising to prosecute Clinton; Clinton proclaiming Trump unfit; and both forsaking even the traditional perfunctory handshake following their final debate encounters.

With only days left in the contest, most public attention has been fixed on the controversial decision by FBI Director James Comey to reopen the bureau’s previously closed investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server during her service as secretary of state. The two candidates and their parties have each revised their former positions on the general propriety (or impropriety) of Comey’s actions.

Clinton has acknowledged that her use of the private server was a mistake — though the unfortunate possibility that emails relating to her service as secretary ended up on a computer jointly used by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her disreputable, sext-happy husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, should not be allowed to color our attitudes overmuch.

Surprise! Clinton is not without flaws. She can be secretive, calculating, occasionally devious, and she has been, as her Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders insisted, too cozy with Wall Street and big money in general. On the plus side, her election would finally smash the “glass ceiling” that has hitherto denied women the office of president. She is sincerely devoted to the issues of diversity and equal opportunity, and her positions on economic justice and tax fairness are definitely to be preferred to the xenophobic fulminations and trickle-down platitudes of Trump.

It is far harder to find redeeming qualities in the Republican nominee — who has been repudiated by an astonishing number of respected members of his own party. His personal background is one of Hefner-esque misogyny, and even his supposed business success is largely a matter of illusion, built upon double-dealing and welshing on his obligations. 

Trump has looked the other way from Russian intervention in our political affairs and that nation’s internet hacking on his behalf. Worst of all, he is willfully ignorant on issues of domestic relevance and cavalier regarding our relations with other nations. About all that can be said for Trump is that he has tapped into a vein of public unrest and desire for change.

The Flyer traditionally does not endorse at election time, leaving such personal decisions to our readers. We would be remiss not to point out the essential nature of the choice at hand, which boils down to a long record of competence and experience versus a legacy of unrelenting narcissism and its resultant chaos.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis’ Big River Crossing is a Game-Changer

CREDIT: bigrivercrossing.com

bigrivercrossing.com

As is well known, the city of Memphis sprawls a good bit. In fact, we are used to hearing politicians contend that, area-wise, Memphis is larger than Chicago, although that claim has an apocryphal ring to anyone who has driven through the Windy City from north to south.

It is undeniable, though, that over the weekend an event occurred on the downtown side of Memphis that will both magnify its size and extend its borders enormously in the eyes of the outside world.

This was the event known as the Big River Crossing, a commemoration that occurred in tandem with the completion of the Main Street to Main Street project that now links downtown Memphis with downtown West Memphis — and does so via an innovative pedestrian/bicycle pathway extending all the way across a refurbished Harahan Bridge, heretofore used only by trains. At night, moreover, the bridge has the capacity to be visually spectacular, thanks to a lighting system that can shine in “architectural white” or, as it did on Saturday and Sunday nights, in dazzling rainbow colors.

This new addition to the city’s landscape is no serendipity. It is the result of years of visionary thinking and liberally applied elbow grease on the part of several local pioneers, who, in tandem with counterparts across the river in Arkansas, worked together to accomplish what, at first blush, had seemed a crazy idea, even to some of its most avid backers.

The father of this project is the distinguished trader/investor Charlie McVean, but he had help in designing it, funding it, and executing it from a host of others — notably the late Jim Young of Union Pacific Railroad in Little Rock, who overcame his industry’s bias against shared rail/pedestrian structures, and 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who went to bat for the project in Washington and ended up making it possible through the acquisition of a $15 million TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant that completed the necessary funding package.

The TIGER grant not only significantly underwrote the project (technically known as the Main Street to Main Street Multi-Modal Connector Project) but also made it possible for both of the bookend cities, Memphis and West Memphis, to undertake significant rehabilitation of their downtown cores. It is one of those rare circumstances from which environmentalists and urban-growth enthusiasts can both take heart.

And McVean and his collaborators aren’t resting on their laurels. They imagine further work on the adjoining Mississippi River levees that would result in a recreational artery extending all the way to New Orleans and to the creation of what would be, in McVean’s words, the world’s largest land park.

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Editorial Opinion

Tubby Smith: A Proven Leader

It seems entirely appropriate that, at a time when we are confronted with the need to choose a national leader, we should have fresh examples of leadership in our midst.

Such was the case Tuesday on the occasion of the regular

Tuesday luncheon of the Rotary Club of Memphis, when the speaking guest was one Tubby Smith, the new coach of the University of Memphis basketball team, at a time when his Tigers are on the very threshold of their 2017-18 season.

Smith gave a virtual seminar on the art of inspiring a constituency and winning its confidence. His first rhetorical move was artfulness itself, when he said that he made it a habit to be “always moving up” in his career changes. This, to say the least, gave a boost to his audience of Memphians, who are thoroughly used to hearing poor-mouthing about the city’s prospects from too many of their fellow townsfolk. The boost was all the higher, inasmuch as the speaker of those words was a celebrated, even legendary coach, a 1998 winner of the NCAA annual basketball tournament at the University of Kentucky who has taken five different teams to the NCAA tournament, and who, as recently as last year, while coaching Texas Tech, was voted college basketball Coach of the Year by the Sporting News.

Tubby Smith

As University of Memphis president David Rudd said in his introduction of the coach, Smith is a guaranteed future Hall of Famer.

After that good start, Smith went on to tell self-deprecating stories about his time as a high school football player. He explained that his position was “tailback,” a fact which he illustrated by claiming that, every time he tried to head out onto the field, his coach would call out, “Smith, get your tail back!”

That’s the kind of modesty, of course, which reinforces people’s sense that the speaker is so self-confident that he need not boast of himself. Not to overstate the case, but compare that to a certain presidential candidate whose campaign seems to consist entirely of braggadocio.

While we’re on that analogy, a further point of comparison: The candidate in question is notorious for winging it and not doing his homework on issues of the day. Tubby Smith made a case for planning and preparation as the necessary precursors of success and told the Rotarians how, from the time of his first coaching gig at Virginia Commonwealth University, he demanded of his players that they keep, maintain, and strictly observe a daily planner — both as athletes and in their daily lives, later on.

As Smith dilated further about his recruiting methods and his rituals, routines, and serious commitment to the Xs and Os of his craft, it became obvious that here was a man who not only knew what he was talking about, but had gone through a highly disciplined process to acquire that knowledge.

That, plus his becoming modesty, plus a record that speaks for itself were all things that make clear that Tubby Smith is a proven leader. Would that we could say the same thing about the politicians we have to choose from this election year.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1443

Chicken Issue

In case the cover wasn’t a dead giveaway, this is the Memphis Flyer’s “Chicken Issue,” with a cover package devoted to all kinds of fowl play.

So it’s probably appropriate — or maybe wildly inappropriate — to draw readers’ attention to a drama that unfolded on Jackson last week that demonstrates just how much this tasty bird means to people.

Sixty-year-old David Haslett was standing in the street when police arrived. He was still brandishing his knife, and covered in goop where he’d been sprayed with a fire extinguisher.

Haslett had stabbed Ibrahima Sene, a convenience-store employee, in the leg for allegedly selling him “bad chicken.”

Haslett, who demanded his chicken money back, was arrested. Sene was taken to the hospital in non-critical condition.

Verbatim

“By not helping out Donald Trump he’s practically supporting Hillary Clinton.” — defeated, often-deplorable former Tennessee Senator turned Donald Trump surrogate Stacey Campfield on the Tennessee governor’s refusal to support the Republican presidential candidate, who is leading in Tennessee.

Haslam may be expressing symptoms of a political phenomenon called “term-limititis.” Or conscience. Hard to tell.

Neverending Elvis

It’s spook season and time to check in on which dead celebrities made the most money this year.

Elvis is still hanging in there earning $27 million before taxes in 2015 so far. He’s in fourth place just below golf guru Arnold Palmer and just ahead of Prince. Michael Jackson’s reigning king of the dead, raking in upwards of $82 million, according to Forbes.

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News The Fly-By

TVA Wells, Old Neil’s Site, Bad Lawyer

TVA wells appealed

The TVA’s old Allen coal plant

The Sierra Club is appealing two permits issued from the Shelby County Health Department to the Tennessee Valley Authority that will allow them to drill into crystalline sand aquifers in order to syphon cooling water for a power plant currently under construction in Southwest Memphis.

TVA has filed five permits for five wells, three of which are no longer eligible for appeal. According to Tennessee chapter coordinator Scott Banbury, the power plant will need a minimum of four functional wells to draw in 3.5 million gallons daily of would-be Memphis drinking water. Should the last two permits be denied, TVA may be forced to explore alternative options.

In a letter to the Shelby County Groundwater Quality Control Board, the Sierra Club cited the board’s own regulations for its opposition.

“Water pumped by private and/or quasi-public water supplies for residential, commercial and industrial purposes shall be limited to reasonable use,” reads the regulation cited by the Sierra Club.

It’s now up to the health department to evaluate whether or not 3.5 million gallons of drinking water a day is a “reasonable use.”

Old Neil’s site transformed

A developer wants to transform the southwest corner of Madison and McLean into a brand-new, five-story apartment building.

A development group called Madison and McLean Partners was slated to ask a Downtown Memphis Commission board this week for an eight-year tax deal worth $474,820.

The $12.4 million project would include 108 apartments (four studios, 72 one-bedroom units, and 32 two-bedroom units), a fitness room, a common room, and bike parking. It would also include about 130 on-site parking spaces.

Proposed apartment building

The project would be built on the land once occupied by Neil’s, a favorite Midtown bar which burned to the ground in 2011. The development group also purchased the book-ending properties, now the sites of a banquet hall and Midtown Nursery. The group would demolish everything and build from the ground up.

If the deal is approved, construction could begin in August 2017, and the building would be completed by December 2018.

Former judge candidate disbarred

Venita Marie Martin

A Memphis attorney who ran for a circuit court judge seat in 2014 has been disbarred for, among other things, not showing up to court and not telling her clients she’d shuttered her law practice.

Venita Marie Martin’s law license was pulled last month by an order of the Tennessee Supreme Court. The action comes after the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility (TBPR), a branch of the Tennessee Supreme Court that oversees the state’s attorneys, reviewed seven complaints of misconduct against Martin.

Martin has a history of misconduct, according to the TBPR, going back to 2011. The board disbarred her this year because she failed to show up in court, failed to tell her clients she was closing her office and terminating her law practice, and more.

In 2014, Martin ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for Shelby County Circuit Court Judge, Division 8.