Author: Mary Cashiola

News

The Case of the Missing MATA Board Members

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date November 1, 2010

Officially, MATA has a nine-member board.

But its most recent meeting, on October 25th, was the first time in four years — at least — that even seven commissioners were at the table.

Looking back at data from 2006 to October of this year, the board has never included more than seven commissioners in recent history.

MATA spokesperson Alison Burton says the board changed to from a seven-member board to a nine-member board by city ordinance in August 2000. But in her more than two decade tenure with the transit authority, she says she can’t remember a time when it had more than seven board members. (In fact, she says she always writes that it’s a seven-member board.)

Of course, it’s had fewer than seven members much of the time.

In 2007, board member Dick Walker passed away after the second meeting of the year and was never replaced, leaving the number of commissioners at six.

Vicki Cloud then resigned in 2007.

Both Marion McClendon and Reo Pruitt were appointed in February 2008, but Pruitt resigned two months later. No one was appointed to take his place.

Ray Holt then resigned at the beginning of 2009, and with no one being appointed to take his place, either.

But Cliffie Pugh, whose term ended this September, hadn’t attended a meeting since April 2009.

Call it the case of the missing MATA board members (or one of those complicated word problems you see on the math portions of state tests).

With Pugh’s long absence and the resignation of Holt, the MATA board dwindled to only four effective members for much of 2009.

Maybe it’s a result of “out of sight, out of mind.” MATA’s headquarters are on Watkins, north of Chelsea, and built on an old landfill. Maybe no one wants to be on the MATA board. But I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t more evidence of a general negligence coming from city government at the time.

~~After Memphis mayor A C Wharton was elected, he appointed former City Councilman John Vergos to the board.~~ After interim Mayor Myron Lowery appointed former City Councilman John Vergos, mayor A C Wharton appointed The New Teacher Project staffer Sheila Redick and Memphis Regional Design Center head Chooch Pickard, and there are still two open spots.

MATA’s board and staff are scheduled to have a retreat later this week.

News

The Big Short

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 28, 2010

I’m one of those people fascinated by the mortgage/foreclosure crisis: how it happened, how it was allowed to happen, the resulting effect on Americans and their communities …

So I’ve recommended Michael Lewis’ The Big Short to a lot of people. Lewis is one of these talented writers who can take a sprawling, complicated issue and make it easily digestable. In this case, he focuses on the six or so people who saw the bottom coming and bet against the American mortgage machine. By doing so, he encapsulates exactly what was going on and how things were slipping through the cracks.

Fresh Air’s Terry Gross also focused on the “complex foreclosure mess” last night with New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson.

One of the things that both Morgenson and Lewis talk about is how a bunch of risky loans would be pooled together — and because that seemed to equal a diverse portfolio — it would be given a better rating.

From Fresh Air:

“Thousands of them would go into one security, like say 10,000 mortgages, from a variety of places. They were trying to achieve diversification in these pools so as to diminish the risks associated with them.

And so you would have varying economic ability to repay in the loans. You would have very high-grade loans, you would have subprime loans, you would have a variety of loans from different geographic areas. And so this would, you know, it was hoped, be put into a security that would perform well over time and, you know, where people would repay the mortgages. And at the end of the line, the owner of the securities, and there were many of them because they were sliced up into varying risk degrees, okay. But in case, the idea was that everyone pretty much would get repaid at the end of the line.

Well, what was happening that many people did not recognize was that the types of loans were poisonous, toxic as you describe them, made to people who could not repay them, carried interest rates that would ratchet up dramatically after a few years, thereby making certain that they couldn’t be repaid.”

Lewis goes even further, talking about how loans were made to people who had very little credit history (thin credit files). Say, recent immigrants to the country. Because they had no previous credit history, it was easy to manipulate a high credit score. These loans would then be used to help achieve a certain average credit score in the pool of mortgages, making them appear to be less risky.

So if you’re interested, both Lewis’ book and Gross’ interview are worth a look.

News The Fly-By

Routed in Change

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 28, 2010

MATA is asking for directions.

As part of the upcoming short-range transit plan, the local transportation agency plans to ask community members what “direction MATA should go in the next five years,” said MATA head Will Hudson.

The $300,000 transportation study will look at routing structure, including the possibility of a grid system, as well as system’s coverage and funding.

On November 9th, MATA staff and board members will hear from two consulting firms, Perteet, Inc., out of Washington state and San Francisco’s Nelson\Nygaard. The board is expected to approve the selected consulting firm at its November 22nd meeting.

At the October board meeting last week, Hudson said the future was not bright for MATA, and he didn’t know how they would survive the next three to five years.

“We talk about this every day,” he said. “How are we going to survive this downturn in the economy?”

MATA is currently projecting a $4.5 million deficit for the year. Hudson said that without a change to the revenue stream, they would have to consider another service reduction.

Board members are eager to see what the study will recommend.

“I’m not on the board to deal with fleet shampoo. I think routes are the most important thing MATA can do,” said board member John Vergos. “We’ve got to increase revenue. I don’t know how we’re going to do that without increasing ridership.”

Board member Chooch Pickard agreed.

“There’s a huge untapped population we are not serving: People who have money and don’t have to ride MATA but choose to,” Pickard said. “I think we can take advantage of the fact that we are in a down economy.”

News The Fly-By

New Math

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 28, 2010

In late 2005, I tromped out to a mushy field decorated with blue and gold balloons for the groundbreaking of the new Manassas High School.

Construction was questionable, even at the time. Memphis City Schools (MCS) had approved $40 million to rebuild Manassas and Douglass High School, two historic schools in North Memphis.

The year before, still housed in the 1936 building, Manassas had 358 students enrolled, and the school being built was going to be able to accommodate 800.

But the school had a past as the city’s first accredited four-year high school for African Americans, as well as dedicated, and notable, alumni such as Isaac Hayes and former school board commissioner Sara Lewis.

“We’re bringing the old with the new, so it won’t feel like a brand-new building,” then Superintendent Carol Johnson said at the time. “It will feel like coming home.”

Now, the history lesson has become a math problem. And a somewhat complex one, at that. The administration is looking at what it’s calling “right-sizing” the district and closing the quarter of its schools that are underutilized.

“We want to be good stewards of our public dollars,” says Hitesh Haria, deputy superintendent of business operations at MCS. “We want to utilize the resources we have and focus them on priorities as we move forward and get student achievement where we want it.”

The district plans to meet with business leaders, city officials, and local nonprofits early next month to determine the criteria for the closures. MCS officials cannot reiterate enough that they have not yet compiled a list of possible school closures.

“We want the community to help us,” Haria says. “At the end of the day, we’re trying to educate kids. We want what’s in their best interest.”

Haria suggests they’ll look at factors other than enrollment — academic performance, utilization of the buildings, among others — but there are certain efficiencies of scale with buildings at capacity.

“If we lose students that go to a school, we still have to heat and cool the entire building,” Haria says. “There are fixed costs.”

If they weren’t virtually brand-new, Manassas and Douglass would seem to be good candidates for closure. Data from the 2009 Tennessee state report card puts Manassas’ enrollment at 569.

(In a somewhat telling, though unsurprising, anecdote, district staff were unable to pull current high school enrollment and capacity numbers by press time.)

Northside High is less than two miles from Manassas and has 672 students. Douglass High, which reopened in 2008, is five miles from Manassas and four miles from Northside. It has 325 students. All told, there are only 1,500 students between the three schools.

The average high school in the system has a capacity around 1,000, though ones in the eastern part of the city accommodate closer to 1,500 students.

“There’s been a geographical shift to where people live,” Haria says. “Unfortunately, we can’t just lift the buildings and move them.”

Just using high schools as an indicator of the student population, it seems many of the district’s schools in the urban core and western parts of the city, such as Booker T. Washington or Westwood, are ripe for closure.

Booker T. Washington, located on South Lauderdale, has around 600 students and a capacity of 800. Cleaborn Homes is literally across the street from the school, but when it comes in December to make way for a new Hope VI development, how many students will be left at the high school?

Westwood, the district’s southwest-most high school, has only 434 students.

Overall, the district can serve at least 31,000 high school students, but the total number of students currently attending classes is closer to 28,300. Taking geography out of the equation, that gap is large enough to close two of the medium-sized schools — say, a Melrose and an East — or several smaller ones.

But closing schools, even ones vastly underutilized, is a complicated business. Closing a school is seen as cutting the heart out of the community, and residents — even ones who themselves have left the community — will turn out in droves to make sure it doesn’t happen.

While the district says it will probably look at academic performance as well as enrollment numbers, the truth is that those factors are linked.

According to the state report card, Manassas has a graduation rate of 55 percent. Booker T. Washington has a 60 percent graduation rate. Westwood also has a 60 percent graduation rate.

It’s not surprising that schools with high graduation rates have higher enrollments. Central, by definition a school in the urban core, has more students enrolled than it was built for and a graduation rate of 84 percent. (The overall graduation rate systemwide was 62 percent in 2009.)

Whitehaven is located in the south central part of the city and has 2,000 students and a graduation rate of 81 percent.

Community meetings will begin in early November and the board will make a final decision next February.

“We implore the community to come out and give us feedback,” Haria says. “This is something that impacts an entire community. These are really sensitive issues. We don’t take that lightly.”

To read more about this and other topics, visit Mary Cashiola’s In the Bluff blog at memphisflyer.com/blogs/InTheBluff

News

Neighborhood Preservation

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 26, 2010

Regular readers of this blog or my column know we’re interested in blight over here.

Seems Mayor A C Wharton is interested, too.

Wharton filed 135 lawsuits against the owners of blighted property this morning as part of the Neighborhood Preservation Act.

The properties are spread across the city, but many are clustered together. Five are located on Forrest Avenue, for instance, while another five are on North Hollywood and another five are on Grenadier Cove in Frayser. (Another five are on nearby Elbert in Frayser.)

News

Intermodal Change

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 26, 2010

MATA’s intermodal terminal, currently about 60 percent done and scheduled for completion next May, is already a million dollars over budget, and that figure is climbing.

MATA staff have already processed $959,997 in change orders for the original $9.62 million intermodal project, $750,000 of it stemming from a problem with the building’s original design. Procurement policies say that staff can do change orders up to 10 percent of the contract amount.

Because the transit authority estimates an additional $650,000 in costs related to the design problem, the MATA board had to approve changing Zellner Construction Services’ contract to reflect a cost of $11.48 million for the facility.

MATA is seeking reimbursement of all the construction-related costs — roughly $1.4 million — through the architect’s errors and omissions insurance.

In other news, MATA board members and staff will participate in a retreat early next month. As part of the retreat, they’ve challenged themselves to ride MATA to the retreat facility.

Film Features Film/TV

Bad Education

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 21, 2010

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) obviously likes to galvanize people around a crisis.

In his latest film, Waiting for “Superman”, Guggenheim turns to education, presenting a compelling and fascinating study of the ways America’s public schools are failing their students.

Inspired in part by the three public schools Guggenheim drives past every morning while taking his own kids to private school, Waiting for “Superman” delves into the “crisis of public education” through the eyes of five students and their families as they search for better alternatives to their neighborhood schools.

Since 1971, the amount of money spent on each student in this country has doubled, but test scores have stayed roughly the same. U.S. students have continued to fall behind their peers in other developed countries, especially in science and math, and the current generation will be less literate than the one before it.

Waiting for “Superman” argues that the school a student is districted to determines his or her destiny and that going to a public school is often tantamount to a losing ticket in the lottery.

With interviews from those on the leading edge of national education reform, the film takes a critical look at problems seemingly hardwired into the American educational system: tenure guidelines that don’t allow school systems to fire bad teachers, encouraging principals to shuffle those teachers from school to school with each new year; dividing students into three “tracks” for professional, clerical, or manual-labor careers, even though a majority of U.S. jobs now require a college degree; so-called drop-out factories where the majority of the students never graduate and aren’t expected to.

The film takes a broad, unflinching view of public education, even positing that failing schools create failing neighborhoods. If you have 40,000 students drop out in the 40-year lifespan of a high school, as one principal in California noted, what does that do to the community in which they live?

The somewhat unfortunate title of the film comes from the realization by Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone, that there is no Superman waiting in the wings to save us. To increase college graduation rates in the area, his organization shepherds children from before birth to college with the mantra “whatever it takes.”

The film’s other flaw is its heavy-handed pro-charter-school stance. With select charter schools one of the few bright spots in student test scores and achievement in the past decade, it’s probably to be expected. The problem is — shown clearly and heartbreakingly in the film — that’s great for children who are lucky enough to get into one of those schools. What about the students who don’t?

Opening Friday, October 22nd

Ridgeway Four

News The Fly-By

Quick Take

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date October 21, 2010

“Which monkey do you want to be?”

Scientist and health blogger Rhonda Perciavalle is onstage at Playhouse on the Square, speed-talking her way through a five-minute presentation on how lifestyle can impact a person’s genetics.

The slide behind her shows two monkeys, both the same age. The one on the left, fed a typical diet, looks sickly and balding. The one on the right, hypothetically underfed, has a lush mane and looks years younger.

The answer is clear. Until maybe right around dinnertime.

Perciavalle was one of 15 presenters at the inaugural Ignite Memphis last week. With 20 slides and five minutes to tell their stories, the presenters were urged to enlighten or entertain the 200-person audience but to “make it quick.”

Presentations ranged from I Memphis blogger Kerry Crawford-Trisler telling the audience how to make an “I like you, but …” mix tape to Computable Genomix CEO Brad Silver talking about the future of personalized medicine.

Mark Hackett from Operation Broken Silence had me thinking seriously about the world’s water supply. And Perciavalle had me searching for a multi-vitamin.

Already, the event’s organizers are planning to do a second Ignite in the spring.

“When you look at entrepreneurial hotbeds and, even more generally, cities of choice, they run these programs,” says LaunchMemphis’ Eric Mathews. “We wanted to bring something new to Memphis.”

Ignite began in Seattle in late 2006 with a popsicle-stick bridge-building competition and 25 locals giving five-minute talks. Sine then, Ignite nights have been held in 100 cities worldwide. Online videos of the presentations — such as one from 2007 on how to buy a new car without getting screwed — have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

LaunchMemphis has been thinking about doing an Ignite night for a few years and recently partnered with MemphisConnect to organize the event.

“This was an absolutely perfect opportunity to highlight what a truly remarkable, innovative city we have,” MemphisConnect’s Elizabeh Lemmonds says. “We wanted a broad spectrum of topics but also things that might not be told elsewhere.”

Would-be presenters submitted applications, and a small committee chose them based on some loose criteria. Organizers also reached out to people they thought could give interesting talks.

“It is possible that a presenter won’t live up to the application, and the presentation is a flop,” Mathews says. “Thankfully, a crap presentation will only last five minutes — enough time to grab a beer.”

(Global Ignite suggests local organizers pick a space that, first, has a bar. A stage with lighting and sound equipment is second on the list.)

Consultant Cardell Orrin presented “Confessions of a Reformed Non-Voter,” about why people don’t vote and why they should.

“I thought the other presentations were good,” he says. “They went from straight serious to straight fun to in-between. I think the format lends itself to that.”

Web designer Zach Whitten talked about technology singularity, or “the nerd rapture,” and quite possibly coined the term Jesi for the plural of Jesus.

“It’s always fun to get up in front of a group of people and rant,” he says.

Even so, Whitten did several run-throughs of his presentation the night before.

“I love the format. People think it’s so simple: I’ll just get up there with 20 slides and just riff on it,” Whitten says. “You have a slide advancing every 15 seconds. It takes a lot of practice and concentration.”

Orrin says the format was more difficult than he thought it would be before he started preparing his presentation.

“I was never concerned about talking for five minutes. That goes by quick,” he says, “but how do you drill down what you have to say to 20 slides, 15 seconds each?

“I had said all I had to say in five minutes, but I was only on slide 12.”

It turns out five minutes is enough. It’s easily accessible for those in the audience and, with 15 presenters, the program takes about the same amount of time as a movie. For presenters, having to edit to five minutes means hitting the most important ideas.

But more importantly, creativity grows with collaboration. Having a space to share ideas, even ideas about Internet space Jesi, seems an important element to propelling Memphis and the city’s cultural life forward.

And maybe that starts with a single spark. That or a picture of some aging monkeys.

To view presentations from Ignite Memphis One, visit http://ignitememphis.com/igniteone.htm. LaunchMemphis’ next event, held in conjunction with the Memphis Music Foundation and the Music Resource Center, will be the 48 Hour Music Launch starting November 12th.

To read more about this and other topics, visit Mary Cashiola’s In the Bluff blog at memphisflyer.com/blogs/

InTheBluff.