The regular session of the 2001 Tennessee General Assembly is now history,
in more senses than one. For the first time ever, a session of the legislature
went overtime, with no budget ready in time for the next fiscal year.

For the first time, also, the Assembly finally emerged with a
budget that everyone knows is only temporary (“stopgap” is the going
term) and will most likely need to be repaired in some kind of reconvening
later this year.

For the first time in memory, vital services are likely to be cut
rather than held even or expanded. And — almost certainly for the first time
since the Civil War — the process by which law was made in Tennessee was
directly influenced by a mass of aroused individuals standing watch over
proceedings and basically dictating the outcome.

Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that the crowd that
overwhelmed the Capitol grounds, laid siege to the building itself, and
essentially held the members of the state Senate and House hostage in their
chambers did not, so far as we know, possess weapons. But they smashed
windows, roughed up legislators, and kept up a torrent of abuse that
effectively prevented negotiators on both sides of the political spectrum from
reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Last week’s mob outburst may provide some explanation for why the
men and women whom Tennesseans elected to send to Nashville behaved so
fecklessly and fearfully for so long — wasting not only the six months of the
super-elongated 2001 legislative session but spending most of the previous two
years dodging the fiscal realities that Governor Don Sundquist and a few
legislative leaders in both parties have pleaded with them to deal with.

The problems remain, however. And they will worsen with time. The
basic reason why Tennessee is in the fix it is in, having to restrict services
— basic medical and educational ones among them — while trying to fend off
enormous deficits is that, as Sundquist and his advisers have said, time has
passed the state’s tax structure by.

No longer will the sales tax — a revenue device designed for the
retail-oriented 1920s — serve Tennessee’s purposes. Even during the recent
economic boom, the sales tax, though pegged to abnormally high levels, did not
generate enough revenue to enable the state, now dominated by a largely tax-
free service economy, to hold its own. Most legislators had the good sense to
resist the lure of another sales-tax increase.

A poll sponsored by the boosters of a proposed state income tax
seems to show that a majority of Tennesseans would welcome — and profit from
— a shift to an income tax as a basic revenue device. But, whether it
represented the feelings of a minority or not, the anti-income tax sentiment
which culminated in last week’s disturbances is quite real.

Faced with unpalatable choices, the legislature this year put off
the issue by looting the entire $560 million which was the state’s share of
national tobacco-settlement money. It was an act equivalent to raiding one’s
personal savings just to pay the rent.

We urge Governor Sundquist to veto the budget enacted last week
and, if overridden, to call the legislature back into special session and keep
it there until it decides, come what may, to deal with the specter of an
economically threatened future that will soon be upon us.

The Fourth of July, the great celebration of national self-assertion and independence which is the centerpiece of the current week for most of us, must have a wholly different feel this year to the members of the Tennessee General Assembly.

After all, the 132 men and women who have been elected to uphold the best interests of our state are obliged to go back to work in Nashville on the day after the holiday this year — in the full knowledge that they have upheld nothing of consequence, have failed to assert themselves significantly, and have done no justice whatsoever to the name of independent self-government. The Fourth of July was surely experienced as a reproach by the members of the 102nd General Assembly.

In half a year’s work so far — and with plenty of advance notice, given the fact that each of the last several regular and special legislative sessions had highlighted the problem — they have utterly failed to produce a budget — their Number One constitutional mandate — to pay for the basic needs and services of state government.

They have failed to do so because a majority of them clearly do not possess the sense to grasp the obvious or the guts to face up to it — or the sense of duty to their constituents to do either. All they could bring themselves to do before the end of the fiscal year was enact the most rudimentary stopgap budget, one that can last only a month or two before it must be supplanted by a real one. Hence, the unprecedented return to work in July.

One legislative veteran, Rep. Shelby Rhinehart of Spencer, went so far as to call this Legislature “dastardly” for its neglect of duty.

As things stand, the state will be short of necessary funding by as much as $800 million. Education, health services, and the state’s bond rating (which took a hit last year when the Assembly also ducked its obligations), are all at stake.

At least the Legislature has held back (so far) from imposing yet another sales tax increase, one that would bring this outmoded levy to the dimensions of a 10 percent tithe. Most members of the Assembly have come to understand that tax-free Internet sales, plus the drain of retail business to establishments across the border from Tennessee, have made the sales tax no option at all.

And even a patchwork budget employing ad hoc taxes here and there, plus use of tobacco-settlement funds and the state’s “rainy day” emergency account, has proved impossible to attain. The special interests that dominate these less-than-independent legislators have seen to that.

Some members of the General Assembly have performed responsibly, to be sure. Senators Bob Rochelle and Gene Elsea and Rep. Tommy Head have proposed a common-sense graduated income tax that would constitute real reform, pay for essential services, and save most Tennesseans considerable money. Our own Senator Jim Kyle, chair of the House-Senate conference committee, has done his best to move the Legislature to make sensible decisions. And Senator John Ford, in his firebrand way, has both proposed a feasible flat-tax alternative and challenged the Assembly’s leadership to resign if it cannot act responsibly.

Who could disagree? If this Legislature cannot face up to its duty, it will both bankrupt the state and dishonor the traditions of democracy.

One contest is now over — that between the adherents of building a new arena in Memphis for the soon-to-be-transplanted Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association and the opponents of such an arena (or at least of the public financing of it).

Through vigorous efforts on the part of Mayors Herenton and Rout and numerous influential private citizens, solutions were found to the most vexing issues raised by the opposition. What these came down to were doubts about tying the county’s property tax to the project via general obligation bonds and concerns about getting more private money into the arrangement.

Both objections were dealt with — the former by a decision to shift the local-government burden from G.O. bonds to revenue bonds, which do not directly involve the taxpayer, and the latter by pledges from local citizens, both members of the proposed ownership group and others, to pony up for season-ticket commitments and a share of the arena financing.

With that, the previously unknown Heidi Shafer, an ad hoc activist who had started vigorously promoting a petition drive to force a referendum on the subject of the arena, threw in the towel. As she noted, her reason for carrying on the fight no longer existed, and she wondered out loud about the switch to revenue bonds: Why wasn’t it done that way in the first place?

The answer to that, we suspect, lies in a phrase used — in a wholly different context — by Shelby County commissioner Walter Bailey, another arena opponent. “Bait and switch,” charged Bailey about the shift to revenue bonds, but his focus was on the local taxpayer, not the current Vancouver Grizzlies ownership and the NBA, who were the real foils in that maneuver. Whether intentionally or not, Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley and league officials were baited with general obligation bonds and switched over to the riskier (for them) revenue bonds once they had virtually set up camp in Memphis and it was difficult, if not virtually impossible, for them to turn back.

The fact is, the bait-and-switch aspects of the deal, improvisational and inadvertent as they no doubt were, proved to be indispensable to its completion. It is hard to imagine any other way in which the local opposition, which was beginning to be considerable, could have been stilled. In that sense, Shafer and her fellow grass-roots operatives were not losers but winners, in that they forced an arrangement far more advantageous to Memphis and Shelby County.

The same can be said of the indefatigable Bailey, who promised — once a commission vote to approve the arena project seemed certain — to do his best to make sure the whole thing “works out.” His way of doing that, most recently, was to keep bearing down on the local donors who have promised financial input to make sure they follow through. With that kind of hard-nosed watchdog on our case, who among us would not do just as he had promised?

The Baileys and Shafers and other skeptics are a large part of the reason we can all celebrate the outcome. We think the city and county have come out ahead, and we look forward to the Grizzlies’ first games here this fall at The Pyramid and the beginning of a new season in which all of us are finally on the same side.

In many ways, Mayors Rout and Herenton and other city and county officials — as well as members of the private sector — have worked wonders in honing the pending deal with the NBA and the ownership of the Vancouver Grizzlies to build a new arena and bring the franchise here.

The proposed “Memorandum of Agreement” (MOA) unveiled before the city council and county commission on Monday is reassuring in numerous particulars — notably in its promise of new private moneys for arena construction and in its provision of safeguards against an untimely departure by the team.

So far, so good. Have we got a deal? Not yet, in our opinion. Some key members of the Shelby County Commission, which will follow the council’s vote this week with one of their own next week, have raised some concerns that we, too, are troubled by.

Most notable is the clause of the agreement titled “Competition,” whereby “HOOPS” (the ad hoc designation for a reconstituted Grizzlies management, including its proposed local part-owners) is given, in effect, veto power over the acts and events that could appear in other local venues such as The Pyramid and the Mid-South Coliseum. HOOPS would have to give its written consent before these and other publicly built facilities could book any attractions that might “compete” with the new arena. Further, HOOPS would maintain the right to match any pending offer on behalf of the new facility.

In one of the more uncertain passages of an otherwise eloquent pitch for the MOA, Shelby County mayor Jim Rout told the county commission it is understandable that the Grizzlies ownership would want to shore up its situation since it would be responsible for operating losses at the new arena. But, as Rout also noted, there is still some room for negotiation on that score.

We should hope so. In fact, we would insist on altering that segment of the agreement — which amounts as of now to an unconscionable restraint of trade, one that could be enormously damaging to facilities that have served us well and that represent so much previous long-term commitment by local taxpayers.

And that consideration gives rise to a larger thought: If and when the arena gets built, Memphis will find itself faced with a veritable garage sale of used sports and entertainment facilities — the Coliseum, The Pyramid, Tim McCarver Stadium, the Mid-South Fairgrounds, and Crump Stadium. Not to mention Mud Island Amphitheater.

What we need — as an addendum to the MOA, if necessary — is a commitment in writing from the mayors and the movers and shakers of HOOPS to rally around the cause of doing something about this detritus — knocking some down, replacing some, selling some off if possible. The guiding principle should be a public-private partnership for participant sports facilities in the mode of the Mike Rose Soccer Complex and Southaven’s baseball fields and various tennis centers.

One of the attractions of the Grizzlies deal is that it promises to provide genuine and lasting revitalization of the downtown area. But that should not come at the expense of the rest of the metropolitan area, especially at a time when so many of our city youth have poor sports facilities or none at all.

The NBA package still requires amendment, and we trust the county commission will see to it. For it to truly be a deal we can live with, it should be the first step toward a wholesale revitalization of the whole community.

According to scripture, one of humankind’s first tasks was to name the animals. Our species has done a far better job at that than in coming up with proper political classifications.

Consider that the oppressive government of North Korea still masquerades as a “democratic republic,” when no practice or administrative structure of that government can remotely be said to deserve either part of the title.

In our own country there are some verbal anomalies as well. To be sure, our two major political parties have evolved names for themselves which, in a rough sense, define the difference between them. The Democrats, true to their name, aim their appeal at the broad masses, while the Republicans evoke more distinctly the idea of a representative (as against a participatory) democracy.

But every now and then an officeholder finds himself in the wrong party and goes through a changeover. Some years back, for example, Richard Shelby, a senator from Alabama, judged correctly that his political positions were far too conservative for him to remain a Democrat. He changed.

And now, in a switch that will have far more profound consequences, Vermont’s Senator Jim Jeffords has publicly renounced his Republican affiliation — ancestral as much as anything else — and declared himself an “independent.” More to the point, he has promised to vote with the Senate’s Democrats on organizational questions — as he already does on most ideological ones.

Jeffords’ decision has brought upon him more of the kind of abuse from the Bush administration and GOP party elders that hastened his departure in the first place. The switch comes after the ill-advised tax cut which has just passed the Congress but in time to have major influence on such weighty matters as judicial appointments and environmental legislation. Most important of all, it gives the Democrats control of the Senate’s parliamentary apparatus and committee chairmanships.

What it will end up doing — especially if other Republican moderates such as Arizona’s John McCain follow suit — is restore a broken promise of the 2000 presidential election, in which George W. Bush (whose ultimate victory was, to say the least, technical) ran as a centrist and “compassionate conservative.” Since his accession to the presidency with a minority of the popular vote, Bush has governed instead from the extreme right, with a minimum of consideration for the rest of the spectrum. In his public leave-taking, Jeffords said as much.

Good for him. In the long run, he may end up a Democrat. In the short run, “independent” sounds just about right. In that same vein, “centrist” is utterly and absolutely wrong for Bush, who so far has been an unblinking servant of the party’s extreme right wing.

Dutch Treat

Our congratulations to the men and women of Memphis in May, who put on a number of first-class events this year — the stellar Beale Street Music Fest (which drew record crowds), the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and the Great Southern Food Festival among them.

The weather cooperated beautifully and everything seemed to go off without a hitch. The MIM organization seems to have risen above its troubles of a couple of years back and soared to new heights. Kudos to Jim Holt, Diane Hampton, and the hundreds of others who made Memphis in May a triumph this year.

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.