Category: Editorial

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.

It was expected that Tom Moss, who was appointed Shelby County Commissioner
last fall, would try to get himself assimilated as a member in good standing
of the commission’s seven-member GOP majority. After all, nominal Republican
Moss had defeated mainstream Republican David Lillard and was named to his
post basically by a Democrat-dominated coalition (the same coalition that
boosted lodge brother Shep Wilbun into the vacant Juvenile Court clerkship).
Moss, along with veteran Republican Clair VanderSchaaf (who voted with the
Democrats both times), was supposed to be dog meat for righteously vengeful
Republicans to gnaw on at re-election time in 2002.

So now builder Moss, whose ascension to the commission may have
been more a developers’ coup than anything expressly political, has tried to
accommodate himself to his fellow Republicans.

But things have become almost surreal: There was Moss after
Monday’s commission meeting complaining, “I don’t think we’re a solid enough
bloc. I don’t think we’re exacting enough in return for what we give up.” We?
Why, the Republican majority, of course!

“For example, we should have demanded a quid pro quo from the
Democrats when Bridget [Chisholm] came on,” Moss continued, referring to the
young African-American woman, hitherto a political unknown like himself who
was elected to the commission to replace Wilbun.

In other words, Tom Moss — who achieved office under the cloud
of Democratic sponsorship — has now become the most zealous of GOP partisans:
No more deals with the Democrats unless something of solid value to the
Republican coalition comes from it! It’s really quite remarkable, this
turnaround saga of Moss the hardnose.

Though there are those who maintain that Chisholm is in the same
developers’ camp as Moss, she herself boasts state Senator John Ford and U.S.
Rep. Harold Ford Jr. as her chief supporters. In a key vote Monday on a
Southeast Shelby County development resisted by its projected residential
neighbors, Chisholm voted one way (against), Moss voted another (for), and
VanderSchaaf voted yet a third way, proposing an amendment that would have
split the difference.

The project deadlocked at six to six and thereby died, although
it can — and probably will — be brought up for consideration again. But the
interesting fact about the vote was that none of the three supposed New Bloc
members were together on the deal.

It may be easier than one would have thought for Tom Moss to take
on protective coloration he’ll need for next year’s election season. At last
Saturday’s annual Shelby County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner at the Adam’s
Mark, Moss was observed having a chummy conversation with Chris Norris, the
ex-commissioner’s wife and a bedrock Republican in her own right.

That was followed by an even chummier conversation with county
GOP chairman Alan Crone, who was overheard asking the new commissioner out to
lunch.

The upshot of all this? Perhaps nothing more than a modification
of the old saw that “politics makes strange bedfellows.” Sudden ones, too, we
could add. Or maybe the point is that partisanship is a substance which these
days is thicker than blood or water.

Few issues have divided sentiment on the Memphis City Council and
the Shelby County Commission more than that of the proposed leasing of
the Pyramid to Bass Pro Shop. In general, officials of the city, which
shares ownership rights to the building with the county and owns

outright the surrounding property, tend to see Bass Pro as the only
extant suitor for the facility, which city and county taxpayers are
still paying for and which continues to soak up stout maintenance costs
even while standing idle. The building’s potential uses are strictly
limited by a contract with the NBA’s Grizzlies that grants first dibs
to the FedExForum for all athletic and entertainment activities.

The prime movers for the turnover of the dormant facility to the
giant outdoors-oriented chain have always been city-side, with Robert
Lipscomb, a longtime ally of Mayor Willie Herenton and the head of the
city’s arena reuse committee, leading the charge. Even on the
commission, where several proposed agreements relating to Bass Pro
(including the sale of the county’s ownership share to the city) were
consistently blocked until this week, the main proponent for an
understanding favorable to the chain has consistently and vociferously
been Sidney Chism, another Herenton intimate.

Shelby County mayor A C Wharton has, however, also been on board for
an agreement with Bass Pro. The main county opposition has come from a
de facto caucus of commissioners who transcend the normal partisan
dividing lines. The opponents of a deal have nursed, together or
singly, a variety of objections — that a city landmark should not
be assigned to what some have called a glorified “bait shop”; that Bass
Pro has offered insufficient financial safeguards and vague development
proposals; and — something that has been spoken to only obliquely
in discussions on the commission — that the deal does not pass
“the smell test,” that somehow the “fix was in” on arrangements with
Bass Pro.

As it happened, the two commissioners who uttered those last two
caveats were on the prevailing side of the 9-3 commission vote Monday
that finally authorized Bass Pro to pursue a development deal with the
city and county. And that’s as good a sign as any that progress (if
that’s the right word) has been made more out of fatigue and
exasperation over the years of wrangling than because of anybody’s
belief that anything is likely to come to fruition. Indeed,
commissioners on both sides of Monday’s vote were predicting afterward
that a combination of a bad economy and Bass Pro’s foot-dragging
attitude made consummation of a completed development unlikely.

In any case, it’s now up to Bass Pro — which is obligated to a
$35,000 monthly rental during the next year (and very little else)
— to put up or shut up. Its critics have accused the chain of
dilatory tactics in negotiations with other cities and with floating
sham proposals for the sake of brand advertising. There is an easy way
to counter that contention now that official resistance on the part of
local government is no more. All the chain has to do, having been
granted a year for “feasibility” studies, is put something real on the
table. If, 12 months from now, Bass Pro hasn’t done so, that should be
the end of it, and the city and county will just have to start over in
looking for a tenant.