An attempt by the administration of Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris to withdraw the the sale of two tax-defaulted properties from a committee agenda having been foiled by a commissioner’s protest on Wednesday, the Shelby County Commission is set for an up-or-down vote on the item at its public meeting on Monday.
The import of the vote is that the two properties, both now technically owned by the county, lie squarely within the South Memphis area targeted for construction of the proposed Byhalia Connection oil pipeline.
Volatility is expected from both opponents and proponents of the pipeline at Monday’s meeting.
A moratorium on a sale of the two properties was imposed by the Commission in October at the request of Commissioner Reginald Milton, who now chairs the Commission’s Delinquent Tax committee, the only Commission committee whose votes by state law are not open to all members of Commission as a committee of the whole.
The committee’s four members are Milton, Amber Mills, Willie Brooks, and Mick Wright. Milton and Brooks are Democrats, and Mills and Wright are Republicans. On Wednesday, only Milton and Mills were present, and Mills — on behalf, she said, of fellow Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr., whose district overlaps with the area of the two properties in question — objected to withdrawing the item from the agenda.
The votes of Milton and Mills regarding her objection canceled each other out, resulting in a resolution to sell the two properties moving, without a recommendation for or against, onto the Commission’s Monday agenda for a vote by the full Commission body.
As of now, the sale price of the properties is expected to be $11,363.00, the amount of the unpaid tax liability.
A companion item on Monday’s agenda, also to be voted on by the full Commission, would eliminate the moratorium on sale of the properties.
Such a sale, presumably to Valero Energy Corporation and Plains All American Pipeline, who intend to build the Byhalia Connection pipeline, is sure to be stoutly resisted by pipeline opponents, who see the proposed structure as detrimental to low-income Blacks in the affected area and as an environmental hazard to the underlying Memphis sand aquifer, source of the Memphis area’s drinking water.
