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Opinion The Last Word

We Are Not Great Again

Okay, America, are we great again yet? Are we respected throughout the world? Are the Chinese quaking in their boots as we hike tariffs? Has Saudi Arabia come clean about murdering a Washington Post columnist after covering up the atrocity so clumsily that you could almost see blood dripping from the hands of the crown prince?

If America is great again, how come we grovel before a nation that needs us more than we need it? Tweet me an answer, Mr. President. But keep it short.

Has America reversed global warming by simply denying it? Are factory jobs up? How about iron and steel? The same. And coal mining — “beautiful, clean coal” in the hallucinatory words of the president? Not what it once was.

Gints Ivuskans | Dreamstime.com

President Trump

Is NATO stronger? Does America enjoy moral leadership? Would our allies rush to our aid, as they did after September 11, 2001? President George W. Bush’s grand “coalition of the willing” might be impossible to reassemble. President Trump has managed to unite Western Europe in one respect. All its leaders loathe him.

The president, like Gulliver, is being tied down by numerous investigations. The explanation is apparent even to Republicans. Trump is an immoral man, a chiseler and a liar and a deadbeat and a damned fool. His eccentric collection of aides are tiptoeing off the stage one by one, some to jail, some to ignominy, none to glory. And then, when they are gone, comes verbal abuse, sometimes in retaliation for a tardy admission of truth. Rex Tillerson said Trump does not read up to grade. For that, he got spitballed. “Dumb as a rock,” the president opined.

The mess is getting messier. Trump lies himself into one corner after another. Is there anyone in all of America who does not believe that Trump paid off two women for their silence? Whether these alleged payments were campaign finance violations or not is almost beside the point. We know the story. Trump is dirty and uses cash as a disinfectant. He thinks it can make any manner of sin go away. Maybe not this time, Mr. President. As with your former Atlantic City casino, you overpaid.

But blaming Donald Trump for behaving like Donald Trump is like blaming a scorpion for acting like a scorpion. The lie is his sting. He cannot help himself. He thinks only of himself because narcissism, like a sixth toe, is a condition of birth. There is no changing it. In the Trump White House, the president’s intense love of himself is about the only consistent policy.

But what about you, Chris Christie? I am talking of course of the former New Jersey governor who jumped from presidential candidate to Trump acolyte. Are you proud of what you did? Didn’t you see any of this coming? Didn’t you talk to any bankers or real estate people from just across the Hudson River? They wouldn’t do business with Trump. They don’t trust him. You knew all this but wanted a cabinet position anyway. What is the word for what you’ve done? It’s something like moral treason.

And you, Mike Pence. You won’t eat alone with any woman other than your wife, but you’d sup at Trump’s table, the womanizer, instead of the woman. Were you the only adult in Washington who had not heard the stories about him? What were you willing to do to advance your career? Is there a principle you hold dear?

I get it. Christie, Pence, and other Republican politicians — as well as financial figures such as Carl Icahn — had other considerations. Some wanted a conservative, anti-abortion judiciary; still others wanted lower taxes and fewer regulations. Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire head of the Blackstone Group, even said in 2016 that he preferred Trump because America needed a “cohesive, healing presidency.”

Trump, these savants thought, would grant all their wishes, and so they tossed the dice on a maniac, comforting us (or themselves) with the hope that once in office Trump’s inner Madison would emerge. Don’t worry, they said, he ran a business and, anyway, the solemnity of the Oval Office would sober him up. Didn’t Augustine of Hippo go from a libertine to a saint of the Catholic Church?

John F. Kelly’s leaving. Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster are gone. Michael Flynn sings, and Paul Manafort lies. The stock market is tanking for the usual reasons, but this one as well: Investors know that no one’s home at the White House. Trump’s a human pinball, ricocheting off events and emitting tweets like a rundown smoke alarm. We’re not great again. We’re drifting toward disaster.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Lisa Gralnick’s “Scene of the Crime” at the Metal Museum

Visiting this year’s Master Metalsmith exhibit at the Metal Museum is a bit like walking into the most famous and frequently recreated panels in comic book history. Even if you’re not a funny book fan, you know the scene because no retelling of Batman’s origin story is complete without several close up images of Martha Wayne’s pearls as they fall away from her neck — falling, bouncing, and rolling in all directions as the bad guy gets away. The focal point of Lisa Gralnick’s “Scene of the Crime” installation is a similarly broken and scattered string of pearls, only in this case, the beads are bigger than bowling balls and the strand takes up the better part of a room.

The pearls are joined by enormous earrings, a fancy barrette, and a few other glittery objects spilling out of a Barbie pink jewelry box as big as a bed. There’s also a wedding band, an engagement ring, implications, and many things left unsaid. Inspired by the loss of the artist’s mother, the pop-artwork mixes childlike whimsy and wonder with an outsized sense of personal violation.

“Whether you are writing about the work, photographing it, or organizing loans from collectors, family, and friends, by accepting a role in the planning and execution, you are stepping into a personal space with the artist,” Metal Museum Executive Director Carissa Hussong writes in her introduction to the exhibit catalog. “You are accepting an invitation to take part in the artist’s journey.” The same can probably be said for observers.

This year’s Master Metalsmith retrospective also includes examples of Gralnick’s jewelry, which is inspired by architecture and industrial imagery, and sometimes asks just how much of the artist’s self can really be embedded in their work. “The Gold Standard” exhibit was inspired by a moment when the artist contemplated melting down past work in order to make a downpayment on a house. It’s comprised of many everyday objects cast in plaster and gold, with the amount of gold reflecting the monetary value of the represented commodity at the time of its creation.

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We Recommend We Saw You

Remembering a Legendary Midtown Party

Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top was a guest one year at ‘A Christmas Party,’ an annual Midtown party Peggy Burch and I hosted for about a decade from the 1970s to the late 1980s.

This week, I’m writing about one of my favorite Christmas memories. It’s the party my friend Peggy Burch and I hosted for a decade or so between the late 1970s and the late ’80s in my old Midtown apartment on Poplar at Avalon.

We dubbed it “A Christmas Party.” The premise was to invite everybody we knew and they were supposed to invite everybody they knew. Those people also were supposed to invite everybody they knew. And so on.

Each year I roasted three or four country hams and Peggy roasted several turkeys. Guests brought side items. One year, I made pumpkin pies from scratch.

Guests brought their own drinks. The first printed invitation for December 15, 1979 read “BYOB,” but Peggy decided she didn’t want to use that term. She came up with “Bring What You Would Like to Drink” for the next party. We used the same invitation wording each year.

I didn’t want to use plastic cups, so I bought cases of highball glasses, which we used from year to year.

I did make homemade eggnog with raw eggs, rye whiskey, rum, and real whipped cream.


The party always was held on the second Saturday before before Christmas. Each year, I bought the newest Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ashford & Simpson 33 rpm albums, which I played on my stereo. I periodically interrupted the recorded music and I played carols for sing-a-longs at the grand piano.

Our party began at 8 p.m. and usually lasted into the wee hours.

The main decoration was a gigantic live Christmas tree. I always had to cut off the top of the wide Fraser or Douglas fir tree because I always bought them too tall. They looked like they were growing through the ceiling.

The first year, my next door neighbor – a medical student – co-hosted the party with us. She made a total of 12 canapes as her offering for guests. She didn’t have a clue what the party was going to be like.

The “gathering” resembled the party scene from the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with people everywhere. About 700 people or so showed up each year. People crowded into my second story apartment, which had a big living room and dining room, two bedrooms – and one bathroom. People lined the hall stairs and waited for guests to leave the party so they could get in.

Strangers I invited at Huey’s Midtown or other watering holes usually showed up. And, of course, they were supposed to bring their friends and on and on.

It was noisy with people shouting so they could be heard over the other guests and the high decibel levels of the Peppers and Ashford & Simpson. People danced, screamed, and drank.

Each year, I watched as my apartment was destroyed before my eyes. I remember seeing a guest knock over an end table, which resulted in a glass of wine tipping over and streaming purple liquid down a white wall.

One year I saw my mother walking amidst the throng picking up an empty can here and there in a futile attempt to help clean up.

Lots of stories are connected with that party. Jill Johnson Piper and John Beifuss helped host the event one year. Jill, who brought a large cheese ball, asked me during the party where it was. She said she put it in a bag at the top of the back stairs. We finally found it way across the parking lot by the garbage cans. Guests who entered the party from the rear inadvertently kicked the cheese ball down the stairs and into the garbage area.

One year, I found cigarettes smashed into one of the pumpkin pies. Someone thought it was an earthenware ashtray.

Another time, a team of athletes from overseas was staying across Poplar. They saw the action going on and showed up. One of the guys picked up a whole turkey and began eating it. The next morning, we found a turkey carcass in the front yard.

I went to bed at 3:30 a.m. one year. The apartment still was jam packed. The next morning I woke up with a hangover to a freezing apartment. I walked in the living room, which, as usual, was a disaster with glasses, cups, bottles, cans, napkins, paper plates, plastic forks, and cigarette butts everywhere. Not a soul anywhere. All the front windows were wide open. A handwritten note on the stereo read, “I turned off the Christmas tree lights.”

Celebrity guests included Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, Bobby Durango from Rock City Angels, and Mojo Nixon, who recorded the popular “Elvis is Everywhere.” I believe John Doe from the punk band, X, also showed up one year.

Musicians who appeared that weekend before Christmas at the nearby Antenna club attended.

The party came to an end after I bought a house and moved out of my beloved apartment, where I lived for 16 years.

People still speak fondly about that Midtown seasonal event.

Probably the worst memory from “A Christmas Party” occurred one year after everyone had gone home. I walked in the bathroom. Something about the bathtub caught my eye. I looked and I saw footprints in the tub. Facing the drain.

Bobby Durango from the Rock City Angels band was a guest one year.

I periodically played Christmas carols during the party. People actually sang.

Michael Finger, my Memphis magazine colleague and long-time friend, was a regular guest.

Jon W. Sparks, my colleague and another long-time friend, attended ‘A Christmas Party.’ He was with Carol Sheehan and Tom Walter.

Andy Hyrka dressed as Santa. Here he is on Poplar at Avalon in front of my apartment building.

Categories
Sports Tiger Blue

Tigers 99, Little Rock 89

“I watch a lot of Penny Hardaway highlights.” — Memphis guard Antwann Jones

During one of his first media sessions as Tiger coach, Penny Hardaway was asked a question nearly impossible to answer: Among current players, who reminds Hardaway of himself? Hardaway grinned and tilted his head, but didn’t dodge the question. He went with freshman guard Antwann Jones.

Larry Kuzniewski

Antwann Jones

Wednesday night at FedExForum, the pupil from Orlando showed flashes of the master who once owned Orlando as an All-Star with the Magic. Making his first college start, Jones scored 13 points, grabbed five rebounds, handed out six assists, and blocked two shots in 25 minutes on the floor. Jones had three assists over the game’s final four minutes to help Memphis pull away and improve to 6-5 for the season.

“Being in the starting lineup really energized [Antwann],” said Hardaway after the win. “He was really focused, and made plays defensively and at the offensive end. When you have an emotional player like Antwann, you just have to continue to talk to him in practice. That’s who he is. And that’s why it’s taken him a while [to get his first start]. He wasn’t emotionally into it. I like this side of him, when he’s happy. He has vision, a god-given ability to see the floor.”

Four days after an emotional loss to Tennessee in front of a packed house, the Tigers struggled to find any rhythm in front of 13,599 fans, their fourth of seven consecutive home games. There were 10 lead changes before halftime. The Trojans hit seven of their first 11 shots from three-point range, but the Tigers commanded the glass with 28 rebounds to Little Rock’s 11 over the game’s first 20 minutes. A Jones block of a layup attempt by 6’10” Trojan center Nikola Maric was followed by an Isaiah Maurice dunk to give the Tigers a 10-point lead shortly before the break.

But the lead changed hands six more times in the second half. Trojan guard Rayjon Tucker converted a three-point play to give Little Rock an 86-84 lead with just under four minutes to play. (Tucker finished with a game-high 29 points, nine more than his average.) But Jones answered with a layup and found Jeremiah Martin near the basket for another that put Memphis up for good, 88-86. Martin finished with 22 points, matching the senior’s season high.

Larry Kuzniewski

Penny Hardaway

Senior forward Kyvon Davenport scored only three points over the game’s first 28 minutes, but came alive down the stretch to post his fourth double-double (15 points and 15 rebounds) of the season. “I got off to a bad start,” acknowledged Davenport. “My mind wasn’t in the right place. But I got stronger in the second half, got some rebounds to help my team.”

Freshman guard Tyler Harris hit four three-pointers and scored 14 points for Memphis. Fellow freshman Alex Lomax came off the bench for the first time and contributed six assists in 20 minutes.

With conference play looming — the Tigers face Wichita State to open American Athletic Conference play on January 3rd — any win is welcome to Hardaway, but Wednesday’s came with more lessons on areas the team must address for sustained success. “Our transition defense was horrible,” said the rookie coach. “We work on this stuff, but it doesn’t look like it. Two guards back. We have to carry it from practice to a game. It’s like they don’t believe it. This is Division 1 college basketball. They have to do what we tell them.”

The Tigers return to FedExForum Saturday to face Tennessee State, the third and final opponent from the Volunteer State on the Memphis schedule. Tip-off is scheduled for 2 p.m.

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Film Features Film/TV

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

All superhero movies should be animation.

It’s really not that far from where we are now. For large chunks of, say, Avengers: Infinity War, everything the viewer sees was rendered by a computer. It’s only the need to have Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson appear as Captain America and Black Widow that keeps them from going totally CGI. This grounding in the real world is necessary in order for us to take seriously these stories of men in tights saving the world by punching each other.

The problem with “grounding” comic book stories in the real world is that you lose an essential element. Read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, and you’ll never look at a Spider-Man comic book the same way again. Comics are not just a storytelling medium — they’re vastly inferior to the written word in that regard. There’s also visual and design elements that are unique to comics, the most obvious being combining words and design elements to evoke sound. Pow! Thwack! Bamf!

Ultimate Spider-Man — Miles Morales is the teenage superstar of the new spider-movie.

Divorced from the vibrant page layout, superhero stories can seem goofy. When Spider-Man is just lines on a page, you know how seriously to take his battles with Mysterio, the guy with the glowing fishbowl for a head. But every live action superhero movie since Tim Burton’s Batman has had to add a line or two about how funny it is that a guy dresses up like a bat to fight crime, because it’s frankly ridiculous to pretend people act like this in real life.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse uses animation to embrace the conceits and eccentricities of comics. It takes its cues more from Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. It also takes as its jumping off point a very comic premise, the “what if?” story. Sure, everybody knows Spider-Man is Peter Parker — a white, working class college student and cub news photographer raised by his aunt in Brooklyn. But what if Spider-Man was a Brooklyn teenager named Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) raised by a Latinx nurse (Luna Lauren Velez) and a black police officer (Brian Tyree Henry). And also, there are five other spider-folk.

Now, we’re getting comic book-y! Publishers like Marvel beta testing new takes on their cash cow characters led to superhero comics being the first sci fi-adjacent genre to embrace multiverse theory, which solves some issues in quantum mechanics by positing that ours is one of an infinite expanse of parallel universes where everything that can happen, does happen. Super-mobster Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) hires super scientist Olivia Octavius (Kathryn Hahn) to build a machine to access these parallel dimensions so he can retrieve fresh versions of his deceased wife and child.

Naturally, Peter Parker (Chris Pine) tries to stop him from running an unlicensed particle accelerator in Kings County. But when he fails, it’s up to Miles, who has been freshly bitten by a radioactive spider, to save reality. Since Miles can’t figure out how to stick (and more importantly, unstick) to walls yet, he needs help, which comes in the form of alternate spider-people. Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), is a down-on-his-luck, freshly divorced, middle age spider-dude. Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) is from a dimension where the radioactive spider bit Peter Parker’s crush instead instead of him. Spider-Noir (Nicolas Cage) is a hardboiled, arachnid-themed crime fighter from a black-and-white universe. Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) co-pilots a mecha with an intelligent radioactive spider. And Peter Porker (John Mulaney) was bitten by a radioactive pig.

Freed from the dubious need for plausibility, Into the Spider-Verse spins wild visuals. Each character is drawn in the style of their own comics. Peter Porker, who looks like a Looney Tunes character, drops anvils on people and assaults his enemies with a giant cartoon hammer. Peni has an anime-inspired, epilepsy-unfriendly transformation sequence. The animators sometimes divide the frame into panel-like spaces. “Thwip” and “Pow!” appear to punctuate the action. During the dizzying finale, in which a newly empowered Miles tries to stuff the interdimensional genie back in the bottle, gravity and reality fail, and abstract bits of Brooklyn float by.

Impossible shots coupled with a breezy screenplay make this the most fun superhero movie since Sam Raimi shot an upside down Toby Maguire kissing Kirsten Dunst. With Marvel building toward an illusory finale and DC dead in the water, this is the fresh approach the genre needs. Don’t just take inspiration from cartoons, be a cartoon.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

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News News Blog

Companies to Offer Free Rides, Towing Over Holiday

AAA

The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years Day is the deadliest time of the year as it’s related to impaired driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

With more than 102 million people expected to travel by automobile this holiday – the most on record since AAA began tracking holiday travel in 2001, AAA, in partnership with Budweiser will offer free rides and vehicle towing to anybody in Tennessee and eight other states through its Tow to Go program.

So whether you’re doing a Santa pub crawl or knocking a few back at the company holiday party, you can enjoy your drinks without worrying about how you’ll get home beginning December 21st through Wednesday, January 2nd. However, AAA says the program is meant for a safety net for those who didn’t plan ahead.

A 2017 study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 20.7 percent of drivers who reported consuming alcohol last year, admitted to driving even when they thought they had consumed too much.

In its 20th year, the Tow to Go program aims to prevent those instances of impaired drivers from getting behind the wheel and risking the lives of other motorists.

“With millions of Americans expected to be on the roadways this holiday season, we encourage everyone to plan ahead for safe celebrations,” Amy Stracke, managing director of traffic safety advocacy for AAA, said. “Before getting behind the wheel impaired, we want to remind people that the Tow to Go program is available over the holidays.”

To date, over 25,000 impaired drivers have been taken off the roadways through the program.

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“The Tow to Go program is a smart option to promote the use of designated drivers and help reduce impaired driving,” Adam Warrington, vice president of corporate social responsibility at Budweiser, said. “We are proud to partner with AAA and their roadside assistance drivers to make our roadways safer during the holidays.”

To take advantage of the offer, drivers can call (855)-286-9246 and be transported to a safe location within 10 miles. Rides are free to both AAA members and non-members.

“No family should have to experience a needless tragedy during the holidays as a result of an impaired driver,” Stephanie Milani, Tennessee Public Affairs Director for AAA, said. “Whether you call Tow to Go, use a designated driver, or stay where you are celebrating, it’s critical to have a plan for getting home safely and never get behind the wheel impaired.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Chelsea Morning

Sometimes I just drive around. It’s a life-long habit. I’ll look at a map and explore a random street from one end to the other, just to see what I can see. Last Sunday, it was Chelsea Avenue, which carves a steady east-west course across the northern tier of the city.

I begin at the street’s west end, where it emerges from Uptown, the slowly gentrifying neighborhood near St. Jude. Once you get onto Chelsea, the gentrifying stops, as you enter the New Chicago neighborhood. I detour north on Manassas Street, past the impressive new edifice of Manassas High School, which has, according to the google, 382 students, of which approximately 100 are grade-level proficient in reading.

North of the school, I turn on Firestone Avenue and pass the abandoned factory site with its lonely small brick building and massive smokestack, vertically emblazoned with the tire company’s logo. At the Firestone Grocery & Deli, two men pass a paper bag and watch the world go by. The homes are small, some neatly kept, some falling down but inhabited, some blighted beyond repair.

Back on Chelsea, I pass through a dystopian world of auto repair services and junkyards — the graveyards of rusted automobiles that serve as a poor man’s AutoZone. You go in looking for a driver’s side mirror for your ’98 Le Sabre or an alternator for your old F-150. You take your tools, and if you’re lucky you come out with your part — and dirty hands.

I cross streets with familiar names — Watkins, McLean, Highland — but up here in North Memphis they look different than they do in Midtown. I venture onto Willett Street, north into a little neighborhood hard by the shores of Kilowatt Lake. There’s a boat repair shop, an auto-painting business, various sketchy quonset huts, Dino’s Sausage(!), and houses that shouldn’t be lived in but are. It’s a world apart, a different Memphis. Who lives here?

At Hollywood and Chelsea, things look a little more brisk. There’s the Fashion Corner Men’s Store, 2 Star JR Barbecue, a big thrift shop, warehouses, and a couple of factories, including Southern Cotton Oil.

I cross Warford and decide to drive by Douglass High School. Like Manassas, it’s an impressive newish building, and like Manassas, it’s underpopulated, with only 476 students. The surrounding neighborhood features the requisite small, boxy houses, many painted in lively colors. There are signs of pride — small statuary, a string of Christmas lights, a nice patio set on a porch. An elderly woman stands in her yard with a power cord in hand, arguing with an MLGW worker. The cord appears to be coming from a neighbor’s window, a work-around for someone whose power has been cut off, I’m guessing. Another reminder that life can be cold.

Near Highland — another familiar street in unfamiliar country — I pass the Dixie Disinfectant Co. and Elegant Security Products. Small churches abound — The Upper Room, Sunset Church, and St. John MB Church near Pope Street, just before Chelsea veers under Jackson Avenue and into the Nutbush city limits, as Tina Turner once sang.

The store names begin to change: Especialitas, La Raza, Las Cazuelas, La Roca Tienda, Santa Maria Tires, Montero’s, La Hacienda. The driveways are filled with more pickups than sedans. It’s another Memphis universe. I pass two small pink houses as Chelsea narrows into a residential street paralleling a set of railroad tracks.

After a few blocks, near the elbow of the I-240 loop, Chelsea ends its eastward journey at Wells Station. There are large trees and a forested area between the neighborhood and the interstate. It’s acreage where a landfill has been proposed — and is being fought fiercely by the neighborhood. For some reason, companies like to put landfills in neighborhoods with little pink houses and poor people. And in this case, they’re wanting to put a landfill near Memphis hipsters’ favorite treat shop — Jerry’s Sno Cones. Maybe that will help the neighborhood’s cause. I hope so.

I take these drives because they take me out of my comfort zone, and because they remind me how many of our fellow Memphians need decent housing, a good education, reliable transit, real jobs, and protection from corporate polluters.

At this time of year — at any time of year, really — it’s good for all of us to consider what we can do to make our hometown a better place for our fellow citizens. Find an organization that’s doing good work. Give your time or your money or both. Take a drive and see what you can see.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Crowning the Political Season in Memphis

If it is true that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then this week’s column is 4,000 words, plus some.

• Memphis native Charles Burson, who served Tennessee as attorney general and the nation as chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore, was in town last week to promote his new book, The Ground Game, at Novel Bookstore. The book consists of photographs from the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Burson functioned as a photojournalist. In his text as in his remarks to a raptly attentive crowd, Burson outlined his view that American politics has entered a new era in which progressive activism and traditional power politics will need to join forces.

• The special-election campaign for state Senate District 32 is on in earnest. Rival Republican candidates George Chism (l) and Steve McManus enjoyed a Christmas party together at the East Shelby Republican Club last week. Candidate Heidi Shafer was also on hand.

• As the grid-locked appointment process to fill three Memphis City Council vacancies entered a second week in search of, first, a council quorum and, second, some kind of compromise agreement, supporters of Rhonda Logan to fill the District 1 vacancy gathered on Austin Peay on Tuesday to reassert their contention that Logan, who received one vote short of selection in last week’s prolonged — and finally adjourned — council session, is still their choice for the position. Logan’s original rival, Lonnie Treadaway, has withdrawn his candidacy.

• As other supporters of the proposed Union Row tax-increment-finding project, a $511,894,155 development, backed her up, Downtown Commission president Jennifer Oswalt made the case on Monday to the Shelby County Commission for expedited approval. She got it, with only one Commissioner, Reginald Milton, abstaining. Milton’s abstention reflected his support for County Mayor Lee Harris‘ expressed wish to have extra time to review the project. But Harris also made clear that he had no intention of vetoing the TIF and continued in his already established course of cooperating with the County Commission’s wishes to the maximum degree possible. See also Oswalt’s Viewpoint, p. 9, elaborating on the Union Row project.

And consult the Politics Blog at mempisflyer.com for elaboration on all these points and more. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, or what-have-you!

Categories
Editorial Opinion

A Seasonal Summing-Up for Memphis and Shelby County

As Memphis and Shelby County headed into the heart of the holiday season, the two entities and their resident populations had much to rejoice about and many serious concerns as well.

For purposes of contrast, merely consider the rather different facts reflected in the respective circumstances of the two major local legislative bodies — the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission.

It may be that the council is able to resolve the issue of filling three vacancies this week. Or maybe not. The council will need to produce a quorum even to begin untangling the circumstances of last week’s deadlocked vote to fill just one of the seats, and acquiring a quorum has been made tougher by the resignation of two council members who were present and voting prior to last week.

Bill Lee

Those two members — Janis Fullilove and Edmund Ford Jr. — are two of the trio of members who were elected to Shelby County positions on August 2nd but deigned not to resign their council seats in a timely manner that would have allowed their positions to be filled by the vote of constituents on the November ballot. The third member of this threesome — Bill Morrison — had resigned earlier by a week.

It is uncertain the degree to which the foot-dragging threesome held on to their seats for personal reasons versus retaining them on the advice, implicit or explicit, to do so by their remaining colleagues, whose demonstrated passion for replacing departed collegues by the appointment process is equaled only by their fecklessness in actually delivering on the appointments.

In any case, if the deadlock holds, the obvious solution is to call for an election, which should have been done in the first place. Only this time, the taxpayers will be footing some extra expense.

Over on the county commission, things seem a little more Christmas-y. Though there are conspicously different political points of view on display there (of the liberal-vs.-conservative sort), so far they have not created a divide. Instead, there has been a measure of peace, harmony, and compromise. The most obvious difference between the version of county government elected on August 2nd and the one preceding it is that there is no schism between the executive and legislative branches, as there was in the long-running power struggle between the former commission and then Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The current county mayor, Lee Harris, and the new commission, led by chairman Van Turner, have evinced an obvious determination to agree on as many issues as possible, and numerous disagreements of the past have been resolved, resulting in a common understanding on such issues as independent legal representation for the commission and an alignment of views on the conduct of legal action to offset the ravages of opioid distributors.

At the state level, things are a tad uncertain as of yet. While we welcome the positive aura emanating from Republican Governor-elect Bill Lee, we are disappointed by his expressed support for voucher legislation (a specter that we thought had been abandoned by the General Assembly) and his reluctance to see the good sense of long-overdue Medicaid expansion.

Even so, we’ll try to be optimistic. Happy Holidays!

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Build Up Not Out

Since the announcement of the proposed $950 million Union Row development, there has been much discussion about what this project means to Memphis and Shelby County. There is no question that an investment of this scale within our urban core signifies momentum. The concept is visionary. The investment is unprecedented. And the access it provides to the neighboring communities is game-changing.

DMC president and CEO Jennifer Oswalt

Memphis isn’t unfamiliar with revolutionary ideas — Piggly Wiggly, FedEx, and St. Jude were all born in the Bluff City. We are a community of out-of-the-box thinkers. We value diversity and creativity. And we demand that our progress be inclusive. The Union Row development’s forward-looking take on community not only raises the stakes for the property itself, but it also significantly changes the neighborhood by bridging two currently underserved areas with new access to food, jobs, and green space.

The area Union Row will occupy has been called the “donut hole.” The planned site spans a void between areas seeing significant public and private investment — South City, the Core of Downtown, and the Edge neighborhoods. Union Row will replace blight with active ground floors and well-lit streets. The planned project intends to bring a grocer, a park, a boutique hotel, office space, and over 700 residential units. These components will also bring more than 2,000 permanent jobs and over 4,100 temporary construction jobs.

In order to help make this monumental development possible, a Downtown Memphis Commission-affiliated board approved the TIF application for this project. A TIF is a win-win, allowing developers to borrow from future increased tax revenues which would not exist but for the development, and to invest those funds in public infrastructure to literally pave the way for the development. The TIF provides for these infrastructure enhancements while also allowing developers to span a gap in financial feasibility generated from their own project’s success. No property receiving a real property PILOT or TIF pays less property tax than it pays pre-incentive as a result of the PILOT or TIF.

Additionally, the city and county benefit by receiving 25 percent of the increased taxes during the TIF period. In the case of Union Row, this is almost $2 million more collectively to the city and county each year during the incentive period. Since the development will long out-live the incentive, the city and county will see exponentially increased tax revenue once the incentive period ends. The incentives are needed because the combination of high property tax and affordable rents does not always allow for feasible development.

The development team, Big River Partners, and its partners, led by LRK, Montgomery Martin, and Duncan Williams have a strong history of inclusive practices and are committed to building a complete team that is representative of Memphis. They are committed to meeting minority and women-owned participation goals of at least 28 percent and offering local minority ownership opportunities. A project of this size means great opportunity for partnerships and planning for minority and women-owned businesses. The DMC looks forward to helping fill the commercial and retail spaces with emerging and minority-owned Memphis businesses.

Union Row is catalytic, and along with another $4 billion of development in the Downtown pipeline, Memphis definitely has momentum. We are in the middle of a hotel boom and a corporate renaissance, with Orion, Oden, Southern Sun, DCA, Leo Events, ServiceMaster, B Riley, and Indigo Ag, among others, choosing to plant their corporate headquarters Downtown. Our riverfront is also changing, and it is clear that opportunity is calling. Union Row answers that call, and responds to Memphis 3.0’s mantra of “Build Up Not Out.”

The Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis and Urban Strategies, the Mayor, Planning & Development, Housing and Community Development, and Business Diversity & Compliance as well as Memphis Housing Authority and Memphis River Parks Partnership have worked hard to show Memphians what our next century should look like — inclusive. Together with developers, elected officials, and city and county leaders, the Downtown Memphis Commission is building a Memphis that is investible — a Memphis that has momentum and a Downtown for everyone.

Jennifer Oswalt is president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission.