“The reality is companies have choices when it comes to where to invest and bring jobs and opportunity. We have worked tirelessly on behalf of our constituents to bring good-paying jobs to our states. These jobs have become part of the fabric of the automotive manufacturing industry. Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy.”
Sounds just like the kind of statement a well-paid automaker CEO would make when faced with the prospect of his company’s lowly worker bees forming a union. Except in the preceding case, it’s the kind of statement six Southern Republican governors would — and did — make at the prospect of the United Auto Workers unionizing a car-manufacturing plant in their state.
The governors — of Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and, of course, Tennessee — were getting the vapors over the notion that factory workers would dare to organize for better working conditions. “Lawsy mercy,” said Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, in a statement. “We cain’t have no communist unions moving into our bidness-lovin’ Land o’ Cotton™. Old times here are not forgotten! Next thing you know, these uppity workin’ folks will be wantin’ gummit healthcare and decent public schools and gun reform.” Okay, ol’ Voucher Bill didn’t really say that, but he sure as hell thought it. And to be fair, he wasn’t the first Lee to get his butt kicked by a union.
Here’s another gem from the governors’ statement: “We want to keep good paying jobs and continue to grow the American auto manufacturing sector here. A successful unionization drive will stop this growth in its tracks, to the detriment of American workers.” Right, because you clowns are always all about the “workers.”
The scare tactics didn’t work. Employees at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted by a three-to-one margin to join the United Auto Workers last Friday, making their factory the first in the South to unionize since the 1940s.
It’s no wonder the governors were scared. The GOP economic model is to keep workers underpaid and uneducated, grateful for any crumbs their corporate overlords deem them worthy to receive. In return, the politicians get fat corporate “contributions” and corporations get sweet tax breaks to move into the states of the old Confederacy. When it comes to workers’ rights, the mantra for those at the top of this pyramid scheme is, “Look away, Dixieland.”
Another vital part of the GOP’s strategy has been to keep working-class Americans fighting amongst themselves, mostly by exploiting racial division. Gotta make sure the MAGA whites stay mad at the African Americans and the Latinos. And vice versa. The GOP knows that if all those folks ever organized to challenge the game being played on them, well, it could get ugly for their overlords.
That’s why it was so edifying to see videos of the Volkswagen plant workers — white, Black, and brown — celebrating their successful union vote with fireworks, chants, and cheers. They were celebrating getting a voice in their workplace, including better healthcare and retirement benefits, and more paid time off. They were celebrating getting some skin in the game.
Current wages for workers in Chattanooga range from $23 to $32, according to Volkswagen. The UAW noted that following their strikes last year against Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, wages for the highest-paid production workers at those plants rose to more than $40 an hour, plus improved benefits. Fireworks, indeed.
Interestingly, Volkswagen said it respects its workers’ right to determine who should represent their interests. “We fully support an NLRB vote so every team member has a chance to vote in privacy in this important decision,” the company said. It’s almost like the state governors were fear-mongering or something. Or maybe the company actually respects its workers. What a concept.
Next up for the UAW — which says it plans to try to unionize a dozen Southern automaker facilities — are two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama, where a vote on unionization will take place in mid-May. The UAW says a majority of workers at those plants have already signed authorization cards supporting union membership.
The results of the Volkswagen vote, could have far-reaching consequences for the labor movement in the region, said Stephen Silvia, a professor at American University who was quoted in a recent Washington Post article: “If the UAW can prevail,” he said, “it means that the Volkswagen victory isn’t an anomaly and we’re really seeing a turnaround in attitudes in workers in the South.”
If so, it’s kudos to Tennessee’s auto workers for standing up to the governors and for leading the turnaround in attitudes toward workers’ rights. And here’s hoping Alabama can keep the momentum going. Roll Tide.
An aerial view of the Central Station Hotel, where the City of New Orleans train makes a stop (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Three hours separate Bluff City and Music City on an I-40 straight shot Memphis drivers know all too well.
“Oh, Jackson is bigger than I remember! Look kids, the Tennessee River! Ha, Bucksnort! There’s the Batman Building!”
Any Memphian who has routinely made that drive will have at one point wished for (a Buc-ee’s, of course, but also) a rail line to connect the two cities. This is especially true for any Memphian who has ever boarded the City of New Orleans train for a hands-off-the-wheel trip to another city up or down the rails.
But those choo-choo wishes here fade into the same place as win-the-lottery daydreams. Passenger rail is for those East Coast types or some European travel show on PBS. This is Tennessee. We won’t even expand Medicaid to save lives, let alone build a statewide train set so the fancies can swan around like they’re Rick Steves. So, I-40 drivers’ dreams go poof, they sigh, turn off the cruise control, and wait to pass a Big G Express truck in the left lane.
But a few things have happened recently to give those rail dreams a flicker of hope.
In 2021, Congress passed President Joe Biden’s massive Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It promised $1.2 trillion in transportation and infrastructure projects with $550 billion for new projects. That pot of money opened the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) Corridor Identification and Development program. Flush with $1.8 billion, it will help cities and states pick new routes for intercity passenger rail service.
In 2022, the Tennessee General Assembly publicly but quietly directed a state-housed group of experts called the Tennessee Advisory Commission for Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR, pronounced TASS-err) to study the feasibility of passenger rail here.
The bipartisan bill was sponsored by the unlikely duo of Sen. Ken Yager, a Republican from the far-east corner of Tennessee (Bristol), and Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Democrat from the far-west corner (Memphis). But they had one thing in common — rail could help their cities. For Yager, Bristol could connect to Virginia’s ever-growing rail system. Memphis could connect to Nashville and beyond, and all of it could bring in people and their money.
“I have all the faith and confidence that [TACIR is] going to bring us back something completely comprehensive, whether it shows that rail is feasible or not,” Parkinson said when he introduced the bill. “It might not even be feasible, but whatever alternatives are available for us, we just need something to connect all of our people and all the tourists that come into our state.”
But as Parkinson introduced the bill to just even study the idea, GOP members quickly questioned the cost of rail. Many thought the idea was a good one (if not at least a pretty one), and no one voted against the study. But some knew already the Feds would not pay for the lines, nor the equipment, nor the resources it would take to maintain it. Hawk mode, it seemed, was already engaged.
In March 2023, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly announced on X that “it’s time to bring the Choo Choo back to Chattanooga! This week, I submitted an application for federal funds in partnership with [the mayors of Atlanta, Nashville, and Memphis] to begin planning for a new Amtrak route through our cities.”
It’s unclear just where in line that application is now. But if the project is picked, the cities will get $500,000 to earnestly study routes and crunch numbers.
While rail in Tennessee has seen a flurry of activity over the last couple of years, Parkinson said it could take up to 15 years for a new passenger train to leave a station here. TACIR said if the process gets started and leaders remain committed to it, a train line could be operational in a hasty seven years.
Rail action could likely see the floors of the Tennessee state House and Senate in its next session this winter. Parkinson added that any rail ideas would need buy-in, also, from the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) and Gov. Bill Lee’s office.
For now, lawmakers are likely mulling the TACIR study and, maybe, gauging where the political winds blow on it. Also for now, it still takes three hours of hands-on-the-wheel, going-the-speed-limit driving for an I-40 nonstop trip between Memphis and Nashville.
Central Station Hotel seen from South Main Street (Photo: Calvin L. Leake | Dreamstime.com)
A Rail Assessment
Rail travel shriveled across the U.S. over the last few decades. While Tennessee was never famous for its great passenger systems, the state certainly had more lines than it does today.
For example, ever wonder why Nashville’s beautiful Union Station luxury hotel is called a “station,” sits on train tracks, but has no trains? Well, it used to. It was once a major stop on Amtrak’s Floridian line, a 1,400-mile route that ran from Chicago, through Nashville, to Miami. But Amtrak stopped the service in 1979.
So, what does Tennessee have now as far as real, people-moving rail service, not meant as nostalgia machines? Very little.
Amtrak stations at Memphis and Newbern to the north are the only two such stations in the state. It’s another sort of feather in West Tennessee’s cap. It seems glitzy, but ridership figures dull the story. Ridership was still below pre-pandemic levels last year when about 40,000 boarded the train here. That’s roughly 3 percent of the Memphis MSA population. That ridership figure is down from a recent high of about 72,000 in 2017, or about 6 percent of the population. The station was on a shortlist for closure with looming budget cuts in 2017, but it was saved with the stroke of a Congressional pen.
Amtrak’s only train running through Tennessee, the City of New Orleans, runs between Chicago and New Orleans. The route through Tennessee follows the Mississippi River along the western border of the state, making only two stops, one in Newbern (close to Dyersburg) and another in Memphis at Central Station on South Main Street. Memphis is the state’s busiest station. While ridership here may have ducked during and after the pandemic, numbers climbed through the aughts, growing 15 percent between 2010 and 2018.
Nashville’s WeGo Star (formerly known as the Music City Star) began operations in 2006 and remains the state’s lone commuter rail line. The train runs east from Downtown Nashville to nearby Lebanon with several stops along the way on a 32-mile line. It was heralded as a helping hand to remove some congestion from the city’s famously jammed interstates. Ridership figures there haven’t bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, either, down by about 67 percent in fiscal year 2022. A WPLN story in July said that number rose to 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels this year, and now about 400 people ride the WeGo Star each day.
Trolleys move people in Memphis, but mostly tourists. Even though they run regularly enough (and usually on time), when was the last time you heard someone talk about their commute to work and say, “You won’t believe what happened on the trolley this morning”? However, sharp-eyed Memphians may have glimpsed sleek, modern streetcars on the Madison Line last year. The Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) is testing the new cars that could, one day, regularly carry commuters. The rail trolley system here is the only one in the state.
That’s really it. Other Tennessee trains do carry passengers, but do so for pleasure’s sake, not efficiency. That is, unless you count Lookout Mountain workers taking the Incline Railway.
Proposed rail infrastructure could connect Memphis to the rest of Tennessee and to states like Virginia and Georgia. (Photo: TACIR)
What’s Proposed
Parkinson said when he proposed a transportation study from TACIR, it wasn’t only about rail. It was about moving people across the state and beyond, and about economic opportunities.
“I wanted to keep it broad enough for us to look at everything — not just rail — but any alternatives,” he said. “I wanted to know what those alternatives were, whatever the future of transport is. And if not rail, then what’s the future of transportation so we can be on the front end of it?”
The legislation he sponsored wanted a top-to-bottom review of the idea. That review had to look at physical train tracks in Tennessee, show what an intercity rail network would look like, and find alternatives to rail that might get the same job done. Lawmakers also wanted to see what kinds of projects like these have been done over the last decade. They wanted to hear from three other states about their rail projects. They wanted to know about possible stakeholders, costs, ridership estimates, operations, equipment, and more.
Two recommendations from the study made headlines when it was released in July. One, an intercity passenger rail system could “improve mobility and the state’s economy,” meaning it could work. Two, the group recommended five routes built in five phases.
The first would connect Nashville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. To this, many Memphians likely sighed a unanimous “well, of course, Nashville ….” But the decision was based on moving the most people, connecting larger swathes of the country via rail, and existing infrastructure, like rail lines at airports in Chattanooga and Atlanta.
The next proposed route would connect Memphis and Nashville. The route was mentioned in 2020’s massive Southern Rail Plan from the Feds but was given a lower priority, though details on why were not given. That plan, however, saw the route as best suited as a link from the East to Midwest cities served by the City of New Orleans.
Well before TACIR recommended the Memphis-Nashville line, mayors of Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, and Chattanooga had done one better and applied to the FRA’s Corridor ID Program. That application seeks to get rail done quickly with minimal investment.
Letters of support for the application flowed from every corner of every state involved right into the mailboxes of Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation, and Amit Bose, administrator of the FRA. Many of those letters refer to the proposed route as the Sunbelt-Atlantic Connector Corridor, even though that name does not yet even appear in any Google search.
“Each of our four cities are leading transportation and tourism hubs in their own right, and such a service would connect many millions of residents from beyond our municipal and state borders to reliable and frequent rail travel opportunities,” wrote Dennis Newman, executive vice president of strategy and planning for Amtrak.
Many of the letters read the same, including mentions of how the route could expand the economy and mobility, drive higher workforce participation and equity, advance “our international climate commitments,” and push tourism and leisure travel.
But letters from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) mention one Memphis-specific need of the proposed route: BlueOval City. Work is underway now on the massive, Haywood County campus that will house Ford’s production line for its electric F-Series pickup trucks and batteries.
“The Memphis region will most benefit from the opportunity to help connect the 5,800 new workers needed to power the coming BlueOval City,” Strickland and Cohen wrote in their letters. “This mega-campus is envisioned to be a sustainable automotive manufacturing ecosystem. The $5.6 billion battery and vehicle manufacturing campus just outside of Memphis will be the largest in the Ford Motor Co. world.”
TDOT studied BlueOval City’s transportation needs, but only a passing mention of it made TACIR’s final report. TDOT aimed to figure out ways to move what it said could be between 5,800 to 7,000 employees from Memphis, Jackson, and nearby areas to the site, “and to try to avoid a surge in congestion along the I‐40 corridor.”
They came up with three ideas. Two of them are mixtures of buses and vanpools with start-up price tags ranging from $8.6 million to $14.6 million. Another option included a passenger rail system with a price tag between $490 million and $600 million. All of these transit options “would be used only by BlueOval workers,” according to TACIR documents.
While the 234-mile Memphis-Nashville route came in second, it does have a few things going for it, adding to its feasibility. For one, freight tracks already exist between the cities. Also, the TACIR study found lower freight volume between them, causing fewer supply-chain disruptions. The route is mostly flat, making it easier to build. While the population it would serve is smaller than the route to Atlanta, it would still connect a collective 3.4 million people in both cities and the roughly 171,000 folks who live in the 29 cities between them. Finally, other transportation infrastructure already exists in both cities.
Another Memphis route recommended by the TACIR study would enhance service from here to Chicago. Amtrak now runs this route once a day. But the study suggested connecting two other train routes — the Illini and Saluki routes — to increase daily frequency and mobility between the states.
Photo: Iandewarphotography | Dreamstime.com
The Money Barrier
Money will easily be the biggest barrier to making any Tennessee passenger rail dreams come true. They’re not cheap to build, they’re not cheap to run, and the state will likely have to pay for most, if not all, of it.
“The experience of other states suggests that costs can range from the hundreds of millions of dollars for more straightforward passenger rail projects to billions of dollars for more intensive projects,” reads the TACIR report. ”For example, Virginia estimates spending $4.1 billion on capital projects over 10 years.”
For costs to run a rail network, TACIR looked to North Carolina, another state making major investments in passenger rail. State-supported Amtrak routes there between 2015 and 2019 ranged from about $14 million to $17 million each year.
But as the study pointed out, Tennessee has, for years, committed millions upon millions of dollars, and staff, and other resources, to roads.
“As a result, [Tennessee] has a first-class road network,” the study said. “The experience of other states demonstrates that a similar approach can be used to overcome the barriers to establishing passenger rail.”
When asked about costs as a barrier, Parkinson was quick to say that, “operationally, they lose money.”
“But when you think about the indirect impact to the cities, to those towns, and those rural areas that are going to benefit from it, it would prove profitable from the rippling effect,” he said.
Others agree. The Southern Rail Plan said the Nashville-to-Atlanta route could produce a total economic output of $18.2 billion and support over 17,000 construction jobs. For travelers, the route could save $1.8 million every year.
Tennessee state numbers say 141 million tourists spent $29 billion here last year. Most of those originated from nearby states, all of which could be connected to Tennessee by rail. How could that impact tourism spending here? The closest analogue is a 2020 study from the Southern Rail Commission. It found that if rail brought even 1 percent more tourists to Alabama, it would generate an additional $11.8 million each year.
But For Now …
Where Tennessee will land on passenger rail is anyone’s guess. It will take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. That’s even if the idea gets off the ground, and getting there is promising to be a fist fight in the state capitol.
Now, however, most Memphians will do what we’ve always done: fill up the tank, buckle up, hit the gas, and, maybe, dream of a rail system one day. But we’ll definitely dream of a Buc-ee’s, preferably near Bucksnort.
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke gets right to the point. “We can’t have digital gated communities,” he told CNN in a recent report about his city’s plan to make high-speed internet available to its poorest public school students. “The power of the web should be an equalizer,” he continued, “not something that creates greater inequity.”
Berke, whose tenure in office has witnessed dramatic drops in crime and bank foreclosures, visits Shelby County next week to talk about his city’s makeover at “A Summons to Memphis,” the popular luncheon series hosted by Memphis magazine, this Thursday, June 2nd, at University of Memphis Holiday Inn.
Chattanooga’s no longer the grubby little factory town that CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite called out for having the worst air quality in America. The air and water is clean again. The vistas are green, and its free public Wi-Fi service has been described as a national model. The dirtiest city in America has been rechristened the “Gig City” and a “playground for pioneers,” because it offers residents and businesses access to one of the fastest and most fully developed fiber and internet services in the world, installed and administered by its publicly owned electric power system.
So, just how fast are Chattanooga’s 10 gigabits-per-second internet connections? Well, 10 gigabits equals 10,000 megabits, and Memphis’ current internet speeds top out at between 70 to 75 megabits-per-second for downloads and significantly less for uploads. In practical, home-use terms, with Chattanooga’s 10 gigabits-per-second system, internet users can fully download an entire HD movie in about three seconds. When it comes to business applications, well … how big’s your imagination?
“Summons to Memphis” runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The $50 ticket price includes lunch. Tickets may be purchased at summonstomemphis.com.
Hey, where are you from? If you live in 10 suburban areas annexed by the city of Memphis since 1998, you could soon be voting to change your answer from, “Memphis” to “an unincorporated neighborhood kinda near Memphis.”
Sweet!
Nose, meet face. As in, here we go again with another debilitating, divisive, and lose-lose battle between the city of Memphis and some of its surrounding suburbs. All this, of course, thanks to some of our fine elected representatives in Nashville, who are pushing legislation that seems expressly designed to make things more difficult for most of Tennessee’s major cities — Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and a couple of other mid-sized burgs. (Nashville, conveniently enough, gets a pass, having consolidated in 1962, thus avoiding divisive city/county struggles.)
The legislation is reckless and vindictive and will put the cities upon which all these annexed areas depend for economic survival at risk by devastating their tax base. The legislation also ignores history — namely, the deal that was brokered following the 1998 brouhaha over “tiny towns,” which involved legislation that would have allowed surrounding suburban neighborhoods to incorporate into, well, tiny towns.
Then-Mayor Herenton fought that bill to the state Supreme Court and won. (Given the current GOP-packed makeup of the Supreme Court, one suspects they would rule differently today.) The current proposed law would nullify legislation passed after that 1998 decision that required Tennessee counties to establish boundaries for local growth by the entities within their borders. An agreement that defined annexation boundaries was subsequently reached by all the mayors and various governing bodies in Shelby County at that time. That deal will be annulled by this legislation, and, presumably, chaos will resume. Which may be what the yokels in Nashville had in mind.
If the law passes, elections will be held, as early as November, to allow annexed neighborhoods to vote to secede from Memphis. The battle will be noisy, setting neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. Yard signs will proliferate. Tempers will rise. Memphis will be disparaged and defended, as the same destructive battle-lines that were drawn over the county/city schools conflict are reanimated.
The elections will be followed by an expensive legal fight, which will go to the state Supreme Court, and probably beyond. Meanwhile, Memphis budget woes will increase, wounding and weakening the city at a time when it is beginning to experience something of a retail and residential renaissance at its core.
In short, this is an unnecessary and unholy mess in the making.
When asked about the legislation, Governor Bill Haslam said, “What I try to tell people in the legislature is, you might not be from a city, you might be from a rural area or a suburban area, but cities matter to you.”
Yes, they do. And weakening the economic driver for an entire region — and the only reason your neighborhood even exists — is the very definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If the state Senate, as expected, passes this bill, our only hope — admittedly, a slim one — for avoiding this foolishness lies with a Haslam veto. Haslam, a former mayor of Knoxville, obviously sees the dangers in this bill. Those of us in the affected cities can only hope he summons the courage to do the right thing.
A group of Chattanoogans have launched a petition drive to recall City Councilman Chris Anderson, who represents District 7 in Chattanooga. Anderson is the first openly gay councilman in the East Tennessee city.
Those behind the recall effort, led by Chattanoogan Charles Wysong, say Anderson hasn’t represented his constituents’ interests, but Anderson believes the recall is related to his sexuality. According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, “Wysong has been an outspoken opponent of the City Council’s decision to extend benefits to the domestic partners of city employees, a measure sponsored by Anderson.”
Anderson has filed a lawsuit challenging the Tennessee statute and the Chattanooga city ordinance on recalling council members.
The Rincon Strategy Firm in Memphis will host a fund-raising dinner at Rizzo’s Diner (106 E. G.E. Patterson) on Wednesday, April 30th from 5 to 7 p.m. The cost per person is $150, which goes toward Anderson’s fight against the recall.
Did you see where the New York Times this week did a big story on Nashville as possibly the hottest city in the United States? And with a picture featuring a mannequin of Elvis — ouch! This after Outside magazine in 2011 named Chattanooga “Best Town Ever.” Think their gain is partly our loss? I do. So what do they have that we don’t? Manageable rivers, hills or mountains, car manufacturing, and fill in the blanks.
The Memphis City Council had little choice but to vote in favor of spending another $12 million on Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium after Robert Lipscomb played the “shut down” card. The Flyer has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the specific documents in which the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department says that in regard to compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Meanwhile, news organizations — guess which one — that failed to report that the agreed upon 564 wheelchair and companion seats are “additional” seats to the accessible seats already there are willfully negligent.
A 1984 Memphis magazine cover with a picture of Al Gore (“Born to Run”) used to adorn the wall behind my desk at work. Since our office was remodeled, the mag cover is gone, and I won’t miss it, or him. Gore always struck me as someone that, had he been around during the Old West, would have sold used blankets to the Indians if he thought there were some bucks in it, and then proclaimed himself a humanitarian. I say this as one who voted for every Democratic Party presidential candidate from McGovern to Obama but switched to Ralph Nader in 2000. I liked Gordon Crovitz’s column on Gore and Al Jazeera the other day. And nobody has better lines about Clinton and Gore than my colleague Jackson Baker. Clinton gives you 15 seconds but it’s a good 15 seconds. Gore gives you a perfunctory handshake and a thanks for your help in Shelby County. Those were the days in the 1990s when the Memphis vote mattered and the Democratic ticket stormed into Shelby County and piled up a big margin and carried Tennessee and locked up the election. With a big assist from third-party candidate Ross Perot, of course.
Silliest debate of 2013: whether too much camera coverage and commentary was given to the Alabama quarterback’s gorgeous girlfriend, Katherine Webb, during the big game. It’s football, people! And she was a Miss USA competitor, in a bikini. And the game was a rout.
Serious debate of 2013: When teams should shut down star players. Washington D.C. is ground zero, with a baseball pitcher whose arm was saved by limiting his innings and a quarterback, RGIII, whose knee is a mess. It’s easy now to say he should have been benched sooner, if not held back the entire game, but the pressure to play him, from RGIII himself among others, must have overwhelming. I hope the success that he and Russell Wilson and other multi-threat quarterbacks in the NFL had this year gives hope to Michigan’s Denard Robinson. The Wall Street Journal this week ranked Michigan as the second most valuable football program in America. Without Robinson’s heroics the last three years, an otherwise mediocre team would have had losing records, no bowl appearances instead of three of them, no national interest and tens of thousands of empty seats at the Big House. He wasn’t the nation’s best player, but in that sense he was the most valuable.
One more item of interest from the national media. Tennessee ranks fourth most attractive in a survey of 650 business leaders by CEO Magazine about business climate in all 50 states. Low taxes and low regulations.
As even their creators and honorees will admit, most of the lists that purport to rank cities are horse crap. But once in a while, one of them comes along that, like a seven-car crash, demands your attention.
Case in point: Outside magazine has named Chattanooga “the best Outside town in America” and one of the “Best Towns Ever.” Chattanooga! The decaying railroad town in the shadow of Lookout Mountain and Rock City. I have been there dozens of times over more than 50 years and was moved to congratulate Candace Davis of the Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“Thank you John,” she replied in an email. “I typically don’t send out mag ranks either, but we do have a list of them compiled. With this being such a great publication with national and international recognition, we thought it was definitely appropriate. I mean how often do you get to be the Best EVER??”
If you are not familiar with it, Outside features extreme sports and doesn’t give a damn about football, baseball, or golf. I like to look at the nice pictures and read the articles which remind me of so many things I either cannot or would not do, like rock climbing, hang gliding, or paddling a surfboard from a standing position like I saw people doing this year in Florida and California and Shelby Farms.
The press release says “Outside scoured the nation to find dream cities that offered a balance of great culture, perfect scenery, stress-free and reasonable cost of living, and, of course, easy access to the outdoors.” Finalists included Charleston, SC; Madison, WI; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Santa Fe, NM; Ashland, OR; Boulder, CO; Burlington, VT; Tucson, AZ. A Facebook poll put our Tennessee neighbor over the top.
While I’m sure researchers put in long hours weighing “stress-free and reasonable cost of living” factors, the emphasis was on the visuals, just as Miss Universe must have, oh, never mind. Chattanooga, if you expand its radius 75 miles, has the goods from whitewater to mountain bluffs to the downtown river walk.
Memphis can play this game. Many of us have seen the warts in Chattanooga and the other finalists, and they are glossed over in such contests. If Shelby Farms, the riverfront, the Harahan Project, the Kroc Center, and Bass Pro work out as hoped, Memphis could and should be on someone’s list of best outdoor places.
As I wrote in this blog last week, I would pair that brag with a not-too-subtle reminder that Memphis is pretty much disaster free at a time when the rest of the country is reeling from floods, droughts, hurricanes, blizzards, forest fires, and monumental traffic jams. In today’s Wall Street Journal there is a story about a bridge closing on Interstate 64 in Louisville (one of our peer cities) that has “doubled commuting times for thousands” and backed up traffic for six miles in Indiana. UPS, Humana, and the University of Louisville are in scramble mode. Sorry, guys, FedEx is running like clockwork.
In the same newspaper, I read that Texas set a record as the temperature hit 100 degrees for the 70th day this year. The state is parched. Tennessee, and Memphis, are mostly green, and we are the Saudi princes of water.
If I were selling Memphis I would point that out. If it’s good enough for FedEx, maybe it’s good enough for you, etc. etc. If you like to bike, skate, run, fish, or paddle, come check us out.
