Tag: consolidation

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At Large Opinion

City/County Consolidation? See Afghanistan.

Photo: Scaramax | Dreamstime.com

The issue of a possible city/county government consolidation for Memphis and Shelby County has been somewhat buried in the news cycle. In case you missed it, here’s the short version: Memphis City Council members Chase Carlisle and JB Smiley Jr. are floating a consolidation proposal that would be put on the November 22, 2022, ballot.

Let me cite the Daily Memphian’s report: “By the terms of the resolution, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland would appoint five citizens to the eventual 15-member body and take those names to a council committee for review within 21 days of the council vote approving the resolution. … A confirmation vote on the five by the council would follow within 30 days of the council approving the charter commission resolution. The resolution urges the Shelby County Commission to take the same action. … The charter commission would hold its first meeting Nov. 1 and complete its work August 1, 2022, with filing of the charter.”

Are you still awake?

This has about as much chance of passing into law as does a countywide anti-barbecue ordinance. Past efforts at conjoining county and city have failed for a reason. Remember the disastrous “consolidation” of the city and county school systems? Memphis City Schools shut down in order to merge with Shelby County Schools. The suburban municipalities would have none of it, forming their own districts and bailing on consolidation. For all intents and purposes, Shelby County Schools is now basically Memphis Public Schools under another name.

We are a bit like Afghanistan, where the U.S. government tried for 20 years to establish a national government, spending billions on infrastructure, weaponry, education, and our own blood and treasure. It all collapsed like a Jenga tower on a trampoline when the final date of U.S. troop withdrawal was announced. The puppet regime fled the country; the Afghan government troops evaporated; the Taliban walked into Kabul, unopposed.

The original withdrawal deal was set up by former President Trump, who released 5,000 Taliban troops as a gesture of good faith and pledged to remove U.S. troops by May. President Biden backed up Trump’s withdrawal date from May to September but didn’t change much else. The final week of chaos, hurried flights to safety via a massive airlift, and a last-minute suicide bombing that cost 13 American lives gave pundits and keyboard kommandos of every stripe a couple weeks worth of second-guessing, but not much else. Most Americans are glad we’re finally out of that hell-hole.

What did we learn? Afghanistan is a landmass with a prescribed border, but it is not a country and certainly not a place to attempt nation-building. Rather, it is a conglomeration of tribes and religious and ethnic groups, many of whom have been feuding for centuries.

Shelby County is also a landmass with a prescribed border and home to various tribes, most of whom have little in common, and some of whom have been feuding for decades.

How many times have you heard a Midtowner say, “I don’t go beyond the Parkways”? How many times have you read an online comment from a suburbanite disparaging Memphis’ crime? People who live in Bartlett, Millington, Germantown, Lakeland, Arlington, and Collierville don’t see themselves as Memphians. And why should they? They don’t live here. They have their own communities with schools, police departments, and governments. The proposed consolidation would leave the burbs intact as towns, but their citizens — as residents of Shelby County — would still have a vote in the referendum. How do you think that will go?

Memphis is blue. The rest of the county is red. We can come together over barbecue, the Grizzlies, the Tigers, and not much else. I love this city and I’m proud to call it home. People in Germantown feel the same way about their town. We can get along fine for the most part, as long as we avoid politics. We even make occasional forays into foreign territory for shopping, dinner, sports, or music. But putting together a consolidation package that would win 51 percent of the vote in this fractious county is not very likely to happen.

And let’s be honest: Nobody wants to go through an airlift around here.

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Opinion

Mayors Wharton and Landrieu and the 66 Percent Doctrine

Mitch Landrieu

  • Mitch Landrieu

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu came to Memphis and The Peabody Thursday and had the audience in the palm of his hand. Memphis Mayor A C Wharton came to the Memphis City Council Thursday and had them at his throat.

Landrieu was guest of honor at an event called “A Summons to Memphis” sponsored by our sister publication Memphis magazine. He said lots of nice things about Memphis and suggested that mayors and cities try to do things that two-thirds or 66 percent of “the people” will support, writing off the other 33 percent as hardcore opposed.
He contrasted the idea of trying to achieve a majority of “50 percent plus one” (“which doesn’t work because somebody can flip that one”) with “governing on the 66 percent model,” in that “Something that works for almost everybody is always better than something that works for half the people, plus one.”

Coincidentally, Landrieu, who comes from a political family, was elected in 2010 with 67 percent of the vote.

Wharton was guest of honor at an event that could have been called “A Summons to The Reckoning” with a mostly cranky Budget Committee of the City Council. Coincidentally, Wharton was elected in 2011 with 65 percent of the vote. Close enough to make him, like Landrieu, a certified 66-percenter.

But if you want to be hailed as a great guy mayor with a bright future, it is not a bad idea to travel to another city where you can smile, compliment, tell jokes, and speak in platitudes. I have no doubt A C Wharton would get a standing ovation as luncheon speaker next week anywhere in New Orleans.

The 66-percent doctrine is brilliant in its simplicity. And if it is not taken too literally, it makes some sense, particularly when a city is on its heels from a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or reveling in euphoria over the success of its favorite professional sports team as New Orleans was with the Saints in 2010.

But it breaks down when you apply it to specific ideas and things and have to put a price on them, as Wharton did Thursday when he floated a 50-percent property tax increase and 3,250 city employee layoffs as the extremes of the spend-cut continuum.

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Opinion

Is It Worth It?

1297100483-coverstory_picklerwithmedia.jpg

The slogans and yard signs have come out. “If You Don’t Know Vote No.” And “Unity.”

I think the “don’t know” one is more effective. The anti-merger side has the easier job. Lots of doubts. The fact is nobody knows the answer to a dozen big questions. The pro-merger side has to choose between the symbolic feel-good message — unity — or the financial message — lower taxes — which is not at all certain.

Slogans aside, another way to look at the schools referendum is to ask this question: Is it worth it?

To answer that, we need to look at what can be changed and what cannot be changed by surrendering the MCS charter and merging the city and county school systems. And then we need to ask if the things that can be changed are more likely to be changed with or without a merger.

First, here’s what I think can be changed:

The discussion. In 29 years in Memphis, I have never seen anything close to this much interest, publicity, serious discussion, and mixed alliances as I have seen in the last four months on the schools issue.

The tax imbalance between Memphis and the suburbs. Sooner or later Memphis will go bankrupt if a shrinking tax base has to support more services, and residents can opt to live in a neighboring suburb where the taxes are 20-40 percent less. It may be a slow death, but I don’t think this can be avoided without consolidation.

School system and school district boundary lines can be redrawn. It’s been done many times already, it just has not been implemented.

School board membership can change and the size of the board can be increased and the district lines can be redrawn.

Superintendents can be changed, just like coaches. Buyouts and hurt feelings come with the territory. If you are a Kriner Cash fan, vote “no” on school consolidation. Otherwise he’s out of here within a year or so.

Openness and accurate, audited numbers. Taxpayers should not have to pay for phantoms. Audit the enrollment and the graduation rate, and the academic outliers. No shenanigans.

The acceptance of an ACT average score of 14, 15, 16, or 17, which is what most city high schools produce. A high school that boasts of increasing its graduation rate with graduates who make a 15 on the ACT— six points below the state average — is cheating those students and setting them up for failure.

The “Us and Them” reporting and grading system that makes Shelby County look so much better than MCS. Blended scores are the rule in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville.

The uncertainty about what Memphians want. This is a city-only referendum. The turnout and the margin and the result will tell us something.

What can’t be changed:

School choice. The choices are much broader than city schools or county schools. There are tens of thousands of kids in private schools in Shelby County and tens of thousands more in public schools in DeSoto County, Mississippi, minutes away. MCS has an open enrollment policy. And now MCS also has a couple dozen charter schools. The strongest force in the universe is a parent determined to get their kid into a good school. Boundaries are nothing.

Resegregation. There are not enough white kids in the combined city and county system — about 32,000 out of 150,000 — to have racially balanced schools. Racially unbalanced schools are a fact of life here. With a merger we might have unity in the sense of one public system instead of two, but probably not for long once municipalities set up their own systems, which I think they would do.

In-fighting on the school board. A bigger board would have fresh faces but democracy guarantees diversity and disagreement.

The suburban dominance of the state legislature. They have the numbers.

A long and difficult transition. A merger of two public school systems is not at all like a corporate merger. There are no lines of authority. No super CEO. No handpicked board. Nobody with a mandate to close schools and cut jobs.

The achievement gap between the very best schools and the worst schools. There will be and there should be a few college-prep public high schools like White Station, Houston, Collierville, and Central. That’s smart policy for any school system, and it recognizes the clustering effect. It is simply not realistic to expect disadvantaged city schools to close the gap with White Station or Houston.

In summary, I think voters will be asking themselves what a merger can and cannot do, and whether some desirable results are more likely to be achieved with or without a merger. The outcome will influence what suburban residents and the courts do.

Categories
Opinion

Germantown: Your Turn on Schools

David Pickler

  • David Pickler

This should be good. There’s a meeting at Germantown City Hall at 7 p.m. tonight to talk about schools. I don’t think they’ll be booing David Pickler and Mark Norris.

What snow? As of noon Monday, it was game on. With timely action on a schools bill expected in Nashville today, and possibly some court filings, counter-moves, or shenanigans elsewhere, there will be fresh red meat for a big crowd meeting on its home court in the belly of the beast.

It was a quiet weekend here in Lake Wobegon, also known as Midtown. The Super Bowl took airtime and print space and blogosphere energy from the schools story, which I sense is testing the patience and attention span of everyone involved in it. Sort of like the Black Eyed Peas halftime show.

And I think that is part of the strategy of merger opponents. Killing with delay, kindness, and confusion is a time-tested winner.

That goes for the white men in suits and boots in Nashville who dominate the legislature and the governor’s office. As my colleague Jackson Baker has described in detail, Norris brilliantly crafted a bill that can and will be seen as giving away a lot while actually giving away very little, and assuring special school district status for Shelby County down the road, if not sooner.

Delay worked for annexation opponents a few years ago when Memphis was on the verge of taking in Southwind and a bunch of schools in southeastern Shelby County. The neighborhoods avoided higher taxes, and the county school system avoided losing so much of its black population that it’s lopsided racial imbalance might have drawn renewed interest from the federal courts. Southwind is supposed to come into the city of Memphis in 2013. Where have we heard that year before? Oh yes, its the year that the city and county school systems will merge in Norris’ bill. We’ll see.

Delay works for Memphis City Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash. He can never seem to come up with numbers when the media and elected officials need them, whether it’s the enrollment, the number of kids who fail to start school until after Labor Day, or the number of pregnant girls at Frayser High School. He talks vaguely about closing some schools, but doesn’t look ready to identify specific schools on the chopping block. “Right-sizing” MCS is off the table at least until the referendum.

Last Thursday the Memphis City Council delayed, for a week, finalizing its support of surrendering the MCS charter. Harold Collins was pushing for final action, and when I saw him later that evening at a public meeting at Whitehaven High School he looked visibly distressed at the ability of Norris to persuade some city council members of his honorable intentions.

“Do you really trust him?” he asked me. Hey, I’m the one who gets to ask the questions.

I told Collins I thought he had no choice but to wait, given that five other council members — all the white guys, at that — were going to vote against it. Not a good outcome. Collins glumly agreed. The trouble is that the council’s “nuclear” option may now be the nuclear dud. Defused. Outfoxed. Killed with kindness and confusion.

I disagree with some of my media colleagues who suggested that the moratorium on March 8th may be irrelevant. Symbolic is not the same as irrelevant. It is good to engage people, good to know how Memphians feel, good to follow through with what the school board started on December 20th, good to play by the rules. A split vote for surrender on the school board followed by a split vote for surrender on the city council without a referendum would have been a disaster.

Better to keep talking, have the referendum, get a big turnout, see what happens, then argue about what it means.

I ran into civil rights lawyer Richard Fields Saturday. He said he plans to file a lawsuit to enjoin the state from taking any action. Fields has the bona fides on this issue. We will see. If he does something, we shall report it.

Categories
Opinion

Council Delays Action on MCS Charter

Myron Lowery

  • Myron Lowery

In an unusual one-topic meeting, the Memphis City voted Thursday to delay for at least a week its final action supporting the Memphis City School board’s decision to surrender its charter.

The council acted in response to pending state legislation in Nashville aimed at avoiding or delaying a merger of the city and Shelby County school systems. The March 8th Memphis referendum will go on as scheduled, according to Council chairman Myron Lowery and council attorney Allan Wade.

The council voted to recess until Thursday, February 9th, but also served notice that it could come back on a day’s notice before that if anything happens in Nashville that might be seen as hostile.

The Council previously voted to support the MCS board’s action, but had not finalized that vote. The meeting Thursday would have done that if the council had not instead gone into recess.

The outcome satisfied Mayor A C Wharton, who attended the council meeting.

“The last thing we want is to be characterized in Nashville as a bunch of trigger-happy politicians,” he said.

The city council and state legislature are playing cat and mouse, each watching to see what the other does day to day on the schools merger issue. The council felt there has been some compromise on the length of the transition period should the referendum pass. That, coupled with assurances that the referendum would be for Memphians only, was enough to buy more time.

Councilman Shea Flinn said “a tremendous amount has changed” on the details of a bill pushed by Sen. Mark Norris, and that “things are going in a positive direction.”

But there was a little bit of drama in the meeting anyway. Flinn first proposed that there be one-day or three-day delays. Both of those votes failed 5-5. Then Councilman Harold Collins proposed the one-week delay and it passed 9-1.

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News

Council Delays Consolidation Vote

The City Council delayed voting for at least two weeks on a resolution to set a new Charter Commission for the purpose of creating a metro government.

“I’m in favor of consolidation,” said councilman Jim Strickland, “but I’m not convinced that next year is the right time to move forward.”

Mayor Pro Tem Myron Lowery gave a presentation to the council’s executive committee that cited population loss, brain drain, economic development, and duplication in services as reasons why the two governments should merge.

“Dual-headed government is a broken business model,” he said.

Categories
Opinion

In Shelby County Isolation Trumps Consolidation

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

To call consolidation a tough sale is an understatement.

Crime and fear of crime, bad schools, higher taxes, lost jobs and fear of lost jobs, old grudges, apathy, suburban (or urban) opposition, political cowardice, the “King Willie” factor, questionable “efficiencies” — any one of those could sink it.

There’s another problem that is not so obvious. In his state of the city speech, Mayor Willie Herenton urged residents of Memphis and Shelby County — black and white, rich and poor, urban and suburban — to pull together for their common good. But the prevailing spirit for at least the last 25 years in Memphis has been anything but “all for one and one for all.”

It has been just the opposite. It is the spirit of isolation, not consolidation. Consider:

Me and mine first, as evidenced by all the elected and appointed officials who, legally and illegally, gamed the system and padded their paychecks.

Self-segregation in schools, churches, and even sporting events and entertainment has replaced legal segregation.

Gated communities from South Memphis to South Bluffs to Southwind.

“Special” taxing districts or TIFs that get dedicated tax streams that would otherwise go into the general fund.

“Special” tourism development zones or TDZs around FedExForum, Graceland, the convention center, and Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium that, when implemented, further erode the general tax fund unless they attract new money.

“Special” incentives in the form of tax freezes given to businesses that promise investment and new jobs, whether they actually deliver them or not. These also erode the tax base. No other city in Tennessee grants nearly as many of these as Memphis does.

“Special” boards and commissions like the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) and Center City Commission (CCC) that are narrowly focused to develop and oversee choice pieces of downtown Memphis.

“Special” building authorities for big projects like FedExForum.

Selective annexation of Cordova, Countrywood, and Hickory Hill which didn’t mobilize opposition quickly or effectively enough, while savvier, wealthier, and more politically powerful areas like Southwind and Southeast Shelby County got a reprieve.

As a reporter covering government, this is the biggest change I have seen in Memphis since I moved here in 1982. Not only are city and county government often not in synch, the elected officials in both governments have willingly given away much of their authority in the name of expedience and efficiency.

The pay has gone up 300 to 500 percent but the job description has shrunk. The City Council and County Commission, which theoretically represent all city and county residents, are often not where the action is any more, or at least not to the extent they once were. To attempt to effectively cover “government” nowadays means to go to meetings or keep tabs on the Sports Authority, RDC, PBA, CCC, CVB, MLGW, Industrial Development Board, Agricenter, Airport Authority, and various nonprofits.

They’re all in their own, often isolated worlds, sometimes for better and sometimes worse. They come to the mayors or council members and commissioners when they need a fix, and if they can do it quietly and out of the public eye, so much the better.

Obviously, in a city of 675,000 people and a county of more than 850,000 people, there’s something to be said for specialization, and maybe a lot. If you want to run an airport, build a FedExForum on a schedule, or attract the big convention of square-dancers, you need focus and partners from the private sector.

But there’s a price for all of this specialization, and it’s not just the bruised egos and additional bureaucracies and lost taxes. It’s the loss of community and the idea that we’re all in this together. As citizens and elected officials in Memphis and Shelby County, we reap what we sow. And what we have sown are the seeds of separation and isolation, not consolidation.

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News

Herenton on State of the City

As promised, Mayor Willie Herenton reopened his civic hymnal on Wednesday to the verse marked “consolidation” and suggested that this time others might join him.

“I favor metropolitan consolidation inclusive of schools,” said Herenton, making his annual “state of the city” address to the Kiwanis Club meeting at The Peabody.

The venue was fairly small and so was the crowd, probably under 200 people. They gave the fifth-term mayor a couple of warm standing ovations. Whether that indicated the spirit of the season or support for consolidation remains to be seen.

Herenton said he sees promise in the new membership of the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission along with Gov. Phil Bredesen and county mayor A C Wharton.

“Thank God for the new county commission,” he said. “We’ve got some people over there with some new energy and some courage.” He did not name names.

He said he will ask state legislators to, in effect, change the rules on consolidation so that approval from both city and county voters in separate elections is not a prerequisite. Several years before Herenton became mayor in 1991, consolidation votes passed in the city but failed in the county, where signs that say “county schools” and “no city taxes” are still a staple of new subdivisions just outside the borders of Memphis.

As he has on many occasions, Herenton said consolidated government would be more efficient and cost taxpayers less money.

“It pains me to see the waste in schools,” said the former superintendent.

It apparently pains Bredesen too. The governor has shown impatience with Memphis “reform” programs and indicated that a state takeover is possible if Memphis doesn’t do better. Herenton mentioned changing the governing structure of the school system but did not specifically call for abolishing the school board or appointing a new one, as he has on other occasions.

Meeting with reporters after his speech, Herenton said consolidation can only happen with support from key business leaders and other politicians. He said the “economics of government will become so tight” that such supporters will eventually come around.

The sticking points are that Memphis has a higher tax rate than suburbs and unincorporated areas in Shelby County and the Shelby County schools, with more affluent students and fewer poor students, outperform city schools on standardized tests. But Memphis accounts for about 70 percent of the population of Shelby County. By Herenton’s lights, a suburban minority is dictating the rules of the game to the urban majority.

On other subjects, Herenton said Memphis is “financially strong” with a reserve fund of more than $60 million. Memphis, he said, is “on the national radar screen” because of FedEx Forum, AutoZone Park, and other attractions. And he said crime “trend lines” are going “in the right direction” but 500 more police officers are still needed. He will announce new anti-blight measures next week.

Responding to a question from the audience about the lack of a “wow” factor on the riverfront, Herenton said he is open to the possibility of razing The Pyramid if a deal with Bass Pro falls through.

“We could get the wow,” he said. “I still want the wow.”

Herenton seemed to be in a good mood, and there were no real zingers for the press or anyone else with the exception of, “For those of you who want to sit on the sidelines and be critical, we’re not going to be mad at you, we’re just going to pray for you.”

Reaction to the consolidation proposal among Kiwanis members was guarded. Businessman Sam Cantor said he is unconditionally for it but does not expect it to happen in the next four years.

Businessman Calvin Anderson is also for it and says it “can happen” if Herenton can take himself out of the equation, recruit allies, and present a reasonably united Shelby County legislative delegation in Nashville. Greg Duckett, former city chief administrative officer under Dick Hackett, said consolidation needs to happen but he stopped short of saying it will.

“Significant strides to making it happen can occur in the next four years,” he said.

Jim Strickland, sworn in Tuesday as a new member of the City Council, said he supports full consolidation but is willing to compromise on schools if necessary.

He said he is “not sure” if Herenton can muster enough support among suburban mayors and state lawmakers to make any headway.

Consolidation by charter surrender does not appear to be an option, which doesn’t mean it won’t keep coming up for discussion. In 2002, the state attorney general’s office issued an opinion that said “the General Assembly may not revoke the charter, the Memphis City Council is not authorized to surrender the city charter, and no statute authorizes the Memphis city charter to be revoked by a referendum election of the voters.”

Herenton, who was reelected with just 42 percent of the vote, made his speech against a backdrop of glum economic news, locally and nationally. Oil hit the $100-a-barrel mark, the stock of local economic bastions FedEx and First Horizon and others plunged with the Dow Jones Average, the Memphis Grizzlies and Memphis Redbirds are struggling at the gate, and foreclosures are expected to soar this year.

“In order to do all these things our economy must remain strong,” the mayor said.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Same Old Challenge

Don’t look now — on second thought, it’s time for year-end reflections and speculation, so go ahead and look — but the specter of city/county consolidation is back with us. We say “specter” not in any pejorative sense. If anything, the idea of combining some of our

wastefully duplicated governmental functions is more like Casper the Friendly Ghost than it is the Amityville Horror. It’s just that the concept keeps coming and going and getting buried or vaporized, only to rematerialize unexpectedly — a fact that makes us wonder if its latest incarnation is the same old phantasm or something more solid.

Maybe this time the idea will take on real substance. It’s not only that a freshly reelected Mayor Willie Herenton has once again promoted metro government to the head of his agenda. Another reality is that an intergovernmental task force, co-chaired by county commissioner Mike Carpenter and outgoing city councilman Jack Sammons, recently climaxed several months of hearings and investigations by approving, via an eight to five vote, the goal of merging the functions of the Memphis Police Department and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

This limited or (in the argot of the day) “functional” form of consolidation won’t happen overnight, if at all. Sheriff Mark Luttrell, among other interested parties, is opposed. That’s more than understandable, given that the sheriff has, thanks to a legal ruling by a state court last year, seen the presumed constitutional nature of his position unexpectedly put up for grabs. And the suburban mayors, long jealous of their independence (and yet dependent for both financial and administrative reasons on some larger umbrella authority) are also reluctant. Contrariwise, Memphis police director Larry Godwin, like his boss the mayor, is avid for the idea. For that matter, the issue of reconfiguring a metro drug unit got some traction during last year’s city election campaign. So there is momentum.

Then there is the constant example of Nashville, regarded by residents of the Memphis area either as a sister city or as an archrival or as both. Whichever way it is seen, the city of Nashville has been formally yoked to the rest of Davidson County for decades now in a metropolitan form of government, and it may not be accidental that, during that same period, it has progressed from a backwater state capital roughly half the size of Memphis to a condition of parity and beyond. In terms of economic growth, new business, per capita income, commercial construction, and the like, Nashville is soaring ahead. That hasn’t happened solely as a consequence of consolidation, but it owes something to the simplicity of central planning, the cohesiveness of governmental structures, and the property-tax reductions.

When former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell addressed the Memphis Rotary Club earlier this year, he teasingly affected the persona of an urban rival and said, in effect, keep on doing what you’re doing in Memphis and Shelby County. Stay separate and spare Nashville the competition. Was he joking? Yes. Was he serious? Also yes.

The issue of consolidation will confront us again in 2008. And it will haunt us thereafter until we deal with it.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Crime Fight

CREDIT: Aaron Kohr | dreamstime.com

When the Memphis Police Department (MPD) upgraded its multi-million-dollar communication system, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office was added to the platform. By joining forces, the law enforcement agencies saved taxpayer money.

But don’t think that means the two departments are ready to share.

County commissioner Mike Carpenter presented a plan last week to the Law Enforcement Consolidation Task Force that would shift county law enforcement to MPD and make the jail the sheriff’s sole responsibility.

“Two weeks ago, task-force members said they weren’t sure what we were talking about. There were no specific proposals,” said Carpenter, the group’s chair. “We need a long-term view. This isn’t about the individuals running things today. It’s not about the mayor.”

Under the proposal, a five-member Public Safety Commission would guide a functional consolidation of the two entities. The commission would consist of five representatives: someone from MPD, someone from the sheriff’s office, a representative of the county mayor, a representative of the city mayor, and a chair, appointed jointly by the city and county mayors. All the mayoral appointments would be confirmed by the City Council and the County Commission.

The plan, which would ultimately require a change in the county charter, would give leaders a chance to reverse or opt out of consolidation agreements if things weren’t going well.

Carpenter called his 21-page proposal a “starting point.” Though several other members of the task force seemed to agree, Sheriff Mark Luttrell called it “premature,” “pre-emptive,” and “ill-timed.”

“One of the most polarizing issues facing the community is consolidation,” Luttrell said. “I feel the report pre-empts the committee process.”

Mike Heidingsfield, director of the Memphis Shelby County Crime Commission, the organization that suggested functional consolidation of the departments’ basic training, traffic, search and rescue, and internal affairs divisions in a 2003 report, felt similarly.

“This perspective assumes this group has decided that consolidation is the path to follow. I don’t think we’ve gotten there as an entity,” he said.

Just the word “consolidation” is controversial. Unfortunately, as Carpenter noted, there will never be an “apples to apples” comparison with another city or county. But the proposal makes a good case, citing the elimination of boundaries, a rising jail population, potential economies of scale, and an elimination of unnecessary duplication.

Representatives from three other consolidated police departments told the task force that their organizations were more efficient after consolidation.

Robert White of the Louisville Police Department said, “Everything there were two of, there is now one of, and people are getting the same type of service.”

As it is, MPD and the sheriff’s office rarely operate jointly. The Metro DUI unit, the Memphis Shelby Metropolitan Gang Unit and the Metro Narcotics Unit, once joint crime-fighting efforts, have all been disbanded.

“Joint efforts at attacking non-federal crimes and day-to-day policework appear to be virtually non-existent,” the report noted. “These kinds of differences in philosophy and mission and disputes between the departments are avoided to the benefit of citizens under one single law enforcement agency.”

But perhaps the strongest argument for a functional consolidation is that it will happen one day whether citizens vote on it or not.

In its 2003 report, the Crime Commission noted that, because of annexation, there will be fewer than 20,000 residents in unincorporated Shelby County by the year 2020.

“Continuing at the current staffing levels to provide law enforcement for the small area described above is impractical and effectively results in municipal taxpayers, who are also county taxpayers, subsidizing law enforcement services for a small portion of unincorporated Shelby County.”

Before its law enforcement divisions were consolidated, Charlotte, North Carolina, was in a similar situation.

“It was not going to be long before the county police did not have a jurisdiction to police,” Charlotte representative Russ McElwee told the task force. “One of the strongest arguments for consolidation was the city people were paying county police salaries without any of the benefits.”

Consolidated law enforcement may not save money, although it has in some places. But that’s probably not the main issue for citizens of a high-crime society.

The success of law enforcement isn’t measured in dollars and cents but in safety and security. And, as the report noted, law enforcement may see boundaries but criminals don’t.