Tag: Fairgrounds TDZ

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Museum of Terrible Ideas

A couple years ago, Flyer writer Chris Davis wrote a funny piece about Beale Street Landing, suggesting that it would be a great place to house the “Museum of Terrible Ideas.” I guess there was something about the giant corkscrew boat-landing ramp and the Lego-colored elevator shaft — and the long-delayed project’s $40 million price tag — that led him to make that suggestion.

Now that it’s built, I have nothing against Beale Street Landing. It’s a nice facility with great river views and a decent little restaurant. The Flyer even held its Best of Memphis party there last fall. So I guess the Museum of Terrible Ideas will have to find another home.

Maybe the Mid-South Coliseum could house the MTI. It’s certainly big enough, and it’s in the center of another possibly terrible idea — the Fairgrounds TMZ — a top-down project with few supporters outside of city hall.

Think of the possibities: There could be an exhibit showing how the feds once tried to put a freeway through the middle of one of the city’s great historic neighborhoods, a project that would have destroyed Midtown, the Sears Building project, Overton Park, and the Memphis Zoo. There could be an exhibit showing the thwarted plans to destroy the historic buildings of Overton Square and put in a low-end grocery store. There could be a section devoted to all our dead malls; a section honoring the former Airport Authority for its deft negotiations with Delta Airlines. Hell, there could be a whole wing dedicated to the terrible ideas of Senator Brian Kelsey.

And now there’s a new terrible idea that’s being, er, floated: water taxis. The Riverfront Development Corporation has ponied up $200,000, and gotten the feds to ante up $800,000, for a study on the feasibility of water taxis that would “ferry people from Bass Pro to Beale Street Landing and Mud Island.”

A 2013 report states: “Taxis are currently imagined as traipsing up and down the Wolf River Harbor, but the only water taxi that is likely to be effective at attracting people to Mud Island will be one that functions like a bridge, free of charge, zipping back and forth across the channel, always in sight, and never more than a few minutes away.”

This presumes that there are people who want to get to the tip of Mud Island. And that you can “zip” around the harbor. Both are out-of-town-concocted fantasies.

I have a little boat that’s docked in the Wolf River Harbor. It’s a no-wake zone, limiting boats to a speed that a casual jogger can easily surpass. If you speed up, you get ticketed by the harbor patrol, and you provoke the Asian carp to start jumping. There are kayakers and canoeists and fishermen in small jon boats. You can’t zip. A no-wake trip from Bass Pro to Beale Street Landing would take 20 minutes.

If water taxis were a good idea, someone would have started a water taxi business. It is, in fact, a terrible idea and the MTI should start clearing space now for its water taxi exhibit.

Here’s a good idea: Get the damn trolleys running before May, when Music Fest starts and Bass Pro opens and the Grizzlies are in the playoffs. Call ’em “land taxis” if it makes you feel better.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (January 15, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Bianca Phillips’ story, “New Bill Would Get Wine in Grocery Stores by Summer” …

Liquor stores are wonderful places. When I walk into Joe’s or Kimbrough’s it’s the same feeling I used to get at Happy Hal’s Toy Town. The availability of booze at Save-Mart or wherever will weed out the schlubs from these sacred places.

Crackoamerican

Greg Cravens

Hanging your hat on the personal service you get from a local liquor store is so funny. By that logic, we should not have grocery stores at all, because the corner convenience store owner can better help us pick out milk, Gatorade, or candy. There is no logical reason at all that any retail business should not be able to sell a legal product, just like the liquor stores that have enjoyed political protection from their cronies for years. The message from the voters is clear.

Dewey

About the ongoing discussion about the proposed Fairgrounds TDZ …

I have been a resident of Cooper- Young for six years and I’ve been pleased with the developments in the area. The KROC Center has been a huge success. However, regarding the ongoing effort to establish a TDZ in the Fairgrounds, I can confidently say that the majority of the citizens living in the area affected by this development do not agree with Robert Lipscomb’s vision.

The new development will eliminate almost all of the parking used for the Liberty Bowl games. My neighborhood already fills up with cars during games and events. What will happen when more parking is eliminated?

Baseball? Who is asking for so many baseball fields? Why take land that can be accessed by the public 24/7 for many different uses and relegate it to one sport for only part of the year? It ostracizes people living in the area, not to mention the noise we will have to put up with.

Hotel? There are already two perfectly good buildings that used to be hotels within a mile of the area — at Union and McLean and Madison and Cooper. Let’s make these buildings work before building yet another hotel in a primarily residential area.

Shopping? Most people living in 38104 live there because they don’t want to be a part of the big-box-store culture. This forces a shopping center on people who don’t want it and will lead to a decline in property values (see Wolfchase and Oak Court Mall). Not to mention that the new businesses would compete with those that are already here. We can’t even keep all of the storefronts in Cooper-Young occupied. Let’s focus on that first.

Tearing down the Coliseum and Pipkin building is irresponsible, historically and practically. Both buildings have many years left in them. Before putting a death warrant on these buildings, we need an honest third-party review of what it would cost to keep the buildings.

The most important part of our disagreement with the TDZ plan comes down to the fact that this is public land being sold for private interests. This issue must be addressed with the concerns of all the organizations and citizens involved.

Jordan Danelz

About our cover story, “New Year. New You” …

How about making 2015 a year of working together – affirming our unity and connectedness – seeing America as the one nation that it is. We are at the very point in time when a 400 year old is dying and another is struggling to be born – a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics; a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine, such as the world has never dreamed. 

Ron Lowe

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Opinion Viewpoint

Dividing by Zero

I’m all about creativity, but it seems our civic imagination has gone wild. The Fairgrounds and Graceland projects have fundamental flaws that would render them untenable as private investments, so why should the public invest?

Memphis Housing and Community Development Director Robert Lipscomb dazzles politicians with PowerPoints and distracts us with ghostly promises of private investment, jobs, and kids playing. He says all the public money is sales tax that otherwise would go to the state. While true, the effect is to get everyone so jazzed they forget the project’s premise is extremely risky.

The Fairgrounds Tourism Development Zone (TDZ) application justifies a $176 million public investment by claiming a private investment of $133 million. The application leaves unsaid that the investment consists of money already spent by Loeb Properties and others on privately financed development projects and anticipated dollars from a to-be-determined private developer.

The project relies on a major retailer swooping in to anchor a massive new retail and hotel development. But there is no lease. There isn’t even a named prospect. At the Fairgrounds, the best location is the corner of Central and East Parkway, which is currently occupied by a school and the Kroc Center. If Target or Walmart was interested, they’d tell us. We don’t need to build it and then see if we can entice them to open in a sub-par spot.

There’s probably rebuttal evidence and “proof” that youth sports is the future in the studies Lipscomb commissioned. Of course, the people who provide these studies are the same ones who are later paid to consult on the development, and their advice can be boiled down to something entrepreneur Richard Branson would say: “Screw it, let’s do it.” Of course, when he says that he’s talking about using his own money, not yours.

As for the Graceland project, there is certainly a public benefit to creating jobs in Whitehaven and improving a major tourist attraction. The Commercial Appeal reports that a public investment of $125 million in the Graceland Hotel project might yield 282 jobs. From a return on investment (ROI) perspective, this does not seem to shake out for taxpayers. From the developers’ perspective, it’s fine, but I can’t calculate their ROI because real numbers aren’t divisible by zero.

Investors use the phrase “skin in the game” to refer to putting something of yourself into the project — usually cash. It gives them comfort to know the risk they’re taking is reciprocated. Apparently, the Graceland Hotel developers are putting zero capital into this project. While they stand to earn all the profits from the venture, they risk nothing. Any investor would be nervous, so why aren’t we?

Public investment has its place. Without it we wouldn’t have the Grizzlies. I can even justify Bass Pro —  at least there’s an actual company with a plan, investing money of its own. The Fairgrounds and Graceland projects represent a $300 million public investment with virtually zero committed private money. Compare that with Crosstown and Overton Square, where public money represented less than 10 percent of the total investment. In these cases, taxpayer investment is secured not only by public oversight but by the natural inclination of private developers to protect their investments.

When Memphis plays developer without market checks and balances, the result is seldom good. The smart play here is to pause and take a breath. The Fairgrounds and Graceland are tremendous assets for our city. The right projects will surface when the time is right. It’s the government’s job to recognize that reality and get out of the way when it happens. Invest incrementally. Instead of huge, risky, public debt-financed projects, invest in many small, neighborhood-level private projects and iterate off what works.

Private money doesn’t flow to projects that don’t make sense, so why should public money be any different? No one I know supports these proposals in full, except the politicians. Of course, if these projects go through, millions of dollars will find their way to lawyers, contractors, bankers, and consultants — the very same people who line the campaign war chests of our local politicians. So, no, nothing’s likely to change here in the city famous for building an upside-down triangle arena inside a right-side-up triangle. Common sense ain’t so common around here.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

In Sync with the Season

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The Shelby County Commission conducted its last meeting of the year on Monday and, in the process, put off until mid-January any decisions relating to two vexing matters — that of Robert Lipscomb’s proposed Tourist Development Zone (TDZ) project for the Fairgrounds and the supposedly dormant but still-simmering issue of rules changes.

The shelving of the TDZ plan was according to plan. Behind the scenes, key members of the commission, Democrats and Republicans, are working on a compromise version that can be presented to the state building commission.

Jackson Baker

Lipscomb meets the press as Cooper-Young consultant David Upton looks on

A successful agreement could be presented as proof not only that the commission supports the TDZ, which is a city project that must be okayed by the state, but that Republican conservatives on the commission, whose counterparts dominate in the General Assembly, are among the plan’s chief supporters.

And things were moving swiftly toward such an agreement, with the GOP’s Heidi Shafer and the Democrats’ Reginald Milton taking leading roles in establishing a commission consensus that, in city planning czar Lipscomb’s words (echoing a title by thriller author Tom Clancy) would resolve “the sum of all our fears.”

Those fears, over the course of several public sessions and private negotiations, had involved three main points:

1) A concern by several commissioners, as well as county Mayor Mark Luttrell, that school funding be insulated from the flow of incremental sales tax revenue to the TDZ’s developmental fund. What is emerging is the concept of a voluntary “set-aside” of what would constitute the schools’ normal portion of incremental sales tax revenue generated within the TDZ.

That amount has been estimated to be as high as $1 million to $2 million annually by Republican Commissioner Steve Basar, who has long been a skeptic regarding the Fairgrounds TDZ (and Lipscomb projects in general) but whose resistance may be softening.

2) An insistence by GOP Commissioner (and former school board member) David Reaves and others that the city of Memphis, as the price of commission support, finally come across with monies long owed the county — notably the court-ordered “maintenance-of-effort” amount stemming from the city council’s decision in 2008 to withhold some $57 million in its customary annual payment to the Memphis school system.

That debt, which is now owed, post-school merger, to Shelby County Schools (SCS), has been the subject of negotiation between the city and SCS, and word is that the wangling principals are within a million dollars or so of a settlement in the general area of $40 million.

3) Guarantees against financial cannibalization by the TDZ — which envisions a combination of athletic facilities and retail enterprises at the Fairgrounds — of other prime commercial and sports areas.

Cases in point are the Cooper-Young and Overton Square shopping/entertainment areas, both of which are in the enlarged TDZ, and such existing athletic operations as Gameday Baseball and the burgeoning sports complex overseen by former University of Memphis basketballer Anfernee Hardaway.

Agreement in all these problem areas by a bipartisan commission majority encompassing both urban and suburban areas is near. It is still far enough away, however, as to ensure slam-dunk passage of a motion to defer action until the January 15th commission meeting. The motion was made formally by Democratic Commissioner Eddie Jones, whose District 11 is directly affected by the proposed TDZ.

On hand Monday to audit proceedings was Lipscomb, who chatted with reporters after the commission’s deferral vote, pointing out that, while commission action on the TDZ was not, strictly speaking, necessary, it would enhance the proposal’s prospects for approval by the state building commission.

Lipscomb welcomed the month-long delay by the commission, saying, “It’s worth taking the time to do things right.”

• The other matter deferred by the commission until January 15th came after a surprise motion by Democrat Walter Bailey to revisit the issue of a rules change for the commission that would basically establish a majority-vote rule for all pending matters, including several that currently require a two-thirds majority vote.

Bailey’s motion was something of a surprise because the commission appeared to have decided on remanding the rules-change issue to an ad hoc committee as one aspect of an agreement to dismiss a lawsuit on the matter brought against Chairman Justin Ford by seven commission members.

The suit had been prompted by Ford’s persistence in rejecting an agenda proposal for the aforementioned rules change from Commissioner Basar. The context of that had been the newly elected commission’s reorganization vote in September, in which Basar, last year’s vice chair, had been denied the chairmanship by a majority vote on behalf of Ford. Though nominally a Democrat, Ford has often joined ranks with the commission’s Republican minority and enjoyed GOP support for the chairmanship.

The bad feeling that persisted from that occasion resulted in a seven-member coalition, comprised of Basar and six Democrats, that challenged Ford’s prerogatives as chairman and, in the judgment of Ford’s Republican supporters, may have also contemplated deposing Ford as chairman.

The objecting members sued Ford in Chancery Court for violation of commission rules in his handling of agenda matters, but Chancellor Jim Kyle ruled that the new commission had not formally adopted rules and needed to do so. In the wash of all that came a compromise agreement in which Ford’s tenure was guaranteed and the rules-change matter was referred to the aforesaid ad hoc committee, which has not yet been activated.

Bailey noted that fact in making his motion to reprise the rules-change matter, but the long and the short of it all was that action was deferred on the matter when Democrat Van Turner, who with Bailey had been co-counsel in the seven commissioners’ lawsuit, called for adherence to the ad hoc committee solution as a matter of good faith.

“We’re all friends here,” said the GOP’s Terry Roland, who, with Shafer, had spoken against Bailey’s motion.

Turner himself will apparently serve as chairman of the ad hoc committee, which presumably will meet and report by the January 15th date.

• Among the other matters dealt with by the commission on Monday was a $14.5 million TIF (tax increment financing plan) to finance the creation of a hotel in the Graceland area. Bailey challenged the plan as “a bad investment [that] could go south,” and one that should have been handled under private auspices.

Bailey asked “who, besides the taxpayers” would be responsible for retiring the bonds on the project if expected proceeds fell short.

James McLaren, attorney for Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE), assured that EPE would be responsible for any shortfall, and the commission gave its approval to the plan by a 9-1 vote.

(This week’s Flyer “Viewpoint,” by businessman Taylor Berger, p. 17, provides a less than favorable view of both the Graceland proposal and the Fairgrounds TDZ.)

• The local political component of the Christmas season got under way with holiday parties sponsored by the Democratic and Republican parties of Shelby County. Whatever the ratio of political support claimed by the two parties, they managed to provide equally festive occasions.

The Shelby County Democrats’ official party took place last Thursday night, simultaneously with two candidate events related to the forthcoming 2015 city election season.

Councilman Edmund Ford Jr., a candidate for reelection, was the beneficiary of a well-attended fund-raiser at the river-bluff residence of Karl and Gail Schledwitz. Architect Chooch Pickard, who is considering a run for the council, held a preliminary meet-and-greet at the Jay Etkin gallery on Cooper.

Pickard, who espoused a preservationist platform, said he was meditating on a candidacy for the District 5 seat now held by Jim Strickland, if Strickland should run for mayor. Crowd-wise, he undoubtedly benefited from the fact that his event was held just prior to, and next door to, the Democrats’ party at Alchemy.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Truce Prevails on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

With the apparent reaching of a compromise on Monday between feuding factions of the Shelby County Commission, a lawsuit may have been resolved and a modus vivendi of sorts achieved, but the ideologically polarized body still has issues.

It took a while, both in the long run (two and a half months since the standoff began, in the immediate wake of the August 7th election) and in the short term (two hours of mind-bending intricacy at Monday’s climactic public meeting), but the commission’s simmering power struggle finally ended — or seemed to — with a win-win solution.

Both of the warring party-line-plus-one factions were claiming victory, in any case — the one composed of six Democrats and one Republican (Steve Basar), and the one containing five Republicans and one Democrat (Justin Ford).

The solution involved a willingness by the D-Plus-Ones to give up their ongoing Chancery Court lawsuit against Chairman Ford (for his seemingly high-handed control of what could be placed on the commission agenda) in return for the R-Plus-Ones’ agreement to drop their appeal of an adverse decision by Chancellor Jim Kyle, coupled with Ford’s acceptance of majority rule in determining agenda items.

Ford and his Republican allies claimed victory because they had fended off what Republicans Heidi Shafer and Terry Roland saw as an effort by the D-Plus-Ones to “overthrow” Ford’s chairmanship. The Democratic coalition — whose ad hoc leaders were newbie Van Turner and the veteran Walter Bailey — claimed victory because they had forced Ford to yield on his arbitrary control of the agenda.

Virtually lost sight of in the two-sided celebration (which followed an exhausting and repetitious squabble settled evidently in an off-to-the-side chat by competing lawyers Turner and Ron Krelstein) was the origin of the dispute, in the chairmanship election held on September 8th by a freshly elected commission with six new members.

Basar, who had been vice chair in 2013-14, had expected to be elected chairman and was shocked when the majority of Republicans opted instead for the candidacy of Roland, then switched to Democrat Ford when the Millington Republican seemed obviously about to fall short.

Ford was ultimately elected on the basis of his own vote and that of the commission’s six Republicans (including the stunned Basar, who would shortly have a change of mind). Bailey, the commission’s senior Democrat, was meanwhile outraged by his second-place finish to Ford, whose long-term chumminess with Republicans and openness to their agenda were no secret.

At the commission’s next meeting, on September 22nd, Bailey and five other Democrats, along with Basar, voted together to block the committee appointments made by Ford. Weeks later, Ford would get his way on the committee matter, but in the meantime, the battle had shifted to the matter of an agenda item that Basar kept proposing and Ford kept rejecting.

That agenda item, which proposed a rules change allowing agenda items to be added on the basis of simple majority votes and not by a two-thirds super-majority, became the basis of a Democratic coalition lawsuit against Ford’s alleged violations of commission rules via his persistent rejections.

Two weeks ago Chancellor Kyle declined to rule outright on the suit, finding instead that the commission had no rules because it had adopted none for the new body and directing commissioners to adopt new rules or to readopt the body’s former rules.

Hence a motion for an amended rules package presented as an add-on by Basar on Monday, igniting another round of the ongoing factional dispute — partly tedious, partly fascinating — and going over all of the same old issues dividing the body.

The amended rules package contained new clauses calling for the majority-rule principle and essentially removing the chairman from any control over agenda items. Deleted from the package, on a finding by County Attorney Marcy Ingram that it conflicted with the county charter, was a clause declaring that the chairman served “at the will and pleasure of the commission.”

When the deal finally came sometime after 6 p.m. on Monday, the two sides had agreed (on a motion by Ford!) to defer the rules matter to the next meeting of the general government committee, to drop their respective legal actions, and to do the trade-off indicated above: Ford can feel secure in his chairmanship, though he has had to sacrifice the power over the agenda that he had previously claimed and employed.

Either both sides won or both sides lost. The question now becomes: Do the two party-line-plus-one coalitions continue to cohere, or do they break apart, a major part of their raison-d’être having dissolved.

• An indicator of whether the coalitions might hold was implicit in another vote taken by the commission on Monday. Two votes, actually, on related ordinances proposed by Roland — to strike language in existing ordinances requiring that contractors with the county observe living wage and prevailing wage standards, respectively.

Roland’s premise is that the existing ordinances are inconsistent with legislation passed by the Republican dominated General Assembly establishing state standards in such matters and prohibiting local requirements that might clash with them. The issue, both in Shelby County and in Nashville, has been a clear divider between Democrats and Republicans.

Since this was the second reading for both Roland ordinances, and since the commission was girding for the later clash on the rules matter, it was tacitly agreed that there would be no extended debate and that any knock-down, drag-out clash between factions would be postponed until the crucial third reading of the ordinances, at the commission’s next full public session.

Both the Roland ordinances got a tentative okay by the margin of 7-6, with Basar voting along with other Republicans and Democrat Ford voting with them as well.

On that evidence of Ford’s continued solidarity with his Republican supporters, coupled with Basar’s reversion to ideological form on a power-neutral issue, it would seem that the GOP may have come out ahead in the power struggle. It remains to be seen how long that state of affairs exists.

• One other matter of both short- and long-term significance was taken by the commission on Monday. This concerned a resolution from GOP member David Reaves putting the commission on record as wanting to see the matter of a court-ordered payment to Shelby County Schools (SCS) resolved as a precondition for any vote to approve a city-sponsored Fairgrounds Tourist Development Zone (TDZ) proposal by city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb.

The TDZ proposal, outlined by Lipscomb to the commission during its committee sessions last week, had been favorably received in general. The commission’s approval of the proposal is not required but would clearly assist the TDZ’s chances in being okayed by the Tennessee Building Commission, where the submitted proposal has lingered for at least a year.

The matter of the city’s debt to SCS — inherited from a 2008 default of $57 million owed to the former Memphis City Schools system — has periodically accounted for controversy between the city of Memphis and Shelby County governments, inasmuch as the county is now responsible for all public-school funding including the delinquent maintenance-of-effort amount incurred by the city.

Reaves’ resolution passed 8-4, with four Democrats — Bailey, Turner, Reginald Milton, and Eddie Jones — dissenting and another Democrat, Willie Brooks, abstaining.

• A former Memphis media personality had a role in a controversy that flared up last week regarding the possibility that Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges may have flashed a gang sign while posing for a news photo with a volunteer in a get-out-the-vote campaign during the week before the November 4th election.

The picture shows Hodges and the volunteer, who has something of a criminal record, pointing at each other, as a sign of solidarity on the GOTV effort. An official of the Minneapolis police union, noting that both Hodges and the volunteer had raised thumbs while pointing, charged that they had thereby exchanged a known gang greeting.

The charge has been the source of much derision in the national media, a good deal of which was directed at KSTP-TV, an ABC affiliate that first aired it. Bill Lunn, a former longtime anchor with Memphis’ Channel 24, was a co-anchor of the KSTP broadcast.

In an exchange of texts, Lunn told the Flyer that Hodges may have “unknowingly” flashed the gang sign while reciprocating the volunteer’s gesture but, without elaborating further, said the station had done a good deal of “vetting” before airing the original segment.