Tag: Janis Fullilove

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News News Blog

Council Looks to Fill Vacancy Left by Morrison

CREDIT: Memphis City Council

Memphis City Council

Bill Morrison

The Memphis City Council District 1 seat will soon be vacant, as Councilman Bill Morrison’s resignation from the council becomes effective on Thursday, November 1st.

Candidates wishing to fill the vacancy may be nominated by council members and the general public, or interested candidates can submit an application packet to the council office in Memphis City Hall. The packets can be picked up from the office beginning Friday at noon and must be submitted before Wednesday, November 14th at noon.

All candidates must submit proof of residency documents, as well as a sworn affidavit and nomination petition with at least 25 registered voter signatures who live in District 1.

The council, who will ultimately decide who fills the seat, plans to vote on a candidate at its meeting on Tuesday, November 20th. At the meeting, the qualifying candidates will have the chance to deliver speeches and answer any questions council members may have for them. Then, the council does multiple rounds of voting.

The process calls for the candidates receiving less than two votes in the first round to be eliminated. The voting continues until one of the candidates receives seven votes. After three rounds of voting, Chairman Berlin Boyd has the option to only consider the top two nominees.

Morrison, who was elected to the council first in 2007, then again in 2011 and 2015, was elected Shelby County Probate Clerk in August. Morrison, along with Janis Fullilove and Edmund Ford Jr., is one of three council members to be elected to other posts. Fullilove and Ford have yet to resign.

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Editorial Opinion

Vote No on All Three November Election Referenda

We have said all this before, but if there is one maxim regarding the process of communication worth trusting, it is that nothing benefits a message like repetition. This is as valid about falsehoods as it is about truths. Witness only the role of rote in the command psychology of ruling entities, whether fictional, as in George Orwell’s classic dystopian epic, 1984, or in reality, as in “Make America Great Again.”

It helps to repeat positive messages, too, and, while the Flyer has, from its beginning, held to a policy of non-endorsement of candidates at election time, we have made no secret of our attitude toward public policies that we deem of crucial importance to our readership.

Ed Ford

We have, for example, deplored the apparently organized reluctance of three Memphis City Council members, elected to other positions in Shelby County government on August 2nd, to resign their council seats so as to permit their constituents, via a call for special election, to have a direct voice in their replacement. The train has left the station on that one — thanks to inaction from the newly installed Probate Court clerk Bill Morrison, Juvenile Court clerk Janis Fullilove, and Shelby County Commissioner Edmund Ford Jr. — leaving it to the other 10 members of the council, not the electorate, to choose their successors.

Actually, in one case there may be a silver lining of sorts. The chairman of the Shelby County Commission, Van Turner, has hit upon the expedient of asking Commissioner/Councilman Ford to serve as a kind of liaison between the two bodies for the next several weeks, and Ford, whose abilities we do not doubt, has apparently tackled the obligation with some industry and in good faith, helping to arrange agreed-upon solutions to issues of joint city/county jurisdiction. In any case, the matter is beyond our control.

We can be somewhat more pro-active about three issues on the November 6th ballot, advising that, if enacted, they would fill a void somewhere between the mischievous and the venal. We refer to three referenda before city voters — one being a re-vote on the process called Ranked Choice Voting (alternately: Instant Runoff Voting); another eliminating runoff voting altogether; and a third, establishing term limits for the council and mayor at three four-year terms, in lieu of the current two-term limit.

All three, we think, either fail to advance the public interest, refute the public will, or are designed to be incumbent-friendly in a way that discourages free choice by the electorate. Or all of the above. The people have already voted, and by resounding margins, to establish Ranked Choice Voting (which eliminates the need for runoffs but allows for a rational and fair way to designate election winners in such cases), and the County Election Administrator has already set up the machinery for RCV in the 2019 city election. And a previous referendum limiting council members to two terms passed handily; the proposed referendum would actually expand council terms.

A “no” vote on all three referenda is the only way to affirm the freely offered judgment of the electorate, already rendered.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Shenanigans

Memphis City Council members Bill Morrison, Edmund Ford Jr., and Janis Fullilove are having a lucrative 90 days. Since the August 2nd election, in which all three won Shelby County offices, these “public servants” have been taking home two paychecks — one from the county for their new jobs and one from the city of Memphis for their council jobs.
That’s because none of the three have done the proper thing and resigned their council seats after winning new offices.
But the real issue isn’t the double dipping, as galling as that is. No, the real issue is that by not resigning, these three have created a situation that enables the current city council to appoint their replacements, thereby depriving their constituents of being able to select their own council representatives in the upcoming November election. The next city election after that is October 2019, so the three appointees will have the advantage of nearly a year’s incumbency in that contest. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.

This city council is also playing games with three referendums on the ballot for November, and you need to know what’s up. The citizens of Memphis in 2008 passed by a 71 percent margin a measure to institute Instant Runoff Voting. They also passed by a similar margin a measure to limit city council to two terms. The council is trying to overturn both of those decisions with deceptively worded referendums. For example, here’s how they’re tackling that pesky two-terms limit:

“Shall the Charter of the City of Memphis, Tennessee be amended to provide no person shall be eligible to hold or to be elected to the office of Mayor or Memphis City Council if any such person has served at any time more than three (3) consecutive four-year terms, except that service by persons elected or appointed to fill an unexpired four-year term shall not be counted as full four-year term?”

To an uninformed voter, it reads like the council wants to institute term limits — which is clever, because voters have already indicated they favor term limits. But in fact, it’s a blatant power grab to extend council members’ and the city mayor’s alloted time in office to 12 years from the current eight.

The language on the other two referendums — which would rescind IRV and eliminate single-district runoffs — is equally deceptive. The council is attempting to rescind measures that have been passed but haven’t even come into effect yet. Vote No on all three. This is some shenanigans.

Such shenanigans have also been happening on a national scale. Since the Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013, in which the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, there have been hundreds of restrictive voting measures passed, all in the South, and all in Republican-controlled states.

The Nation reports that since 2013, there are 868 fewer places to vote in the states affected by the SCOTUS ruling. Arizona, for example, has reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent — to just one polling place per 21,000 registered voters. In the most recent election in that state, voters waited in line for five hours at many polling places. See the map accompanying this column for a full accounting of this nefarious and anti-democratic practice.

Why do elected officials want fewer voters and longer terms in office? Simple. Money and power. It’s a plague and it’s spreading from the presidency on down to the local level. I can’t think of any election in my lifetime where it’s been more important to vote than the one coming up in November. We need to throw the rascals out and put a stop to this relentless assault on our democracy.

And speaking of shenanigans. … You may have seen an insert in last week’s Flyer that appeared at first glance to be a promo for the Cooper-Young Festival but was in fact a religious tract. The insert was sent directly to our printer without getting properly vetted by the ad department. We trusted someone and we got duped. Our apologies.
By the way, the Cooper-Young Festival is this weekend, so go. Have fun. Tell ’em the Flyer sent you.

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Politics Politics Feature

Shelby Politics Won’t Take a Break After August Election

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

For all the ballyhoo, emailed appeals for more cash, and intensified public rhetoric of recent days, the known world will exist in more or less its usual form after the electon results of this week are digested.

There are more election matters to be decided, for one thing: Someone will have to succeed the late state Representative Ron Lollar as the Republican nominee for state House District 99 on the November ballot. Lollar’s death occurred after the ballot was irrevocably composed, but on August 6th, a GOP caucus will meet to name a successor to run in November against Democratic nominee David Cambron.

The caucus will be made up of the members of the Shelby County Republican Committee who represent District 99. Those are current GOP chair Lee Mills, Mills’ wife Amber Mills, Becky Parsons, and Kenny Crenshaw. Among those interested in becoming the District 99 nominee are chairman Mills himself; Bartlett alderman David Parsons (husband of Becky Parsons); Lakeland Mayor Wyatt Bunker; and County Commissioner David Reaves.

For obvious arithmetical reasons, Lee Mills would seem to have an edge. The chairman has already cleared a prospective leave of absence with FedEx, for whom he is a pilot.

• Still unresolved, too, is the matter of whether residents of three City Council districts in Memphis will have a chance to vote on replacing any of three council members who may have been elected to county positions this week. The three are Bill Morrison of District 1, candidate for Probate Court Clerk; Edmund Ford Jr. of District 6, candidate for the County Commission; and Janis Fullilove of Super District 8, Position 2, candidate for Juvenile Court Clerk.

There had been, as of this week, no definitive answer as to when any of the three, if victorious in their county races, would formally resign their council positions. They could resign immediately upon election to their new posts, but the county charter allows them to retain their current position for as long as 90 days. If they should stay on the council for the entirety of their allotted time, there would be no opportunity to schedule a special election on the November ballot.

Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove advocating for IRV.

What several local activists fear is that the dominant council faction, which has close ties to the city’s business elite and whose members tend to vote as a bloc, would relish the opportunity to skirt the election process and appoint the successors to any or all of the vacated positions.

Uncertainty on the point has been whetted by the claim of council Chairman Berlin Boyd, a member of the dominant faction, that the city charter does not allow for a replacement election on a November ballot. Council attorney Allan Wade apparently backs Boyd on the issue.The activist group cites charter language specifically licensing a potential November election for the purpose, and the matter is further complicated by ambivalence as to the post-election intentions on the part of the three council members whose seats would be in question. 

While continuing to keep her own counsel on the resignation matter, candidate Fullilove did choose, weekend before last, to make a public break from her council mates on another matter —  the referendum scheduled by the council for November that, if successful, would repudiate an earlier 2008 referendum enabling Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting), a process that Election Administrator Linda Phillips had scheduled for the 2019 city election.

Fullilove’s statement: “Back in 2008, as a charter commission member, I voted to support Instant Runoff Voting. I also supported it during the 2008 referendum Campaign, when 71 percent of Memphians voted for it. That was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea now. Last fall, I deferred to some of my colleagues on the city council who expressed concerns about IRV. But I have rethought my position. The people have already voted for this. We ought to give it a try. So I am … announcing my support for instant runoff voting and my opposition to any attempt at repeal. I call on my council colleagues to take both IRV referenda off the November ballot. Thank you.”

So far, there have been no takers on Fullilove’s request, and the referendum still stands. But chalk up at least a partial victory for the activist group, Save IRV Memphis, many of whose members have doubled up on the lobby process concerning the resignation matter.

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Editorial Opinion

Memphis City Council Hijinks?

The Memphis City Council is under attack from various disenchanted citizens regarding several alleged pro-incumbent referenda it voted onto the November ballot — one that would counter the council’s current two-term limit for members, another that would negate the Shelby County Election Commission’s plans for ranked choice voting (RCV) in the 2019 city election, and another that would abolish all runoff elections. Now new scrutiny is arising on the question of how and when three council members might be replaced should they win other elected positions they are seeking in the August county general election.

Janis Fullilove

The three members are Janis Fullilove, Democratic nominee for Juvenile Court clerk; Bill Morrison, Democratic nominee for Probate Court clerk; and Edmund Ford, Democratic candidate for the Shelby County Commission’s District 9 position. All are generally favored to win, and all have been urged by a citizens’ group to resign their council positions immediately following the August outcome.

Members of the citizens’ group fear that the three council members, if victorious in their contests, might hold on to their council seats for an additional three months, as is apparently permitted by a literal interpretation of the city charter, thereby overlapping with their new county duties (and double-dipping financially).Most important from the protesters’ point of view, retention of the council seats for that long would stretch the calendar to the point that special elections could not be called for the forthcoming November ballot and would mandate the departing members’ replacement by an appointment process, in which case the replacements named would serve through the city election of 2019.

Edmund Ford Jr.

The challenging citizens fear that a current council majority will contrive to appoint new members of the same stripe, end-running other options that might surface in a special election.

So far, none of the three council members has committed to a course of action on a time for resignation. Berlin Boyd, the current council chair, and Allan Wade, the council’s attorney, insist that the critics have misread the charter and that special elections to replace departing council members can only take place in August — thereby nullifying the prospect of November elections for the three seats and making the protesters’ wishes moot.

The Rev. Earle Fisher and other citizens seeking a commitment for a timely withdrawal by the departing incumbents, should they win, cite charter language specifically authorizing replacement elections in either August or November.

Regardless of who’s right about charter requirements, the protesting citizens’ point is well taken: The appointment process has become wholly predictable, with a dominant council faction choosing replacements who, though they may be admirably skilled and bastions of integrity, have been suggested by well-placed supporters of the current majority and not subjected to any real public vetting via the election process.

The video archives of last week’s council meeting show that, after four speakers had made their case and had been basically blown off by Boyd, Wade apparently engaged the speakers in an exchange of taunts, somewhat off-mic. We think the protesters have a respectable case to make and should be listened to.

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News News Blog

Race Again focus of Beale Street Talks

Beale Street

It is clear race will be a big part of the ongoing discussions about the future of Beale Street.

Memphis City Council members discussed the street again Tuesday, two weeks after council members said a company was cheated out of a contract to manage Beale Street because the company’s leadership is mainly African American.

Tuesday’s discussion did not yield any next steps for the future of Beale Street. But it did give council member Janis Fullilove plenty of time to vent her frustrations and sarcastically throw shade on the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC), the organization that now manages the street.

DMC president Terrence Patterson presented council members with some successes they’ve had managing the street over the last three years. Patterson said his group has held back on some plans because the group was only to manage the street on an interim basis while the Beale Street Tourism Development Authority (BSTDA) found a permanent manager.

The BSTDA voted against giving the contract to 21 Beale, a black-led business, which was the last company standing during two rounds of requests for proposals from the Beale board. The board decided to continue to let the DMC manage the street.

Fullilove said of Patterson, who is black, “I see they sent a brother this time to address us.” She then ticked off a list of some of the events the DMC has put on, saying each name with a “who cares” inflection in her voice, but ended by saying “all of those are good things.”

“From the historical perspective, we’re not getting it,” Fullilove said. “Black folk, whether you like it or not, we were there on Beale Street. That was us.”

Furthering the race angle of the discussion was council member Barbara Swearengen, who asked who on the Beale Street board made the motion to not give the management contract to 21 Beale, She was told Jamal Whitlow. She asked if he is black or white and was told he is black.

She then asked how many member of the DMC were black and how much of their contract spending goes to black firms. She was told total spending with minority-and-women owned firms totaled about 36 percent of the DMC’s contract budget. But Swearengen wanted to know how much of that was spent with black businesses. The DMC officials did not have that figure on hand.

The discussion ended only because the meeting had run out of time. But Tourism Committee chairman Martavius Jones said the discussion would continue at the next meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 21.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Janis Fullilove: Shot at and Downed by a Memphis Policeman in 1968?

CREDIT: JB

As described JB

Councilwoman Fullilove addressing local Democrats on Sunday night

 in a companion article, “Shelby Democrats Make Do on GOTV,” the efforts of local supporters of the Democratic presidential nominee included a Sunday night event — styled as an “African-American Rally for Hillary Clinton” — at Christ Missionary Church on South Parkway.

As noted in the article, the major theme of the event was to establish a meaningful connection between the civil rights struggle of half a century ago and the fight to elect Clinton, thereby to maintain and defend the gains from that era.

Virtually every speaker expressed some version of that theme, but no one did it so vividly and even shockingly as City Councilwoman Janis Fullilove, who told a story that most, if not all, the members of her audience had not heard before, and which had apparently never before been related publicly in any form.

The kernel of that tale was Fullilove’s contention that, while a school girl marching in memory of the recently assassinated Martin Luther King in 1968, she was shot at by a Memphis police officer and left to lie helpless in fear on a downtown Memphis pavement.

Here is the story as she told it Sunday night:

[audio-1]

“…I don’t want to be long, but I think about 1968, and I was a young thing, 18 years old, attending the Booker t. Washington High School of leadership excellence. And when Dr. King came to Memphis, members of the NAACP — Jesse Turner, Maxine and Vasco Smith — they came and they embraced us and said, ‘We want you to be part of this movement because we’re doing this for your tomorrow. And I remember sanding on the stage of Mason Temple on the night that Dr. King had given his Mountaintop speech. And I remember how moved I was at 18 years old to hear that speech from this man, who thought enough of our sanitation workers to come to the city to mobilize us, to get what was done that was right to be done, and showed us how to do it.

“The next day, my grandmother and I had gone to Corondolet. That was like Target, and it was in the North Memphis area, and we were shopping, very quickly, because, she said, ‘Look, Dr. King is going to speak at 6 o’clock. We’ve got to hurry up in order to go home and go hear what he has to say. When it was around 3 o’clock that afternoon, we were shopping, and I went down another aisle, and I heard a white man say, ‘They just shot that nigger, Dr. King!’ It hurt me so bad, I ran to my grandmother, and she saw the look in my eyes and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And said, ‘They’ve shot Dr. King!’ And she threw everything down that she had in her hands, and we went home, and everything was chaotic.

“When you talk about ‘the winds were ranging,’ well, the winds were ranging in the city of Memphis, they were raging, the storm was brewing, and it didn’t seem to get any better; we began to march, and we marched and marched, and I was shot at by a Memphis police officer, and I had a ponytail on the top of my head. And the bullet hole went through it. And as I was laying on the corner of Vance St., it was Vance and 4th, because no one would open their doors and let me in, and I didn’t know whether I was shot, I was just frightened out of my head, I just lay there and said, ‘Lord, have mercy! Things have got to change…..”

From there, Fullilove segued into a description of the Memphis she sees a half century later, in which “racism abounds…and people are brewing hatred by talking, ‘Let’s make American great again….”
Go here for more details from her story and the Sunday night pro-Clinton rally.

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News News Blog

Memphis City Council Approves Budget, Raises for City Employees

After two days and nearly 10 hours of debate in the chamber, the Memphis City Council passed a budget for the next fiscal year Tuesday morning.

When debate opened Tuesday morning, the budget stood at $656 million. The council added 2 percent raises for police officers and fire fighters and 1 percent raises for all other city employees. The raises added $3.1 million to the budget for a total of $656 million.

The raises were the first order of business Tuesday. They were proposed by council member Reid Hedgepeth during last week’s regular meeting. Though raises represent less than 1 percent of the overall budget, they consumed most of the debate on the entire $661 million budget.

Reid’s proposal gave raises of 2 percent to police and fire only. It was amended by a proposal from council member Edmund Ford Jr. to include a 1 percent raise to the rest of the city’s employees.

The money to pay for the raises will come from cutting some funded but unfilled positions in the Memphis Police Department.

The council approved the raises but completely circumvented the impasse process. That process, set up after labor struggles of 1978, give city employee unions a vote by three-member council committees if unions can’t get a deal worked out with the city’s mayor and administration.

Impasse committees approved several raises this year and rejected others. However, those decisions weren’t considered by the council Tuesday. On advice from the city council’s attorney Allan Wade, the group ignored the impasse decisions, allowing the budget vote to supersede them.

This drew the ire of many council members, including Harold Collins and Janis Fullilove.

“I’m not sure what we went through the impasse process when it means absolutely nothing, just to make some time during the day to say we’re doing something?” Fullilove asked. “We are making a joke of our political process. I never thought I’d say this in my life but I am so sorry to be on this council with many of you.”

Collins said the council could vote the impasse decision up or down but they should not circumvent the process.

“We are setting the wrong precedent by what we’re doing here today,” Collins said. “Hedgepeth offered what I considered a worthy alternative (to the impasse decisions). But it is not right. We have to do what the ordinance tells us and the law tells us first, then we have to proceed.”

Many proposals for raises were raised, defeated, and even turned down by labor unions in the chaotic budget season that began in April. In the end, it was the chaos that had many council members “baffled.”

“I am shocked today,” said council member Wanda Halbert. “I’m like some of you (in the audience), I’m baffled by all of this. … This budget seasons had been very different form the rest in the last seven years.”

Halbert then, called for the question, meaning she wished to stop all debate on the budget and take a final vote.

Council members Berlin Boyd, Alan Crone, Kemp Conrad, Ford, Halbert, Hedgepeth, Myron Lowery, Bill Morrison, and Jim Strickland voted for the budget.

Council members Bill Boyd, Joe Brown, Collins, and Fullilove voted against it. 

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News News Feature

Memphis’ Political Morass

In an interview after he had been selected as the new interim

District 7 Memphis city councilman, a relieved Berlin Boyd admitted he had been temporarily been taken aback by a question from Councilwoman Janis Fullilove.

At first, warmly referring to Boyd’s previous interim tenure on the council after the resignation of former Councilwoman Barbara Swearengen Ware, who also happened to be a candidate for this year’s opening, Fullilove abruptly spit out a hypothetical inquiry into whether, if chosen, Boyd’s loyalties would lie with the seventh floor (code for Mayor A C Wharton) or with the constituents he’d represent in the 7th District.

To his credit, Boyd was unwavering in his answer. “I am my own man,” he said. “No one has given me anything in life. I have and will make my own decisions.” With those resolute remarks there was no need for any additional follow up.

That exchange struck me as the epitome of the political morass in Memphis we have endured for decades. Never has a city administration and the council been at loggerheads as strongly as they are now. The past week’s announced mediation settlement of the long-delayed funding for Shelby County Schools only reflected the great chasm of distrust, contempt, and miscommunication that exists between the seventh and bottom floors of City Hall. With a city-wide election coming in October, the level of rancor would only seem to be headed toward even greater depths of political grandstanding, divisiveness, and the embarrassing exploitation of racial bigotry from blacks and whites alike.

But, 2015 offers us a chance to get on track toward positive change, and I’ll tell you why it should happen.

Since Councilman Jim Strickland officially entered the mayoral race, I have read the fervid Facebook comments of those who believe that a white candidate cannot possibly understand or embrace the hopes and dreams of a predominately black populace. But, isn’t a mayor someone who is supposed to be a visionary leader for all citizens regardless of his own ethnic background? Isn’t a mayor the chief executive who vows, “The buck stops here,” and then comes before the city’s governing body to make his case in person, rather than send others to do it for him?

Let’s be brutally realistic. It’s been almost 24 years since Willie Herenton became the first African-American mayor of Memphis. During his tenure, there were stellar successes, not the least of which was the extinction of many blighted areas in black communities that had come to symbolize degradation and hopelessness.

But tearing down those concrete facades did not really elevate the majority of the city’s black — or white — population. Memphis is still one of America’s poorest cities, and we still have one of the highest crime rates in the nation. Has black leadership on the seventh floor or black majority representation on the council changed the fact that 47 percent of Memphis’ black children are still caught in the cycle of generational poverty? We should have learned by now that the color of our leaders’ skin is irrelevant.

There are those who want to perpetuate the stale argument that a white man could only be elected to lead this city if the black vote gets split up among a handful of candidates, including the incumbent. I’ve lived in this city way too long to swallow the notion that because someone has my skin color, my life is automatically going to get better if he or she is elected to public office. When it comes to those we’ve voted for to lead this city over the past two decades, too many of us, black and white, have ignored the wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our choices shouldn’t be based on a candidate’s skin color, but rather the content of their character.

That’s probably why Boyd’s heartfelt response to Fullilove’s politically motivated question made such an impression on me. In this year of decision, we must closely look at those who promise results but whose track records would indicate otherwise. Go to political forums where you can see and talk to candidates, not just for the mayor’s office, but the council, as well. Then decide who you think offers the best direction for this city. If it will help, close your eyes and just listen to what they have to say.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Parking Pinch

Funding for a new parking garage in Cooper-Young is again before the Memphis City Council with familiar arguments and familiar advocates. And the proposal comes as the council debates a familiarly tight city budget.

The garage was first proposed to the council last year, but funding was not approved. Now, Councilmember Janis Fullilove has put the issue forward again. Last week, she moved to add $3.4 million for the project to the city budget next year, noting that “Cooper-Young is a very booming area” that attracts tourists from across the country and residents from all over the region. 

“[Cooper-Young] is a meeting point of Orange Mound and the Glenview area and, of course, Midtown, so this is a citywide kind of project,” Fullilove said. “If we’re lucky, we could get some [tourist development zone] money from Nashville. But if we don’t, we need to put this in the budget and start planning this.”

A vote on the matter was delayed for two weeks. The council passed a resolution from Councilmember Kemp Conrad that mandates money for new projects be found in budget cuts or created with a tax rate hike. Fullilove said she’d bring a funding proposal back to the council in its regular meeting on Tuesday, June 17th.

The proposed garage would have two floors of parking for about 150 to 250 vehicles and be built on the corner of Meda and Young. The ground floor would be reserved for commercial space. Architects from Pensacola, Florida-based Structured Parking Solutions said they designed the building to fit in with the neighborhood.  

The Cooper-Young Business Association (CYBA) has been out front in support of the garage project for the past four years. Representatives from the group have led community discussions, lobbied leaders, and formally presented the plan to (and requested funding from) the city council last year.

CYBA Director Tamara Cook said the district has 95 on-street parking spaces and 366 spaces in private lots. The area’s 187 businesses (21 of them restaurants) employ more than 1,150 people, which alone would use up all the parking spots. But add in the 40,000 to 50,000 people who visit Cooper-Young each week, and Cook said the neighborhood is in a parking pinch.

“The Cooper Young Historic District generates over $12 million in sales tax revenue annually,” Cook said. “Now is the time [for the garage] because we do not want our historic district business owners to suffer by not having adequate parking for our patrons.”

A survey last year from the Cooper-Young Community Association found that 75 percent of respondents said parking was a problem. Most said a garage was the best option, but the plan has long had opposition from those who think a garage would kill the neighborhood’s vibe. A Facebook group called “Keep Cooper-Young Walkable” was launched this week.