Tag: Memphis City Council

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Memphis City Council Passes Water Meter Ordinance

After months of debate and amendments, the Memphis City Council finally passed an ordinance that would require individual water meters to be installed at all newly constructed condominiums.

MLGW Master Water Meter

  • MLGW Master Water Meter

On Tuesday, April 1st, the Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (MLGW) Committee held its third and final reading of an ordinance proposed by Councilman Myron Lowery earlier this year that would require all condos or apartment complexes converted into condos to have individual water meters installed. The committee passed the ordinance, and it was subsequently heard by the full council. It was passed unanimously and will take effect July 1st.

The ordinance that passed is an amended version of Lowery’s original proposal, which requested that both all newly constructed condos and apartments have individual meters installed.

“We’re continuing to allow master water meters on apartments, but the minute an apartment complex is late paying their water bill, and I’m talking about one month late, it will automatically trigger action from Code Enforcement, and it will go in court,” Lowery said. “And the court has the right to appoint a receiver to collect rent [from tenants], so that the water bill will be paid. The goal is to ensure that everyone can stay in their home.”

Lowery was inspired to create the proposal after tenants of Garden Walk Condominiums in Raleigh were forced to evacuate their homes due to the homeowner’s association failing to pay the property’s $30,000 water bill. If the ordinance doesn’t eradicate the potential for similar occurrences in the future, Lowery said he’s going to re-propose the ordinance in its original form.

“This was really a compromise,” Lowery said. “If this process doesn’t work one time, I’m going back to the drawing board and asking for all newly constructed apartments as well as condominiums…Water is an essential service. Food, water, and shelter are what people need, and government is here to make sure that cities run properly. We’ve got to make sure that people have water.”

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News The Fly-By

Illumination Altercation

The battle to have streetlight fees reduced for homeowners isn’t going the way some Memphis City Council members thought it would.

The council wants monthly fees lowered from the current $4.32 per household per month, but it looks like those will remain the same for now. The fees are tacked onto the utility bills of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water customers.

Last week, members of the council’s MLGW committee passed a resolution that would have consolidated residential customers’ streetlight fees with that of apartment dwellers, meaning both would pay $3.17 each month. However, the MLGW board of directors rejected the proposal.

“I felt like I got hit in the stomach when I heard the decision,” said Councilman Lee Harris. “We’ve been working on trying to get a fair system for streetlight fees, so it’ll be as low as possible for as many Memphians. We sent that fee structure over to MLGW, and they rejected it.”

Last Thursday, the MLGW board approved a resolution that maintains the current fees being paid by both single-family homes ($4.32) and apartment dwellers ($1.08) but equalizes a fee for all commercial establishments.

Small commercial customers currently pay $6.48 each month and large commercial customers pay $19.07 per month for each individual billboard they operate. The new fee, if passed by the city council, would require all commercial establishments to pay $8.65 monthly instead.

The number would provide some relief to larger commercial businesses, but smaller businesses, such as the Memphis branch of outdoor advertising company CBS Outdoor, would see its current fees increase. Dave Hogue, real estate manager for CBS Outdoor, said the company currently pays more than $600 monthly in streetlight fees. He said their billboards have their own lights, so they don’t utilize the streetlights.

“If it’s done, it should be done equitably and fairly to all citizens,” Hogue said. “It’s unfortunate that something like that can be passed without looking at the impact is has on individual businesses before it’s done.”

Controversy began to surround streetlight fees after some residents in private developments, areas that pay fees to homeowner associations for amenities and services such as streetlights, complained about making additional payments to MLGW for the city’s streetlight fees. Some residents in private developments don’t even have streetlights in their neighborhoods.

George Kessler resides in the city’s newly annexed South Cordova area. He thinks people living in private developments should be exempt from paying streetlight servicing fees.

“We live in a little, private community where we maintain our own streetlights as far as maintenance and the cost of electricity, so I don’t think it’s fair what Memphis and MLGW have done,” Kessler said. “The fees should be eliminated.”

Initially, streetlight fees were included in property taxes. However, an ordinance was passed that altered the way streetlight billing would work. Fees are now incorporated into utility bills. The fees raise approximately $12.9 million annually. Half of that money is used to pay for electricity usage of the streetlights and the other half is used to maintain them.

MLGW President Jerry Collins Jr. said now that people are aware that some of their money goes to servicing streetlights, some have decided to voice their opposition to the fees.

“When streetlight fees were paid for by the property taxes, it was out of sight, out of mind. No one paid any attention to it,” Collins said. “The difference is, now it’s an item on your utility bill that says ‘streetlight fee,’ which calls attention to the fact that streetlights cost money to maintain.”

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News The Fly-By

A New Hope

After years of bits and pieces being amputated from the Raleigh Springs Mall, the formerly thriving mall has been declared a “slum and blighted area,” according to a proposed plan to renovate the entire property.

The Raleigh Springs Urban Renewal plan, if approved by the Memphis City Council, would turn the lot into a multi-use property with coexisting public and retail space. The plan features a recreational lake and public skate park, as well as a walking trail. It also calls for the relocation of the Raleigh branch library and the Old Allen Road traffic precinct into the property. Both projects have funds set aside for that purpose.

“I think it will give residents of this area a stronger sense of security and safety knowing that a police precinct is a few blocks away,” Councilman Myron Lowery said.

The mall opened in 1971, but the plan surmises that when the Wolfchase Galleria mall opened in 1997, the Raleigh Springs Mall began to decline. When the mall was renovated for the first time in the early 2000s, businesses along Austin Peay Highway had already begun a perceived downturn.

“Several businesses such as check cashing and pawn shops opened on the street giving the impression of a depressed area,” the plan reads.

According to Councilman Bill Morrison, who represents the Raleigh area, the mall will eventually be torn down, but the demolition will occur in phases. He said if everything goes well, construction might start in late 2014.

The current proposed plan would be “pretty close” to the final product, Morrison said. The private section of the property might change, depending on what retailers decide to build, but the public portion will be within the parameters of the current plan.

“Either I will be the person who had a great idea or [I’ll be] the guy who screwed up the traffic precinct for Raleigh,” Morrison said.

the Raleigh Springs Mall remain open.

At a joint committee meeting on February 18th between the council’s Economic Development and the Housing and Community Development committees, Mayor A C Wharton said funding for the new police precinct was already approved by the city council in 2010. Councilwoman Wanda Halbert sits as the chairman and vice-chairman of the two committees, respectively.

Halbert expressed concerns about the specifics of the plan to Robert Lipscomb, director of the Division of Housing and Community Development. She says the project is needed, but she wants to know the details on all long-term plans for anti-blight projects that have been proposed all over the city.

“I just wish I could see that five-year strategic and operations plan with all of these projects included in it,” she said. “Somehow there’s a cherry-picking process — what project comes first, what project doesn’t come at all — none of that is really making sense when you look at the big picture. Having some type of strategic direction is critical.”

Lowery does not share her concerns.

“[Lipscomb] refers to ‘connecting the dots’ around the city with a wide variety of projects,” Lowery said. “I don’t think any community has been ignored or left to suffer. I think our challenge is to treat every area equally, and I think that we’ve done that.”

The Flyer spoke to some business owners in the Raleigh Springs Mall, but many were unaware of the renewal plan.

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Editorial Opinion

Where Are the Strong?

Maybe the impasse between Mayor A C Wharton and the Memphis City Council will have begun to heal by the time this gets read, and maybe it won’t have. The issue of whether the city should buy AutoZone Park may have been resolved one way or the other, too, but — how to say it? — as crucial as that issue has seemed to become in recent weeks, that issue is not the issue.

Yes, there’s no disputing that whether or not Memphis will ultimately succeed in keeping its Triple-A Redbirds, its affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals, or its use of that dandy little AutoZone Park are all significant matters. And playing chicken with the issue, as at times contending players in the drama seem to have done, is nerve-wracking at best, and reckless at worst.

Elvis Costello

But the divide that has opened up between mayor and council (and between factions on the council) speaks to something more than personal ambitions, undesirable negotiating tactics, willful attitudes, or even the matter of what we can or can’t afford. And, again, the ball park is not the issue. Memphis survived the horrific loss by fire of Russwood Park in 1960 — an event that took place only hours after an exciting major-league exhibition game between the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox that surely had whetted the appetite of local fans for more baseball. In the aftermath of that disaster, the city would try to hold on to but would ultimately lose — at least for a space of many years — its Double-A Memphis Chicks. But the city survived.

Memphis will survive the outcome of the ballpark issue, whichever way the ball eventually bounces, just as it will survive the eventual resolution of the now raging debates over pension reform or this or that TDZ or TIF or the question of whether the city can bootstrap itself into a new convention center.

What it won’t survive, at least in any kind of healthy condition, is the continuation of the current aversion to compromise, without which agreement on issues and the very sense of holding a community in common are impossible.

It was encouraging to hear so many of our key political figures concur on the need for “unity” and “civility” on the occasion of the annual New Year’s Day prayer breakfast, hosted by city councilman Myron Lowery. “I’m through with whose fault it is,” was the apt phrase used by Wharton to indicate a willingness to back away from recriminations and fault-finding. The task, though, is not merely to enunciate such sentiments or to employ them like nostrums but to commit to them as real and effective mantra for a unified and forward-looking community.

As Elvis Costello, the British musician whose stage name paid homage to our city’s favorite son, once asked in song: “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” But the follow-up questions posed by Costello in that song are still the real ones: “So where are the strong? And who are the trusted? And where is the harmony?”

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Editorial Opinion

Time To Step Up

We like Mayor A C Wharton. We appreciate his unmatchably reassuring presence as the head of city government. We are grateful for the sigh of relief he allowed us to take after the several stormy years we experienced under the latter phase of the Willie Herenton administration. But, increasingly, we find ourselves wondering: Can he govern our city as well as he represents it?

The question has acquired some currency of late, both among citizens at large and in local civic and governmental circles. One city hall denizen surprised a Flyer reporter recently by saying: “If [former Mayor Willie] Herenton announced for mayor tomorrow, I’d go door to door for him.”

There is no likelihood of that happening, of course; the former mayor is wholly invested these days in a charter-school enterprise, which he’s struggling to make work, and he seems to be burned out on electoral politics. Moreover, our confidant was and is no Herenton partisan: His point was that the current mayor, for all his initial promise, seems unable to govern effectively.

To preside over ceremonies, yes. To announce exciting-sounding initiatives, clearly. To churn out resonant and quotable sound-bites, sure. (TV reporters, especially, love him for that.) But to get results? Let’s look at the recent record. There was the extravagant signing ceremony last August, on the eve of the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Martin Luther King-led March on Washington, in which the mayor met the media in the company of AFSCME union representatives and the honorably grizzled veterans of the sanitation strike of 1968. His purpose was to announce, at long last, a pension arrangement for the city’s long-term sanitation workers. The only problem was that he hadn’t disclosed any of this to members of the Memphis City Council, who weren’t on hand for the ceremony, didn’t know the details of the proposed arrangement, and were faced with having to unravel them from scratch. Just last week, the council finally brought the pension matter to a vote but found itself unable to approve the increased user fees involved. And without them there would be no new equipment and none of the savings needed to pay for the pensions that were dependent on them and were actually voted on, and … you get the idea.

Add to this fiasco the several recent development projects brainstormed by city housing chief Robert Lipscomb and ballyhooed by the administration but, once again, without the full revelation to the council of the details, some of them debatable, that could make these projects work. Further, there were few responses to the council’s requests for more information.

Now there’s the matter of a proposed purchase by the city of AutoZone Park. From the administration was heard the usual cry of “Act now! There’s no time to waste!” But the council has been there and done that so many times by now that, once again deprived of all the advance details needed to make a decision, it has wisely chosen to postpone the decision.

Mr. Wharton, we like you, but in the wake of these events, it is now incumbent upon you to demonstrate — especially since you intend to run again — that you know how to work with the council to get things done in a collegial, timely, and fully transparent manner.

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News News Blog

Memphis City Council Members Vow to Fund Southbrook Mall Project

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City money will be found to fund a $1.5 million project to revitalize Whitehaven’s Southbrook Mall, Memphis City Council members said Tuesday, after a legal opinion last week stopped the original funding stream.

Council members voted last month to approve $1.5 million in city capital funds, some of which were to be used to for the revitalization of the Elvis Presley Boulevard corridor, for the project. But city council attorney Allan Wade issued an opinion that said the funding mechanism was illegal.

Some council members said Tuesday the opinion came as a way to stop the project. Councilwoman Janis Fullilove said the project “was doomed from the onset” and that while Memphis Mayor A C Wharton said he was in favor of the project, his administration was silent even though they likely knew the funding mechanism was illegal. She said the mayor’s office has a bias on what projects get funded.

“I get the feeling you don’t want to do this little black project for $1.5 million,” Fullilove said. “But we’ll probably be asked soon to support the $15 million for Crosstown and then the Raleigh Springs Mall and other projects with money we don’t have.”

The issue came before the council’s economic development and tourism committee Tuesday. Committee chairwoman Wanda Halbert said the Southbrook Mall project was orchestrated by some council members and administration staffers away from Memphis City Hall. She reminded officials that the only two places to get city business done is around the council’s committee room conference table or in the city council chambers.

“The council’s role is to put the issues on the table, and it’s the administration’s job to bring forth recommendations,” she said.

Council member Harold Collins said Southbrook Mall is in his district and wanted to help get the project started. He said he met with Wharton and others to discuss funding sources for the project and that everyone in the meetings thought using city capital funds was appropriate. Wade’s opinion on the matter, Collins said, was out of their hands.

But council members vowed to find the funds to at least get the Southbrook renovation project started. Fullilove suggested finding the money to get a new roof on the building before the winter and then find the rest of the money later.

“I’m sure there’s $400,000 here or $400,000 there or $300,000 over here [in the city’s budget], and we can get our finance director [Brian Collins] to find it for us,” Collins said.

Halbert also wanted to know how the administration picks the private projects it selects to invest in each year. Chief administrative officer George Little said determinations are made based on job creation and overall economic impact to the city.

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Opinion

Fairgrounds Redo: Will Third Time Be Charmed?

stadiums_memphis.jpg

The 89-page Fairgrounds redevelopment plan released this week is the third major one since 2006 so I’m taking my time digesting it.

The Looney Ricks Kiss firm did one in 2006 that, obviously, didn’t go anywhere. The RKG Associates consulting firm did a 2009 study as well as the one that came out this week. The 2009 study was pessimistic about the $125-million public/private financing proposal for a sports-oriented Tourism Development Zone. The current one is optimistic about a $233-million public/private proposal for a sports-oriented TDZ.

Same property, same qualified public use facility (Liberty Bowl Stadium), but different economy (recession then, comeback now), different mayor (Herenton then, Wharton now), different developer at risk (Henry Turley and Robert Loeb then, unnamed now), different master/enabler (a city-appointed Fairgrounds Reuse Committee then, Robert Lipscomb, head of the Division of Housing and Community Development, now) and different fate of Fairview school at the key corner of Central and East Parkway (out then, in now).

Turley’s Fair Ground plan, which I wrote about here, is not mentioned in the 2013 RKG report despite the obvious similarities. Turley got state approval for a TDZ but ran afoul of the City Council and Lipscomb, who said his fees were too high, which Turley disputed. The new plan needs state approval, and a presentation is tentatively scheduled in mid-October. After that it will also need City Council approval.

In a supporting letter, Wharton wrote that “the fairgrounds project will also serve as the central hub of the city’s family-tourism expansion through its developments at Graceland, Bass Pro at the Pyramid, and the Riverfront.” He makes no mention of the proposed Crosstown project which is less than a mile from the edge of the Fairgrounds TDZ and is seeking $15 million in public funds. The Bass Pro Pyramid is part of a separate TDZ.

In short, Memphis is betting on a whole lot more free-spending tourists coming our way.

As the name suggests, the key to a TDZ is tourism spending as opposed to local spending that would have gone somewhere else but for the new development. In a TDZ, Memphis gets to keep the incremental increase in state sales taxes above a baseline number.

The baseline number is important in determining what “new” revenue can be used to pay off the bonds. From the new report:

“The analysis by RKG Associates concludes that the projected baseline retail sales are approximately $214 million, and as a result there are ample sales tax revenues — projected at $14.3 million yearly beginning in 2016 — to support the bond payments of $11.9 million annually.”

And from the 2009 RKG report: “The estimated stream of sales tax revenue, while significant, is not necessarily new revenue. Additionally, under the assumptions of the bonding in this analysis, the projected stream of sales tax revenues is insufficient to retire $112,264,000 in bonding.”

One more negative note from the 2009 report: “By the very nature of retail there is always some degree of transferred retail sale. In the context of the Mid-South Fairgrounds, it is likely that the majority of retail sales will be transferred sales from existing merchants.”

The 400,000-square feet of “destination retail” that would bring in new money in the current fairgrounds plan is not named. Nor is the operator of the “180-room hotel/conference center.” The location would be north of Tiger Lane and south of Central Avenue. Obviously, it matters whether the retail is a destination for East Memphians or Nashvillians and Mississippians.

The report says “the Fairgrounds redevelopment is being driven by the City of Memphis as owner” and “based on the city of Memphis vision and design” the city will seek “a retail development company” for the property north of Tiger Lane and another developer/operator for the sports facilities south of Tiger Lane. There is no mention of fees.

However there is this statement:

“Using the TDZ as the vehicle for financing the Fairgrounds redevelopment and carefully calibrating a plan of redevelopment, the City of Memphis continues to build economic engines, as it has done with the redevelopment of The Pyramid into destination retail and a tourist attraction.”

Well, let’s hold that praise until after Bass Pro actually opens. As the report says elsewhere, “there is no assurance that actual events will correspond with the assumptions on which such estimates are based.”

The proposed three-square-mile Fairgrounds TDZ would include big Midtown tax generators such as the Memphis Zoo, Overton Square, Union Avenue and the soon-to-be rebuilt Kroger, and Cooper-Young. The report doesn’t flat come out and state cause and effect, but the assumption is that these things are tied somehow to the fairgrounds and the stadium and therefore their incremental tax revenues should be captured.

Again, the big question is what’s the increment? That depends on what the baseline is. The lower the baseline, the bigger the increment. In this proposal, the baseline is 2012 sales tax collections, adjusted for inflation until 2016 when the retails sales stream starts flowing to the fairgrounds bonds.

RKG’s 2013 optimism starkly contrasts with its 2009 pessimism about fairgrounds retail, which went well beyond the recession: “Approximately 80 percent of the sales that would occur at the fairgrounds would come from residents within the primary trade area. Most all of the sales activity would be reallocated sales already occurring elsewhere in Memphis.”

Fairgrounds retail, RKG said then, “would fill a void in the local market area, however it lacks highway presence and the tenant mix to be a regional consumer draw.”

That was then, this is now.

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Opinion

With City Pay Hike, Are We Safer Now?

CREDIT: John Branston

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Burning questions in the aftermath of the city budget meeting this week.

Is Memphis safer now? The Memphis Police Association put up billboards saying “DANGER, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK” like the one in this picture taken on South Third Street, one of the gateways to Memphis from Mississippi. Members of the police and firefighters unions were vocal advocates at council meetings, seeking restoration of a 4.6 percent pay cut. They got it. Why do unions play hardball at crunch time? The same reason corporations play hardball on tax breaks: because it works.

Will there be another push to revise the residency policy for public employees so they can share the burden of Memphis property taxes? City policy does not require police and fire fighters to live in Memphis. Memphis and Shelby County have gone back and forth on residency requirements for public employees in the last ten years, with referendums in 2004 and 2010.

Will the public safety unions whose members benefit from taxes mount a billboard campaign urging them to live in the CITY THAT SUPPORTS PUBLIC SAFETY, which only a minority of them do?

If the school scramble doesn’t do it, will even more people move out of Memphis now that the new combined city-county rate is likely to be about $7.78 once the Shelby County Commission acts?

Will karmic justice be done when the revenue-generating ticket cameras in school zones are installed and council sponsors Myron Lowery and Bill Morrison get ticketed and fined for going 20 miles an hour in a 15 mile an hour zone after school hours by a police officer making the city safer?

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Deal Appears to be Nearing on City Tax Rate in $3.30-to-$3.40 Range

CREDIT: JB

Council Lee Harris vote could be key next Tuesday.

  • JB
  • Council Lee Harris’ vote could be key next Tuesday.

After two weeks of dealing with an implied threat of intervention from state Comptroller Justin Wilson that later became explicit, City of Memphis officials appear to have come out from under the gun, though a final resolution of the city’s budget for fiscal 2013-14 is yet to be achieved.

But here’s a What-If for you: Given that Wilson, in an interview this week with the Flyer, made a point of citing state law as a basis for his possible intervention in the city’s budget travails, what would happen if the Council, whose members face reelection bids in a couple of years, should allow the Comptroller to do just that, assuming all the onus for a tax increase?

One Council member, asked about that prospect, said, “There have been a lot of jokes about that, but it’s not going to happen.” Instead, he said, it is likely that the Council will reach agreement, when it reconvenes budget discussions on Tuesday, on a tax rate somewhere between $3.30 and $3.40 — in the neighborhood of Mayor A C Wharton’s originally proposed tax rate of $3.36 and up from the present rate of $3.11.

The final tax-rate figure is likely to be based on some restoration of the 2011 employee pay cuts that were temporarily excised again on Tuesday of this week. It will also allow for necessary adjustments in the city’s health insurance programs.

Meanwhile, the Comptroller’s office seems to be brandishing both a carrot and stick in its dealings with Memphis. On Monday, apropos the City Council’s then seemingly stymied budget negotiations, Wilson, citing Section 9-21-403 from the annotated Tennessee code, told the Flyer, “…[T]here’s absolutely no question that I’ve got to approve the budget. If the budget doesn’t balance, I can bring it into balance. There’s no question I can raise taxes…. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do….But just look at that statute. The authority is powerful!”

But on Tuesday, as the Council conducted a come-to-Jesus budget session that gave tentative approval to some $30 million in new cuts, including potential layoffs and abandonment (temporarily at least) of previous plans to restore 2011 reductions in employees’ salaries, the Council and Mayor A C Wharton received a letter from Sandra Thompson, the Comptroller’s director of state and local finance stating that “the City appears to have complied with the Comptroller’s directives.”

Perhaps the operative metaphor should be one of good cop/bad cop.

Wilson’s explicit threat of Monday was in the wake of two letters addressed to city officials. One was to Wharton advising against a debt refinancing plan by Wharton, reminiscent of one employed by the mayor in 2009-10, that Wilson referred to as “scoop and toss” in that it would load too much debt repayment into future years. Another letter, addressed to Council chairman Edmond Ford Jr at Ford’s request, advised that, if the City could not successfully conclude a workable budget within acceptable financial guidelines, “someone else may end up doing this.”

Even as he made Monday’s more explicit reference to potential state action, however, Wilson was at pains to suggest that he thought the Council was moving in the right direction.

Even should the employee salaries be amended upward again next Tuesday, when Councilman Lee Harris, on vacation this week, returns, a tax rate in the range of $3.30 to $3.40 would seem to accommodate the expense and balance the budget, easing the Comptroller’s concerns. (The voters’ concerns, of course, are a different matter.)

Meanwhile, Shelby County’s fiscal plans, apparently on course after the County Commission earlier this month approved County Mayor’s budget and a tax rate of $4.38, increased by 32 cents, hit a snag on the tax rate’s required second reading this week.

With one member, Democrat Melvin Burgess, absent, the tax rate failed to get the required seven votes on the 13-member body. Another Democratic member thought previously to favor the new tax rate, Commissioner Sidney Chism, voted no on second reading. Both Burgess and Chism are targets of an ethics complaint by Commissioner Terry Roland, a Millington Republican who has asked the state Attorney General for an opinion on the two Democrats’ eligibility to vote on the tax rate.

Roland hinges his complaint on the facts that Chism operates a day care center that receives county “wraparound” funds and that Burgess is an employee of the new Unified School System that is directly funded by county government. On the tax rate’s first reading, Burgess declared he would not submit to “bullying” and voted for both the tax rate and Luttrell’s budget, which required only one round of approval for passage. Burgess is still expected to vote for the $4.38 tax rate on July 8, when the Commission has a final vote.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A State Budget Takeover?

Even as the Memphis City Council, now in Hail Mary mode, scrambled this week to choose from several budget alternatives, including a brand-new austerity proposal from budget chairman Jim Strickland, state comptroller Justin Wilson in Nashville was, resolutely if a bit apologetically, pointing out the bottom line.

In a strong letter last week to council chairman Edmond Ford Jr., Wilson wrote that if the council could not successfully conclude a workable budget within acceptable financial guidelines, “someone else may end up doing this.”

That someone, Wilson made clear in an interview with the Flyer on Monday, was himself, the state comptroller.

In the interview, Wilson cited Section 9-21-403 from the annotated Tennessee code, which, he said, gives him virtually unlimited authority, in a pinch, to take over the process of budget-making from Memphis city government — using his power in a virtually line-item sense, if necessary, to add or delete budget items and to set the tax rate for Memphis or any other gridlocked and out-of-balance jurisdiction.  

  
“It’s pretty strong, and there’s absolutely no question that I’ve got to approve the budget. If the budget doesn’t balance, I can bring it into balance. There’s no question I can raise taxes. I want to be real clear about this. I hope we never get there. I do not anticipate that we get there. It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. This is not what I’m about. I don’t want to argue about my authority and all that kind of stuff. … ”

The comptroller paused to take a breath.

“But just look at that statute. The authority is powerful!”

Wilson read from portions of the statute, citing one passage in particular, which points out what can happen if a local jurisdiction fails, in the judgment of “comptroller of the treasury or the comptroller’s designee” to submit a budget that can be kept within balance.

The section reads, in part: “The annual budget of each local government with notes outstanding shall be submitted to the comptroller of the treasury or the comptroller’s designee immediately upon its adoption. The comptroller of the treasury or the comptroller’s designee must thereupon determine whether or not the budget will be in balance in accordance with this chapter.

“If the budget does not comply with this chapter, then the comptroller of the treasury or the comptroller’s designee shall have the power and the authority to direct the governing body of the local government to adjust its estimates or to make additional tax levies sufficient to comply with this chapter.” [Italics ours]

Wilson repeated that he had no desire to impose this authority so long as the city council and the administration of Mayor Wharton were making bona fide efforts to pass an acceptably balanced budget and establish clear financing guidelines.

“Oh, absolutely not. I think they’re going to work it out. I really do. But it’s there.”

Regarding the clearly stepped-up sense of urgency apparent in council budget deliberations, Wilson said, “Well, that’s good. My whole goal is to have a balanced budget.” It was not his concern “how they get there,” and he has expressed indifference about specific controversies, such as that over the restoration of salary cuts made in 2011 for city employees

“That’s not my fight, how that plays out or doesn’t play out,” Wilson said.

Asked if he had an optimistic attitude about the council’s efforts to establish a workable budget, Wilson said, “Oh yeah, I do. I really do. And the point is they are now talking to each other. And I’m hearing from council members that they want to come to resolution. Now, they may have different resolutions, but that’s all probable. Once you acknowledge there’s a problem and you all want to come together to solve it, you get a solution. I think it’s wonderful, and I hope they do.”

Justin Wilson

Wilson’s concerns about Memphis city financing were made public recently with the public release of two letters, one on May 20th to Wharton, criticizing a refinancing plan undertaken by the mayor for fiscal 2009-10 and cautioning the mayor about a new proposal for leveraging city debt that Wilson referred to as a “scoop and toss” arrangement, designed, as the comptroller saw it, to defer what would become an enlarged financial problem to a later decade.

A second letter on June 12th to council chairman Ford was even blunter. This was the one in which Wilson used the “someone else may end up doing this” language. As Wilson explained on Monday, “I had a telephone conversation with the chair, and he asked me that question [about takeover authority], and I answered it. He said, ‘Well, could you write me a letter saying that,’ and I said ‘Yep.’”

Asked why he had not taken some sort of action at the time of Wharton’s 2009-10 refinancing plan, Wilson, who was elected comptroller by the new Republican legislative majority in 2009 and took office at the beginning of that year, said he was preoccupied at the time with various kinds of financial problems around the state resulting from the 2008 meltdown — financial “swaps” involving the state and local governments and other types of transactions that had gone bad.

“I certainly didn’t focus on [Memphis’] refinancing.”

Budgetary and other fiscal problems are common “all across the state, not just Memphis,” Wilson said.

“Whenever there’s a fund imbalance, our county folks notify our state and local finance people. And we saw that there was a negative fund balance [in Memphis] back in January. And we sent a letter asking ‘What’s going on?’ There could be all sorts of good reasons for that. We didn’t know at the time. For example, they could be waiting for a grant to fund the balance or something like that. So that’s what kicked it all off, back in January. I think January 14th was the date of the letter.”

There were further exchanges between state and local officials in February, but “I wasn’t really aware of much of this myself. It wasn’t the sort of stuff that necessarily got to me.” The May 20th letter to Wharton marked the point of his first intervention, Wilson said.

The comptroller, a longtime resident of Nashville and a Republican, said he was aware that there had been accusations that he was carrying out some partisan GOP purpose in his dealings with majority-Democratic Memphis, or that he was acting out of the historic Nashville-Memphis rivalry.

“I’m not surprised. I know that. I expected that. Does it concern me? Of course.”

Wilson, in fact, has long had a reputation as a political moderate and has never been regarded in political circles as an ideologue. Though in recent years he has made an effort to distance himself from the fact, he is widely considered to have been the architect of the income-tax proposals of former Governor Don Sundquist, whom he served as chief policy advisor.

Concerning financial issues, Wilson said, “We’ve got problems all over the state, not just in Memphis. Some are much worse. Memphis is so much bigger, though.” He said he was constantly involved in conversations and interventions all over the state. “It goes on all the time,” he said, though it rarely attracts public notice.

• Councilman Strickland’s new budget proposal, under the head of “Strickland’s Proposed Reductions to Mayor Wharton’s $3.36 Budget,” outlines a total of $26,383,805 in cuts across the board of city spending, and posits the retention of the city’s current $3.11 tax rate. It envisions layoffs and attrition in city employees’ ranks and cutbacks in city travel and other expenses.

• Meanwhile, the Shelby County Commission fell one vote short, on second reading, of approving county mayor Mark Luttrell’s $4.38 tax rate.The vote was 6-5, a result of Commissioner Sidney Chism’s vote of no and the absence of Commissioner Melvin Burgess.

Chism and Burgess, both Democrats, have been considered supporters of the Luttrell budget/tax rate proposal, but both are targets of ethics complaints from Republican commissioner Terry Roland of Millington, who alleges potential conflicts of interest resulting from Chism’s involvement with a day-care center that benefits from county “wraparound” funds and Burgess’ employment by the Unified School System, a major recipient of county funds.

Burgess is still expected to be the seventh and deciding vote for the tax rate on third reading (the hudget itself passed last week on the one reqaired vote), but Chism has apparently settled on an attitude of caution, given somewhat nuanced advice he’s received on the subject from county attorney Kelly Rayne.