Tag: Memphis city government

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Opinion The Last Word

Walking? In Memphis?

Some walk for health, some out of necessity. (Photo: Vadim Zakharishchev | Dreamstime.com)

A walk can be many things. You can have a lovely stroll in the woods on a nice autumn day; you could be going to a friend’s house to play or gossip; or, you may even walk just for walking’s sake. But for many folks, me included, walking is their one and only form of transportation — especially without buses and trolleys available.

The trolleys of Memphis used to run from East Memphis, near the college, all the way down to the river. Along the river, it ran the span of North to South Memphis. Nowadays, if you want to get through any of those neighborhoods, you either have to walk the length of the city or become car-dependent. The last remaining trolley, the Main Street Line, has been shut down by the city, and with it, accessibility for anyone without a car Downtown.

Honestly, Memphis is beautiful when you walk its streets. I have seen families growing up and trees blooming over the years. Infrastructure rising and falling. Businesses coming and going, new youthful energy rushing into those spaces like birds to their nests. But I’ve also seen the sidewalks get torn up from mismanagement. I’ve seen streetlights go dim and then finally off for good. And I’ve seen the rusting rails of our once magnificent trolley lines.

I could rant and rave of course about how frustrating it feels to be so closed-off from my communities, land-locked to Midtown. But even when I want to walk in the other areas of Memphis, it’s much more difficult than I remember. Out east and beyond, every road is meant for cars and traffic. Over by White Station, the intersection might as well be nonexistent. Forget trying to see a movie at Paradiso. 

Downtown is almost no better. Constant construction means diverging pathways for any visitor to those streets, sometimes well out of the way of anywhere you want to go. And the only surprisingly easy pathway is along Tom Lee Park, by the bluffs. Credit where credit is due: The switchback installed by the city is one nice treat for any pedestrian. But god knows if you are disabled, that hill is still a nightmare.

Now, I feel like I should specify that when I say pedestrian I mean anyone who doesn’t drive or cannot drive. That includes my disabled neighbors. That includes my friends and family who shake behind the wheel of the car and realize that they’d be more a danger on the road than off it. That especially includes those who walk to combat climate change, to try our damndest to lower emission levels, even by a smidgen. For us, it feels like survival of the fittest on these streets.

My colleague Alyssa Wolf has a project she’s working on, researching the affordability of Memphis housing. One thing she’s included on her list is a “walk-score.” How close are you to the nearest stores; how rough is the terrain outside your home; how close are you to any other city infrastructure? Let’s just say, in her research, she has found more disappointment than relief.

What else can be said? I’m mad about how MATA got its funding cut. Mad about how the trolley lines sit there, unused. I used to live in Portland before moving back home. There was a lot I had trouble with in that city, but the trolleys and rails led everywhere. Trains connected the airport to Downtown to a suburb called Beaverton, their version of Germantown. I saw a future for Memphis’ public transportation.

Instead, the Memphis City Government has decided to, on November 3rd, eliminate five major routes. One of those routes is to and from the airport (Route 28). When I was a tutor, I took Route 50 to and from the sessions. Seeing that that route was not on the chopping block was a slight relief. But my heart goes out to the people who need the Southeast Circulator (16) and Winchester Route (69) to get from the Greyhound station to Downtown. Or those who live along the Perkins Route (37) who use it to get to and from their jobs like I once did. And then there’s the sister route to 50 along Central that I’m sure a lot of Cooper-Young residents and university students could rely on to get to and fro.

I am home, yet trapped in my town. So many of my fellow citizens are. It was agreeable with the bus routes (when buses would come) at the very least, but not ideal. I have only seen my city go backwards when it comes to how well it treats its citizens and especially its pedestrians, us unlucky few who simply want a good life. No matter what our reason to stroll, whether its to go to the store, get to work, or even to enjoy the day, we should be able to do it comfortably and safely. 

William Smythe is a local writer and poet. He writes for Focus Mid-South, an LGBT+ magazine.

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Editorial Opinion

Grading Government on the Curve

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It is probably too early to give out report cards on our various branches of government, but before we move deeper into what could turn out to be a crucial year, a little preliminary judgmentalism might serve a constructive purpose.

Justin Fox Burks

Lee Harris

To start with the national government: Now, that is an unruly classroom. As a collective institution, it gets an Incomplete, and that’s grading charitably. The president, Donald Trump, gets an F, and that, too, is almost an act of charity. It almost implies that Trump is trying to succeed at something. There’s no question that the president has failed singly — to articulate and carry out a coherent, productive theme of government, as well as to accomplish any of his sundry private goals, notorious among which is his insistence on building a wall on our southern border. One of the first things most of us learned in school was the folly of the Great Wall of China. At enormous expense, an impenetrable barrier was erected across that Asian nation’s northern frontier, preventing potentially troublesome access from without but also dooming a once thriving kingdom to hundreds of years of isolation and stagnation from which it is only now recovering. Trump would have us repeat that doomed experiment. Meanwhile, he is failing at various other assignments and seems not to know the meaning of homework.

On the score of conduct, he also fails at working and playing with others — having made a mess of our relations with long and trusted allies and simultaneously permitting — or inviting — outside bullies of his acquaintance to nose into our classroom and creating enough mayhem of his own to shut things down altogether. All in all, some form of expulsion may be the only option here.

At the level of state government, we’ve just begun what amounts to a new semester, and from the looks of things [see cover story], the various students involved in the  process seem entitled, at the very least, to an A for effort.

We have a city council that is just getting reorganized after several of its members transferred to other institutions. The reconstituted group is about to undergo crucial exams in the form of an election year, as is Mayor Strickland, whose authority to lead the body is about to be tested as well. The final grades here will come decisively this fall.

County government is off in a brand new direction under the tutelage of a new mayor, Lee Harris, who is proposing what amounts to a new curriculum based on re-evaluating the nature of justice. So far the body of commissioners he’s working with seem inclined to follow his example and are working in harness, keenly exploring the new group project. This effort, too, needs some additional time for evaluation, but we are impressed so far.

Government is an inexact science, and opinions about it are famously subjective. All grading is, more or less, on the curve of our relatively modest expectations. We will periodically  look in on the various branches of government in this space and let you know what progress, if any, is being made.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Strickland’s First 100 Days

It has been 100 days since the formal ascension to the mayor’s office of former city Councilman Jim Strickland on New Year’s Day, and, though it wasn’t his formal “First 100 Days” address, which will occur soon, along with the mayor’s first budget message, members of the Rotary Club of Memphis got a preview on Tuesday.

Strickland eschewed grandiosity in outlining what he called the “big picture,” just as he had during last year’s mayoral race, when he campaigned on a triad of what could be called housekeeping issues — crime, blight, and accountability in government. On Tuesday, Strickland stated his goal as that of having the city be “brilliant at the basics.”

Crime control was, once again, at the top of that list, along with such other basics as attending to potholes, making sure the city’s 911 system was functional and responsive, and conforming to state law that now requires that Memphis, along with all other Tennessee local jurisdictions, must maintain its pension obligations in a condition of complete funding.

Those matters had to be dealt with “so that the great things in Memphis can grow and grow,” Strickland said.

One of the matters he considered in some detail was the specter of population loss, a circumstance the mayor saw as being the proximate cause of most urban decline in the nation and which had been an undeniable aspect of recent Memphis history. Strickland cited statistics showing that Memphis’ population, which stood at 650,000 30 years ago, had been maintained at that level only by means of continuous annexations.

Strickland noted that some 110,000 Memphis citizens (including, he said, his own parents) had left the city in the period from 1980 to 2010, and they had been replaced by as many newly annexed residents in adjacent areas, not all of them — as introduction of a de-annexation bill in the current session of the General Assembly made clear — happy at the change in their status.

Hence the passage of legislation two years ago that blocks further urban annexations without a reciprocal vote of acceptance in areas about to be annexed, and hence also the more recent de-annexation bill, which easily passed the Tennessee House and was stalled in a commmittee of the state Senate only via the strenuous efforts of a coalition partly engineered by Strickland.

That coalition — including representatives of Memphis and other city governments statewide, the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce, and influential bill opponents in the legislature and state government at large — succeeded in relegating the de-annexation measure to the limbo of “summer study.”

But the challenge of maintaining the city’s population and improving its economic base remains, Strickland said, who cited various programs, including a massive effort to increase the city’s police force and to hire a world-class police director, along with upgrades to the city’s transportation system, encouragement of universal pre-K, and an effort to regain Memphis’ lost reputation as one of the nation’s cleanest cities. (“Be Clean by 2019” is the slogan for that endeavor.)

There was a lot more to what the mayor said, but that idea of being “brilliant at the basics” is the key to all of it. We hope he succeeds. It will not be easy.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Myra Stiles, Longtime Democratic Activist, Gets a Surprise

CREDIT: APG/JB

APG/JB

SURPRISE FOR MYRA STILES — The longtime activist  in local Democratic affairs went to Sunday’s meeting of the Democratic Women of Shelby County at the Southwind home of state Senator Reginald Tate and Lashun Pollard Tate, expecting it to be, as advertised, a reception for members of the new Memphis city government.

Well, that it was. But it also turned out to be an event honoring Stiles herself, who has just retired as treasurer of the Democratic Women of Shelby County, a duty she had performed for decades,  and had presided over 25 consecutive DWSC Christmas parties. 

In Panel One, DWSC president Virgie Banks brandishes proclamations in the unsuspecting Stiles’ honor from both Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell. In Panel Two, Strickland reads his proclamation aloud, to great glee and appreciation from the honoree. (The large crowd present enjoyed it, too.)