Tag: Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland

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3.0 Executive Order Marks Fourth Since Strickland Took Office

Tuesday’s executive order adopting the Memphis 3.0 plan was Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s fourth since he took office in 2016.

An executive order provides mayoral direction to the heads of all the city’s divisions regarding operations and day-to-day business, Dan Springer, the city’s deputy director of media affairs, said.

So far, Strickland’s orders have dealt with ethics, data, sexual assault, and, most recently, the Memphis 3.0 comprehensive planning document.

Here’s a snapshot of the other three orders:

The mayor’s first executive order came about five months after he took office, when he signed an order on ethics, rescinding a 2009 order.

The order instructed city employees not to accept gifts, money, or favors from residents. It also discouraged city employees from using information obtained on the job to make a profit, as well as prevented employees from entering into or benefiting from contracts with the city or its agencies.

Then in June of that year, Strickland issued his second executive order. This one related to the city’s sexual assault task force. Through the order, the mayor directed the task force to “continue their work to raise awareness about sexual assault and violence.”

Strickland instructed the task force to test every kit in the city’s inventory, investigate leads and examine all cases coming from the kits, improve victim support, prosecute the suspects, and “continue the dialogue in Memphis about sexual assault and domestic violence, including a deliberate effort to get information in the hands of victims and survivors who need it most.”

In February 2018, the mayor signed an order creating adopting an open data policy. The move created the Memphis Open Data program and the Data Governance Committee.

As a result, data related to public safety, neighborhoods, jobs, government, and youth is available through the open data portal on the city’s website.

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News News Blog

City, County Look to End Street-Level Homelessness With New Facility

CREDIT: Full Build

Full Build

Rendering of planned facility

A new homeless shelter for women and expanded programs to combat homelessness in the city were announced by city and county officials Thursday

At a joint meeting of the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission Thursday, officials detailed plans for an $8 million relocation and expansion of the Hospitality Hub, an organization that assists homeless men and women, providing customized care, resources, or referrals in partnership with other organizations.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland who was at Thursday’s meeting said homelessness is a “community issue and what we’re bringing to you today is a community solution.”

The solution addresses the lack of emergency shelter beds for homeless women and of assistance for the homeless population during the day,” Strickland said.

The new Hub, which will move from a spot near Second and Beale to the former City of Memphis Public Service Inspection Station on Washington, will house a resource center, an outdoor day plaza, and a women’s shelter.

The women’s shelter will be built to house at least 32 women, officials said. Kelcey Johnson, executive director of the Hub said the shelter is meant to house women for four to nine days, but in some cases, women might need to stay up to 30 days.

Johnson said there is a significant need for shelters here that serve women: “I never have to say to a man ‘tonight you have to sleep outside, but I frequently have to say to a woman ‘tonight you have to sleep outside because there’s no bed for you.’”

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Based on data from the Hub, 37 percent of Memphis’ homeless population are women, but only 6 percent of the beds in shelters are open to women, city council chairman Kemp Conrad noted.

“A barrier-free facility for homeless women in our community does not exist, and it is unacceptable,” Conrad said.

The outdoor day plaza, to be created in partnership with Youngblood Studio, will be a place that the homeless individuals can relax and rest.

The plaza will include shade, seating, art, play areas, a garden, and a stage. The Hub also plans to activate the space with music, food, and art programs. The space will serve as a heating and cooling center as well.

The plaza is expected to be open by summer.

Full Build

Layout of planned facility

Private funding totaling $5 million has already been secured for the facility. The city and county are both planning to add additional funds to that each year through 2021 of up to $1.2 million.

The goal of this new effort is to eliminate street-level homelessness within 30 months, officials said.

The city council and county commission will vote on a resolution confirming funding allocations at their next respective meetings in May.

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News News Blog

Strickland Says New Budget Will Accelerate Momentum

CREDIT: JB

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland presented the 2020 budget to the Memphis City Council Tuesday.

The $709 million operating budget doesn’t include a tax increase. Strickland said this is possible because his administration has been “disciplined and efficient with city government operates.”

Strickland also highlighted that for the first time since 2006, the pension fund will be fully funded.

The key focus areas of the budget are public safety, paving, opportunities for youth, reducing recidivism, and improving neighborhoods.

“Today I am presenting a budget that will help city government do its part to accelerate that momentum,” Strickland said.

One way the budget will do that is through a 3-percent raise for all commissioned Memphis Police Department officers and Memphis Fire Department personnel, which the mayor first announced last month.

Public safety has been a top priority, the mayor said.

When Strickland took office in 2016 policing recruiting was basically “nonexistent,” he said. Since then the number of commissioned officers has risen from 1,900 to over 2,000. The goal is have 2,100 officers later this year and 2,300 by 2020, Strickland said.

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Strickland said that all city employees will receive a 1 percent pay increase: “It’s not revolutionary, but it is absolutely necessary to recruit and retain quality employees and further demonstrate that the city of Memphis government is truly a great place to work.”

The pay increases will be funded by $10 million in revenue growth. Due to less expenditures there’s an additional $4 million in revenue that will go toward the increasing cost of insurance premiums for city employees.

Another area of focus is paving. Strickland said for the fourth year in a row, he is proposing increased funding for paving, which he said is an “expensive but very necessary budget item.”

Strickland is also proposing to invest in neighborhoods through two funds. The first is the Community Catalyst fund, which the mayor first announced at the State of the City address in January. Starting at $2 million a year, the fund will be dedicated to renewing the source of money used to make infrastructure improvements to key neighborhood areas. Under the initiative, the city will work with neighborhoods to identify areas that need improvement to infrastructure hoping to spark private development.

The second fund, the Memphis Affordable Housing Trust Fund, will be used for new construction and rehab of multi-family homes, as well as minor home repairs for low income families. The fund will get $700,000 in its first year. 

“For far too many families in Memphis, housing takes way too much of their income,” Strickland said. “It’s a problem that’s gotten worse.”

Finally, the mayor is looking to reduce recidivism through expanding Manhood University, a six-week program that teaches young men skills such as, time management, communication, financial literacy, job readiness, and conflict resolution.


Other highlights of the budget include increased jobs for youth, a new library in Frayser, a new fire station in Whitehaven, and an additional $2.5 million for the Memphis Area Transit Authority.

The council has until the end of June to discuss, amend, and vote on a final budget.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Poll Shows Strickland with High Local Approval Ratings

A graph showing some of the results of a Public Opinion Strategies poll on Mayor Jim Strickland’s current approval ratings with Memphis voters

On the eve of what could well turn out to be a long, hot summer, and with all the crises, ongoing and potential, affecting Memphis, how is the approval rating of Mayor Jim Strickland holding up?

Rather well — or so would a fresh new poll taken on the Mayor’s behalf seem to suggest.

A new sampling of public opinion by Public Opinion Strategies, the firm relied on for the Strickland campaign during the 2015 mayoral race, shows the Mayor’s approval rating, as of May 2016, to be 68 percent, with only 15 percent of those polled disapproving.

The results are analyzed three ways:

—By gender, with 66 percent of men approving and 15 percent disapproving, and wotj 70 percent of women approving, against 14 percent who disapprove;

—By political party, with 89 percent of Republicans expressing approval and a statistical sample small enough to register as zero disapproving; 65 percent of approval from Democrats, with 17 percent disapproving; and 63 percent of independents approving, as against 19 percent disapproving;

—By race, with whites approving at a rate of 80 percent with only 5 percent disapproval, and with a approval rate of 62 percent among African Americans, 20 percent disapproving.

— And, Rather oddly, the poll offers figures for “Northern Districts” (73 percent approval, 13 percent disapproval) and “Southern Districts (61 percent approval, 17 percent disapproval).

According to Steven Reid, the consultant whose Sutton-Reid firm represented Strickland during his successful 2015 mayoral race, the actual polling was performed by Public Opinion Strategies of Alexandria, Virginia, the company which had also done polling for Strickland in 2015.

The poll was conducted by telephone from May 15 to May 17, with 25 percent of those polled contacted by cell phone. The sample involved 400 voters, broken down as follows: 66 percent said they always vote in all elections, general and primary; 23 percent vote in all general elections but occasionally miss a primary; 5 percent were occasional voters in general elections but never primaries; 5 percent “almost never” voted at all.

The poll’s margin of error was estimated at 4.9 percent.

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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.

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Politics Politics Feature

Pending Matters in Shelby County

Newly inaugurated Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland kept himself on solid ground with the electorate, and may have expanded his beachhead somewhat, with a post-swearing-in address on New Year’s Day that added significant new terms to the lexicon of his political rhetoric.

More so than in his campaign speeches, which hewed to his themes of public safety, action on blight, and employee accountability, Strickland made a conspicuous effort to broaden his constituency. His key passage: “Here on this day of renewal, this time of celebration, we must recognize that we are a city rife with inequality; it is our moral obligation, as children of God, to lift up the poorest among us.”  

The mayor’s implicit commitment to social action was reinforced by specific promises “to expand early childhood programs,” “to provide greater access to parks, libraries, and community centers,” and “to increase the number of summer youth and jobs programs.”

• The year-end resignation of long-beleaguered county Election Administrator Rich Holden creates an opening that the Shelby County Election Commission must fill. Final deadline for applications to the newly vacated position is next Wednesday, January 13th, according to Janice Holmes, deputy administrator of Shelby County government.

One of those actively campaigning for the position is Chris Thomas, an employee of the Redwing public strategies group who has served previously as Probate Court clerk and as a Shelby County commissioner.

• In the ongoing movie series based on the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, there was a never-ending stream of new challengers to Rocky’s championship title, each one with a plausible case to make for beating the champ, each one a loser finally, though usually after a bruising and suspenseful struggle.

The difference between Balboa and 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, who, since first winning his congressional seat in 2006, has also faced a different contender for his title in each successive election season, is that Cohen has hardly ever been forced to raise a sweat in disposing of his opponents.

Nikki Tinker in 2008, Willie Herenton in 2010, Tomeka Hart in 2012, Ricky Wilkins in 2014: Each of these would-be Democratic primary claimants to the 9th District seat came into the race against Cohen with a show of credentials and a fair degree of ballyhoo. Each went down hard in the end, with Cohen’s edge against them on election day usually turning out to be somewhere between four to one and eight to one. (Wilkins fared better, losing only 2 to 1.)

Now here — as first reported in the Flyer‘s wrap-up edition of 2015 — comes another worthy looking to take the seat away from Cohen: State Senator Lee Harris, who previously served most of a term on the Memphis City Council and who had been, Cohen says, formally endorsed by the congressman both in his 2011 council race against Kemba Ford and his 2014 win over then-incumbent state Senator Ophelia Ford.

Harris has confirmed his interest in seeking the 9th District seat. If he runs, it would be his second try for the office. The University of Memphis law professor was, along with Cohen and a dozen or so others, a Democratic primary candidate for the seat in 2006, the year incumbent congressman Harold Ford Jr. vacated it to run for the U.S. Senate.

Harris didn’t fare so well in that maiden effort, finishing near the bottom among the 15 primary contenders, but his status was considerably enhanced by his council and state senate victories, the latter allowing him to become leader of the five-member Democratic Senate caucus.

If he enters the race, Harris has indicated his campaign would be of the generalized it’s-time-for-a-change variety, though he has taken issue with Cohen on the matter of the congressman’s opposition to Governor Bill Haslam’s Tennessee Promise program of subsidies for community college students, funded by using proceeds of the Hope Lottery. Cohen, who objected to the diversion of funds as favoring higher-income students over lower-income ones, was the guiding force behind the creation of the state lottery as a longtime state senator.

• The ongoing power struggle between the administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and an apparent majority faction of the county commission was apparently not subject to any time-outs during the holidays. Indeed, it seems to have intensified over the break — to the point of open warfare.

Two matters in December have pushed the combatants to the brink: 1) a December 18th hand-delivered letter from commission chairman Terry Roland to Luttrell  threatening the mayor with “removal procedures” if he persisted in resisting a commission resolution appointing former Commissioner Julian Bolton as an independent attorney responsible to the commission; and 2) a bizarre circumstance whereby a Roland resolution seeking a transfer of the county’s budget surplus — a disputed amount running somewhere from $6 million to $20-some million —from the administration to the commission’s contingency fund reached the state comptroller’s office in a form that seemed to call for the transfer of the county’s entire fund balance of some $108 million.

The latter situation is being denounced by allies of Roland as nothing short of forgery committed somewhere in the administration before being transmitted to Nashville. After Sandra Thompson of the state comptroller’s office responded to Luttrell that the resolution featuring the larger sum was illegal, Roland sent a letter to Thompson charging that alterations had been made in his resolution, not only in the amount sought in the transfer, but in the enabling language of the resolution.

Roland’s letter included copies of both his original resolution, which — given a longstanding dispute between Luttrell and the commission — omitted any sums whatever, and what Roland called a “blatantly altered” copy that was sent to the comptroller’s office, which seemed to spell out a request for the transfer of the entire fund balance, which would be an astonishing demand, and which, noted Thompson, would leave the county without cash available to support spending in its General Fund and in potential violation of state law.

According to Roland’s letter, “When the altered document was brought to my attention I immediately contacted Harvey Kennedy, CAO, to address the issue and clarify my intentions. Mayor Mark Luttrell confirmed via a conversation with me that he was aware the document was altered. … I would never place Shelby County in [a] position where insufficient resources would be available to provide the cash flow needed for operations.”

Meanwhile, conversations and correspondence have flowed back and forth between commissioners and the administration, with the latter contending that a clerical error accounted for the apparent alteration in the resolution and Commissioner Heidi Shafer, a Roland ally in the struggle, concurring with the chairman that conscious skullduggery was involved.

Shafer sees a silver lining to the imbroglio, however. She believes that publicity concerning the matter has put the administration so clearly on the defensive that Luttrell will be willing to compromise with Roland on the independent-attorney issue — despite his statement, in a November 19th letter to Roland that he would stand by “a clear, unambiguous opinion from the county attorney that Resolution #16A [calling for Bolton’s appointment] violates the county charter.”

Roland and his supporters on the commission maintain that the charter mandates that the mayor is bound to implement the requirements of the resolution, which Luttrell vetoed but which was sustained in an override vote by the commission. The case of the altered resolution has earned itself a place for “discussion” on the commission’s committee agenda for Wednesday.

And at some point, even should the independent-attorney issue be resolved in compromise, the original point of rupture between the contending branches of government remains — a suspicion on the part of the commission that the administration is playing fast and loose with the fiscal totals it issues and refusing to submit to regularly scheduled audits.

That issue was apparently at the root of Roland’s wish for the transfer of surplus monies to the commission’s contingency fund.