Tag: Memphis Zoo

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News News Blog

What’s Up with All the Zoo Babies?

On Monday, the Memphis Zoo tweeted about their new baby flamingos — the most recent in a long line of zoo babies we’ve met through the spring and summer.

What’s Up with All the Zoo Babies?

Let’s see … there’s been Winnie the hippo, two giraffes, a sloth, an orangutan, rare Louisiana pine snakes, a Yellow-backed Duiker, a Francois langur, and a Spot-nosed Guenon named Grommet.

Baby Spot-nosed Guenon Grommet with his mother Thimble

So what is going on? Has there been extra-sexy time at the zoo? Do we need to have a birds-and-the-bees talk with them? Is this all a PR stunt?

Matt Thompson, director of the zoo’s Animal Programs, says that while springtime is a time for babies, reproduction at the zoo has been higher than average, and the push to get the public involved has also been higher than average.

The birth rate is all part of a bigger plan, bigger than the Memphis Zoo.

“There’s different programs for different species of animals — Species Survival Plan (SSP),” Thompson explains. “For instance, there is a sloth SSP, and a hippo SSP and a giraffe SSP. What that is is a collection of zoo professionals, very smart people who analyze and look at the genetics of different lines of animals, so if the Memphis Zoo, for example, has a certain genetic line and a certain female that would really work well at the Indianapolis Zoo, they might put out a recommendation. They work their hardest to keep the gene pool healthy to prevent inbreeding and that kind of thing.”

A prime example of the SSP at work is one little hippo named Winnie.

“Her mother and father both came to us from Disney’s Animal Kingdom and they came as a result of an SSP recommendation. It was kind of win-win because Disney was getting a little full with hippos — as you can imagine, hippos take up a lot of room,” Thompson says. “We were building a new hippo exhibit and we needed a hippo or two, so we reached out to the SSP and they made recommendations based on genetics and that’s how we wound up with these animals.”

As for birth control, Thompson says it ranges from oral contraceptives to physically pulling the animals apart. And there are accidents. “Sure, just like with people, there are surprises. Not many, but every now and then,” says Thompson.

Thompson says there are over 500 SSPs that cover all sorts of animals from pandas to lizards. The coordinator for the SSP for Louisiana Pine snakes, a rare species, is based at the Memphis Zoo.

Some of the toughest animals to breed are amphibians, and, yep, pandas.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” Thompson says. “Pandas are challenging because they ovulate about once a year and you have about a three-day window for them to get pregnant. They’ve got to tell you when they are ready [and] that’s very challenging.”

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Compromised Greensward “Solution”

Mary Wilder’s June 15th Viewpoint column describes a great success story. Wilder lauds the million dollars recently raised by the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC) and says this money will “end parking on the Greensward forever.” The truth is buried a few paragraphs later: “This will result in the loss of some park land on the northern edge of the Greensward … ” This attempt to reinvent reality is very troubling to me and should be to anyone else who cares about preserving public land.

Wilder uses the words “compromise” and “solution” to justify her opinion that it’s fine to pave one-quarter of the Greensward and give it to the Memphis Zoo. According to the current “compromise” map on the OPC’s website, the northern three acres of the historic Overton Park Greensward would be paved and lost forever. There is no compromise here. This is nothing but a naked land grab by zoo leaders. Amazingly, zoo leaders have conned the public into paying half the cost of destroying our own parkland.

Wilder claims to speak for 19 civic groups known as the Overton Park Alliance. I expect many members of those groups would be shocked to realize they have been used to justify the destruction of one-quarter of the Greensward. How did this happen? Why are these groups so eager to surrender our city’s free open space to benefit corporate interests?

I only claim to speak for myself. I have been involved in more than a few land protection campaigns over the past four decades. In 1986, I was one of the founders of Save Shelby Farms Forest and helped write the legislation that created the Lucius Burch State Natural Area. I was one of the first board members of the Wolf River Conservancy (WRC) and helped establish the Ghost River canoe trail in 1989. In 1997, I became the first executive director of the WRC and helped protect thousands of acres of land along the Wolf including the Ghost River State Natural Area.

In 2008, I helped revive the Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP) volunteer group that saved Overton Park from being destroyed by Interstate 40 in 1971. I supported the three-year-long CPOP campaign that created the Old Forest State Natural Area with unanimous approval from the Tennessee state legislature in 2010. Those 126 acres remain the only legally protected acres in the 342-acre Overton Park, which is why CPOP began their ongoing “Save the Greensward” campaign in 2014.

All of this is to say that I have witnessed and used a variety of tactics to protect green space for citizens to freely enjoy — including protests, letter-writing campaigns, lobbying for local and state legislation, and outright purchase and donation to state agencies. Before now, I have never seen a group of advocates come to the negotiating table in order to surrender to their aggressor. I have never seen a group of advocates willing to pay a million dollars to partly destroy the resource they ostensibly want to protect.

It is obvious that zoo leaders want as much of Overton Park as they can grab. In 1990, they fenced off more than 20 acres of old growth forest and destroyed four of those acres for the Teton Trek exhibit in 2008. Zoo leaders personally lobbied our city officials and Tennessee legislators to oppose CPOP’s campaign to create the Old Forest State Natural Area. And zoo leaders currently control public access to the northern three acres of the Greensward, due to the failure of OPC and city officials to defend this public land.

Those who favor giving up the Greensward to the zoo without a fight are a symptom of a bigger problem. They are part of a long tradition of political behavior in which cowardly but power-hungry people position themselves as leaders, then bow to threats and intimidation, then sandbag and deflate the efforts of others, then reframe the outcome as a necessary compromise and a success.

I believe the zoo can be driven off the Greensward if enough citizens demand it. Where zoo leaders park cars is their problem to solve — it is not the responsibility of citizens to provide funding or sacrifice parkland for a rich corporation that refuses to plan ahead. Zoo leaders claim to run a “world class” facility that is visited by a million people yearly. You cannot tell me those same people are mentally and financially incapable of devising ways to handle their traffic without paving parkland.

The Greensward fight is not over. Battle lines are now clearly drawn between those who think it’s fine to pave one-quarter of the Greensward and those who want to save it. I will continue to support CPOP and the citizens who remain committed to saving the entire Greensward, in the belief that it is priceless common ground that should be protected for everyone.

When the protests start again, which side of the zoo’s fence will you be on?

Larry J. Smith is a lawyer, environmentalist, and lifelong Memphian.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Off the Grass in Overton Park — Forever.

CREDIT: Overton Park Conservancy

Overton Park Conservancy

It’s time to move forward and end parking on the Overton Park Greensward — forever. It’s past time, actually, and the neighborhoods and groups that make up the Overton Park Alliance and thousands of other supporters of Overton Park want to see the Memphis City Council accept $1 million in funding from the zoo and the Overton Park Conservancy at its June 20th meeting and move this process forward.

Overton Park, established in 1901, is a 342-acre park in the heart of Memphis with more than 100 acres of rare old-growth urban forest. The park was catapulted into national significance in the 1970s, when it was saved by the U.S. Supreme Court from government plans to bisect it with Interstate 40, leading to permanent nationwide protection of park land from highway construction.

The park suffered from years of neglect after that, especially after the City Council abolished the Memphis Park Commission in 2000. The Memphis Zoo’s occasional use of the Greensward for overflow parking increased in frequency over the years. The Overton Park Conservancy (OPC) was formed in 2011, funded in part by the city. The OPC has breathed new life into the park in a few short years. Overton Park is now safe, clean, and heavily used by diverse Memphians from all over the city. 

In early 2016, the Memphis Zoo removed two dozen trees from the Greensward and sued OPC, contending the zoo had rights to the entire Greensward. Mayor Strickland arranged for the zoo and OPC to engage in mediation. While the mediation was pending, large protest gatherings on the Greensward demonstrated the public’s strong desire to end parking in that space. Nevertheless, the council rushed through a surprise resolution giving most of the Greensward to the zoo and then moved toward passing an ordinance making the change permanent.

When the mediation ended in June 2016 with no agreement, Mayor Strickland stepped in with a compromise solution that became the basis for an agreement between the zoo and OPC. The City Council largely confirmed the agreement in a resolution in July 2016. That resolution requires reconfiguration of the zoo’s parking lot, plus 415 additional parking spaces. This will result in the loss of some park land on the northern edge of the Greensward and will allow the zoo to continue parking on the Greensward until construction is complete. That resolution also requires OPC and the zoo to share the cost of the zoo’s parking solution equally, despite the fact that OPC manages a free park, generates little revenue, and is funded primarily by philanthropic and membership contributions — and that the zoo will keep all revenue from the new parking lot.

In 2016, the city established a steering committee to guide the project that includes representatives of the zoo, OPC, the Overton Park Alliance, the public, and various city departments. (The meetings of the committee are open to the public; a website [http://www.memphistn.gov/Government/ExecutiveDivision/OvertonParkParking.aspx] provides information on the process, including a timeline.) In February, the committee selected Powers-Hill Design (PHD) to design and lead the project.

In April, the council was asked by the steering committee to accept $250,000 from both the zoo and OPC to fund the project’s design. The zoo threatened to pull out of the process unless OPC agreed to contribute half of the entire cost of the project up front. The council voted in favor of the zoo and mandated that both the zoo and OPC demonstrate they had $1 million to contribute to the project by June 11th.

With the support of over 1,000 donors and contributors from 40 states and 28 Memphis zip codes, including large and small donors (and some generous zoo board members), OPC has met the enormous fund-raising burden placed on it by the council and raised the required $1 million in two short months.

It’s time for the council to accept this funding and let the city-appointed steering committee’s process to go forward. It’s time to quit throwing roadblocks in the way of this painstakingly crafted solution. The Overton Park Alliance and other park supporters remain committed to monitoring the design and construction of the zoo’s parking solution to achieve the best possible solution, not only for the Memphis Zoo, but for Overton Park as a whole.

Mary Wilder is a member of the Overton Park Alliance, which is comprised of the Free Parking Brigade, Humans of Overton Park, Memphis Heritage, Midtown Action Coalition, Midtown Memphis Development Corporation, Park Friends, Inc., Physicians for Urban Parks, Stop Hurting Overton Park (Facebook group), and 10 Midtown neighborhood associations.

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News News Blog

Report: New Zoo Lot Would Take an Acre of Greensward

The size of the parking spaces in the Memphis City Council’s resolution on the Memphis Zoo parking lot will swallow more than an acre of the Overton Park Greensward, according to an analysis offered this weekend by the local chapter of the Sierra Club.

The resolution ended nearly two years of fighting on the Greensward issue and promised to end the zoo’s use of the grassy field for overflow parking by 2019. The resolution was a slate of conditions and proposals agreed upon by zoo officials and the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC) during nearly six months of private mediation sessions ordered by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.

Council member Reid Hedgepeth added another condition to the resolution during the council’s debate on the issue in July. He wanted the parking spaces in the newly reconfigured zoo lot to be 10 feet by 20 feet, the same as in Tiger Lane.

The space size is twenty-nine square feet larger than the zoos current spaces, which are nine feet by 19 feet.* The cumulative effect of enlarging all 415 new spaces in the lot to the larger size will take 1.14 acres of the Greensward, the Sierra Club Chickasaw Group said this weekend. The group said that is 11 percent more land than needed for the project.

“Changing the size of each parking space is an attempt to solve a problem which doesn’t exist,” wrote Dennis Lynch, transportation chairman of the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter. “There is no public ‘uproar’ or even a quiet plea to make parking spaces larger. There is no evidence that the public wants larger parking spaces. Thus, there is no need to change the sizes of the individual parking spaces.”

Members of a steering committee assembled to make the council’s resolution into a reality discussed the parking space size in a meeting last week. Tina Sullivan, executive director of the OPC, said she’d be willing to push the project’s completion date (and, thus, the end of Greensward parking) if the firm hired to design the new lot would consider the smaller parking space size.

However, John Conroy, a steering committee member representing the zoo, said the “zoo will not entertain changes to the [council] resolution.”

Still, Lynch, in his analysis, delivered 15 reasons the smaller space size should be considered. (See below.) Lynch said, based on his review, “it seems hard to justify larger parking spaces which would take over 1 acre of valuable space from a beloved community resource — Overton Park — to give that space to another community resource — the zoo.”

Lynch asked that the design consultants consider two plans, one with the larger spaces and another with the current-sized spaces.

Sullivan was told last week that shrinking the space sizes would require another vote by the council, a process that would take a least six weeks. That, she was told, would add time to the project and reviewing the smaller space size would likely add cost to it as well.

The Commercial Appeal, it seems, is tired of the negotiations on the council plan. In an editorial headlined “Bickering over Memphis Zoo parking must come to a halt,” which was published Monday, the newspaper opined  that both sides “need to act like reasonable adults,” understand that not everyone gets what they want in a compromise, and focus on solving the problem.

“We fully realize why the zoo is concerned about anything that threatens to chase away visitors, and that park advocates are serious about protecting public green space,” the anonymous editorial writer said. “Forgive us for using a cliched phrase, though: While the parking dispute continues, this city is dealing with other issues that impact far more Memphians than the size of a parking space – violent crime, budget issues and poverty top the list.

“Please stop the bickering, act like reasonable adults and make the compromise work.”

Three design firms will vie for the contract to design the new parking lot for the zoo. One firm will be selected probably by the end of January. Money for the project must be in hand from OPC and the zoo by early February.

A city official said last week, though, that the final price tag on the project is not known. Projections last year put the figure at $3 million, a cost to be split evenly between the park and the zoo.

Here’s Lynch’s 15 reasons small parking spaces should be considered in the reconfigured zoo lot:

1. 75% of the cars parked in Zoo lots are small or medium-sized cars.

2. The existing 9′ x 19′ spaces are large enough to accommodate all cars which visit the Zoo, even extra large cars. 3. The City Council’s resolution would cause the new Zoo parking to take 11% more space than needed.

4. The city council’s resolution needs 1.14 extra acres just to address the larger parking space size.

5. The 10 foot by 20 foot parking spaces at Tiger Lane accommodate tailgating — not a common practice at the zoo.

6. Parking spaces at other tourist venues around the city are smaller than 10 foot by 20 foot.

7. There is no public “uproar” or even a quiet plea insisting that zoo parking spaces be larger.

8. The Memphis & Shelby County (Unified Development Code), defines spaces to be 9 feet by 19 feet minimum but allows smaller for compact cars.

9. Given the distribution of vehicle sizes at the zoo, it may even be worth considering a section for smaller cars.

10. The Traffic Engineering Handbook, 5th edition, specifies a “minimum size” of parking spaces, but emphasizes that sizes should be based on the nature of the usage (type of activity) and the physical environment (space available and constraints).

11. The city, zoo, OPC, and the community should work together to meet the parking need, but also to protect the Greensward. Specifications which increase the total acreage unnecessarily are in conflict with this objective.

12. Encroachment into the Greensward is the root cause of the current problem. This project should make every effort to avoid a solution which encroaches. “Appropriately-sized” parking spaces help to meet the objective.

13. With the coming “invasion” of autonomous cars, many people will be dropped off, thus, reducing the need for prime parking spaces near the zoo’s front entrance.

14. Philosophy & Economics — “Land is not free.” The tightly constrained land in the park and near the zoo means that every fraction of an acre must be carefully metered out.

15. “The High Cost of Free Parking” (Shoup, Donald; American Planning Association; 2011) clearly recommends a shift from minimum parking requirements to parking prices which are used to control demand, and encourage other modes of travel.

*edited from the original post to reflect a math error.

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News The Fly-By

Not All Are Happy with the New Greensward Parking Plan

Grumbles about the final Greensward parking plan began even before the Memphis City Council recorded its unanimous vote to approve it last Tuesday.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland unveiled a plan to permanently end the Memphis Zoo’s use of the Overton Park Greensward on July 1st. That plan included adding parking spaces on existing zoo lots and on North Parkway, a new zoo entrance on North Parkway, and running shuttles from a new zoo lot on East Parkway.

Council member Bill Morrison brought a modified version of that plan to the council on July 19th, one approved by the zoo and the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC). The Morrison plan added 415 new parking spaces to the zoo’s existing lots and added parking along North Parkway.

With this, zoo officials said they no longer needed the added parking on East Parkway and, thus, no longer needed to run trams through the Old Forest or on city streets. The city’s General Services lot on the east side of the park will instead become parking and green space for Overton Park.

But all of this will take time. Morrison’s plan won’t end Greensward parking until 2019.

Also, the plan gave the zoo legal latitude to park on the entire Greensward until the new changes are instituted. However, zoo officials have said they will continue to park cars on its traditional footprint, which is roughly the top third of the 12-acre Greensward.

The new agreement does not set legal boundaries for park entities, a contrast from the council’s March 1st resolution, which gave the zoo control of two-thirds of the Greensward. Instead, council members gave the city engineer authority to establish those boundaries — flexibility to change the plan as engineers fit the 415 spaces in the area.

All of this raised the ire of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP), an independent park advocacy group.

“And just to put a cherry on top, this action was a violation of state Sunshine Law, because the public had zero access to this resolution or exhibit until a citizen requested that information during the city council meeting,” read a CPOP post on Facebook.

Details of the final plan were not divulged until the council’s executive session, only two hours before the group was set to vote on it. The resolution was passed out to council members during that session but wasn’t made available to the public beforehand via the council’s website.

Getting that information led to an awkward exchange between CPOP member Stacey Greenberg and council chairman Kemp Conrad. Greenberg asked Conrad if the resolution was the final vote on the issue. Conrad said nothing.

“Mr. Conrad, did you hear what I said?” Greenberg asked. “I asked a question.”

“I heard you loud and clear,” Conrad said.

After a moment of silence, Greenberg said, “You’re not going to answer?”

Conrad replied, “I think it’s pretty clear.”

The final Greensward plan also calls for a northern portion of the field, a low-lying area with trees, to be paved.

“[One hundred and fifty] of the trees in this picture will be removed and paved over in accordance with our ‘win,'” said, Hunter Dempster, a member of the Stop Hurting Overton Park Facebook group. “We have the numbers and stats that show they don’t even need the Greensward.”

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News The Fly-By

Tina Sullivan Talks Trams in the Old Forest

As the final vote on Greensward parking approaches, park leaders said they’ll fight any plan to run shuttles through Overton Park’s Old Forest.

Running shuttles or trams through the Old Forest has emerged as, perhaps, one of the final sticking points on an agreement that would end parking on the Greensward.

Mayor Jim Strickland’s plan would put a surface lot on the site of what is now the city’s General Services area. Shuttles, buses, or trams would carry Memphis Zoo visitors from the lot to the zoo entrance on city streets.

Zoo officials have said the General Services lot won’t work unless they can run shuttles on Old Forest roads. However, state officials have said no motorized vehicles are allowed in its state natural area. — Toby Sells

Tina Sullivan

Flyer: Hasn’t the state already ruled against motorized vehicles in the Old Forest?

Tina Sullivan: I re-confirmed [last] week with a representative of [the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation] that they see no reason to consider re-opening those roads that have been closed for 30 years. Even if the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC) weren’t opposed to it, TDEC would still be opposed to it.

So what is the play here?

As often as OPC has said we would never support vehicular traffic on those Old Forest roads, the zoo has said just as often that parking at General Services does not work for their visitors, unless they can run vehicles on those Old Forest roads.

If that is a solution that the zoo is going to continue to pursue, then they’d be setting themselves up for direct battle with OPC and, potentially, with the state. So, yes, they’d have to pursue it at the state level, in addition to pursuing it at the local level.

What can we expect with the council’s vote on Tuesday?

I think that the council — as much as anybody — would like to see this resolved as quickly as possible. I think that the mayor’s plan is the best chance we’ve seen so far in getting this matter resolved. He didn’t throw it together quickly. It was a result of some pretty comprehensive analysis. I can’t imagine that the council would come up with — in the next week and a half — a dramatically different set of solutions that would solve this problem. The quickest and easiest way to get this matter behind us is to adopt the mayor’s plan.

Why are the Old Forest roads important to park users?

Kids are learning to ride bikes [on the roads]. There are senior citizens that rent tricycles from the golf clubhouse and ride them on the protected roads. We have so many 5Ks on those Old Forest roads.

Those roads have a very clear place in that kind of recreation for people across the city. We want to make sure we aren’t introducing something completely disruptive [like trams].

So, if you can imagine 1,000 runners on a Saturday morning competing with trams moving back and forth through a significant part of the road, it’s just not a compatible use.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Memphis Zoo Plans to Save Rare Louisiana Pine Snake

The Memphis Zoo will lead conservation efforts to save the Louisiana pine snake — the rarest snake in the United States. Longleaf pine forests, the pine snake’s natural habitat, have been destroyed by urbanization, logging, and cultivation. Human alteration has pushed the species to near extinction, but the Memphis Zoo has a plan to save them. — Joshua Cannon

Flyer: How many pine snakes will the zoo have?
Matt Thompson: We will initially have approximately 20 snakes under our care beginning in late fall or early winter. The remaining snakes that are in 21 different zoos across the country will be distributed to three other locations: Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, Louisiana; Fort Worth Zoo in Fort Worth, Texas; and Ellen Trout Zoo in Lufkin, Texas.

Will the snakes be housed in an existing location or will one be built?
A Louisiana pine snake research facility will be built on zoo grounds near the giraffe barn, courtesy of funds from the U.S. Forest Service Catahoula District. The building, contracted by Mayer Construction Co. Inc., will cost just under $150,000 and will be pretty cut and dry — no fancy features since it will not be open to the public. It will include strong lights that will mimic sunlight and wall-to-wall cages. We hope to have it completed by mid-September.

What method will the zoo use to breed the snakes?
While there are various methods for breeding different types of snakes, the pine snake is bred using the standard practice for North American colubrids — non-venomous, egg-laying snakes. In the late fall/early winter, we lower their temperature in a controlled setting, essentially hibernating them. Once spring rolls around and hibernation ends, the snakes are paired together to facilitate breeding.

What led the pine snakes to near extinction?
The population of the Louisiana pine snake has dwindled due in part to the loss of its habitat, longleaf pine forests. The lush forests once stretched across the Southeast from East Texas to the Atlantic coastline, covering an estimated 90 million acres until their decline began 150 years ago.

Because the trees were so abundant many years ago, settlers saw them as an inexhaustible resource, clearing the longleaf pine forests to make way for human development and agriculture, as well as using the high-quality lumber to build ships and railroads. Now, the trees can only be found in patches throughout those regions.

Once settlers discovered the vast loss of the trees, they replaced them with fast-growing pines that would produce economic benefits much more quickly than their predecessors. However, replacing the longleaf pines caused the areas the snakes once inhabited to no longer be a good fit for the species to thrive.

How many pine snakes are left?
There are 108 Louisiana pine snakes held in captivity in the United States. They’re also found in the wild but sparingly to say the least. The snake is the rarest in North America with fewer than 250 specimens that have been found in the wild.

When did the zoo begin breeding pine snakes, and how many have been successfully re-entered into the wild?
The Memphis Zoo began breeding Louisiana pine snakes in 2010. Over the last six years, we have released 50 pine snakes into the wild at an experimental site in Grant Parish, Louisiana, on the Catahoula District of Kisatchie National Forest. Now that this conservation effort is being kicked up a notch, we’re looking forward to increasing that number exponentially over the next few years. We estimate that each of the four conservation sites will produce about 100 snakes annually.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Week That Was: Greensward, Guns, and Wine

Mayor on Greensward

• Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland proposed to permanently end Greensward parking in a proposal issued last week after the mediation deadline passed between the Memphis Zoo and the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC).

Even though mediation did not yield an agreement, Strickland said his plan is a by-product of the mediation talks.

The final decision on the plan, though, will fall to the Memphis City Council, which was slated to vote on the matter Tuesday. However, council chairman Kemp Conrad, who said he supports the mayor’s plan, said he will ask his fellow council members to delay the vote for two weeks.

Strickland’s proposal includes reconfiguring parking spaces on the zoo’s existing lots, adding 100 spaces on the now-wooded north end of the Greensward, building a berm around the Greensward to block views of zoo parking, adding a new zoo entrance on North Parkway, building a new parking lot on what is now the city’s General Services area, and running shuttles form the lot to the zoo on city streets.

OPC was in favor of the mayor’s plan. But zoo president Chuck Brady called the plan “disappointing” and said that he wanted to “maintain the status quo.”

Wine in Grocery Stores

• On Friday, wine flowed from the shelves of Tennessee grocery stores for the first time.

Wine sales began after a nine-year battle in the Tennessee General Assembly. Tennessee is now one of 40 states that allow wine sales in grocery stores. No other state has changed laws to allow wine sales in grocery stores in the past 24 years.

Liquor store owners have long expected their businesses to take a financial hit as one of their main (and exclusive) products can now be found at the local grocery store. The legislature gave liquor store owners a one-year head start on the change, allowing them to expand their offerings with beer, mixers, light food, and more.

While it’s too early to call wine sales in grocery stores a success (sales are barely a week old), many industry insiders predicted it would be a massive surge in the wine business overall.

Guns on Campus

• Beginning last Friday, registered full-time employees of Tennessee’s public universities were allowed to carry concealed handguns on school grounds.

State lawmakers passed the bill to allow full-time employees to carry handguns on public university campuses in May. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam expressed concern about the legislation but allowed the bill to become law without his signature.

The University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee (UT) Health Science Center began registering employees who wish to carry on campus last week. Leaders of the Tennessee Board of Regents and the UT system opposed the legislation.

No Easy Answers on Gun Violence

• Congressmen Steve Cohen assembled a panel in Memphis last week to discuss curbing gun violence, after several gun-control bills failed in Washington last month.

Panelists and members of the audience suggested tougher penalties for those illegally carrying guns, “common-sense” background checks for anyone wishing to buy a gun, and ending gun sales to several groups, including those on the federal no-fly list.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of guns [in Memphis],” said Memphis Police Department Deputy Director Mike Ryall. “The access to guns is so easy that it’s a constant feeding machine. We need to look into how guns get in the hands of bad people.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Timing of Zoo Study Release Draws Criticism

Questions remain about a conspiracy (or a conspiracy theory at least) that has bubbled in the background of the Overton Park Greensward controversy for weeks.

Memphis Zoo officials claim they released the full report of their economic impact study to the media back in 2015, but some Greensward supporters claim the zoo only put out a news release at the time, not the full study.

That is important, some Greensward supporters say, because the zoo has used the big numbers — $83.8 million in annual revenue and 879 jobs — to get special treatment from city leaders to use Overton Park for parking. Then, as the Greensward controversy boiled, some supporters say the zoo hid the full report fearing questions that its methodology would prove a lesser economic impact.

But zoo officials say that’s wrong. Zoo spokesman Laura Doty and Kelli Brignac, a zoo-hired public relations specialist from Obsidian Public Relations, said the news release was given to media on May 6th, 2015, and a hard copy of the full report was released the next day.

However, news reports of the study in 2015 didn’t carry information from the study itself, only facts and quotes from the news release. This led many Greensward supporters to question why the full study wasn’t cited, including the assumptions of the study used to prove such high figures.

Those supporters then asked for the full report from the zoo and the University of Memphis, which conducted the study. But those requests were denied.

The zoo’s study was commissioned after a six-month period in the spring and summer of 2014, in which zoo officials said attendance slumped 17 percent as the Greensward was off-limits to parking. Then-Memphis Mayor A C Wharton had banned parking on the Greensward at the time and said parking was “not the highest and best use” of the space.

Attorney Robert Spence denied Greensward supporter Scott Springer access to the report in an April letter, stating that the zoo is a private entity and is not subject to the Tennessee Public Records Act.

Then, on May 13th, 2016 — nearly a year after the study was allegedly given to members of the Memphis media — the zoo released the full study on its website. The release was due to “overwhelming public support and interest” in the zoo and the study, according to a news release at the time. That news release said the zoo “releases” the economic impact study, not “re-releases” it.

“It is standard practice to release high-level findings of a study in an executive summary or news release,” said a statement from the zoo’s public relations team last week. “The zoo did make the study available, but at the time, few outlets reported it. [The zoo] re-released it after fielding requests for it again this year.”

But that explanation nor the information in the study itself is good enough for a group called Physicians for Urban Parks, a group of dozens of Memphis-area doctors advocating for green space.

“It has now become clear that the information [the Memphis City Council was] provided is not valid or defensible,” Dr. Emily Taylor Graves said. “The city council and the citizens of Memphis have been misled. Now that this has come to light, it is time for the city leaders and citizens of Memphis to re-examine their positions on the Overton Park issue.”

In a May 20th editorial, the Memphis Flyer stated that the zoo “finally” released the full version of the study this year. Zoo officials called for (and were granted) a correction to the editorial to say the study was actually made public last year.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Silver Lining

Ordinarily, we don’t address the same subject in this space for two weeks running, but there are exceptions, once in a while. Last week, you may recall, we wrote about the Memphis Zoo board’s economic impact study, vis-a-vis Greensward parking at Overton Park. We dealt briefly (and by no means definitively) with both the study and the reaction of critics who distrusted its conclusions that Greensward parking was not necessarily a bad thing.

The subject (which shows no signs of going away, in any case) reared itself again this week in remarks to a Rotary Club of Memphis luncheon at the University Club by former city councilman Shea Flinn, now senior vice president of the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce and, as described by chamber chair Carolyn Hardy, the man who “moves the needle” on economic opportunity incentives pushed by the chamber.

Flinn oversees the Chairman’s Circle, a public outreach group operated by the chamber, as well as a series of innovative projects he refers to as “moon missions.”

His approach to the Greensward question was somewhat inadvertent and came his way during the post-address question-and-answer period, via an audience query regarding one of the aforesaid moon missions, this one designated as “Advancing Green Space.” Flinn was asked to comment on that mission in light of the current Greensward controversy.

Flinn made it clear that a) he was not advancing an official chamber position; and b) he was not bursting at the seams with an urge to speak on the matter as a private citizen. In keeping with that caution, Flinn’s first response was to express optimism that, as a result of ongoing mediation efforts initiated by Mayor Jim Strickland, there would soon be found “an adequate solution” to the controversy. He then went further, suggesting that there was an obvious silver lining to the whole wrangle, “if we could step back from the passion and Facebook of it all.”

Flinn reminded his audience that, “20 years ago we actually celebrated the fact of zoo parking.” It was because, he added, at that time the Memphis Zoo and Overton Park had each lost much of their luster and were not attracting nearly as many local citizens and tourists.

What he was saying, in effect, was that there is a problem today only because both the zoo and the park have been upgraded to the point that there is green space worth fighting over.

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

We were struck by several of Flinn’s observations, including his warning that “the best intentions” do not necessarily lead to “the best process.” In any case, said Flinn, it would be “a mistake to see ‘green space’ as meaning only Overton Park.”

Regrettably, however, that is the one green space that most clearly needs to be protected, however the process unfolds.