While Shelby County Covid numbers are falling, a new health directive keeps masks in place, and tells some businesses to be ready to implement mandatory vaccines or weekly testing.
The new health order comes as several major events occurred since the previous order. Cases have declined. Booster shots are available for some. Masks are, once again, mandated in schools here. Vaccine or testing mandates are expected. Pfizer is seeking approval to use its vaccine in children over age 5.
Here’s how the Shelby County Health Department characterizes the area’s current Covid situation:
“Shelby County is beginning to experience a small decline in Covid-19 cases, and while this gives reason to hope, the best way to continue on this path is to remain vigilant in our efforts to combat the disease. Generally speaking, this means: Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Stay home if you are sick.
“The danger in letting down our guard right now is that we experience a plateau in cases followed by another surge. The most troubling aspect of this surge is the impact on children and the marked increase in pediatric cases compared to last year. This is why masking in schools, with appropriate exceptions, is a must. The department considers in-person learning a vital element of education and pediatric health.
”Shelby County is still considered by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – CDC] to be an area with a high rate of community transmission of Covid-19. In large part, this is due to the low percentage of vaccinated people in the county and in Tennessee. Vaccination is the most important strategy to prevent severe illness and death.”
One substantial change in the new order is that businesses and schools must report positive cases to the health department within 24 hours. Another new change requires businesses and schools to post signs reading “mask required” at their entrances.
The new order also taps some business owners to be ready should new vaccine and testing rules be issued from the Occupational Safety and Health Adminstration (OSHA), as is expected.
“Employers with 100 or more employees should prepare for a new emergency temporary standard from [OSHA] requiring them to mandate that all employees be vaccinated against Covid-19 or else undergo weekly testing,” reads the order. “Please consult with your legal counsel about coverage and implementation of the emergency standard.”
The new order is set to expire on Sunday, October 31st. It can be changed or renewed depending on changes in the county’s case rate, hospital capacity, or vaccination rate.
Shelby County passed a grim milestone this week as Covid deaths here ended the week at 2,021.
Sixty-one deaths were recorded during the week. Deaths from the 19-month pandemic in Shelby County were 1,960 as of Saturday.
Overall case counts continue to fall, however. The weekly average of positive Covid deaths have fallen for the last five weeks. The seven-day rolling average of new cases here fell every day this week, starting with an average of around 600 on Saturday to around 400 later in the week.
Active cases of Covid fell from week to week, also. Last week, nearly 6,000 were known to have the virus. The number fell to around 5,000 this week. Of those, 1,666 were pediatric cases.
One reason a federal judge struck down Gov. Bill Lee’s mask opt-out order in Shelby County is that students wearing face masks in school is more efficient, easier, and cheaper than Lee’s plan to protect disabled students.
U.S. District Court Judge Sheryl Lipman’s Friday ruling says that Shelby County’s mask mandate for students is legal. The ruling strikes down Lee’s order that allowed parents to opt their children out of the mandate. This means that all students will have to wear a mask at school in Shelby County starting Monday.
Lee’s opt-out order was delivered in mid-August. Legal challenges to it rose later from Shelby County and private attorneys working for disabled school children at greater risk of Covid’s effects than most. Attorneys said those student could not safely return to school with other maskless students. On these complaints, Lipman had temporarily halted Lee’s order earlier this month, but the order was set to expire Friday.
The new order states plainly, “schools cannot implement adequate health measures to ensure Plaintiffs’ access to school with the executive order in place.” The “unmasked presence” of other students “creates the danger to these plaintiffs.”
The order reads that local school boards won’t be able to give these disabled students reasonable accommodation to keep them from harm. Lee’s order, it says, eliminated Shelby County’s mask mandate “to create more costly and complex measures to protect every child with a disability.”
Lipman said Lee and members of his adminstration have said publicly that masks reduce the transmission of Covid-19. Mask requirements were already in place in Shelby County with set-ups for classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, school buses, libraries, and P.E. classes — none of which would need to be changed with the existing mandate.
To do it Lee’s way and individualize processes and supports for disabled students could possibly come with new facilities like larger gyms or outdoor seating areas. It could also call for more teachers to monitor masked and unmasked students, as well as complex policies and schedules for moving between classes or to school buses. All of these could change, too, if parents change their minds on masking their children.
”The accumulation of costs, alternative schedules, and other changes stands in stark contrast to the cost-effective, minimally burdensome requirement for children to wear masks when at school,” Lipman’s order reads.
Sacramento now smells like “smoke and homeless people” and, perhaps, we should “cull” the 5 percent of society “that give the other 95 percent a bad name.”
These were but two public statements from key witnesses in a four-hour hearing on state bail reform in Nashville Tuesday. Neither of these statements brought public repudiation from any House or Senate member in the room.
A joint session of House and Senate member of the Tennessee General Assembly convened Monday and concluded Tuesday to hear from a long slate of witnesses on bail reform in Tennessee.
The panel heard from bail bondsmen, heads of professional bail organizations, companies that work on monitoring technology, sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, legislators who have worked on bail issues in other states, local elected officials from across the state, and at least one national organization looking to reform the money bail system altogether.
But the two days of hearings were largely pro-industry affairs with a conservative-leaning, lock-’em-up, tough-on-crime philosophy. Many seemed interested in nitty-gritty topics like bracelet-monitoring tech and sharing stories about locals cops letting someone go on bond only to make trouble again. Few, it seemed, were interested in an overhaul of the money bail system itself that, largely, allows those with money to walk free until their trial and those without money to sit in jail.
The hearings came with many surprise statements from witnesses, many probably used to speaking from the heart, not in public, and not before a legislative panel. It also had surprise moments from some lawmakers, too.
Tuesday’s first witness was Jeff Clayton, executive director of the American Bail Coalition. He told the group he’d traveled the country talking about bail reform.
“Last week, I spent in lovely Sacramento, California, which smelled like smoke and homeless people,” Clayton said, apparently in reference to recent wildfires there and the city’s homeless population.
Again, not a single legislator spoke a word against this insulting remark, including Sen. Mike Bell (R-Riceville) who presided over the hearing.
Gardening, specifically pests in a cucumber patch, was on the mind of Memphis-based Ernie Arredondo, president of the West Tennessee executive board of the Tennessee Association of Professional Bail Agents, as he thought about criminals. In a bit of rambling testimony, he also suggested, maybe, getting rid of a chunk of society.
“It is just always a few things that will spoil your whole crop,” Arredondo told the panel. “If you don’t get the beetle bugs out of your cucumbers or where your squash is, they’ll eat up all your plants and kill it.
“Let’s say 95 percent of people are doing well. We just need to find a way to cull the other [3 percent, 4 percent, or 5 percent] that give the other 95 a bad name.”
Kansas state Rep. Stephen Owens was past his prepared testimony and well into question time before Bell, with obvious anger in his voice, reprimanded him.
“It almost cast a cloud on your testimony that you didn’t start out with, “I’m vice president of the bail bondsman association of Kansas. That I make my money in the bail business and I make my money in the monitoring business,’” Bell told Owens. “If chairman [Rep. Michael Curcio (R-Dickson)] hadn’t look it up online, we would have never known that.
“You come back before this committee again, at least in the Senate, I want you to lead with that before you say anything else.”
Owens explained that he gave up his position with the association when he was elected but admitted he was in the bail industry.
Look for even more surprising, silly, and strange moments, in our YouTube video.
The issue of a possible city/county government consolidation for Memphis and Shelby County has been somewhat buried in the news cycle. In case you missed it, here’s the short version: Memphis City Council members Chase Carlisle and JB Smiley Jr. are floating a consolidation proposal that would be put on the November 22, 2022, ballot.
Let me cite the Daily Memphian’s report: “By the terms of the resolution, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland would appoint five citizens to the eventual 15-member body and take those names to a council committee for review within 21 days of the council vote approving the resolution. … A confirmation vote on the five by the council would follow within 30 days of the council approving the charter commission resolution. The resolution urges the Shelby County Commission to take the same action. … The charter commission would hold its first meeting Nov. 1 and complete its work August 1, 2022, with filing of the charter.”
Are you still awake?
This has about as much chance of passing into law as does a countywide anti-barbecue ordinance. Past efforts at conjoining county and city have failed for a reason. Remember the disastrous “consolidation” of the city and county school systems? Memphis City Schools shut down in order to merge with Shelby County Schools. The suburban municipalities would have none of it, forming their own districts and bailing on consolidation. For all intents and purposes, Shelby County Schools is now basically Memphis Public Schools under another name.
We are a bit like Afghanistan, where the U.S. government tried for 20 years to establish a national government, spending billions on infrastructure, weaponry, education, and our own blood and treasure. It all collapsed like a Jenga tower on a trampoline when the final date of U.S. troop withdrawal was announced. The puppet regime fled the country; the Afghan government troops evaporated; the Taliban walked into Kabul, unopposed.
The original withdrawal deal was set up by former President Trump, who released 5,000 Taliban troops as a gesture of good faith and pledged to remove U.S. troops by May. President Biden backed up Trump’s withdrawal date from May to September but didn’t change much else. The final week of chaos, hurried flights to safety via a massive airlift, and a last-minute suicide bombing that cost 13 American lives gave pundits and keyboard kommandos of every stripe a couple weeks worth of second-guessing, but not much else. Most Americans are glad we’re finally out of that hell-hole.
What did we learn? Afghanistan is a landmass with a prescribed border, but it is not a country and certainly not a place to attempt nation-building. Rather, it is a conglomeration of tribes and religious and ethnic groups, many of whom have been feuding for centuries.
Shelby County is also a landmass with a prescribed border and home to various tribes, most of whom have little in common, and some of whom have been feuding for decades.
How many times have you heard a Midtowner say, “I don’t go beyond the Parkways”? How many times have you read an online comment from a suburbanite disparaging Memphis’ crime? People who live in Bartlett, Millington, Germantown, Lakeland, Arlington, and Collierville don’t see themselves as Memphians. And why should they? They don’t live here. They have their own communities with schools, police departments, and governments. The proposed consolidation would leave the burbs intact as towns, but their citizens — as residents of Shelby County — would still have a vote in the referendum. How do you think that will go?
Memphis is blue. The rest of the county is red. We can come together over barbecue, the Grizzlies, the Tigers, and not much else. I love this city and I’m proud to call it home. People in Germantown feel the same way about their town. We can get along fine for the most part, as long as we avoid politics. We even make occasional forays into foreign territory for shopping, dinner, sports, or music. But putting together a consolidation package that would win 51 percent of the vote in this fractious county is not very likely to happen.
And let’s be honest: Nobody wants to go through an airlift around here.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. (Courtesy Shelby County Government).
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris took aim at city and county tax breaks last week and pulled no punches, calling components of it “made up” and “laughable.”
Harris spoke candidly about the issue during a panel convened last week by The Beacon Center, a Nashville-based free-market think tank. The panel included Mark Cunningham, the center’s vice president of strategy and communications, and was moderated by Otis Sanford, Memphis journalism professor, columnist, and television commentator.
The conversation followed an online viewing of a documentary called “Corporate Welfare: Where’s the Outrage?” (below). The film features The $9.5 million tax break given by Memphis and Shelby County in 2015 to lure Swedish retailer Ikea to Germantown Parkway. (The company returned some of the money in 2019 after failing to meet job numbers set out in the original agreement.)
Harris has been publicly against tax breaks for some time and said (as he did again last week) that investing in infrastructure like schools, roads, and law enforcement would do more to lure companies to Shelby County.
Here are some of Harris’ hardest-hitting quotes from Thursday’s discussion:
• “I am generally against tax breaks for corporations. One of the main reasons is because it sets up government to pick winners and losers, to decide which companies should get a government subsidy and which companies should not.”
It sets up government to pick winners and losers.
“Those kinds of things should be determined by the market, by what consumers demand, and by entrepreneurship, and what kinds of companies are good at their craft, not by government.
“This idea that government somehow steers a company one way or another doesn’t sound believable to me.”
On the prestige of having an Ikea and the competitive pressure to woo the company here:
• “This stuff is just made up from the start of it to the end of it.”
This stuff is just made up from the start of it to the end of it.
“A few weeks after [Ikea] got the millions in tax breaks from Memphis and Shelby County, they announced that we’re going to also open something in Nashville and they continue to open stores all across the country.
“It’s just made up stuff. It’s a made-up theory about how the economy works. It’s a made-up theory about ‘if we do this, they’ll go somewhere.’
“Businesses want to achieve profitability. That is what drives their decision-making. Government’s getting in the middle of it actually hurts and hinders all of us. It doesn’t help them to make their businesses better. It hurts us all.”
• “That’s what I’d say about the repetitional effects: They just weren’t there. [Ikea was] announcing these openings all over the place. So, those things are just made up to get the tax breaks and they tell you what’s really happening.”
On why politicians support tax breaks:
• “I think it’s just the idea among politicians is still — that for the last 50 years or more — jobs has been such a high-polling issue. So, if you want to attach yourself to that high-polling issue, this is one way to attach yourself to it.”
You just got to understand that the businesses create jobs, not government elected officials.
“But … if you go back to the fundamentals of the economy, government officials don’t create jobs except jobs in government, right? You just got to understand that the businesses create jobs, not government elected officials. That just doesn’t really happen. They come, but it doesn’t really work that way.”
On why tax breaks continue:
• “The system [for tax breaks] already exists. The consultants are already out there.
“[Consultants] produce the reports, which are generally not worth a lot. They come with these packages to say, ‘Hey, we can get you a little extra.’
“So, from the business perspective, they start to feel like suckers. If they say, ‘No, no, no, I’m all about the free markets.’ They’re almost boxed into saying, ‘Okay, you’ve got a package of incentives and subsidies that you can bring from a municipality or from a state. I’ll take it.’”
So, from the business perspective, they start to feel like suckers.
“So, the businesses are boxed in, too, even if they agree that it would be better to not have this practice at all.”
Sanford:What if Memphis and Shelby County decided to get out to the tax break game? Wouldn’t that depress the economy here?
• “I don’t think it has an effect on these kinds of decisions. Governments are in charge of some things. They’re in charge of infrastructure in schools, and crime, a lot of quality-of-life-kinds of issues.
“At the margins, executives are making decisions based on those issues. Can I recruit other executives [to the city]? Is it a place families want to live?
“So, if we shifted from economic incentives to quality of life [improvements], we all know, or we all should know, that we would get a lot more benefit. If you have high-quality schools, and low crime, and great roads, and bicycle lanes, we all know that that’s a thriving community and that’ll be very appealing.”
Tax cuts for all:
• “There are alternatives; just give everybody a tax cut, right? Everyone agrees that any level of tax cut across the board, is going to stimulate the economy. There may be some disagreement about how much a tax cut stimulates the economy, but every tax cut helps the economy.”
• “If you do shift away from this winners-and-losers mode into a general tax cut mode, then you can stimulate a whole bunch of additional economic activity.”
We don’t even know how much money we’re giving away, right?
“First, you’ve got to quantify where the incentives are, which no one does a good job at, right? We don’t even know how much money we’re giving away, right?
“But if you were to quantify it and know what you were giving away and then shift as much as possible to just the general-tax-cut mode, then you can create a whole lot of additional economic activity, the same way that some of these other things like infrastructure, schools, law enforcement, and crime reduction create.”
On companies living up to their promises and clawback protections if they don’t:
• “They definitely don’t [have to live up to promises].”
We were told for years, “we’ve got these clawbacks” and “there are these clawbacks coming.” I mean, it’s laughable.
“We were told for years, ‘We’ve got these clawbacks’ and ‘There are these clawbacks coming.’ I mean, it’s laughable.
“I’m not trying to belittle anybody. But it’s just the truth of the matter. We don’t have clawbacks. We didn’t get anything back. It doesn’t happen.
“I’m not trying to belittle anyone because I understand the need to talk about jobs and it’s a really, really high-priority issue, but I’m just saying when these deals are done and put together with the customer, they just don’t happen the way they are advertised to happen.”
New business filings in Tennessee continued at a “record-shattering” pace during the second quarter of 2021, according to state officials.
In those three months, paperwork was completed for 19,983 new business entities here. That’s up 61.6 percent form the same period last year. Secretary of State Tre Hargett said it the most number of new business filings ever recorded in one quarter in the 28 years that such data has been collected. First-quarter 2021 broke the previous record.
“The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Tennessee,” Hargett said in a statement. “Our business-friendly environment encourages investment and jobs. The record number of firms choosing to establish in Tennessee is a testament to the stewardship of our state leaders and an encouraging sign for the future.”
Shelby County led the way in new business filings, followed by Davidson (Nashville), Knox (Knoxville), and Hamilton (Chattanooga) Counties.
Hargett reported that Tennessee’s June unemployment rate (4.9 percent) continued to decline from its pandemic high of 15.8 percent and remains below the national rate of 5.4 percent. In June, employment in Tennessee grew by 22,100 jobs, but total employment remained below the pre-pandemic peak in February 2020.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris nominated Dr. Michelle Taylor to be the next director of the Shelby County Health Department.
The nomination comes after the March resignation of former director Alisa Haushalter amid a state investigation of wasted COVID-19 doses and untidy vaccine record-keeping. Dr. LaSonya Hall has been serving as interim director.
Taylor is a graduate of White Station High School. She has a B.S. from Howard University, an M.D. from East Tennessee State University, and an M.S. the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She also earned a Doctor of Public Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University.
“I believe Dr. Taylor is the right person to lead our health department and pull us all toward shared responsibility,” Harris said in a statement. “She will bring to the job a wealth of knowledge and, as important, compassion and commitment to community.”
Taylor said she was a “military brat” and “Memphis was the only place I lived for more than three years.”
“God didn’t bring me here with all of this expertise not to give back to the community that has nurtured me and helped me to grow up in so many different ways,” she said.
Shelby County Commissioner Van Turner said “Taylor is exactly what Shelby County needs.”
“She has the academic credentials, professional skills, and knowledge to lead our health department well into the future,” Turner said. “The fact that she is from right here in Shelby County is an added benefit, but even if she weren’t from here, she’d still be an excellent candidate for this job.”
Taylor has served with the department for several years. She also worked as the associate medical director and deputy administrator for the Maternal and Child Health Public Health Emergency Preparedness Program. Most recently, Taylor worked as an aerospace medicine division chief in the Office of the Air National Guard Surgeon General in the Air National Guard Readiness Center.
Taylor will be presented to the Shelby County Board of Commissioners’ General Government Committee on Wednesday, July 21st. The full commission will vote on her appointment on Monday, July 26th. If approved, she will begin work on August 2nd.
A new health directive will eliminate almost all of the prior restrictions on businesses and outlines the limited mask requirements still left in Shelby County.
The new directive will go into effect Saturday. It comes as “metrics indicate vaccination efforts are working to limit the spread of the virus in our community.”
“More than 70 percent of adults in Shelby County have some level of immunity to the COVID-19 virus, either because they are vaccinated or because they had the virus and have recovered,” reads a statement from the Shelby County Health Department. “The average number of reported COVID-19 cases per day is 46 today. One month ago, that average was 135 per day. The test positivity rate is now 3.6 percent. That means that of all COVID-19 tests, only 3.6 percent are positive.”
Some of the main changes to come in the new health directive include:
• Points to CDC guidance on what you can safely do if fully vaccinated.
• Removes references to the authority of private businesses and institutions to require masks as it is their authority to generally manage their facilities and operations.
• Continues to require individuals and businesses to cooperate with the health department’s long-standing duty to carry out disease prevention measures, such as contact tracing, upon learning of a positive (or symptoms of a) COVID-19 case.
• Eliminates guidance for physical distancing for as they are better suited for making site-specific determinations
As for where you must still wear a mask in Shelby County, the health department mainly points to CDC guidance and they include:
• You are awaiting, boarding, disembarking, or traveling on public airplanes, ships, ferries, trains, subways, buses, taxis, and ride-shares as they are traveling into, within, or out of the United States, and U.S. territories. This includes hubs, airports, terminals, stations, and ports of entry.
• You are entering property on which a public authority (local, state, or federal) has a propriety interest, and that authority requires you to wear a mask while in the property and has posted “mask required” notice signs at frequently used entrances.
• Judges with courtrooms in Shelby County buildings retain the discretion to require the use of masks within their courtrooms, and the judge must post a “mask required” notice sign at the entrance doors to his/her courtroom.
Shelby County led the charge of a record-breaking surge of people starting new businesses in Tennessee, according to new data from the Tennessee Secretary of State.
New business filings in the first quarter of 2021 were “the highest in history,” said Dr. Bill Fox, director of the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research. In the first three months of the year, new business filings were up 55.1 percent over the same period in 2020.
In the first quarter 19,652 entities filed papers to start new businesses, according to state data. It marks the largest year-over-year gain in the 28-year history of the collection of this data. State officials called it “astonishing” in a news release.
“This data is an encouraging sign and a strong vote of confidence by Tennesseans and people worldwide investing in our state’s business and entrepreneur-friendly environment,” said Secretary Tre Hargett.
The first quarter marked the third straight quarter of new business filings in the state. Officials said a strong annual gain in new business filings in any quarter is 15 percent. In the last three quarters, new businesses filing have been up 30 percent. “The record-breaking boom over the last three quarters has roughly doubled or tripled top quarters from the past,” officials said.
The growth in new online businesses during the pandemic across the country “likely” explains Tennessee’s new business surge, officials said.
Shelby County saw the largest number of new filings, followed by Davidson, Knox, and Hamilton counties. These four — the most populous counties in the state — accounted for 47.9 percent of new filings statewide.
“COVID-19 has complicated how we compare economic activity over the past year, but initial filings for new businesses during the first quarter of 2021 were the highest in history,” said Fox. “This strong rate of growth signals that Tennessee is experiencing a rapid economic rebound from the pandemic.”
