Tag: State Rep. William Lamberth

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School Voucher Bills to Be First Filed Ahead of Next Legislative Session

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, flanked by Republican legislative leaders, speaks with reporters after the 2024 General Assembly adjourned on April 25 in Nashville. The defeat of Lee's universal voucher proposal was a major setback for his administration. (Courtesy of State of Tennessee)

A new universal school-voucher proposal will be the first bill filed for Tennessee’s upcoming legislative session, signaling that Gov. Bill Lee intends to make the plan his number-one education priority for a second straight year.

Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) said last week that he’ll file his chamber’s legislation on the morning of Nov. 6, the day after Election Day. He expects House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland) will do the same.

The big question is whether House and Senate Republican leaders will be able to agree on the details in 2025. The 114th Tennessee General Assembly convenes on Jan. 14 as Lee begins his last two years in office.

During the 2024 session, the governor’s Education Freedom Scholarship proposal stalled in finance committees over disagreements about testing and funding, despite a GOP supermajority, and even as universal voucher programs sprang up in several other states.

Sponsors in the Tennessee House, where voucher programs have had a harder time getting support from rural Republicans and urban Democrats, attempted to woo votes with an omnibus-style bill that included benefits for public schools, too. But Senate Republican leaders balked at the scope and cost of the House version.

On Monday, Johnson gave a voucher update to school board members in Williamson County, which he represents, on the development of new legislation.

Similar to last year’s proposal, the new bill would provide about $7,000 in taxpayer funds to each of up to 20,000 students to attend a private school beginning next fall, with half of the slots going to students who are considered economically disadvantaged. By 2026, all of Tennessee’s K-12 students, regardless of family income, would be eligible for vouchers, though the number of recipients would depend on how much money is budgeted for the program.

“The bill is not finalized, but we’re all working together with the governor’s office to come up with a bill we all can support,” Johnson told Chalkbeat after the presentation.

Testing accountability is among chief issues to settle.

Johnson said the Senate’s 2025 bill will again include some type of testing requirement for voucher recipients — either state assessments or state-approved national tests — to gauge whether the program is improving academic outcomes.

However, the Senate bill would eliminate a previous provision that might have allowed public school students to enroll in any district, even if they’re not zoned for it. That policy proposal had been included at the insistence of Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), who lost his reelection bid in the August primary.

Lamberth, the House leader, did not respond this week to multiple requests for comment about his chamber’s plan, which in 2024 had no testing requirement for voucher recipients. Instead, the House version sought to dramatically reduce testing and accountability for public school students, including replacing high school end-of-course assessments with ACT college entrance exams.

The House bill also included numerous financial incentives to try to garner support from public school advocates. One idea was to increase the state’s contribution to pay for public school teachers’ medical insurance by redirecting $125 million the governor had earmarked for teacher salary increases.

Johnson told school board members the governor is planning a “substantial” increase for public education funding in 2025 but didn’t specify how much or for what.

“I think we’re going to have some things in there that will be great for all public education,” he said when asked later about including costly incentives such as teacher medical insurance funding. “Whether it’s in that (voucher) bill or if it’s in a separate bill is a great question. We will see. I don’t know the answer.”

Williamson County school board rescinds earlier anti-voucher resolution

Johnson told board members in his home district that he expects “nominal” impact to Williamson County’s two suburban school systems south of Nashville, if the bill passes the legislature in 2025. Most enrollees, he said, would be in urban areas that have more low-performing schools and private school options.

Later Monday, Williamson County’s board, including four newly elected members whose campaigns were supported by a conservative out-of-state political action committee, voted 10-2 to rescind a resolution passed by the previous board opposing Lee’s Education Freedom Scholarship Act.

The governor is from Williamson County and graduated from a public high school there in 1977. So it was significant when his local board voted in March to join more than 50 other school boards across Tennessee on record against his signature education proposal.

But Dennis Diggers, a new board member, argued that it was appropriate to revisit the issue given the recent election, and proposed rescinding the resolution.

“Four of the six candidates who won their election ran publicly for more than six months on this issue, so it was out there,” Diggers said. “I am not going to deny the parents in Williamson County the chance to help their kids.”

Meanwhile, a Tennessee policy organization that supports vouchers released a new poll showing 58 percent of the state’s voters are more inclined to support a candidate who supports letting parents collect public funding to choose where their child is educated, including public, private, charter, or home schools. The Beacon Center poll did not use the word “vouchers” in its question to voters, which tends to poll worse than language about “school choice.”

Universal vouchers would mark a major expansion of vouchers in Tennessee, where lawmakers voted in 2019 to create education savings account options for students in Memphis and Nashville. That targeted program, which has since expanded to the Chattanooga area, has 3,550 enrollees in its third year, still below the 5,000-student cap, according to data provided by the state education department.

A spokeswoman for the governor said his administration continues to work with both legislative chambers on a “unified” universal voucher bill to kick off discussions for the 2025 session. She also noted that $144 million remains in this year’s state budget for the program, even though lawmakers didn’t approve the bill.

“We remain grateful for the General Assembly’s continued commitment to deliver Education Freedom Scholarships to Tennessee families by keeping funding for last year’s proposal in the budget,” said Elizabeth Johnson, the governor’s press secretary.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Tougher State Sentencing Laws Likely to Push Profits at Private Prisons

Tennessee lawmakers on the Joint Ad Hoc Committee to Review the Adequacy of the Supervision, Investigation, and Release of Criminal Defendants review prison release and sentencing policies at October 6 hearing (Photo: John Partipilo)

This article was originally published by The Lever, an investigative newsroom.

As states across the country adopt harsh new sentencing laws, private prison companies are celebrating, telling investors that they soon expect more people in their prisons — and even higher profits.

From Mississippi to California, many states have taken a decided “tough on crime” tack over the past two years in a strengthening backlash to criminal justice reform efforts in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. This year, Louisiana passed a package of harsh sentencing laws that will keep some people in prison for years longer. A new parole board in Mississippi is keeping people in prison for longer terms by denying early release. In March, Washington, D.C. enacted a sweeping anti-crime package.

These laws, advocates warn, threaten to reverse years of progress in the fight against mass incarceration. Instead, they would again trap people in prison for lengthy terms, ripping apart communities and exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequality — while enriching the private firms that manage prisons and their shareholders.

Perhaps no state is more emblematic of the recent sentencing crackdown — and the private interests that stand to benefit — than Tennessee, where one of the world’s largest prison companies is headquartered.

Since 2022, lawmakers in Tennessee have fought to enact a slate of harsh sentencing laws that are expected to increase the state’s spending on incarceration by tens of millions of dollars annually. The key power brokers behind the legislation are also some of the top recipients of private prison company cash, The Lever found.

On May 28, Gov. Bill Lee signed the latest of these proposals into law, a bill that will end the use of so-called “sentence reduction credits,” which allow people incarcerated in Tennessee to serve shorter sentences as a reward for a clean record in prison. The law, which will only apply to future offenses, is projected by the state to result in a “significant increase” in spending on incarceration.

For the people locked up in Tennessee’s prison system, who are disproportionately poor and Black, this will mean, in some cases, they will spend years longer in a prison cell. There’s little evidence that longer sentences deter crime.

But the law does have at least one key beneficiary: Tennessee’s private prison contractor, CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the world’s largest prison companies, which will almost certainly see new profits as a direct result of the legislation. The company, which spends millions of dollars a year lobbying both in states and on a federal level, has begun telling its investors that harsh sentencing laws across the country will soon translate to bigger profits from the 70-plus prisons it runs nationwide.

“There has been a fair amount of activity both this year, and really the last two years, within state legislatures on adjustments to sentencing reform,” Damon Hininger, CoreCivic’s CEO, who has political aspirations in Tennessee, said in an earnings call last month.

Hininger said he expected this development to lead to “pretty significant increases” in prison populations — good news for the prison company, which is often paid by how many inmates are housed in prison at a given time. Already, he said, higher occupancy rates in CoreCivic-managed prisons had led to, in turn, “strong financial results” for investors.

Bianca Tylek, the executive director of Worth Rises, an advocacy organization that focuses on the harms of prison industries, called Hininger’s comments “brazen” and proof that the companies “don’t think people are listening.”

“It’s a real travesty that we’re allowing industry to shape what our carceral system looks like,” she said.

State set to extend CoreCivic contract despite prison deaths

Tennessee Lookout

Increased the sentences tremendously

David Raybin, a criminal defense attorney in Nashville, has been fighting for sentencing reform in Tennessee since the 1970s. He has witnessed decades of ebbs and flows in sentencing policies. Yet the crackdown that Tennessee lawmakers have launched over the last two years is like nothing he’s ever seen before.

“Over time, it will have an enormous effect,” he said.

In 2022, the Tennessee legislature passed a “truth in sentencing” bill, a sweeping law that essentially rewrote sentencing practices in the state, requiring people to serve, in some cases, up to 10 years longer for certain felony crimes.

“It just absolutely increased the sentences tremendously,” Raybin said.

The 2022 law was just the beginning of Tennessee’s draconian sentencing crackdown. Last year, lawmakers proposed a “three-strike” bill requiring even harsher sentences for people with prior convictions. The legislation passed a key House committee last year but did not reach the governor’s desk, though it has continued to move forward in the Tennessee Senate this session.

Should the three-strike bill ultimately pass, it will require an entirely new prison to be built in Tennessee to house 1,400 more inmates, costing taxpayers at least $384 million.

In May, ignoring the outcry of criminal justice advocates around the state, Lee signed a bill that will largely end early release from prison, which inmates were able to earn through participation in educational programming and maintaining a clean record in the system.

Now, people in Tennessee’s prisons will only be released early on parole, which in the state is rarely granted. The effect will be to “keep people incarcerated longer,” said Matthew Charles, a Nashville-based policy advisor with Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit that advocates for more just sentencing reform.

Lee also signed a new law this spring that will impose adult sentences on teenagers after they have served a juvenile sentence, which criminal justice reform advocates say will have “alarming” repercussions for youth in the state.

It will take several years before the full impact of the laws becomes clear as new cases wend their way through the courts.

“It’s not immediate,” said Dawn Deaner, the executive director of the Nashville organization Choosing Justice Initiative. She estimated that it would take more than five years to start to see the full effect of the new sentencing laws.

“But we’re going to see the prison populations grow,” she said.

The people that have the money

Tennessee is an important state for CoreCivic, as evidenced by the company’s significant lobbying expenditures in the state. The private prison company is headquartered in Nashville, and it has long been one of the state’s biggest political spenders. Since 2009, the company has spent $3.7 million on lobbying and campaign donations in the state, a Lookout analysis found.

In response to a request for comment from The Lever, CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd wrote the company “supports candidates and elected officials who understand the limited but important solutions our company can provide,” and noted that it employs 1,200 people at its prisons in Tennessee.

Although a Tennessee law from the 1980s mandates that the state have only one privately run prison, CoreCivic has carved out a loophole after years of attempts to rewrite the law entirely. The company now runs four of the state’s fourteen prisons by routing contracts through counties rather than the state. Together, the value of those four contracts exceeds $200 million.

Lobbying records from last year indicate that CoreCivic has a small army of eight lobbyists working on its behalf in Tennessee’s state house. According to state campaign spending data aggregated by FollowTheMoney.org, Lee, Tennessee’s current governor, has received the most money from the private prison company of any politician in the nation: $65,400 over the last two election cycles, including donations from company executives, making the company one of his largest donors.

This year, Hininger, CoreCivic’s CEO, who is said to be considering a run for Tennessee governor in 2026, chaired a fundraiser dinner for the state Republican Party and personally gave each attendee a souvenir glass emblazoned with the state’s Republican Party logo. Hininger himself has donated more than $100,000 to politicians in Tennessee over the years.

Meanwhile, lawmakers who have pushed the slate of harsh sentencing laws in Tennessee have been rewarded.

House Republican Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland), a former county prosecutor, has spearheaded the sentencing bills in the state, championing the sweeping 2022 law and sponsoring the more recent bill that did away with early release.

“He’s been very active in trying to pass harsher sentencing laws,” said Deaner of the Choosing Justice Initiative.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton, center, with House Majority Leader William Lamberth at left and Republican Caucus Leader Jeremy Faison. (Photo: John Partipilo)

Lamberth is also one of CoreCivic’s biggest beneficiaries in Tennessee, receiving $8,500 from the company. So, too, are other Republican champions of the sentencing bills, including Lt. Gov. Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge), who has received $7,500 from CoreCivic, House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) ($10,000), and Rep. Jerome Moon (R-Maryville). ($3,000).

The money is “absolutely” having an impact on policy, Deaner said.

“Who are the people that have the money in Tennessee?” she said. “Particularly in rural places, there’s not a lot of wealthy donors.”

In the absence of other campaign funding sources, this state of affairs has allowed CoreCivic to wield an especially significant influence with state lawmakers, she said.

Driven by greed

CoreCivic regularly claims it does not lobby on sentencing-related bills — in Tennessee or elsewhere — and did so again in response to questions from The Lever.

“CoreCivic does not lobby or take positions on any policies, regulations or legislation that impact the basis for or duration of an individual’s incarceration,” said Todd, the company spokesperson.

But it’s clear from executives’ statements to investors that they are, at the very least, monitoring these laws closely.

“Going forward, the next three years to five years, a lot of states are looking at pretty significant increases [to prison populations] because, again, of changes, maybe, in sentencing reform,” Hininger said in the May call.

For the first time in a decade, prison populations across the country are rising after a dramatic drop in 2020 during the pandemic, when court backlogs and early releases due to COVID-19 lowered the number of people in prisons. The majority of states have reported an increase in the number of people incarcerated in their prisons over the last two years, according to a study published by the U.S. Department of Justice last November. According to the report, there were currently more than 1.2 million people behind bars — raising the country’s already sky-high incarceration rate.

A significant part of this incarceration surge is the return of normal court systems as judges worked through case backlogs that had persisted through the pandemic. But tough sentencing laws, criminal justice reforms say, also appear to be playing a role. Prison executives agree.

“In conclusion,” Hininger said in May. “The macro environment in which we operate continues to improve.”

The agency found Tennessee is seeing one of the country’s sharpest increases in its prison population — a reported 8 percent surge between 2021 and 2022. Colorado, Montana, and Mississippi all reported incarceration rates growing at 8 percent or above, and another 42 states reported some growth in their prison populations.

Many of CoreCivic’s prison contracts, including in Tennessee, are paid on a “per inmate, per day”  basis, meaning that these fluctuations in prison populations directly impact the company’s bottom line. Many of the company’s facilities, its financial statements show, are not at full occupancy levels — and laws that could change this would put money directly into the pockets of prison companies.

CoreCivic’s “unholy alliance,” in the words of one state Democratic lawmaker, with the state of Tennessee illustrates just how greatly private interests are profiting from rollbacks to criminal justice reforms — whether that’s prison companies raking in cash from harsh sentencing laws or the bail industry’s success in Georgia, which reimposed cash bail requirements after experimenting with bail reform, a move that will benefit bail bond agents and insurers.

“This moment is revealing exactly what we’ve known about the carceral system,” Tylek of Worth Rises said. “The expansive use of incarceration as a solution to social failures is driven by greed.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and X. For more information on The Lever, go here.

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Lawmakers Pass Bills Allowing Death Penalty for Child Rapists

Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

GOP lawmakers still want to kill child rapists in Tennessee and while laws to do it have passed both chambers, death penalty opponents question motives behind the legislation. 

If the governor signs the bill, adults over the age of 18 could face the death penalty if they rape a child under the age of 12. However, judges could also levy lesser punishments to those convicted.

The legislation was sponsored by two powerful lawmakers: House Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth (R-Cottontown) and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Jack Johnson (R-Franklin). 

The House version of the bill passed Tuesday. The Senate version passed earlier this month. 

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court said a similar idea from Louisiana was “not proportional punishment for the crime of child rape.” In a Tennesseean op-ed published Monday, Johnson said he sponsored the legislation “in an effort to challenge the 2008 Supreme Court ruling.” That part rang a sour note for Tennesseeans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP) which said the statement shows “what this bill is really about.”

“Bottom line: This bill is about overturning Supreme Court precedent and not about protecting our children,” reads an email newsletter sent from the group Tuesday. “If protecting kids was the priority, then lawmakers would listen to the child service providers who continue to publicly share their concerns that this legislation will only chill the reporting of this crime since 90 percent of offenders are family or friends of the child. It will also trap children in decades of capital litigation that will only serve to re-traumatize them, particularly if they have to testify over and over again.” 

Such legislation is on brand for the GOP’s tough-on-crime platform. Conservative lawmakers believe the threat of death is equal to the some crimes and their laws may make some re-consider their actions. But the bill could also open a big door for lawmakers down the road.

Current law says a “defendant guilty of first degree murder” must get a sentencing hearing in which they’ll get the death penalty, a life sentence, or a life sentence without the possibility of parole. This GOP bill removes “first degree murder” wherever it appears in current law and replaces it with “an offense punishable by death.” This would add child rape this year. But it seems to crack the door open for lawmakers to add other offenses in the future. 

For now, though, Johnson and Lamberth are focused on child rapists, who Johnson called “monsters” in his op-ed. 

“Child rape is the most disgraceful, indefensible act one can commit, leaving lasting emotional and psychological wounds on its victims,” he wrote. “As a legislator, and more importantly, as a human being, our responsibility to protect the most vulnerable comes first.”

However, the notion of upending the Supreme Court ruling was on Lamberth’s mind even as he presented the House version of the bill earlier this year. He vowed then to fight for its implementation in court. He noted that in 2008, the court’s ruling came because “not enough states had this type of penalty on the books.”     

“We’re seen other decisions by the Supreme Court overturned,” Lamberth said. “I believe this particular makeup of the court, it leans more towards state’s rights.”

Death penalty executions remain on hold in Tennessee after a scathing report in December 2022 found numerous problems with the state’s execution protocols. 

Two death penalty bills failed in the legislature last year. One would have added firing squads to the state’s options for executions. Another would have brought more transparency to the execution process. 

One death penalty bill passed last year. It gave the Attorney General control over post-conviction proceedings in capital cases, rather than the local District Attorneys. That bill was ruled unconstitutional in July by Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan. 

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TN House Leader Seeks Death Penalty for Child Rapists

State Capitol (Photo: Tennessee State Government)

“If you rape a child in the state of Tennessee, you will die. Period.” 

This is the hope of state House Majority Leader Rep. William Lamberth (R-Cottontown). If his legislation passes, adults over the age of 18 could face the death penalty if they rape a child under the age of 12, he told the House Criminal Justice Committee last week. He described his legislation before the Tennessee General Assembly as “the gravest type of bill we would possibly consider.” 

“If [the legislation] saves even one child from going through that, because the fear of [the death penalty] gets into the head of some monster out there — that’s even thinking about this — then it’s worth saving that child,” Lamberth said. “I will tell you life in prison for these evil people is simply too good. They should not be able to live out their days with the rest of us, including their victim — paying for their food, and housing, and care, and medical as they age and everything else. If you rape a child, you should die.”

The bill moved quickly through the House committee system. It is now placed behind the budget for consideration by the full House. The Senate bill was only introduced in mid-January and awaits a review by the Senate Judiciary Committee, its first hearing by lawmakers in that house. Its sponsor there is Sen. Jack Johnson (R-Franklin), Senate Majority Leader.  

So far, the only votes cast against the bill are from Democratic House members Rep. Ronnie Glynn (D-Clarksville), Rep. G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis), Rep. Joe Towns Jr. (D-Memphis), and Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville). 

Johnson said the penalty of child rape in Tennessee is life in prison, a sentence that must be served fully. She argued this already holds the guilty accountable. She worried a death penalty sentence would have a “chilling effect” on victims reporting the crime. 

“If a child was raped by an uncle, say,” Johnson said. “The uncle’s going to say, ‘Don’t tell because I’ll be killed, I’ll get the death penalty.’ Then, the mother of the child, who is the sister of the [alleged perpetrator], maybe won’t want to testify against her brother, if it means the death penalty. 

“If the victims fear, it will create a chilling effect on reporting.”

 Johnson also argued the move could further “re-victimize the victim.” 

“Not only is [the child in the scenario] a victim, she will be victimized every day by the state that’s going to require her to carry that pregnancy [to term]. Then, they’re going to require her to show up for appeal after appeal.”

“It’s a heinous crime and I hate to think about it, but life in prison also takes care of the situation.”

Lamberth read an email from a young, female victim, asking committee members to support the legislation. It spoke the high hurdles for criminal charges and soft sentences for defendants accused of child rape. It described their sexual desires like “they were at an all-you-could-eat buffet with the appetite of a bear coming out of hibernation and only having access to a single plate.”

“The ones that actually get convicted should face real consequences,” the letter read. “Perhaps if that happened, there would be less people in our community forever changed.”

If the legislation passes, Lamberth vowed to fight for its implementation in court. A 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said the death penalty is not proportional punishment for the crime of child rape. Lamberth countered this, however, noting that the court’s ruling came because “not enough states had this type of penalty on the books.”     

“We’re seen other decisions by the Supreme Court overturned,” Lamberth said. “I believe this particular makeup of the court, it leans more towards state’s rights.”

Death penalty executions remain on hold in Tennessee, after a scathing report in December 2022 found numerous problems with the state’s execution protocols. 

Two death penalty bills failed in the legislature last year. One would have added firing squads to the state’s options for executions. Another would have brought more transparency to the execution process. 

One death penalty bill passed last year. It gave the Attorney General control over post-conviction proceedings in capital cases, rather than the local District Attorneys. That bill was ruled unconstitutional in July by Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Paula Skahan. 

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Bill to Possibly Ban Hemp-Derived THC Products Advances in House, Senate

Photo by Elsa Olofsson on Unsplash. Olofsson manages the CBD Oracle blog at cbdoracle.com.

State lawmakers and cannabis industry representatives began working out details of a bill that would regulate products here made with hemp-derived THC.

As it is written now, the bill would would ban the sale or possession of products that contain Delta 8, HHC, THC-O, and any others that have a THC concentration of more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis, which is already the federal legal limit for such products. 

The bill is sponsored by state Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland) and Senator Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville). Both bills moved ahead Wednesday in the legislative process with positive votes from a House Criminal Justice subcommittee and the Senate Finance, Ways, and Means Committee.   

A recent fiscal review of the proposal says retailers would stop selling the products, costing state and local tax coffers $4.8 million in the next fiscal year and $1.9 million in the years following. The Tennessee Department of Corrections projected that felony incarcerations would rise by one each year if the bill was passed, adding $2,900 in state costs per year.

In Wednesday’s hearing, Rep. Lamberth said there are no regulations on these products, including the Delta 8 gummies that are widely available, and there are no packaging requirements on these products. He said 115 people overdosed on these products, specifically Delta 8 products, last year because they contain “extraordinarily” high levels of THC, and 30 percent of those people were under the age of five.   

The state and federal laws already set THC levels at 0.3 percent in these products. But products with higher concentrations are “being sold all over Tennessee. So, we must not have made it clear enough when we passed this before.” For all of this and more, Lamberth said he wants to clear up confusion on the issue for business owners and consumers. 

There needs to be a specific, consistent expectation for customers of this product.

Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland)

”This needs to be a clear cut line,” Lamberth said. “There needs to be a specific, consistent expectation for customers of this product. I have heard from folks that said, ‘Well, look, I was buying this product from this retailer and it had this effect. Then, I switched to this one over here and it had a drastically different effect.’

“Again, there’s no standards here. This needs to be clear cut as to what is and is not legal and what exactly is on the shelves.”

Tennessee cannabis company owners testified before the committee Wednesday, with many arguing that the issue needs a scalpel while Lamberth’s bill was a blunt instrument. If the bill were to be passed as it is now, it would constitute a ban on these products, and cost many their livelihoods. 

Debate on the issue was calm and level-headed Wednesday. Lamberth said before the vote that while the bill was likely to pass out of Wednesday’s subcommittee, it will be up for debate and for testimony in other committees, and, perhaps, a final debate on the House floor. He invited all of the leaders from the cannabis companies to his office to speak about the bill as it progresses.   

“Quite frankly, there’s not as much daylight between where I am and where you guys are,” Lamberth said, speaking to the company representatives. “It’s just a matter of figuring that out.” 

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Threat of Reduction in State Funds Averted for Memphis and Shelby County

UPDATE: Reportedly, the House-Senate conference committee has agreed on new amounts for Memphis and Shelby County, as well as for Davidson County (Nashville). Memphis and Nashville are to receive $10 million apiece as a result of negotiations by the conference committee, which included three participants from Davidson County but none from Shelby County.

Locally, this solution represents a partial restoration of the $14.3 million originally allowed to Memphis by the state Senate but reduced to $5 million in the proposed House version of the budget. Shelby County’s amount reverted to the Senate’s original budget version of $7.7 million, a figure which had also been reduced to $5 million in the proposed House budget.

The funding is part of a $200-million package which was authorized by the legislature for statewide distribution in March as a response to the economic emergencies caused via the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the money was restricted for specific infrastructure or COVID-related purposes, but the restrictions were lifted by the Senate last Thursday and by the House on Wednesday of this week, but the two chambers disagreed on the amounts to be allotted to the state’s two largest urban areas.

Accordingly, the money, whose sums the two legislative chambers now agree on, is available for the general funds of both Memphis and Shelby County.

Rep. Mark White

PREVIOUSLY REPORTED: What the Senate giveth, the House taketh away. The newly freed state financial resources that the Tennessee Senate voted last week to make available to Memphis and Shelby County have been truncated significantly by the House, and only the work of a joint-chamber conference committee can fully restore them. The issue is that of so far unreconciled differences in the budgets approved by each chamber.

On Thursday of last week, state Senate majority leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) announced that the Senate’s version of the fiscal 2020-21 budget would allow the lifting of restrictions from a $200 million infrastructure grant program approved in March. In practical terms, what this meant was that the City of Memphis was enabled by the Senate action to re-allocate some $14.3 million in previously restricted infrastructure-grant funds for any purpose it chose; Shelby County’s share of the newly freed-up funds was $7.7 million.

The problem is that the House version of the state budget, passed on Wednesday, allows the lifting of restrictions on how that previous statewide funding is spent by local governments but caps the amount allowed for the cities of Memphis and Nashville and for Shelby County to a maximum of $5 million each. That’s a cut of $9.3 million for Memphis, and one of $2.2 million for Shelby County. The theory of the reductions on the amounts for the state’s two largest urban centers, as presented by House majority leader William Lamberth (R-Portland), is based on the state’s need for fiscal austerity and the fact that Memphis, Nashville, and Shelby County, uniquely, had all been beneficiaries of the federal CARES Act, covering some of the same potential purposes, including COVID-19 needs, as were intended for the state infrastructure-grant money in March.

This has not gone down well with Shelby County’s legislative delegation in Nashville, nor with the two local governments here. “This does not seem so good a deal for Memphis and Shelby County,” observed state Rep. G.A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) in debate. The state, he said, would be doing a “back-out” and “end-around” of moneys the city and county governments had been led to expect. State Rep. Bob Freeman (D-Nashville) voiced similar sentiments on behalf of the state’s capital city.

Lamberth expressed confidence that Memphis and Nashville were able to “bounce back faster” from current financial predicaments than more rural areas, whose allotments were not cut — the idea seeming to be that the two big-city areas could better shoulder the pain of austerity.

A spokesman for Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland released the following statement: “We had included the original proposed state funding into our FY21 budget. We are hopeful that amount will remain intact as it goes through the conference process.”

In the case of Shelby County, the $7.7 million figure provided for it in the Senate’s version of the budget has already been spoken for in the Shelby County Commission’s ongoing efforts to achieve a budget for fiscal 2020-21. The Commission voted on Monday to incorporate the whole amount into the county’s fund balance or reserve fund, there to be drawn upon to meet such needs as rehabilitation of The Med (Regional One) and funding for construction of the new Juvenile Justice Center.

Before receiving news of the House’s intended reductions of the county’s grant amount, Commissioner Van Turner and County Mayor Lee Harris had been reaching toward agreement on how to split the figure of $7.7 million between the two needs. Should the reduced House figure survive the forthcoming conference committee between the two chambers in Nashville, the county’s budget calculations will be even further complicated than they already are. State Rep. Mark White (R-Memphis) was more sanguine about the consequences if the House’s budget figure should stand. “We’ll always take care of Memphis,” he said. “We’re now getting $5 million that wasn’t on the table to begin with. So we’re $5 million ahead.”

White said he thought the federal government would end up taking the strings off the COVID-related funds it had previously allocated to Memphis and Shelby County, and that it was important meanwhile to take care of the distressed counties of rural Tennessee.

White’s Democratic opponent for his District 83 seat, Jerri Green, responded to White’s support of the House version by saying, “Budgets reflect our values. And the values of anyone who voted for this budget do not lie with this community. If I was asked to voted for it, my answer would be ‘Hell no.'”

UPDATE: In the aftermath of the conference. committee report [see above], White, a member of that ad hoc committee, sent out a press release claiming to have influenced the final outcome and quoting GOP House Speaker Cameron Sexton as saying, “Chairman White was instrumental in the negotiation process between the House and Senate in efforts to obtain this critical funding for Memphis.”