Tag: suburban

Categories
Opinion

In Shelby County Isolation Trumps Consolidation

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

To call consolidation a tough sale is an understatement.

Crime and fear of crime, bad schools, higher taxes, lost jobs and fear of lost jobs, old grudges, apathy, suburban (or urban) opposition, political cowardice, the “King Willie” factor, questionable “efficiencies” — any one of those could sink it.

There’s another problem that is not so obvious. In his state of the city speech, Mayor Willie Herenton urged residents of Memphis and Shelby County — black and white, rich and poor, urban and suburban — to pull together for their common good. But the prevailing spirit for at least the last 25 years in Memphis has been anything but “all for one and one for all.”

It has been just the opposite. It is the spirit of isolation, not consolidation. Consider:

Me and mine first, as evidenced by all the elected and appointed officials who, legally and illegally, gamed the system and padded their paychecks.

Self-segregation in schools, churches, and even sporting events and entertainment has replaced legal segregation.

Gated communities from South Memphis to South Bluffs to Southwind.

“Special” taxing districts or TIFs that get dedicated tax streams that would otherwise go into the general fund.

“Special” tourism development zones or TDZs around FedExForum, Graceland, the convention center, and Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium that, when implemented, further erode the general tax fund unless they attract new money.

“Special” incentives in the form of tax freezes given to businesses that promise investment and new jobs, whether they actually deliver them or not. These also erode the tax base. No other city in Tennessee grants nearly as many of these as Memphis does.

“Special” boards and commissions like the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) and Center City Commission (CCC) that are narrowly focused to develop and oversee choice pieces of downtown Memphis.

“Special” building authorities for big projects like FedExForum.

Selective annexation of Cordova, Countrywood, and Hickory Hill which didn’t mobilize opposition quickly or effectively enough, while savvier, wealthier, and more politically powerful areas like Southwind and Southeast Shelby County got a reprieve.

As a reporter covering government, this is the biggest change I have seen in Memphis since I moved here in 1982. Not only are city and county government often not in synch, the elected officials in both governments have willingly given away much of their authority in the name of expedience and efficiency.

The pay has gone up 300 to 500 percent but the job description has shrunk. The City Council and County Commission, which theoretically represent all city and county residents, are often not where the action is any more, or at least not to the extent they once were. To attempt to effectively cover “government” nowadays means to go to meetings or keep tabs on the Sports Authority, RDC, PBA, CCC, CVB, MLGW, Industrial Development Board, Agricenter, Airport Authority, and various nonprofits.

They’re all in their own, often isolated worlds, sometimes for better and sometimes worse. They come to the mayors or council members and commissioners when they need a fix, and if they can do it quietly and out of the public eye, so much the better.

Obviously, in a city of 675,000 people and a county of more than 850,000 people, there’s something to be said for specialization, and maybe a lot. If you want to run an airport, build a FedExForum on a schedule, or attract the big convention of square-dancers, you need focus and partners from the private sector.

But there’s a price for all of this specialization, and it’s not just the bruised egos and additional bureaucracies and lost taxes. It’s the loss of community and the idea that we’re all in this together. As citizens and elected officials in Memphis and Shelby County, we reap what we sow. And what we have sown are the seeds of separation and isolation, not consolidation.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Same Old Challenge

Don’t look now — on second thought, it’s time for year-end reflections and speculation, so go ahead and look — but the specter of city/county consolidation is back with us. We say “specter” not in any pejorative sense. If anything, the idea of combining some of our

wastefully duplicated governmental functions is more like Casper the Friendly Ghost than it is the Amityville Horror. It’s just that the concept keeps coming and going and getting buried or vaporized, only to rematerialize unexpectedly — a fact that makes us wonder if its latest incarnation is the same old phantasm or something more solid.

Maybe this time the idea will take on real substance. It’s not only that a freshly reelected Mayor Willie Herenton has once again promoted metro government to the head of his agenda. Another reality is that an intergovernmental task force, co-chaired by county commissioner Mike Carpenter and outgoing city councilman Jack Sammons, recently climaxed several months of hearings and investigations by approving, via an eight to five vote, the goal of merging the functions of the Memphis Police Department and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.

This limited or (in the argot of the day) “functional” form of consolidation won’t happen overnight, if at all. Sheriff Mark Luttrell, among other interested parties, is opposed. That’s more than understandable, given that the sheriff has, thanks to a legal ruling by a state court last year, seen the presumed constitutional nature of his position unexpectedly put up for grabs. And the suburban mayors, long jealous of their independence (and yet dependent for both financial and administrative reasons on some larger umbrella authority) are also reluctant. Contrariwise, Memphis police director Larry Godwin, like his boss the mayor, is avid for the idea. For that matter, the issue of reconfiguring a metro drug unit got some traction during last year’s city election campaign. So there is momentum.

Then there is the constant example of Nashville, regarded by residents of the Memphis area either as a sister city or as an archrival or as both. Whichever way it is seen, the city of Nashville has been formally yoked to the rest of Davidson County for decades now in a metropolitan form of government, and it may not be accidental that, during that same period, it has progressed from a backwater state capital roughly half the size of Memphis to a condition of parity and beyond. In terms of economic growth, new business, per capita income, commercial construction, and the like, Nashville is soaring ahead. That hasn’t happened solely as a consequence of consolidation, but it owes something to the simplicity of central planning, the cohesiveness of governmental structures, and the property-tax reductions.

When former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell addressed the Memphis Rotary Club earlier this year, he teasingly affected the persona of an urban rival and said, in effect, keep on doing what you’re doing in Memphis and Shelby County. Stay separate and spare Nashville the competition. Was he joking? Yes. Was he serious? Also yes.

The issue of consolidation will confront us again in 2008. And it will haunt us thereafter until we deal with it.

Categories
Opinion

Batteries Not Included

Consolidating Memphis and Shelby County is the government equivalent of changing your phone service, Internet service, credit cards, bank, checking account, brokerage firm, home mortgage, termite contract, doctor, car insurance, utilities, club memberships, billing address, will, and marital status.

And it gets really hard if you have children.

Now that Mayor Willie Herenton has been reelected to another four-year term, consolidation is back in the news.

“We need to consolidate,” Herenton told a Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce audience last week. “We’ve been singing that song, and we’re going to open that hymnbook again.”

In 1993, two years after he was first elected, Herenton floated the idea of consolidation by surrender of the city charter. The New York Times even did a story about it. The mayor appointed a committee to look into it. The committee included some familiar names. The chairman was Mike Cody, a Memphis attorney, former candidate for mayor, and former Tennessee state attorney general. Members included Herman Morris, who ran against Herenton in the 2007 mayoral election, John Ryder, who managed the Morris campaign, Charles Carpenter, who managed Herenton’s campaign, state senator Steve Cohen, who is now a member of Congress, Shelby County attorney Brian Kuhn, and others.

Their conclusion, in short: no way.

“You can say I’m in favor of it,” Cody said in a telephone call from Boston this week. “We tried to find some ways.”

There were 14 pages of analysis, to be exact.

The Tennessee General Assembly would have to pass an enabling law. If the law was amended to apply to the Memphis city charter, 10 percent of the residents of the city could petition for a referendum. The committee noted, however, that the state constitution apparently only envisions dissolving cities with a city manager and commission form of government.

“No dissolution method is provided by the General Assembly for cities organized as is Memphis,” the committee concluded.

As for legal and practical problems that might arise from charter surrender, the committee suggested a few: Suburban cities such as Bartlett, Collierville, and Germantown might use annexation to cherry-pick prime neighborhoods and pick up residents and/or retail. Or residents of a defined area in the suddenly unincorporated Memphis could hire a smart lawyer, incorporate, and invent a new city.

“Any contracts of the city of Memphis would survive a surrender of the charter and could be enforced,” the report said. Joint boards and commissions “would require some degree of restructuring.” Consolidation “would be further complicated for those authorities with holdings in their own names.” The city board of education would be abolished unless provisions were made to create a special taxing district. Both MATA and MLGW “would cease to exist.”

The committee fell back on the old, safe standby of “functional consolidation” of certain departments, which has been dusted off several times since then.

In 2002, Cohen requested an opinion on charter surrender from the state attorney general. The answer was no way once again.

“The General Assembly may not revoke the charter, the Memphis City Council is not authorized to surrender the city charter, and no statute authorizes the Memphis city charter to be revoked by a referendum election of the voters,” the opinion said.

Case closed? Not quite. Lawmakers can do almost anything if they put their minds to it, witness those lottery tickets on sale at your neighborhood convenience store. But the lottery had popular support, and other states had shown the way.

The city most often mentioned as a model for consolidation is Louisville, which has some similarities to Memphis: river city, big college-basketball town, long-serving mayor, air-cargo hub. The big difference is that Louisville was 65 percent white before consolidation and more than 80 percent white after consolidation, which took effect in 2003 after voter approval in 2000.

You don’t need 750 words to figure out that one.