Tag: urban

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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.

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News

Herenton on State of the City

As promised, Mayor Willie Herenton reopened his civic hymnal on Wednesday to the verse marked “consolidation” and suggested that this time others might join him.

“I favor metropolitan consolidation inclusive of schools,” said Herenton, making his annual “state of the city” address to the Kiwanis Club meeting at The Peabody.

The venue was fairly small and so was the crowd, probably under 200 people. They gave the fifth-term mayor a couple of warm standing ovations. Whether that indicated the spirit of the season or support for consolidation remains to be seen.

Herenton said he sees promise in the new membership of the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission along with Gov. Phil Bredesen and county mayor A C Wharton.

“Thank God for the new county commission,” he said. “We’ve got some people over there with some new energy and some courage.” He did not name names.

He said he will ask state legislators to, in effect, change the rules on consolidation so that approval from both city and county voters in separate elections is not a prerequisite. Several years before Herenton became mayor in 1991, consolidation votes passed in the city but failed in the county, where signs that say “county schools” and “no city taxes” are still a staple of new subdivisions just outside the borders of Memphis.

As he has on many occasions, Herenton said consolidated government would be more efficient and cost taxpayers less money.

“It pains me to see the waste in schools,” said the former superintendent.

It apparently pains Bredesen too. The governor has shown impatience with Memphis “reform” programs and indicated that a state takeover is possible if Memphis doesn’t do better. Herenton mentioned changing the governing structure of the school system but did not specifically call for abolishing the school board or appointing a new one, as he has on other occasions.

Meeting with reporters after his speech, Herenton said consolidation can only happen with support from key business leaders and other politicians. He said the “economics of government will become so tight” that such supporters will eventually come around.

The sticking points are that Memphis has a higher tax rate than suburbs and unincorporated areas in Shelby County and the Shelby County schools, with more affluent students and fewer poor students, outperform city schools on standardized tests. But Memphis accounts for about 70 percent of the population of Shelby County. By Herenton’s lights, a suburban minority is dictating the rules of the game to the urban majority.

On other subjects, Herenton said Memphis is “financially strong” with a reserve fund of more than $60 million. Memphis, he said, is “on the national radar screen” because of FedEx Forum, AutoZone Park, and other attractions. And he said crime “trend lines” are going “in the right direction” but 500 more police officers are still needed. He will announce new anti-blight measures next week.

Responding to a question from the audience about the lack of a “wow” factor on the riverfront, Herenton said he is open to the possibility of razing The Pyramid if a deal with Bass Pro falls through.

“We could get the wow,” he said. “I still want the wow.”

Herenton seemed to be in a good mood, and there were no real zingers for the press or anyone else with the exception of, “For those of you who want to sit on the sidelines and be critical, we’re not going to be mad at you, we’re just going to pray for you.”

Reaction to the consolidation proposal among Kiwanis members was guarded. Businessman Sam Cantor said he is unconditionally for it but does not expect it to happen in the next four years.

Businessman Calvin Anderson is also for it and says it “can happen” if Herenton can take himself out of the equation, recruit allies, and present a reasonably united Shelby County legislative delegation in Nashville. Greg Duckett, former city chief administrative officer under Dick Hackett, said consolidation needs to happen but he stopped short of saying it will.

“Significant strides to making it happen can occur in the next four years,” he said.

Jim Strickland, sworn in Tuesday as a new member of the City Council, said he supports full consolidation but is willing to compromise on schools if necessary.

He said he is “not sure” if Herenton can muster enough support among suburban mayors and state lawmakers to make any headway.

Consolidation by charter surrender does not appear to be an option, which doesn’t mean it won’t keep coming up for discussion. In 2002, the state attorney general’s office issued an opinion that said “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.”

Herenton, who was reelected with just 42 percent of the vote, made his speech against a backdrop of glum economic news, locally and nationally. Oil hit the $100-a-barrel mark, the stock of local economic bastions FedEx and First Horizon and others plunged with the Dow Jones Average, the Memphis Grizzlies and Memphis Redbirds are struggling at the gate, and foreclosures are expected to soar this year.

“In order to do all these things our economy must remain strong,” the mayor said.

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.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Reality vs. Stereotype

The line at the cash register in the Macy’s men’s department was four-people deep. I was number four, standing there with my soon-to-be-purchased (I hoped) pants hanging over my arm. But “soon” didn’t look to be in the cards.

The guy at the head of the line had a big stack of stuff — two pairs of jeans, a Calvin Klein shirt, a couple pairs of socks, and a belt. He was a smallish black guy, maybe a teenager, maybe a little older. He was dressed in baggy, low-rider pants, an oversize T-shirt, shiny white tennis shoes, and a new baseball cap with a stiff brim turned sideways on his head.

In short, he looked like the classic urban hip-hop stereotype. He and the sales clerk were engaged in a rather involved conversation. As they continued to chat, those of us in line began to get restless. The guy in front of me let out a sigh — a very audible “this-is-so-Memphis” sigh.

Then a funny thing happened. The guy in front of him joined in the conversation at the checkout.

I heard him ask the kid, “So, when are you going back?”

“In a month,” he said. “I’m getting this stuff because I’m tired of wearing that uniform all the time.” He smiled as he said it. A big warm smile.

Turns out that the “kid” was in the U.S. Army. He was going back to Iraq for his second tour of duty in December. Suddenly, those of us in line weren’t in a hurry anymore. Everyone started talking to the kid, asking him how it was going over there, how was morale, etc.

“Pretty good,” he said. “I won’t say I’m looking forward to going back. But you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s the Army, man.”

The clerk finished ringing up the young man’s items and put them in a sack. As she handed them to him, she said, “God bless you, child. You be careful.”

The rest of us in line shook his hand and said thank you and be careful and thank you again. He smiled from underneath his tilted ball cap, thanked us, and walked away.

Reality, one. Stereotype, zero.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Eavesdropping Case

Shelby County has figured more than once in judicial decisions of momentous national importance. Arguably, the most influential Supreme Court decision of the last century was Baker v. Carr (1962), which struck down legislative gerrymandering of the crude rural-vs.-urban kind.

The lead plaintiff in Baker v. Carr was the late Charles Baker, longtime chairman of the Shelby County Court, who sued to force state government (Joe Carr was the Tennessee secretary of state) to give equal representation to urban counties in the apportionment of the state’s legislative districts. The fallout from Baker v. Carr has affected all reaches of American government — local, state, and federal.

What Baker sought was simple justice, and his manner of radical revisionism was to insist on fidelity to immutable constitutional principles of fairness. He was a “strict constructionist,” we are tempted to say.

That point is relevant to the outcome of a ruling issued last Friday by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals concerning the legality of the domestic warrantless-search procedures of President George W. Bush. The administration had appealed a 2006 decision by federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit in favor of plaintiffs, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which had challenged the administration’s ongoing program of arbitrary domestic eavesdropping.

Of the three appeals judges who heard the case, two — Julia Gibbons, a Bush appointee, and Ron Gilman, a Clinton appointee — hailed from Memphis. Gibbons and a fellow judge, appointed by the senior President Bush, constituted a majority of two. They reversed Judge Taylor’s prior ruling, on the grounds that the plaintiffs in the case lacked proper standing.

In essence, what the appeals court majority held was that unless the plaintiffs could demonstrate that they had themselves been subject to the kind of surveillance under challenge, they could not sue to challenge it. The bottom line was that the administration, which has claimed the inherent authority for such eavesdropping under the Military Authorization Act that followed the 9/11 attacks, was free to continue.

We believe, along with Judge Gilman, that the perfectly legitimate principle of “standing” was misapplied or applied over-literally in the eavesdropping case.

In finding, as had Judge Taylor, that the eavesdropping procedures were explicitly prohibited by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Gilman went on to note that summary judgment had been asked by both sides to the dispute, “[b]ut the government did not contest the plaintiffs’ statement of undisputed facts or provide its own statement of undisputed facts. … If the adverse party does not so respond, summary judgment, if appropriate, shall be entered against the adverse party.”

In short, even on the technical issue, the previous ruling should have been upheld. We await the inevitable Supreme Court ruling on this case, which we expect to be as momentous for this century as Baker v. Carr was for the previous one.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

It’s a Rap

“Back in the days our parents used to take care of us/Look at ’em now/They even f*****’ scared of us.” — Notorious B.I.G., “Things Done Changed”

Let it never be forgotten that, in the beginning, hip-hop documented the disintegration of the community that created it. It did not cause this disintegration.

The messy dissolution of the civil rights movement. The crack epidemic. Government disinvestment. White flight. These are the things that ravaged urban communities across the country. In the beginning, so-called gangsta rap merely reported from the rubble.

But, over the past decade or so, it’s become impossible for even thoughtful fans of the music not to acknowledge how this relationship between culture and community has evolved. In recent years, too much hip-hop has at best exploited and at its too-frequent worst exacerbated the problems it once merely detailed.

Now topics such as gun violence, drug dealing, and the degradation of women have become rote accoutrements for many emerging rappers, akin to ripped jeans and frizzy hair for ’80s metal bands, albeit with a real-world downside for artists, listeners, and innocent bystanders alike.

As Memphis celebrates the 50th anniversary of Stax, it’s unbearably easy to see the juxtaposition between a music that served its community and one that largely preys on it. Things done changed.

“You scream obscenity/But it’s publicity that you want.” — Geto Boys, “We Can’t Be Stopped”

This is an important topic, but the reason it’s on the minds of Memphians is a little Don Imus and a lot Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas, who raised a familiar stink last month about local rappers Three 6 Mafia performing at the Beale Street Music Fest. This felt like a publicity ploy for the CA, one made worse by the ridiculous sidebar — a call to action against Memphis In May — that accompanied Thomas’ April 22nd column.

If the paper itself, as opposed to Thomas as a columnist, wants to confront this topic, perhaps it could start by grappling with the cultural content of the music in its arts coverage, something the paper’s music writers have long shied away from.

I find myself feeling very protective of hip-hop these days, but less in opposition to detractors such as Thomas — whose outrage I sympathize with but who, for my tastes, is too uninterested in aesthetics and too willing to conflate “lewd” with truly brutal — than to white defenders of the music whose arguments fit too neatly with what I suppose our president would call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” These defenses range from naive comparisons of the most heinous rap lyrics to old-time rock-and-roll transgressions to condescending dismissals that are usually a variation on “What do you expect? It’s rap music.”

“I started thinking, how many souls hip-hop has affected/How many dead folks this art resurrected/How many nations this culture connected.” — Common, “The 6th Sense”

The notion that art merely reflects reality is a liberal truism. But it isn’t always true. I think the culture that people consume — especially young people — has a significant impact on their attitudes and behaviors. It’s an active, not just reactive, force. It matters. It’s important.

I love hip-hop: At its peak, it was every bit the rival of the Harlem Renaissance or the soul explosion of the ’60s as a cultural movement, and even now the cartoon idea of hip-hop that most non-fans (and too many alleged fans) carry around with them vastly understates the diversity and richness of the genre. But hip-hop has taken a damaging turn over the past decade, one whose negative impact on real lives is so momentous that it demands to be addressed.

So I’m glad this conversation is taking place regardless of how it got started. I just wish the debate would expand beyond the finger-wagging opponents, targeted artists, and profiteering apologists who dominate the discussion. The people who most need to engage in this dialogue are hip-hop fans themselves.

The largest audience for rap music now, according to most studies, is white — people who generally do not have their reality reflected by the music, if the music reflects any kind of reality at all. These listeners would be wise to investigate their own attraction to the music; their own investment in a cultural model — the black man as badass outlaw hero — that robs the subject of his humanity and feeds the submerged, in many cases unrecognized, battery of racial biases that white listeners bring to the music.

There’s a parasitic relationship here that listeners need to think — and talk — more about. That’s a start.

Chris Herrington is the Flyer‘s film and music editor.