Anti-Memphis suburban politicians –the political equivalent of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight – have done it again.

They regularly manage to yank defeat from the jaws of victory.  Driven by narrow partisan agenda and conversations in the Nashville echo chamber, they lose all perspective of the consequences of their actions and they forfeit the objectivity necessary for them to consider a scenario that isn’t about their own meretricious grandiosity.

Webster: Grandiosity, as in psychiatry – having an exaggerated belief in one’s importance, sometimes reaching delusional proportions, and occurring as a common symptom of mental illnesses, as manic disorder.

Where’s Dr. Phil when we need him?  He could pioneer a new branch of his profession – political psychology and intervention.

Anti, Anti, Anti-

Once again, the anti-Memphis gang has tried to change the rules in the middle of the game – this time about annexation agreements – and once again, the results of their interference invoke the law of unintended consequences.

Intent on responding to the squeaky wheels that have always characterized the Eastern Shelby County community of Fisherville, the Norris-Todd gang tried to upend the 1998 binding, legal agreements between Memphis and every other government in Shelby County that identified the reserve area for each.

At any rate, the gang was shooting at Memphis, but they’ve ended up hitting the people of Eastern Shelby County, because the legislative meddling pushed the fast forward button  for Memphis City Council to begin the process to annex an area that might never have otherwise been taken into City of Memphis.

Because the Nashville gang only talks to each other, they tend to assume that everyone must agree with them and that they are cleverly pulling one over on Memphians.  So, the people of Fisherville can thank Norris-Todd for putting them at risk for annexation.

Decisions to Make

If Norris-Todd had, God forbid, deigned to talk to city officials, they would have known that there have been serious conversations in City Hall about the wisdom of Memphis’ annexation policies and even if city government should de-annex some of its area.

The problem for the city is that as usual, it doesn’t have the data or analysis to clearly weigh its options.  Memphians have been subsidizing the decline of their own city for decades.  There are serious questions to be answered on the wisdom of more annexations and on shrinking the city’s size as some other struggling mid-sized, mid-U.S. cities are doing.   The best way to do this would be methodical and thorough, but faced with a state bill that removes an option from Memphis before it can even evaluate these issues, city government had little choice but to fight back.

That said, City of Memphis needs to consider all of its options, and they extend beyond annexation.  There’s little doubt that city government should not have build the interceptor sewer to Gray’s Creek.  It was another gift to big contributor developers.  When the city showed some reluctance to the sewer, county government swung into action with a resolve that would lead someone to think that the future of the region hung in the balance.

Truth be told, it was the white votes that allegedly hung in the balance, and this was the underlying, unspoken political dynamic for most of county government’s sprawl-inducing plans.  It was thought that these suburban expenditures would keep Republican voters in Shelby County and give Republican politicians their only hopes of remaining viable candidates for countywide elections in the future.

Other Hammers

As for the final balanced growth agreement signed between City of Memphis and Shelby County in return for extension of the sewer, we believe that county government did not live up to the full terms of the agreement, which included, for example, funding for city programs like commercial demolition of eyesore properties.  City of Memphis should review the history of this agreement and the payback requirements for the sewer interceptor.

In addition, Memphis has extraterritorial jurisdiction outside its boundaries, so it has a major say in zoning and development in this area.  In the era of developer dominance in local government, developers were always able to get approval by the city administration and City Council for their strip centers and sprawl-causing developments.  It does not have to be so and there may be threats that the city can make to bring more reasonable minds to bear on the annexation issue.

Whether it ever intends to annex Fisherville, the annexation reserve area agreements should remain in place.  They brought stability to and eliminated conflict about the annexation issues, and as we wrote earlier this week, during the negotiations about the annexation reserve agreements, Memphis gave back 150 square miles of county land that had previously been in its annexation path as a show of good faith with the other cities.  In return, it now gets the legislative back of the hand as the Norris-Todd gang once again snip the threads of trust.

Tangled Logic

Meanwhile, Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner continues to add two plus two and get seven (so much for that county school education).  In his mangled logic, the vote to merge the school systems and treat all Shelby County children equally are part of a giant conspiracy that included a vote on city-county government consolidation two years ago.

It would be laughable except for the fact that he really believes it.  In his world, the consolidation debate emphasized that the schools would not be merged as part of city-county government merger.  Somehow, in his tangled webs of illogic, merging the school districts and the government consolidation vote were part and parcel of the grand Memphis conspiracy.

Except for one inconvenient fact: Government consolidation would have kept the school districts separate.  Only if Shelby County Schools agreed to merge with Memphis City Schools would it have happened.  In other words, in their zeal to build a wall around their towns, the towns gave up their best chance of “protecting” their schools.

It’s all poetic justice at one level, but on a more reasonable plane, it’s just plain sad.  As they enjoy their ever-present victimhood, they seem oblivious to the reason they now find themselves as part of a new, countywide school district.  In last year’s referendum on consolidating city and county governments, they vehemently denounced the pro-consolidation mantra: “Doing Nothing Is Not An Option.”

It Was Your Choice

Well, they chose “doing nothing” and because of it, they now have the unified school district.  In taking a shot at Memphis with the government consolidation vote, they in fact wounded themselves, and their best case to maintain their own walled-off school district. Instead, they stand on the verge of ushering in an era of double taxation for public education and climbing tax rates as the realities of funding the new districts become clear.  (The present tax projections for a school district are a classic case of low-balling the numbers to encourage approval at the polls.)

They did get what they wanted.  They killed off the new city-county charter.  At the same time, however, they breathed life into the movement to instead force the consolidation of the two school districts.

Meanwhile, all of this school and annexation rhetoric has cranked up the normal screeds against Memphis.  As usual, the first victims are the facts.   Unified school board member Vanecia Kimbrow put it best: “We are being driven as a community based on our fears and misinformation…Those fears, at this point in time, are unfounded, and I think as rational adults, we have the sensibilities to wait for the facts and not be pawns on anyone’s political agenda.”

If only.

For too many people in the towns, all the ills of our community come to rest at the feet of Memphis.  All the problems are caused by Memphians.  All conflict is created by Memphis politicians.

Here are some of the myths about Memphis:

Memphis’ tax rate is soaring.

It’s the same that it was in 1993, and that’s despite increased public safety budgets.  The truth is that it’s Shelby County Government’s tax rate that’s climbing, driven over the years by the cost of sprawl outside Memphis.  In fact, Shelby County Government would not have more than $1.5 billion in debt except for the cost of infrastructure and schools in the suburbs.  Because sanctimony knows no bounds, those were the days when Mark Norris, then Shelby County Commissioner, voted against tax increases although it was his district that was causing them.

City of Memphis is too wasteful and corrupt.

City government delivers its services on a per capita basis cheaper than Shelby County, Collierville, Millington, and Germantown governments.  And it’s done it despite increasing its land area and reducing its densities.  More to the point, if the last two years of the Wharton Administration have shown anything, it is that he is intent on rooting out waste wherever he finds it.

Memphis is dangerous and crime-ridden.

Memphis has seen dramatic decreases in crime and even if the memos written in the Memphis Police Department were converted into reports, it still would have done so.  But here’s the truth: all of us know which parts of Memphis are risky and if we don’t go there, our risks as a victim of violence are minimal.  The high crime areas unsurprisingly coincide with maps of Memphis poverty, and if suburbanites want to attack crime, they should roll up their sleeves to remove families from neighborhoods where kids are taught where to hide when gunfire breaks out.

Memphis teachers are no good.

The top schools in Memphis City Schools are a match for the top schools in Shelby County Schools, but here’s the big difference: city school teachers are teaching moving targets. Each year, roughly 15 percent of city students move, disrupting learning and creating toxic stress that has a negative impact on brain development.  The majority of Memphis students are dealing with a web of issues that teachers are addressing every day while county schools prove conclusively that socio-economic status is the greatest impact on student achievement.

Memphis City Schools has gotten a windfall for years.

There is widespread belief that the ADA (Average Daily Attendance) laws in Tennessee have produced a windfall for Memphis City Schools every time a new school was built for Shelby County Schools.  It is true that all school spending must be proportioned in accordance with the number of students in each district, but over the decades, city schools never got any capital funding from county government unless the county district needed construction money.  It was the tail wagging the dog, but it created the conventional wisdom that Memphis City Schools had no needs and was just squandering money flowing from a slot machine; however, the capital needs for city schools (eight schools are more than 100 years old and 30 are more than 80 years old) is $488 million.

Memphians are poor and uneducated.

The number of people living in poverty in Memphis has been about the same since 1980 (which does not diminish the need to address the city’s most malignant problem), but for every person living under the poverty line, there are three who are not.  In terms of educational attainment, Memphis’s numbers are better than the MSA’s.  As for the poverty rate, it’s the level outside Memphis that forces the Memphis MSA into the top five.  Memphis on its own is not in the top 10 for highest poverty rate.

Memphis doesn’t really matter.

Memphis remains the economic and job center for the entire region, and with more than 75% of the people in the suburban towns commuting to jobs outside their borders, the health of Memphis should be uppermost in their minds, because so goes Memphis, so goes their paychecks.

Memphis is the next Detroit.

We have no patience with this oft-made derogatory – not to mention racially-charged – comment.  Memphis’ percentage of people with college degrees is two times Detroit,Memphis has 40% more in the labor force, the poverty rate in Memphis is 30% lower and household income is about 25% higher, the number of vacant housing in Memphis is about half of Detroit’s  (although Memphis is almost three times larger in land area), Detroit’s city budget is three times bigger than Memphis’, and its debt is 20 times bigger than Memphis.

Memphis is a backwater city.

We are home to FedEx, one of the top 10 most respected companies in the world and global commerce was invented by it.  In Sir Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, he cites 16 cities that shaped the world.  Memphis is on the list, along with Athens, Vienna, Tokyo, Paris, Florence, Berlin, Rome, New York, London, San Francisco, and Stockholm.   It’s easier to say we have backwater suburbs than to say we are a backwater city.  Hall writes: a remarkable event in human history took place: cultural creativity and technological innovation were massively fused…The       special reputation of the place, free and wide open, helped it all to happen…the music of an underclass could literally become the music of the world…This was a revolution in attitudes and behavior, as profound as anything that has happened in the last 200 years.”

It’s time to set aside the myths, but the current climate calls on mainstream Republicans to stand up and say enough is enough.  Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has shown before that he may be the grown-up in his party to do it, the person to say that the current hostility level is unacceptable and the constant drumbeat of anti-Memphis venom is in the end unhealthy for all of us.  We hope he’s up to the task.

Apparently, there is no hunger more intense than being power hungry.

It’s proven on a daily basis by Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris and his sycophant, Tennessee Representative Curry Todd.

Hardly a day goes by that an action of the Norris-Todd cabal doesn’t leave us wondering if they ever bother to tend to state government business.  Clearly, they prefer to meddle in the affairs of local government, to mandate their biases as local policy, and to make sure there is no level playing field when it comes to local intergovernmental decisions.

They play regular role as the playground bullies, asserting their dominance over any issue that deepens their power base and strokes their unquenchable political egos.  As we’ve said before, at least Mr. Todd has an excuse: we think he had too many basketball balls hit his head during his stellar career as a local hardwood legend.

Quest for Power

But Mr. Norris doesn’t have an excuse.  He’s intelligent and gifted, but he’s turned into our very own Newt Gingrich, captured by his own grandiosity and undone by his own egotistical belief that he’s always the cleverest boy in the room.  It’s been sad to watch Mr. Norris’ fall as a relatively effective member of legislative bodies to a shill for narrow partisan leanings that undermine the qualities that made Tennessee great in the first place: generosity, pioneer spirit of camaraderie, compassion, and a sense of a shared and better future.

Along the way, he sacrificed his principles on the altar of his own quest for power, and as a result, today, there is no local decision that he isn’t willing to interfere in and there is no pandering so demeaning that he’s unwilling to do it.

The latest example is the Norris-Todd bill which suggests that their political interests trump legal annexation reserve agreements negotiated by the county mayor and every mayor of every city in Shelby County and ratified by every city government and by county government.  The Norris-Todd duo introduced a bill in Nashville to remove a large area of Memphis’ annexation reserve area in east Shelby County.

It’s an unprecedented interference by the Tennessee Legislature into the agreements reached in 1998 in the aftermath of the “tiny towns” controversy following the passage by the Legislature of Chapter 1101 mandating the establishment of growth boundaries in Tennessee counties.  State law said: “In any county with a charter form of government, the annexation reserve agreements in effect on January 1, 1998, are deemed to satisfy the requirement of a growth plan. The county shall file a plan based on such agreements with the committee.”  In that way, the annexation reserve agreements that existed at that time in Shelby County became the starting point for additional negotiations to satisfy Chapter 1101.

Good Faith

The ultimate annexation reserve agreements resulted from a process that involved the Shelby County Mayor, the mayors of every city in Shelby County, and representatives from the largest utility, the largest school district, the largest Chamber of Commerce, the soil conservation district, two people appointed by the county mayor, and two people appointed by the mayor of the largest city.

It was a process characterized by difficult negotiations, but in the end, all governments in Shelby County came together to enter into an agreement that set the future boundaries for each city, ending conflicts and lawsuits between governments.  As part of the process and to show its good faith, City of Memphis relinquished 150 square miles of land that were in its annexation areas and those areas were taken by the smaller cities.

It’s the kind of good faith now lacking in the actions of Mr. Norris and Mr. Todd.  That said, some think it’s possible that neither of them expect their conniving about the annexation reserve agreements to become law.  Instead, they may be throwing out this abhorrent bill as a tactic to make their upcoming bill more attractive, the one to give schools owned by the county school system to the towns when they set up their own municipal school districts.

That bill was already floated by Mr. Todd, but Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell said the bill was “inappropriate” and it was tabled.  For now.

Here, we think this bill is aimed at giving the municipal districts even more taxpayers to prop up their walled-in community schools.  All in all, it has a certain putrid smell that’s becoming familiar with the Norris-Todd wheeling and dealing.

Councilmen Nailed It

There is no doubt that, regardless of what Mayor Luttrell thinks, the bill to give county schools to town districts is going to be resurrected in a matter of weeks unless Norris-Todd get their way on the disposition of the schools. Until they, we expect even more of their good cop (Norris), bad cop (Todd) routine, because it is aimed at forcing their will on the broad-based transition planning group that has been doing a remarkably good job in considering the future of a unified school district.

As for the annexation reserve agreements, member of Memphis City Council said it well:  Chairman Bill Morrison said: “If Mark Norris wants to run the county, he should probably run for county mayor.  It’s kind of ridiculous that Nashville, with all the problems we have in the state, wants to run Memphis and Shelby County, and they want to run them into the ground.”

Councilman Myron Lowery referred to it has a “stunt” from people practicing “the self-serving politics we’re getting out of Nashville” these days and from people who regularly change the rules in the middle of the game.  Councilman Jim Strickland said he was “old-fashioned” enough to think that “agreements should be honored…and local folks should be allowed to handle local issues” without the interference of “Big Brother.”

It’s Mr. Norris’ behavior that makes it absurd that he is chairman of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, whose mission is to serve “as a forum for the discussion and resolutions of intergovernmental problems.”  As the chief intergovernmental problem for Memphis and Shelby County, it’s even more ironic that he leads a “think tank” whose purpose is to identify smart policy for the future.

Bend Over

In one of its reports, TACIR wrote that the need for a dependable and consensus framework for annexation is because “at times, the powers of the legislature could be abused.  This abuse could take the form of the passage of annexation acts against the wishes of local government officials and citizens.”

The Norris-Todd annexation reserve bill is proof positive that TACIR got it right.

TACIR has been a driving force in applying the growth policies encapsulated in the 1998 state law, and it seems only logical that if Mr. Norris is now taking aim at destroying the legal intergovernmental agreements entered into in 1998, he should step down as TACIR chairman.

It’s hard to think of anyone in Nashville who has been more detrimental to intergovernmental relations, because when he talks about intergovernmental relations, it usually starts with making the City of Memphis bend over.

If you have any we can post, please email them to tjones@smartcityconsulting.com.

Another week goes by and yet another CA article about service cuts at Memphis International…. With theAmsterdam flight generating over two billion in economic impact since its inception, do you think Smart City could do a round robin with local stakeholders taking about the service cuts and ideas for saving our International flight which has more of an impact than some of the companies that are located here…. (on another note it would be fun to read round robins of local leaders and progressives on other Memphis issues).

A few thoughts on saving our international service that other cities have employed.

1) Asking our business and civic leaders to make it a company / city policy to use the flight for employees traveling to Europe and beyond. The Cincinnati business community did just that the save their Paris service.  Make the commitment public so the flying public understands they need to use the service or loose it.

2) The chamber should bring together Delta and FedEx to see if FedEx can make use of the flight for cargo. I am sure they do this to some extent but can it be increased? Keep in mind that FedEx has for years lobbied Air France for non-stop Paris service. They should be willing to put their money where their mouth is to save Amsterdam service by placing additional cargo on the Amsterdam flight.

3)  During the first year of the fligh,t we did C&VB advertising. Promoting the city and the flight through web banner ads is inexpensive. C&VB should have a partnership with Delta to do joint web banner ads across Europe and beyond. Think Elvis sites, Music sites,  anytime someone in Europe does a goggle search a Memphis via Amsterdam flight banner ad should come up, etc., etc.

4) Mayor Wharton should appoint a community of ambassadors between Memphis and Amsterdam. In the many years of air service can we point to a single cultural exchange?  How about a trade and cultural mission. Amsterdam is a capital of finance, high tech, culture – we should be forging cultural and business relationships. Those relationships will not only help us keep the flight they will enrich both cities. The mayor really could help drive business and cultural relationships and I bet people would be thrilled to serve. Are we even sister cities with Amsterdam?

“Once a city loses international routes — as Portland did in 2001, when Delta ended Portland-Japan flights — they are difficult to restore.”

“Since its launch on June 27, 1995, more than 2 million customers have flown Tennessee’s sole nonstop flight to Europe, generating more than $2 billion in statewide economic impact.”

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_597442.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/06/ports_gamble_on_delta_pays_off.html

Wayne Risher – The Commercial Appeal:

I was wondering if you could talk about the Memphis-Amsterdam flight and how it’s performing, now that it’s down to four days a week? And also, could you speak to any plans for further reductions in the frequency of that flight in the near future?

Glen Hauenstein:

We are looking at the financial performance real time on this. And it seems to be doing better with a reduced frequency level. And so we’ll continue with that and analyze that as the data comes in. Of course, we’re not really in the peak yet. We’ve got December and January to come in and I think it’d be a better question to ask next spring.

Posted June 1, 2011, and unfortunately, even more relevant today as Tennessee Representative interferes in local affairs yet again to serve a narrow – and narrow-minded – special interest group:

It’s hard to think of anything that’s uglier about life in Memphis than the self-loathing that passes for normal daily activity.

It shows up regularly in The Commercial Appeal in comments from readers who default unfathomably on any subject to race and hate about all things Memphis .  It also shows up in the stereotypes that form the foundation for letters to the editor from towns whose very existence owes to the city they so often despise.

It shows up frequently in the code words and proxy issues used by suburban Republicans – particularly when they 200 miles away in the state capital – but which every one is able to translate correctly.  All of the symbols and code words refer to evil African-American city where most of them earn their livelihoods.  We see it in Nashville when Republicans like Sen. Mark Norris can vote against the funding to attack  Memphis’ third world infant mortality problems.  We see it with the Curry Todd mentality of the suburban legislators produces guns in parks and bars legislation.  We see it when state officials wrestle with funding for The Med while our suburban legislators stand around fondling their gun barrels.

Stand-ins

All of these issues are stand-ins for anti-black sentiments that drive so much of the politics outside Memphis.  No, they’re all too polite these days to come out and say they  dislikeAfrican-Americans, but every one knows that when they talk about being safe in parks, they’re alluding to the threat from Memphis gang bangers.  When they talk about us carrying guns as we engage in our daily lives, we know that they mean that it’s not safe in this majority black city.  It’s all a game of seeing who can come up with the best code words for blacks and then hammer it over and over to make sure that their white constituents are fearful and see the politicians as protectors from a city that’s just too poor and too black to trust.

In the past eight years, the African-American population in Shelby County outside Memphis has almost doubled, as has the percentage of the black population in DeSoto County.  It’s further evidence of Memphis’ imminent history-making event when it becomes the first American metropolitan area with more than one million people that is African-American.  In other words, if bigots set out to pick the worst place in the U.S. to live, Memphis would be that place.  What’s amazing is that so many of them managed to do it.

Like the driving force for the tea party movement, much of the suburban angst is driven by fear of the “other” and the reality that the tide has turned and the world is being transformed.  Memphis just got there early, but more and more, white men will become the minority in all parts of the U.S.  as the change becomes more real, so will the shrillness of the rhetoric.

Why Are White Men So Angry?

In a meeting last week, we were killing time by looking at the macho videos by candidates from the white candidate for Alabama commissioner of agriculture complaining about thugs and brandishing his rifle, the Ron Ramsey ad in which he stomps his boots and pretends that Tennessee doesn’t need federal money and the fringe candidate for Tennessee governor who’s running to attack the “mental illness” of liberalism.

An African-American colleague in the meeting brought down the house by asking the most pertinent question.  “What are all these white men in the South so angry about?” she said.  “They think they have it bad.  White men in the South.  Unbelievable.”

And yet, it’s hard to laugh about this strain of absurdist politics because it clearly resonates with so many people in our community.  More to the point, it’s a primary reason that state politicians privately joke about sticking it to “black Memphis” and portraying it as a city that is beyond solutions to its problems.  We admit that many of the Democratic politicians that we send to Nashville fall right in the trap and behave in ways that convince the rest of the state that “Memphis is nothing but trouble,” as a Democratic government once said.

The 70% Solution

A Commercial Appeal poll a couple of years ago concluded that 70% of Shelby Countians thought race relations in Memphis was good.  It begged the question of why it’s the other 30% who seem to get regularly on the ballot, win election and shape our local politics.

But back to poor and black Memphis.  We’ve written often about the 151,000 poor people who live largely out of sight in our midst.  There are places in Memphis where the infant mortality rate is higher than Haiti or Afghanistan, and while suburban Republican politicians wring their hands over women’s reproductive choices, they don’t feel as strongly about funding programs to make sure fetuses are born healthy to mothers who want them (as proven by the funding cut for infant mortality programs).

But such is the life of poor people in Memphis.  They get much more attention as political symbols than they ever get when it comes to solving their problems.

American Dreams

Here’s the thing.  The link between race and poverty in Memphis (and the South) is obvious and overdue for serious attention and action.  And contrary to convention wisdom, for every poor African-American in our community, there are two African-Americans who are not.  They simply go to work, buy their homes, raise their family and hope to live in a city that shows its greatness by its concern for the poor and needy.

Somehow, in all the political posturing and partisan rhetoric, it’s lost on this city by and large that there are 400,000 African-Americans who are not poor and whose ambitions and priorities are squarely in the mainstream.  In fact, if you doubt us, try visiting the cafeteria at FedEx World Headquarters.

It’s impossible to not be struck by two things: 1) that we have a strong black upper middle class and young professionals; and 2) that the coarseness of public life and the ugliness of the political scene keep most of them from plugging in.

The Best Practice We’re Looking For

Memphis is on the cusp of national transformation, and because we are there first, we have a rare opportunity to become the “best practice” that we seem to be perpetually seeking.  Already, for the first time in U.S. history, children of color are a new majority in the South’s public schools.  If we are serious about a competitive future for Memphis, we must also be serious about creating the quality of life, the schools and the public life that engage the diversity that is becoming commonplace in the nation’s workforce.

As long as Memphis is stereotyped as a poor African-American city, we will endure state and federal officials’ lack of urgency in addressing our problems.  After all, one party seems to take African-Americans for granted and the other seems to use them as whipping boys.  In the end, the lack of understanding about the realities of our community results in the worst kind of racism – lower expectations for getting the basics of government right.

It’s the MATA lesson writ large.  Because it seems its customer base as poor and lacking options, it reliably delivers a dismal service, and state and federal officials do nothing to force change.  But it’s no surprise, because after all, Memphis is a poor, black city so we don’t deserve quality programs, quality of life and quality of civic institutions that are crucial for cities today.

There was little time for a celebration following the Greater Memphis Chamber’s announcement about $1.2 billion in private investment and 14,000 new jobs.

The day after the Chamber announcement, Brookings Institution ranked us as one of the worst-performing metropolitan economies in the world — #171 of the world’s 200 largest metros.   The report wasn’t unexpected based on negative trend lines for a decade, but putting it into a global perspective was nonetheless jarring.

That said, it’s worth noting that we finished higher than Denver (174), Birmingham, AL (175), Las Vegas (179), Indianapolis (183), New Orleans (186), San Francisco (1987), Atlanta (189), Kansas City (190), and Richmond, VA (191).  But that’s more like a “misery loves company” explanation.  Nashville was #89.

First, the good news.  The total is actually more than the $1.2 billion the Chamber announced.  The capital investment amount was based on a total of companies that created 25 jobs or more and $5 million in new investment.  Unfortunately, only 3,700 of the total 14,000 jobs were within Shelby County, but 90% of those Shelby County jobs were inside Memphis.

Welcome News Cries Out for More Detail

These milestones would hardly be worth celebrating in the 1990s when it was routine for the public capital investment was more than $1 billion a year and new jobs were regularly above 10,000.  But those heady days were pushed deep into our memories when the decade of the new century brought with it the loss of about 40,000 jobs and the Memphis metro economy languished even before the recession made things even harder.

While it’s too early to make broad statements about Memphis turning the corner, it was at least some better news for a change.  If you were paying close attention during the last mayoral campaign, you already knew about the new jobs.  It was part of the Wharton campaign’s bragging points, and although it was questioned by a couple of members of the news media, the Chamber’s numbers validated the campaign’s numbers.

These kinds of announcements are welcome but we always wish for more details.  The capital investment number is always headline-grabbing because it sounds big, but it’s people that matter more to us.  Because of it, it would be helpful to know the average salary for the 14,000 new jobs, the industry sector breakdown for the jobs and the average salaries, and a correlation with the tax freezes and business incentives given to each company (both inside and outside Shelby County).

Also, the statement that 44,000 existing jobs were preserved cries out for more information, because our already loose tax freeze policies were yet again made even looser for the purported purpose of protecting jobs that are already here.  The justification was always up for debate, but more to the point, the loosening of the PILOT rules drove up the amount of waived taxes to roughly $50 million every year and make threats of relocating now pro forma.

Good, Bad and Percentages

The devil is always in the details, but if more details were released, maybe, just maybe, we’d have more things to brag about.  Or a clearer understanding of where we need to concentrate.

Now, the bad news – yet another negative warning about the Memphis MSA’s economy from Brookings Institution.  Then again, it was pretty negative for the entire country.  Only one American region made the top 20: Houston, which came in at No. 19, a notch above Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In Brookings’ list, 90 percent of the world’s fastest-growing economies were outside North America and Western Europe. And 95 percent of the weakest-performing metro areas were in the long-dominant economic powers of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

In one respect, it points out the pitfalls of dealing with percentages in setting economic indicators.  The economies of developing nations have a tendency to show up in the higher rungs of the listing, because the base number is low .  As a result, when the economies become more of the global mainstream, the percentage tends to be higher than cities that have been operating at their potential for awhile.

It’s the Region, Stupid

The same goes for cities that have bottomed out like Detroit and Buffalo, which ranked #72 and #68 respectively.   Are we really supposed to believe that they are better examples of free-wheeling capitalism than Denver and Atlanta?  If you were buying stock in a city, which would you invest in?

Like the Chamber statistics, the Brookings ranking cries out for more context.  In addition, we would welcome an explanation about why the Chamber’s statistics don’t agree with the Brookings’ statistics although they are essentially reporting on the same period of time.

By the way, from 1993-2007, Memphis ranked #115 in the Brookings Institution rankings.  From 2007-2010, it was #150.  Clearly, we are headed in the wrong direction, and we’ll have to put together sustained progress to get back to the middle of the pack.

The rankings are part of Brookings’ program highlighting the economic importance of regions.  The 200 largest metropolitan economies it analyzed account for nearly one-half (48 percent) of global output, but contain only 14 percent of the world’s population and employment.

Headlines Bad As Economy

The headlines about the Brookings Institution’s report were so unfortunate: “Memphis economy ranked with world’s weakest (Memphis Business Journal),” “Memphis economy one of world’s worst (Commercial Appeal),” and “Memphis ranked 171^st for economic performance out of 200 major cities (ABC 24).”

It wasn’t the Memphis economy.  It was the Memphis region’s economy.

We’ve said it before.  We’ll say it again.  Our problems are regional in nature, not about a city’s problems.

The poverty, the crime, low educational attainment, and per capita income are Delta phenomena.  If headlines would more accurately refer to “Memphis region” rather than just “Memphis,” perhaps we could create a momentum for regional focus, agenda-setting, and action that is so lacking now.

While success in the past does not guarantee success in the future, it’s sure a lot easier than proving that failure in the past does not guarantee failure in the future.  A good beginning is for everybody in the metro area to get into the game to prove that failure can give way to success in the future.

So, let’s take Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner at his word.

His obsession with a municipal school district for his town is not “separatism,” he said, although it does seem Freudian that he picked that word.  Then again, there’s another “ism” that does fuel the rush to judgment on these school districts.

This week, the mayors got a consultants’ report that said, surprise, they were right all along.  But considering that they hired the former Shelby County Schools superintendent, it really isn’t too much of a surprise.

This is one of those cases that has the feeling that the consultants were paid to tell the towns what they wanted to hear.  In fact, back in February at a public meeting in Germantown, Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy laid out what the bedroom community needed to do to create its own school district.   Her observations were parroted in this week’s report.

Politics First

What was clear in her comments was that she (and we’re sure the other mayors) were choreographing their actions with Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, an allegedly  small government conservative who finds it impossible to stay out of the affairs of local governments.

The other thing that’s telling about Mayor Goldsworthy’s comments about the school district was that she never talked about education.  It was all about politics.  It was about counting votes on the planning commission to marginalize any influence by Memphis Mayor A C Wharton, an objective that received warm applause from the crowd.

That in a nutshell does in fact sum up the back story on the towns’ school districts.  It is all about political power, not student performance.  It is about isolationism, and the fulfillment of a derivative and vanilla world that shuns “the other” and clings to a community of the “right people.”

We’re not suggesting that these are evil people, but they aren’t exactly noble either.  As usual, we are disappointed more in Mayor Goldsworthy and Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald because they are smart enough to know how cynical their actions are.

Those People

Over the years, they have extolled the importance of Memphis to their cities and professed to care about its future.  Unfortunately, they regularly default to a myopia that sees the world as “them” and “us” and contribute to the divisions in our county.

Mayor Goldsworthy was right about one thing, not that it affected her opinion in the end.  Speaking of the transition planning commission, she said: “hopefully a very rational, reasonable group of people figuring out how to do this and hopefully they would be receptive to all sorts of creative ideas about how schools might advance in Shelby County.”

In fact, that is a perfect description of the planning commission thus far.  Under the leadership of Barbara Prescott, its members have been thorough in considering alternative structures for the new unified school district. Rather than wait for the outcome, however, the town mayors rush to create a system where they can continue to have as much influence as they had over the old Shelby County Schools system.

It was always a curious feature of the county school system that it genuflected to the town mayors, particularly considering that they never allocated any money to schools within their borders.  Meanwhile, county government always got short shrift although it was the major source of local funding.

Justifications

The potential of losing their fiefdoms seem a motivator for the mayors and their comments dependably demonstrate that they reached a political position on schools before they bothered to search for the research and articulate their justifications.

Recently, Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner said that his town is working to “get education right” although there’s no consultants’ study about academic performance, teacher excellence, classroom size, and other issues affecting school success in the town districts.

Mr. Joyner also said Collierville needs more than just the cookie cutter approach of Memphis City Schools.  Of course, the city schools system has never taken a “one size fits all” approach.  The truth is that there are variations across the city system, and when innovation, principal leadership training, and better teachers are the criteria, the county system has never measured up.  In fact, based on the economic background of most of its students, it actually underperformed.

We predict town district advocates will quit talking about how a 5,000-student system is the optimal size for the best classroom outcomes.  It was always a charade anyway, because if the law allowed the towns to bring all of their students into one district of, say, 20,000 students, they would have done it in a nanosecond.

More Taxes

The consultants’ reports this week proposed that school funding come from an increase of 10 percent in their property tax rate (we still suspect the amount of the increase is being low-balled to keep it from being an issue in a referendum) or the funding would come from an  increase in the sales tax to the legal limit.

Perhaps, Memphis has finally found a slight marketing hook – shoppers there have a lower sales tax rate and Memphians don’t pay twice for schools like residents of the towns.

Most of all, this week, the towns finally got the rose-colored glasses view of town school districts that they have wanted.  They even provided an overly optimistic (they should hope not pollyannish) view about the transfer of the schools inside the towns to the new districts.

Whatever the final decision is, it will likely come from a lengthy court battle, raising the question of whether the town districts can be created before a judge’s ruling, leaving the towns with districts but no school buildings.

Rhetoric Over Reason

Meanwhile, town district supporters continue to promote the mythology that Memphis never had to pay for county schools that it annexed.  It’s a position that’s not backed up by the facts, but as the mayors push aggressively for their very own districts, we look for facts to be their first casualty.

Right after reason.

We wrote yesterday about what Tom Lee Park could be…a magnet for recreation and leisure…as opposed to what it is today…forlorn and bleak.   We got an email asking for some ideas of what could be done, and we suggest that anyone interested in possibilities should visit the website of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc, landscape architecture firm that creates environmentally sustainable and experientially rich places across a wide range of landscape scales.

Our favorite project is along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.  That said, you can click any of his waterfront projects on this page if you want to see what can be done when an open space on the water is a real park instead of a festival grounds.

Here’s how the firm describes the Hoboken project and it’s enough to give a hint of what can happen when we attract the best and brightest nationally to work with our local best and brightest to get Tom Lee Park fixed:

Pier C Park is located along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Hoboken, New Jersey and is part of the city’s ongoing efforts to provide recreational open space at the water’s edge. An active recreation pier designed to accommodate users of all ages, the new park complements neighboring parks in program and form. Pier C represents a new generation of waterfront programming, defined by recreation and public access rather than industrial or maritime uses. The new pier sits within the rectilinear footprint of the long-absent original Pier C, with arcing walkways that capitalize on views to Manhattan as well as the active uses of the pier.

The sculptural quality of the landscape simulates the forms of a barrier beach while the interior breaks open to reveal the play landscape—a whimsical, other-scaled world designed to engage children of all ages and abilities. The playground is separated into a pre-school play area and a school-age play area including structures for climbing and hiding, slides, sand play, water play, climbable slopes, rockers and spinners. A continuous tricycle path loops through the interior of the play area and a park building is situated such that an employee can easily dispense toys to children.

The Promenade, at the eastern edge of the pier, provides recreational opportunities for adults and families. In addition to the introduction of lawn areas for sunbathing and casual games, there is ample seating located along the water’s edge. The park encourages users to experience waterfront wildlife opportunities, including the use of a planting scheme that strongly favors coastal species and the construction of a roosting structure for nesting osprey.

Tom Lee Park is a room with a view.

It’s a magnificent view but the room is empty.

That’s because Tom Lee Park is essentially a field without any activity beyond the month of May or anything to make it more than a spectacular backdrop for joggers or more than a photo op for visitors.

Expanding the Vision, Not Just the Size

When the park was expanded from a four and half acre sliver in 1991 to 25 acres, it was about engineering, not placemaking.  Carol Coletta, president of ArtPlace, a national creative placemaking program, said: “Tom Lee Park was an incredible civic gift from the engineers, but from the perspective of the visitor experience, it’s a wholly inadequate park.  The question is ‘how do we take that asset and make a park that lives up to its location?’”

It’s a question that’s come up in meetings about “how to build a world-class riverfront” being conducted for the Riverfront Development Corporation by Caissa Public Strategies.   Paige Walkup of Caissa said: “People say they enjoy the space, but there’s so much to be done to heighten the experience. Someone said that after she’s taken her child to see the view once, she has more to do in her neighborhood park.”

About a decade ago, city traffic engineers kicked off a controversy when they proposed to widen and straighten Riverside Drive, once again underscoring the words of former National Endowment for the Arts Director of Design Jeff Speck who said three years ago that “Memphis should not leave the design of the city to traffic engineers.”

Creating a World-Class Park for a World-Class View

As part of the process to consider Riverside Drive’s options, Frank Ricks of Looney Ricks Kiss Architects prepared some rough drawings for three “rooms” at Tom Lee Park that responded to the needs of Memphis in May.  “The park’s so long and linear and the three rooms could be created by trees or by an allee of trees lined up with the bluff stairway,” he said.  “It’s a world-class view, but it’s barren.  It needs something to give it context and human scale.”

Ricks’s ideas also included performing space on the hill on the south end of the park, ways to get closer to the river, and a better urban edge that removes the overgrowth of shrubs and plants at river’s edge.  Coletta said the park could benefit from a variety of landscapes, paving materials, and uses.

Landscape architect Ritchie Smith, referring to the ways the land can be contoured to make it more interesting, said: “If you assume Memphis in May remains there, I wonder if there are gentle land forms that could be created to make the park more interesting.”

Adding More to Do

If the decision was made to move Memphis in May, he said a master plan should be developed.  Ideas could involve more trees and plantings, improved restrooms and pavilion, places for children to play, picnicking, sand beach volleyball, zones around the Tom Lee sculpture and obelisk, all park benches on pads adjacent to the sidewalks, and sculptural and dramatic land forms “to break the park into distinct areas to create definition so it’s not an undifferentiated treeless lawn with a monotonous topography.”

Now, Tom Lee Park embodies two drawbacks frequently found in public spaces here. First, there are weak connections to other nearby civic places.  In the case of Tom Lee Park, that means it needs strong connections to Beale Street Landing (connections weakened with the present parking lot for Beale Street Landing) and Mud Island.  “You have to connect Tom Lee Park psychologically and physically to Beale Street Landing,” said Ricks.

Second, there is an absence of the kind of programming and activities that distinguish great public spaces.  At Tom Lee Park, there is no programming beyond the three weekend events of Memphis in May.

Achieving the Potential

“It’s all or nothing,” said Coletta.  “The park is programmed during Memphis in May, so today, we have a crescendo of activity and then we leave it as barren festival grounds for the rest of the year.  I’m all for Memphis in May remaining downtown, but if it were mine to do, I’d move it out of Tom Lee Park.  The park is one of our greatest untapped civic assets and it can be a great place.”

Today, Memphis squanders its potential to develop a park that lives up to one of the most spectacular river views in the U.S.  Twenty years ago, Memphis backed into the decision for Tom Lee Park to be our festival grounds, but facing the opening of Beale Street Landing, it seems the perfect time to consider how Memphis can turn Tom Lee into a park.

This post was previously published in the December issue of Memphis magazine.    

This annual holiday in honor of America’s great nonviolent prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is always a timely occasion to read the inspiring words of a minister who understood that his faith called for him to stand up for those traditionally frozen out of public decision-making and whose fair right to vote and equal opportunity were illusions.

Dr. King understood that change often flows from the civic tension that forces people to confront myths and half-truths and insincere calls for more time before change is made.  Most of all, Dr. King teaches us still that it is important for people of good will to step forward to work for the benefit of people whose interests are often ignored.

While Dr. King’s words have deep meaning at any time, they have even more impact this year as the unified school board works to create a public education system that treats every child in our community equally and equitably.  It will not be easy.  Already, we have seen the clever justifications for separate town school districts that are often fueled by a racial prejudice not condemned by more sensible advocates of the concept.

Some of the language in the school debate have been ugly and the raw emotions on display in the Collierville hearing last week was a stark reminder of the tendencies by some to divide our community in “us and them” terms and to call for the sensitive treatment that was never shown to others as county school policies created racially identifiable schools in Southeast Shelby County and Arlington.

Shelby County has the opportunity to unite as a people behind the shared belief in quality education for all.  The truth is that if the students in Collierville schools went to sleep one night and woke up the next day as part of a new unified school district, they would never know anything had changed.  They would be in the same schools, they would have the same teachers, and they would remain part of the same socio-economic class that is the most significant determinant to classroom achievement.

We suddenly hear a lot of rhetoric about better results from smaller districts, but the silence was deafening on this concept when Shelby County Schools was in charge.  It’s a safe bet that if there had never been a unified school board, we’d never have heard this sudden commitment to small districts. As we’ve said before, the ultimate irony is that if these suburban voters had approved consolidation, the two school districts would have been preserved and this issue would never have arisen.

Because of the undercurrent of race and class that bubbles beneath the surface of the school discussions, it’s the perfect time to reflect on Dr. King’s words.

Address to 1st Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) Mass Meeting, at Holt Street Baptist Church:

And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie (Yes), love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I want to say that in all of our actions, we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the hour  and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve. And don’t let anybody frighten you. We are not afraid of what we are doing because we are doing it within the law.

Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.”

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood…Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.

We know we imagined it, but we thought we heard much of Memphis say “amen” when they read Church Health Center founder and executive director Scott Morris’ January 2 op-ed column in The Commercial Appeal.

Dr. Morris urged Memphians to emulate University of Memphis basketball coach Josh Pastner in their lives.  “His first response to stress is to be kind and compassionate and then to offer constructive instruction,” he wrote after hearing the 34-year-old coach tell a player during a highly contested game that he loved him before telling him what he was doing wrong.

“All too often, we deal with the stress of life in ways that are not helpful. We become angry. We blame others. We look for excuses. Rarely do we turn to the person we are coaching, mentoring or working with and say, ‘I love you.’  I know many of you think the Tigers’ woes would be resolved if he were more harsh and tough on his players, but to what end? Do we really want victory if the cost is having the coach cursing and humiliating players?”

We were reminded of the answers to Dr. Morris’ questions the next day with the eulogies that followed the death of former University of Memphis and Hall of Fame basketball coach Gene Bartow.  When he was hired at “Memphis State” from a small Indiana college, he was either 39 or 40 years old.  He did not curse and became as famous nationally for his positive, upbeat attitude as for his won-loss record.

In a sentence, he was the “kind of coach you’d want for your children,” the late Memphis Mayor Wyeth Chandler said after his team played for the national championship in 1973.  It’s impossible to find anyone who has a negative comment to make about him.

“No coffee, no tea, no drinks, no four-letter words,” said George Lapides, former Memphis Press-Scimitar sports editor. “I really believe Gene is one of the nicest human beings God ever put on this earth.”

If Josh Pastner is channeling anyone in his job, it sure seems like it’s Gene Bartow, and it’s impossible to think of a better role model.  As Dr. Morris wrote in his Commercial Appeal op-ed:

“I do believe that Pastner’s approach to stressful situations is worth adopting for the New Year. If we could decide to greet the stress of the moment with a positive attitude — yes, even with love — then I think good things would be more likely to happen. Offering kindness is always a healthier way to deal with others. Living a healthy life has as much to do with how you handle stress as it does dealing with a specific disease.

“My New Year’s wish is that you condition yourself to deal with the stress of life the way Pastner does in a game. Responding with kindness can help hold at bay the health consequences that come from anger and despair. And, no, it doesn’t mean you will win in every situation. But you will be more likely to end the day understanding what truly matters and making healthier choices.”

It was his knowledge of what mattered that led to Gene Bartow’s healthy choices that were eulogized last week by basketball fans everywhere.

The folks at the Family Action Council of Tennessee suggest that they stand like a rock on their principles.  That shouldn’t be particularly hard for them since it’s a rock that they’ve climbed out from under.

Even in an era where we have all become accustomed to the “Big Lie” as political strategy, the Family Action Council deserves the title as “Big Liars.”  It’s not just that they spew hatred and prejudice, which were never values in the families we know, but that they so proudly lie about the fact while preying on people clinging to the belief that there is always a scapegoat who can be blamed for their frustration with a changing world.

It’s tempting just to ignore them, because it’s inarguable that they’re on the wrong side of history.   Heck, they’re even on the wrong side of Christianity as they selectively obsess on a verse in the Bible to magnify their fixation on homosexuals while absolving themselves from any Biblical sanctions about divorce and other heterosexual behaviors.

Their political base is dying out, replaced by more tolerant and more moderate young people who aren’t interested in vilifying women who control their own bodies, objectifying homosexuals as if they are the cause of all that ails America, and condoning bullies in our schools.  In a world known more and more by diversity and tolerance, they cling to the world where white men make the rules and decide who is a winner and who is a loser.

Scoundrels

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, the very last refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism posing as religious dogma.  Because of it, The Family Action Council is both anti-American and anti-Christian, building on the pretense that its extremist opinions about everything from the founders of the U.S. to religious principles are actually facts.

George Orwell saw it coming: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it is becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…”

Research at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.”

These studies help to explain why people like the Family Action Council inhabit a closed belief system where they pick and choose only what allows them to wall themselves off from uncomfortable truths. It’s how they lie about the bullying that led to the death of a young Tennessee boy and suggest with a straight face that gay-hating bullies in school should be given protection to torment their peers with name-calling and intimidation.

WWJD?

It’s a classic case of blaming the victim, because they have to shed even the last shred of their humanity to attack the suicide of a teenage boy as caused by his homosexuality rather than the attacks and intimidation by gay bashers in his school.   We’ve heard it all before from these apologists for basest form of human behavior (sorry, we mean family value).  They exist in an echo chamber that justifies everything from torture at Abu Ghraib to murder of abortion doctors to attacks on gays.

They’ve also learned this about The Big Lie: the bigger the smear, the more it sticks. And as they have proven, there is no shortage of smear artists.  It’s all reminiscent of the days when similar people used the Bible to defend segregation, poll taxes, and “Tuesday is the day for blacks” at public facilities on the basis of their religion.

It’s no wonder that given a choice between discrimination and equal liberty, the right wing extremists – all while professing an unyielding belief in small government — choose government intervention over personal rights on issues like same sex marriage.  Given a choice between anti-gay bullying on the schoolyard and anti-gay epithets, they come down on the side of the bully.

We predict confidently that there will be a time when the Family Action Council will be viewed with as much disbelief and disgust as we now view Father Coughlan’s hate-filled sermons of the 1930s.  As the Family Action Council the meaning of Scripture and parses words to support its pre-existing prejudices, it joins other false prophets proven over time to be absolutely wrong in their theology.

Flat Earth Society

History has a way of overtaking religious bigotry, from the Inquisition to the Crusades, from bloody conversions to Christianity and Bible verses used as justifications to take people into slavery, and from anti-Semitism to Copernicus.  In other words, the Bible accepts things that we condemn today and we accept behaviors that it condemns.

The Bible is not a science book.  It is not a history book.  It is not a human sexuality book.  It is a sacred book.  It seems at times that those who tell us repeatedly that they have the most faith are the ones who actually have the least, and because of it, they need everything in the Bible to be unquestioned, such as the age of the earth or the origins of humankind.

It’s an anti-intellectual theology that treats the Bible as if interpretations of its verses haven’t changed drastically over time nor that the culture and context of the time when it was written aren’t relevant in understanding them.  If, as the Family Action Council believes, homosexuality was a prime concern of Biblical times, it’s strange that Jesus said nothing about it nor did the Jewish prophets, and while people like those at the Family Action Council obsess on six or seven verses in one million to justify their political positions, none of these verses refers to same-sex orientation as it is today.

There are many people of good faith and deep faith who are wrestling with these questions in honest and sincere ways.  Some feel that while they have no personal objections to gay relationships, they see the Bible as unyielding and unequivocal on the subject.  And yet, Christianity celebrates heroes who changed their minds about the meaning of various Bible verses, and even if we believe that the Bible is infallible, it’s still dangerous to assume that some humans are convinced that they are infallible in their interpretations of what it says.

The Five Percent

In times of great change in history, there is often a brand of extremism that does everything possible to resist and to attack the symbols of that change.  Gays are a convenient stalking horse for extremists, who promote the fiction that 5% of the people in this country have an agenda that is eroding the rights of the rest of us.  If American history tells us anything, it is that it is the minority that must fight and campaign for their full rights.

More to the point, some of the most religious, church-going people we know are gay.  If Family Action Center wants to quote Bible verses, how about the ones warning about judging others and casting the first stone?

The degree of manipulative distortion today seems to know no bounds, and at times, the real war on terror appears more accurately to be a war on reason.   Jingoism is an American tradition, but it’s hard to think of an era when the truth has been as effectively dispatched in pursuit of political gain and personal hatred as it is today.

Every utterance of the Family Action Council proves it so.

The Shelby County Board of Commissioners ramps up for another vote to bring more secrecy to public decision-making and our mayors are working again to close some public records.

It all too much to understand, particularly considering that public confidence in government is at record lows and a large part of the problem is caused by the feeling that elected officials are cutting deals out of the view of the public and serving their own political self interests.

We remain stunned that the board of commissioner’s bastion of liberal thinking, Steve Mulroy, continues to lead the fight to move public discussion from the sunshine to the back room.  More to the point, none of the advocates for eroding the public’s right to know has offered any examples of problems caused by Sunshine Law.  It always acts as if they aren’t already working around the law: Sometimes, now in the midst of debate about testy agenda items, the commissioners recess so they can allegedly gather in the backroom of the Commission Chambers to get some refreshments.  The real purpose: to talk and reach agreement on the issue being debate on the agenda.

The call for changes in the Sunshine Law conjure up images of the early days of Shelby County Government. In those pioneer years in this wilderness community, the county legislative body was the law of the land – administration, judicial and legislative. As a result, when a member was arrested for public drunkenness, enough members left the room to make sure there was never a quorum to convict him.  Meetings were also moved from various locations, including residences, so it was difficult to find the meeting in the first place.

Somehow, there are days when the notion of drunk members of public bodies would at least make some of their decisions make sense.

Going Backward

Changes in the Sunshine Law would ensure that meetings in an Internet age would become throwbacks to the back-slapping days of local politics, when the meetings of the three-headed administrative branch of county government – the structure of county government before the mayor’s job was created by public referendum in 1974 – actually lasted less than three minutes.

It happened because the three officials met privately before their public meeting and cut their deals. When the public meeting convened, one commissioner would make a motion to approve everything on the entire agenda.  It would be seconded, passed, and the meeting adjourned beforemost people had even sat down.

Frequently, the prayer to open the meeting lasted longer than the meeting itself, making the invocation one day especially insightful. With the officials calling on their budget director to open the meeting, he delivered one of the most eloquent prayers ever delivered at the meeting of a public body — “Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do. Amen.”

In the face of the calls to weaken public meeting laws, it’s worth remembering that our state’s laws aren’t particularly onerous or strict. While there are some areas that need clarity (so there aren’t 95 county attorneys giving 95 different interpretations of the law), the last ranking that we saw by the Investigative Reporters and Editors ranked Tennessee 45th in the effectiveness of its Sunshine Law.

Do Overs

After all, the remedy to “cure” a violation is pretty simple – deliberating and debating the same issue in public session. And what are the draconian consequences for a public body if a newspaper or activist actually wins a lawsuit? The action by the public body is voided, which means that it has to have a “do over” in a public meeting.

The head of the Tennessee County Commissioners Association, David Connor, pleaded for the weakening of the Sunshine Law a few years ago by saying: “It’s more to the fact that there are some circumstances that the public and taxpayers’ interests are better served by meeting in closed session.”

If he’s so sure of this, would he like to let us taxpayers vote on this? After all, it’s not like these elected officials aren’t conducting personal business or paying the costs of their decisions. We are.

It’s called a public meeting not just because it’s an open meeting, but because it’s the public paying the freight – for the bills being passed and for the salaries of the people involved.

Moving to the Back Room

After all, not only will the changes in the so-called Sunshine Law allow secret meetings attended by almost all members of a public body, but it will in turn eliminate much of the public discussion that now takes place and gives taxpayers more insight into legislation. In weakening the law, back room deals can be cut in secret so that at the meetings of the public bodies, for example, votes can be taken without any real debate or discussion, denying taxpayers key information into the decisions.

Put simply, changes in the Sunshine Law are all about serving the interests of politicians rather than the public.

Meanwhile, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton are pushing again this year on their own amendment to state law to close records that are now public.

Anytime there is a choice in Memphis and Shelby County governments between secrecy and transparency, it should be a no-brainer.

Hook, Line and Sinker

We have previously cautioned our local governments against buying into the propaganda from the special interests that can never get enough in incentives and special privileges from government.  Just a few weeks ago, it was suggested that the law involving the transfer of property to the Industrial Development for as long as a tax freeze is in effect has a “chilling effect” on business recruitment.  This actually led city and county to recommend an amendment to the state constitution.  Now, it’s imperative that we close some public records that purportedly contain proprietary information about companies.

We all agree that we have to remain competitive, but Memphis’s lack of worthiness and desperation for new jobs combine to create a risk to a healthy balance in our business recruitment.  Again, it seems like we’re majoring in minors while there are really relevant issues that deserve attention to get our economy moving in the right direction again.  And yet, economic development types would have us think that all of our problems stem from these pesky IDB rules to protect taxpayers’ interests.

Being a business-friendly government doesn’t mean that we have to do everything business wants.  That’s why the public records law should not be weakened.

The problem with negotiations is that hindsight is always 20-20 when the smoke clears a few months later.

The truth of the matter is that City of Memphis, Shelby County, and State of Tennessee could have insisted on putting more conditions into the contract with Electrolux.  It is equally true that there would not now be a contract to second guess because Electrolux would have selected a different city.

Electrolux made it clear that it would walk if additional conditions – which were in fact favored by government  – were included, and after losing 35,000 jobs in the preceding nine years, we weren’t really in a position to make demands in the first place.  We just needed the jobs too badly.

It’s a fundamental rule of negotiations.  The party with the greatest need generally has to give more in negotiations to seal the deal.  In the Electrolux negotiations, the company was clearly in the driver’s seat, because it had other offers it could take.

Got to Do Somethig

More to the point, Memphis had to do something to stop the bleeding of jobs and reverse the tide.  It’s worth remembering that Memphis lost the record number of jobs in the years before the global recession, so there was almost no one who thought things would improve when the global economy came to a standstill.

And yet, things did improve.  In the past couple of years, our community attracted and created new jobs – about 10,000 of them.

It’s never a bad thing when Memphis City Council raises the importance of minority business, but it’s hard to imagine that its members, if more directly involved in the contract’s terms, would have put the deal at risk to add more conditions to the contract.  Suggestions that have been made to amend the City of Memphis charter to give the legislative branch more control over negotiations is simply a bad idea.

After all, Memphis City Council in effect approved the contract as it is written when it approved the $40 million contribution from city government to the project.

Tone Deaf

As for Electrolux, we hope that their products are more responsive than company leaders.  By and large, they have been tone deaf to Memphis’ concerns, complicating the political environment for its supporters and giving credence to stories about disrespectful treatment of Memphians who have tried to show the company a way to achieve its objectives while responding to local concerns.

We’re way past the time when we should fall for rhetoric that it just isn’t possible to find local minority companies who can work on construction of Electrolux’s manufacturing facility.  In the first two phases of the Pyramid redevelopment project for Bass Pro Shops, minority participation has exceeded 40% in both phases and was just shy of 50% in one.

It’s the fact that we have companies who can do the work at Electrolux that makes the company’s reactions and comments so frustrating.  There is a way where everyone wins, but first, Electrolux needs to shift from tough negotiator to corporate citizen.

Timing Is Everything

Nobody has been more critical than we have about our local addiction to tax freezes for economic development.   Nobody has been more frustrated about the $50 million in taxes that have been waived routinely for decades to businesses asking for tax freezes. Nobody has been more cynical about the interest by some employers in keeping Memphians in a low-wage, low-skill economy.

Nobody has been more passionate about the need to develop workers who can compete in a knowledge economy.  Nobody has been more dismissive about the argument that we have to waive taxes to make up for the poor state of our workforce, an argument we’ve made for 25 years while doing little to actually  improve our workforce.

And yet, we believe that the government incentives paid for Electrolux and Mitsubishi to locate manufacturing operations here are justified.  We also believe that the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce deserves serious credit for its work on these two projects, because it knew that our economy needed emergency resuscitation.  In fact, it’s because our economy is gasping for air that we think that these incentives are merited.

The only thing harder than finding business prospects are the negotiations to seal the deals.  It’s nearly impossible for local economic development officials not to feel at times that they are negotiating against themselves.  Because of it, there’s often little to do but err on the up side of incentives.  Faced with an economy that was tanking, we think that the determination of Chamber officials to close the deal is understandable.

Three Reasons

Besides the loss of 34,700 jobs in nine years, a recent analysis of private sector jobs growth in the top 100 regions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor, there were 89 regions ahead of us.   Put another way, we have lost 1.5 jobs a day for the past nine years.  Meanwhile, we’ve lost $1.9 billion in income.

There is a point at which a city’s economy gets much more difficult to pull out of a descent because the city has developed a negative narrative and an unfavorable reputation that can become deadly in the incestuous world of site location firms.  It seems to us that there are reasons that made this a time when Memphis needed to go the extra mile to snare these companies.

First, the jobs are located in the core city where there is existing infrastructure that is already paid for.

Second, these are manufacturing jobs, which continue to be the gold standard for cities like ours without a deep knowledge economy.  There’s little argument that they are much more preferable to our regular diet of warehouse and distribution jobs.

Mostly Upside

Third, there is the potential for these facilities to give us a stronger position in the increasingly important export economy.  As President Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union address, the Administration’s goal is to double U.S. exports in the next five years to support and create U.S. jobs. In the past year, exports have outperformed the economy overall, but exports in our region has not been a widely pursued strategy for economic growth.

In a ranking of the top 100 U.S. metros, Memphis is #50 in annual exports, #65 in export share of GMP, and #46 in export jobs.  Memphis produces $5.6 billion in exports; 9.3% of what is produced here is exported, and exports employ 44,515 people.

It’s in this context that it’s pretty hard to criticize the philosophy that was used to get the Electrolux deal done.  It may not have all the upside that we all might have wished, but at least for once, we have upside in the creation of several thousand badly needed jobs.

When will the madness end?

It’s a question we often ask ourselves when we read about planned highway construction by Tennessee Department of Transportation, aided and abetted by the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization.

Here’s the latest: a $30 million cloverleaf on I-40 just over the Fayette County line so the few dozen cars using Tennessee Highway 196 (Hickory Wythe Road) can enter and exit the interstate instead of driving a few miles to an existing interchange — five miles to the east (SR-59) and two miles to the west (New Airline Road) in Shelby County.

In the last presidential election, we heard a lot about the “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska, but back here at home, a “cloverleaf to nowhere” remains on the drawing board.  Well, we don’t mean to overstate it; it’s not exactly nowhere – there are probably about 3,500 people in this part of Fayette County.

Smart Transportation

At a time when Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam says that Tennessee’s success depends on Memphis’ success, TDOT and MPO have yet again moved ahead with a massive project that wastes money needed for projects on much, much more heavily-traveled highways in the more populated areas of Memphis.

As we have learned from the single-minded push for I-269, there is little regard given by our road planners and builders about the long-term impact of their projects on the fiscal and economic health of the city that powers the entire region.

According to TDOT documents, Fayette County officials have said that the cloverleaf could attract a shopping center, which should concern Memphis officials because of the potential impact on Wolfchase Galleria.   This interchange would make it the first “access point” east of Shelby County.

We remain hopeful that TDOT Commissioner John Schroer will bring a fresh perspective and new thinking to TDOT which has traditionally operated with a working definition of transportation that means more and more highway construction.  Mr. Schroer has articulated a smarter philosophy for TDOT in the year since he was appointed by Governor Haslam, but the real challenge for him is to change the culture of an organization that has been dominated for decades by its fealty to the road construction industry.

Unsurprising

The depth of the entrenched thinking becomes clear when reviewing the plans for the interstate interchange on the Hickory Wythe Road in Fayette County.  When asked if the interchange was needed because of projected population growth in the northwest corner of Fayette County, it was hardly surprising that Fayette County officials said the cloverleaf is needed.  It’s the pro forma answer.

As for building an interchange for the rapidly growing part of Fayette County, it’s worth noting that between the 2000 and 2010 census, the population of Gallaway swelled a grand total of 20 people for a total population of 680.  There are no 2010 numbers for Hickory Wythe, an unincorporated community that had 2,600 people in 2000.  Braden added 11 people to increase its population to 282 in 10 years.

According to TDOT, the interchange is “consistent with the MPO’s 2026 Long Range Transportation Plan.”  It’s yet another indictment of our local MPO, whose operations have been commandeered by suburban and rural interests.  As we have pointed out previously, the mayor of Memphis can be outvoted by the mayors of Gallaway and Braden.

Smoking Gun

We wrote a month ago: “If sprawl is a smoking gun, there’s little doubt that MPO’s fingerprints are on the weapon.  If there is a poster child for bureaucratic processes that waste time and money, it is the MPO.  If there is an agency masquerading as regional that is truly more suburban and rural-dominated, we don’t know of one.

“The fixation on congestion mitigation has produced massive expenditures on roadways that do little to create jobs and new economic development investments while economic arteries are ignored.  There are numerous highways in our region that are built to six-lanes to solve congestion that exists for a few hours each weekday.  Then there are highways like the vital logistics highway, Lamar, that have been trying for more than a decade to get the attention that it demands and that is vital for economic development.

“Transportation infrastructure spending drives the location of private development, and with a plan directing almost all of this investment outside the I-240 loop, the MPO is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of continued sprawl and unsustainable growth.   Without a comprehensive growth plan and the incorporation of economic development strategies, the current LRTP methodology will continue to perpetuate the same unsustainable pattern that it has for decades.”

We hasten to add, as we have done several times, that we make no criticism of the MPO staff, who labor to do their best in a badly flawed process called one of the most unrepresentative in the country by Brookings Institution.

Cotton Fields Interchange

Back to TDOT, the new Fayette County interchange will be constructed to serve SR 196, “currently a rural two lane, non-access controlled road.”  “Land use in the project area is primarily rural with cotton fields and a sod farm,” TDOT wrote.

“Commuters from this area primarily use I-40 to travel to jobs in urban and suburban Memphis areas,” the TDOT report said, failing to point out that once again transportation planning rewards the same people who abandon urban areas and whose decisions are now to be subsidized by the rest of us.

Most damning is the fact that the TDOT “assessments” repeat economic projections as if they are fact and rosy predictions as if they are real.  Nowhere can be found any research that calls into question the methodology that unfailing supports the construction of every highway project and misstates and exaggerates the effects of congestion nor do the reports take into account trends lines moving in favor of urban living as a result of gas prices, housing markets, and livability issues.

“The Memphis Area Transit Authority system does not reach this far from the central metropolitan areas,” TDOT wrote.  “The closest bus route is over ten miles away.”  It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy since TDOT has acted for years that it doesn’t have a significant role to play in public transit.

The Fayette County cloverleaf is a testament to old TDOT thinking and priority-setting.  It’s time for TDOT to shift its emphasis from the asphalt lobby to meaningful transportation systems that don’t routinely start and stop with more and more highway construction.

It leverages existing strengths, it’s the rare economic development project here that isn’t built on cheapness but quality, and it is multi-dimensional, aiming at student, researcher, and entrepreneurial alike.  To celebrate Bioworks, we’re reprising the following post that points out the importance of its work.

Here’s the post:

Memphis doesn’t have to look outside its own city limits to find one of the nation’s leading economic development strategies.

It’s taking shape at Union and Dudley in the form of the UT-Baptist Research Park, according to Kip Bergstrom, former executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council and now deputy commissioner for Connecticut Economic and Community Development.

Memphis Bioworks Foundation – which is building the research park – embodies “a brilliant approach” that gives Memphis the chance to leap ahead of its rivals, Mr. Bergstrom said. The best ideas are “organic rather than institutional and build on existing capabilities.”

“When I look for a ‘best practice,’ I look at what’s been done in Memphis with biotech. More often than not, in approaches like this, it’s entrepreneurs convening themselves.”

Finding The Mountains

“Succeeding in today’s economy is about finding out what you’re good at and understanding what others are doing,” he said. “It’s about identifying mountain peaks of capability, and asking the question, what are we going to differently that raises the elevation of our mountain peak? What does it mean to succeed in the innovation economy? What do we do to play the game, but then, what do we do to win?”

Memphis has a more entrepreneurial environment than the Northeastern U.S. and the attitude should translate to government innovation, he said.

“Up here, we still have lots of work just to make government transparent and efficient,” he said. “We need to be thinking about how we can make it innovative. We need to think of government in a design sense rather than as a product of the industrial age overly invested in legacy systems. We need to look for government departments that are creative and entrepreneurial and work with them to find opportunities for them to become agents for change.”

As part of this different approach to public programs, he says schools need to compete for public investments. In Providence, “The Met” (The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center) is a national model with six small campuses across the city. “It’s a phenomenal personalized approach to education,” he said, noting that its program centers on workplace internships and independent projects tailored to each student’s interests.

An Urgent Sense of Urgency

“Memphis is like most cities,” he said. “It needs a sense of urgency. Do we have to suffer a major catastrophe before we make the investments that we need in math, engineering and science?” It’s the need to emphasize these subjects that makes the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering (MASE) such an important part of the work of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation, he said. MASE is a charter school that was opened by the Foundation in 2003 and eventually will have 900 students concentrating on science-related subjects.

Acknowledging that in addition to educating our students, Memphis has to attract 25-34 year-old professionals, he suggests that successful cities are those that allow them to have an impact. “That’s what these young professionals want,” he said. “But they often feel that it’s a closed circle. You need to reach out to the group, open the loop and let them have input. They want to live their values. They want to live in a place with leadership that’s bold and taking risks. They want to be part of something that’s not done yet, so they can help to complete the city.”

In looking for the keys to the future, Mr. Bergstrom offers this advice: “Whoever learns to turn immigrants and low-wage earners into knowledge workers wins the game. Is there any reason that can’t be Memphis?”

Shifting The Focus

He advised that changes in the global economy demand changes in Memphis’ approach to economic development. In shifting its focus from what it “needs to play” to what it “needs to win,” his advice is:

• Rather than focusing on developable sites, focus on distinctive places.

• Rather than focusing on skilled workers, focus on lateral thinkers.

• Rather than focusing on research institutions, focus on world-class research teams in specific areas.

• Rather than focusing on serial entrepreneurs, focus on a ubiquitous entrepreneurial culture.

• Rather than focusing on transparent and efficient government, focus on innovative government.

• Rather than focusing on high-wage jobs, focus on networks of firms with synergistic capabilities that create individual and collective added value.

In the end, cities that succeed in the innovations economy, Mr. Bergstrom said, are those that identify “game changers” and catapult their economy to another level of competitive advantage. The Bioworks Foundation looks like our best bet.

What Memphis needs now is a balance of realism and optimism.

We should all feel upbeat about developments that have positioned Memphis positively in the last couple of years: the convergence of important national initiatives in Memphis, the fact that our MSA in 2010 had a larger increase in GDP than the Atlanta MSA, and that after a decade of shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, Memphis is on the plus side of the jobs ledger.

That said, we should resist the temptation to engage in the kind of cheerleading that 250,000 Memphians with low incomes find perplexing or that obscures the structural problems that has plagued Memphis for decades.  Memphis Mayor A C Wharton walked this line in an interview on WKNO-FM’s Marketplace a few weeks ago, saying that there are signs of progress and momentum but that we have structural issues that demand attention and action over a sustained period of time.

Perhaps, hopefully, we have reached a tipping point and that we can now finally attack the tough structural problems in Memphis: a high poverty rate and its attendant web of problems, almost half of the people over 18 out of the job market, and long-standing low educational attainment levels.

We’ve written several times in recent months that as we begin the journey to where we want to be from where we are, we must be realistic enough to understand that it will require us to stay focused for several decades on the things that matter and to keep our focus and show patience to stay resolutely on task.  Year after year.

Moving Past What We Want to Hear

Last week, the news media heralded that we have the highest poverty rate among the nation’s largest 51 MSAs.  Of course, it’s not like this problem appeared overnight, but without New Orleans to kick around anymore, we have no one to keep us from being the very worse in a number of categories.

The one thing that the news media can do is to create a sense of urgency, and that was the case last week as some key leaders in the public and philanthropic sectors began to talk anew about a concerted attack on poverty.  Hopefully, it was the wake-up call that we needed to get serious about tackling our toughest and most intractable problem.

We begin by being completely honest and by setting out an accurate context for our work.  As a friend of ours is fond of saying: “In Memphis we pay people a lot of money to tell us what we want to hear.”  Well, it’s past time to come face-to-face with the things we don’t want to hear.

Other cities are doing it.  There’s the Greater Louisville Project which reports data and trend lines and points out factors, like density, that are crucial to the region’s economic success.  There’s the East-West Gateway Council of Government’s Where We Stand – The Strategic Assessment of the St. Louis Region, which provides a clear context of the area’s competitive position when compared to 35 other major cities.

We’re #1

Both of the reports call it like they see it and focus on the factors and forces that have the power to improve their region’s trajectory.  In particular, we always find the St. Louis report useful because Memphis is one of the 35 cities, and the report dramatically demonstrates our structural problems.

The 35 MSA’s in the Where We Stand report are Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Nashville, Austin, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Columbus, Kansas City, Cleveland, Cincinnati, San Antonio, Portland, Pittsburgh, Denver, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Diego, Minneapolis, Seattle, Phoenix, Detroit, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington DC, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City.

The results of our structural problems are clear in the categories in which we are #1:

# 1 – Families in poverty
# 1 – Families headed by single parents (37.3% and Miami is a distant #2 at 31.3%)
# 1 – Births to Teen Mothers (15% of all births)
# 1 – Unwed Parents (55.4%)
# 1 – Children Living in Poverty (30%)
# 1 – Individuals Living in Poverty (19.4%)
# 1 – Infant Mortality Rate (12.5 per 1,000 births and #2 is Cleveland at a distance 8.8%)
# 1 – Prevalence of Obesity
# 1 – Incidence of High Blood Pressure

Other Warning Signs

It also speaks to our highest priority and greatest challenge: to break the link here between race and poverty.  We are also #1 in percentage of population that is African-American.

Several other rankings suggest the price that the Memphis MSA pays as the nation’s leader in poverty:

# 1 – Transportation Costs as percent of Median Household Income (27.1%)

# 2  – Housing/transportation costs as % of MHI income (55.4%)
# 6  – Homes with negative equity (28.5%)
#35 – Adults with advanced academic degrees (8.7%)
#34 – Adults with bachelor’s degree (15.5%)
#34 – Children enrolled in preschool (17.4%)
#35 – Median Household Income ($43,633)
#31 – Metro area density

Sooner Rather Than Later

There are a few faint silver linings in the dark clouds.  First, we talk a lot about finding regional solutions and regional plans of action here, and Memphis is #2 in one category: the largest city’s share of the region’s population.  Memphis is about half of the region’s population and when you include Shelby County, it’s about 75%, meaning that if we can adopt countywide policies and programs with organizations like EDGE, we will have taken a big step toward regionalism.

Another positive relates to our region’s low cost of living.  Although we are #31 in earnings per job ($43,204), when it is adjusted for cost of living in each MSA, we move all the way up to #10 ($49,151).

The journey to a more prosperous and equitable Memphis will be long and difficult, but there’s no time like the present.  The sooner we begin the sooner we can see progress.

Memphis is a mythic city.

There are of course the mythic musicians and entrepreneurs who created our greatest exports to the world – from B.B. to Elvis to Chilton and from Kemmons Wilson to Pitt Hyde to Fred Smith.

And yet, there are mythologies of a different kind. They limit Memphis’ options for progress, trap us in the same old conversations, and create conventional wisdom treated as facts.

That’s the most intriguing promise of a new term for the Memphis mayor: the chance to think anew about old problems and to begin by blowing up old myths.  It’s a chance to shift from the triage of the past two years to moving ahead with action and intentionality.

Mythologies

There’s the myth that we talk too much about race. Actually, we don’t; it’s just that we talk about the wrong things. The verbal blasts out of the Herenton City Hall were a lot about race, but never about discussions concerning the consequences of Memphis’ economic segregation, the worst among the top 50 metros, or about breaking the inextricable link between race and poverty.

There’s the myth that new suburban highways create new economic growth. More to the point, they fueled the greatest relocation in history of people to outside Memphis, cannibalizing existing businesses, driving up county government’s debt to bankruptcy level, and forcing Memphians to pay the lion’s share of infrastructure they didn’t need.

There’s the myth our African-American majority is an economic drag. Because distinctiveness is the basis for competitive advantage, Memphis needs to be a hub of black talent. If that isn’t at the top of our economic development agenda, we’re not really in the economic development business.

There’s the myth that the 103,000 students in Memphis City Schools are problems. Instead, our anomalous bulge in students is a strategic opportunity. As the U.S. workforce contracts and cities fight for fewer workers, we already have ours. But we’ve got to train them for jobs of the new economy.

Acting On Myths Instead Of Facts

There’s the myth that all Memphis neighborhoods are in chaos and in despair. And yet, for every neighborhood in crisis like New Chicago, there is a one like Prospect Park – proud, well-kept, and attractive. While we deal with the neighborhoods swamped by problems, we need also to shore up the islands of great neighborhoods.

There’s the myth that success in economic development is measured by the number of tax freezes we hand out and now much construction is done each year. Rather, they reflect the need to create a more competitive city, because prosperous cities aren’t selling themselves on cheapness, but quality, and to measure success in its impact on people’s salaries, not buildings’ construction.

There’s the myth that downtown is booming. Despite the frequent use of the word, renaissance, to describe downtown, we still tend to define success by comparing Memphis against itself rather than against other cities. Our downtown still misses the vibrancy and activity that are so evident in other cities’ downtowns that have been reborn in the past 20 years. That’s why ideas like Memphis Art Park and the skate park on Mud Island are so important.

There’s the myth that annexation is always good. Memphis is now larger in area than New York City and eventually, it will be bigger than Los Angeles. Already, annexations have driven up the costs of public services and contributed to a deterioration of services in the pre-annexation area. The city government analysis needs to measure the impact of more land on the existing city and not assume that the neighborhoods and tax revenues will not decline.

Getting It Right

There’s the myth that consolidating city and county governments is bad for the county’s smaller cities. A large government lies in the future for them – either a new one or a Memphis government that expands by almost 50 percent and surrounds them without them having a voice in it. It all makes the town mayor’s mantra all the more ironic: “We hate Memphis City Hall and don’t trust Memphis politicians. Memphis is full of problems. So we want to leave everything just like it is.”

There’s the myth that Memphis and Shelby County Governments are wasteful while the smaller towns are efficient and economical. Actually, both city and county governments spend less on services per citizen than Collierville, Bartlett, and Germantown – from 32 to 48 percent.

There’s the myth that all we need to do is to tell our story better. More importantly, we need to create a city that gives us a different story to tell.

That’s why the most dangerous myth of all is the hoariest of all: there’s nothing we can do to change things. Meanwhile, in the 20 years that we’ve wrung our hands and complained, China has turned its whole economy around.

That’s why it’s time for city officials – and for the rest of us – to take a “no excuses” approach to our own city’s future. Memphis is a mythic place, but to become great, it means that we have to some of the most stubborn myths of all.

A version of this post was previously published as Memphis magazine’s monthly City Journal column.

He illustrates well what we’ve written several times: While the notion that the county school system could build schools cheaper than Memphis City Schools had political cachet, it was because the city district was building schools that were distinctive, contributing to a sense of place, and enhancing their neighborhoods. 

Mr. Whitehead’s two other blogs, Tours by Josh Whitehead, and Nothing Ever Happens in My Block, are equally enjoyable and frequently spark our thinking about quality of place and livable cities.

Here is his post from December 17 from Creme de Memph:

The Memphis City School System, which as a legal entity has been dissolved and is currently winding down, nevertheless has a long history of building architecturally impressive buildings.  This post looks at a few of these schools.

Humes Middle School was designed by local architect George Awsumb and constructed in 1923-24.  According to Messrs. Johnson and Russell in their seminal work Memphs: An Architectural Guide (1990: University of Tennessee Press), the building exhibits “vaguely Venetian and Tudor Gothic styles.”  I would add that the minarets along the roofline are almost Byzantine in style.  Perhaps the most historically significant fact about Humes is that Elvis Presley attended this school while he lived in Lauderdale Courts downtown.

Tudor details above the entrances at Humes.

Vollintine Elementary, also from the 1920s, exhibits a Colonial design.

In the center of Vollintine Elementary is a nicely proportioned amphitheater.

Snowden Junior High was built in 1909 and designed by the local Memphis firm of Jones and Furbringer.  The school has had three expansions over the years: 1924, 1939 and 1979.

The gymnasium was part of the 1924 expansion.  Jones and Furbringer were able to seamlessly meld this wing into the original 1909 building.

Detailed scholastic flourishments at Snowden.

Hamilton Middle School was built as Hamilton High School.  Note the shields above the windows and the urns along the roofline.

Johnson and Russell call Fairview Junior High “the architectural gem of the school system and one of the finest buildings in the whole city.”  Constructed in the then-popular Art Deco style in 1930 and designed by architect E.L. Harrison, this is its central entrance tower.

The entrance tower is flanked on both sides by these pylons, which feature reliefs representing night and day (which are identified in English, French and Latin).

Note the original light fixture.  The urns along the base of Fairview are much grander than those found in the other City schools discussed on this post.

In addition to its great pre-war schools, the Memphis City School system also features some equally great post-war Modern buildings.  This is Southside High.

In addition to its front entrance which really captures the time period, Southside has turquoise panelling adorning its classroom wings.

Just as fabulously Mid-Century Modern as Southside is Georgia Elementary.  Here, however, the building features orange panelling along its facades.   One of the most unique features about this building is that it contains both interior and exterior hallways.  This great modern building may be at risk of being demolished; it has been identified as one of the schools the system is considering closing.

Georgia Elementary was designed by the office of Walk C. Jones, Jr. and built in 1960-61.  The site that it sits on is gently sloping, which enabled the architects to add features such elevated breezeways and outdoor instructional areas.  Even the seating at these outdoor instructional areas have elements of design that tie them in with the overall design of the campus.

This aerial of Georgia Elementary shows that it is made up of three free-standing buildings connected by a series of breezeways.  The design is about as 1960 as you can get!

Branching out of the core of the City, we find some schools originally built by the Shelby County School system and inherited by the Memphis City School system upon annexation into the City.  This is the main entrance to Whitehaven High on Elvis Presley Blvd.

To many Memphians, East High School is probably the grandest school in the system.  It sits on its prominent location on Poplar Avenue like a 18th century baroque palace.  Designed by Everett D. Woods and built in 1946-48, it was the first post-war high school constructed in Memphis, largely to accommodate the ever eastward migration of the city.

Further east than East High School is White Station High.  Note its very post-war gymnasium.

Going even further east is Cordova Elementary School, which features a design that has become the norm for today’s schools: a one-story, X-shaped layout that attempts to give all classrooms exposure to some sunlight.

An exception to the design featured at Cordova Elementary is Downtown Elementary, which had site constraints typical with an urban lot that necessitated two stories.  Note the fanciful brick patterns.

Many of the schools’ newer buildings were actually built on the same site as schools they replaced.  The school system has attempted to keep as many architectural features of the old building when this occurs.  Guthrie Elementary on Chelsea is a great example, which features the original building’s main entrance facade.

Finally, here is the headquarters of the Memphis City School system, the Francis Coe Administrative Building.  It harkens back to the design featured at Southside High and Georgia Elementary.  The future of this building remains uncertain as the new unified school board decides where it will permanently settle.