by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | June 16th, 2011 12:08am CST | 5 Comments
Yes, we agree with Tea Partiers that government needs to return to its historical underpinnings. No, we don’t mean the historical fictions advanced by the Tea Party to justify policies that often seem un-American in a modern context. After all, if we take the admonitions literally about returning to the governmental world of our [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | May 6th, 2011 12:05am CST | Comments Off
Here’s a sentence we never thought we’d type: Terry Roland is absolutely right. When the Millington county commissioners raised questions this week about the salaries and benefits of part-time assistant county attorneys, he was kicking over an anthill that’s been begging for the light of day for 17 years. That’s when the newly [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | December 2nd, 2010 12:41am CST | 12 Comments
It’s the season of the pointless government gesture and it’s apparent that it knows no party lines. There is however one silver lining although it’s likely to be brief. On one hand, Tennessee Senator Mark Norris announced himself as the arbiter of the local school controversy, pledging to delay legislation for a year that would [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government, Taxation, Uncategorized | November 10th, 2010 10:49am CST | 11 Comments
This is the second post about the issue of Memphis tax inequity. The first part was published in the previous post. Effectively addressing the serious issues facing Memphis is complicated by the absence of a coherent philosophy of public financing. Perhaps, it’s finally time for a fiscal equity study that becomes the blueprint for [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government, Taxation, Uncategorized | November 8th, 2010 9:54pm CST | 7 Comments
Several years ago, Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin said “functional consolidation doesn’t work” and blew up several city-county law enforcement units. At the time, many suggested that he acted on deep political motivations, but he was nonetheless right. Functional consolidation – frequently a stand-in for full city-county government consolidation – is hardly the magic answer [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | October 20th, 2010 12:22am CST | 28 Comments
It’s a favorite refrain these days of voters outside Memphis: If only Memphis would quit electing incompetent elected officials, the members of the white flight brigade would be willing to vote for consolidation. Of course, it’s all rhetoric. There’s nothing that’s ever going to be good enough that these “county” voters won’t find some reason [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | September 30th, 2010 12:25am CST | 5 Comments
Caught in a brutal vise of too many kids, too little density and a broken tax structure, the people who head up local government here may not need to be mayors, but alchemists. There are so many troubling trends taking place in Memphis, and they converge by necessity in the budget hearings of our governments. [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | June 21st, 2010 12:31am CST | 31 Comments
Interim Mayor Joe Ford’s billboards say that he is the “People’s Voice” and that may indeed be the case judging from his apparent lack of basic information about government and public policy. Once upon a time, one of Memphis’s original characters, Cliff Tuck, ran Shelby County Intergovernmental Coordination Office. He was a policy wonk before [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | May 11th, 2010 4:11pm CST | 20 Comments
Remember the old political adage: Whenever someone tells you it’s not about sex, it always is. When they tell you that you shouldn’t take it personally, you should. When they tell you it’s not about money, you can bet it is. And when a Republican State Senator tells you that a bill isn’t about ethnic [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | March 11th, 2010 12:14am CST | 2 Comments
The grand experiment that began 32 years ago to reinvent Shelby County Government as an urban government is coming to a close. It began with such promise on a clear, unseasonably warm New Year’s Day in 1976 when Shelby County’s first mayor, Roy Nixon, took office and sent the clear message that he was intent [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | August 17th, 2009 11:30pm CST | Comments Off
Maybe we’re just the world’s slowest learners. Despite 20 years of tax freezes that have accomplished nothing so much as expanding a low-wage, low-skill economy, we fought the reform of the PILOT program and continue to define success by how much city and county taxes are given away. Despite the exodus of an average of [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | July 12th, 2009 11:10pm CST | Comments Off
Caught in a brutal vise of too many kids, too little density and a broken tax structure, the next people to head up local government here may not need to be mayors, but alchemists. There are so many troubling trends taking place in Memphis, and they converge by necessity in the budget hearings of our [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | May 26th, 2009 11:35pm CST | Comments Off
It’s tempting to dismiss Shelby County Commissioner Wyatt Bunker and his fundamentalist preacher friends as merely the latest incarnation of the flat earth society. Surely, it’s hard to identify a group in recent memory that has so cavalierly dismissed scientific evidence, that has so conveniently picked and chosen selective Bible verses, that has calculatedly misstated [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | May 18th, 2009 12:06am CST | Comments Off
Shelby County’s model “smart growth” road – Houston Levee between Wolf River and Macon Road – lives up to its advanced billing. The $7 million experiment sparked by Shelby County Engineer Mike Oakes’ commitment to smarter road design stands in stark contrast to county government’s long-time tendency to build too many lanes to fuel too [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | January 11th, 2009 8:05pm CST | Comments Off
Mike Ritz is a member of the Shelby County Board of Commissioners: The priorities for our County Commission in 2009 must be all about the challenges the national and local economy are imposing on our fiscal situation. In anticipation of some fiscal challenges, the County Commission for the current FY 2009 budget year froze compensation [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government, Taxation | January 3rd, 2009 10:56pm CST | Comments Off
Memphis City Council is right. Its members have proposed the end of city government’s funding of the Health Department. The logic is similar to the logical – and courageous – cut of $66 million in school funding: Shelby County Government, according to state law, is mandated to provide health services, and Memphis taxpayers are paying [...]
by Smart City Memphis (RSS) Shelby County government | November 30th, 2008 10:47pm CST | Comments Off
We get frustrated at times by the inescapable feeling that our city is trapped in a time warp. We are recycling old conversations, old charges and old complaints. But whenever we need perspective, we can simply say consolidation in front of the small town mayors of Shelby County and watch them respond in ways that [...]
by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →
Photograph by Amie Vanderford
Memphian Amie Vanderford is a photographer for peace and justice. Her portfolio includes photographs from Peru, Zimbabwe, Nepal, Indian, and her hometown.
