Author: Smart City Memphis

The Tennessee Legislature is flirting with the idea of toll roads to fill the gap in road funding.We cast our vote for Highway 385.It’s the most expensive gift ever given in this county to developers and to sprawl, and it’s time...

Finally, a City Council member suggested the obvious: tenants for Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium should help pay for the $7.6 million in upgrades that they will benefit from.Savvy Council member Jim Strickland, after listening to...

Some opponents of the Beale Street Landing project – which is vitally needed to reinvigorate a riverfront ready for embalming – have recently taken to asking how Memphis City Council can justify spending $29 million on the...

We’d feel better about our public tax money being funneled to a private college – Lemoyne-Owen College – if we were getting some signals that it’s making the kinds of strides that will set it on a new financial and...

After working about a year to get former National Endowment for the Arts director of design Jeff Speck to Memphis, we were unfortunately unable to attend his presentation last week.More unfortunate was the fact that his...

This week on Smart City, the wave of foreclosures hitting many American cities are challenging many communities to wonder, “What’s next?” Can these neighborhoods be revived? And if so, what will it take? Those are questions...

Perhaps, the tepid pool of candidates for superintendent of Memphis City Schools is a result of the “Herenton Factor.”Surely, there’s no question that Memphis Mayor Willie W. Herenton’s highly publicized on-again, off-again...

Memphis Mayor Willie W. Herenton proved again that there’s just no substitute for the city’s biggest megaphone.In his 45-minute presentation to Memphis City Council today about the state of Memphis City Schools, he repeated his...

A few months ago, we were asked to name a great Memphian. We named Thomas Boggs.Few words are as carelessly used today as the word, great. And yet, there’s no other word to describe Thomas, and his death leaves a gaping hole in...

My daughter died Friday. Those are the hardest four words I have uttered in my whole life. Emily Jones Shrader was 32 years old and died at 7:40 Friday morning seven weeks after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor....