- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- A look at growth and development in Millington, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes of The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Chris Thomas.

He's executive director for the Millington Chamber of Commerce.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

Good to be here.

- Along with Frankie Dakin, city manager for the City of Millington.

Thanks for being here.

- Good to be back.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

- And Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

It, I sort of realized in the pages of The Daily Memphian, such as they are pages, the webpages of The Daily Memphian, that there were all kinds of little interesting things and then bigger interesting things happening up in Millington.

And so, we'd been working to get you all on the show.

Given everything with the federal intervention and so on, this show is gonna sit for a week, so if anything happens, we'll talk about the Wanda Halbert County Clerk issue.

So, but just know that the show is waiting a week here.

But what, I'll start with you Frankie, and then we'll go to Chris.

What's the thing that people don't understand, most don't understand about Millington?

- Oh, yeah, so that's a really great question.

I think people are picking up on the message that we are an engine of growth for Shelby County and West Tennessee.

And that's something we're really proud of.

I think one misconception that I hear out in the community is that the Navy base left in the late '90s and we're still fighting that.

And so that Navy base has between 6,500 and 7,500 employees any given day.

It's one of the largest employers in our area and one of the largest employers in the state of Tennessee.

What's different about that employer is they're constantly bringing new folks in, and folks are retiring from that base.

So every year, a couple hundred people retire from that base with some of the best leadership development in the world, twenty years of service in the United States military.

Those are folks that could stay right here in Shelby County in Millington.

Our growth primarily is because they are choosing to stay in our community, and that is really a huge driver of our growth, not only because of the neighborhoods that are being filled up, but because of the workforce aspect there.

You know, when you talk to the economic development folks, workforce is number one, and if you can hire somebody 38, 42, after 20 years of service in the United States military, you're getting an excellent employee that's gonna really devote their time to your cause.

- Well, one alum is Doug McGowen, right?

- That's right.

- The head of MLGW, former CAO, COO for the city.

A friend of the show.

Chris, from your point of view, you've worked in government in all kinds of places, we were joking before the show, you've been school board, you've been, you were in Lakeland for a minute, you were in lots of different roles, County Commission.

What do people not understand about Millington that they should?

- Well, for years, Millington unfortunately had a bad reputation as far as all the municipalities.

But what has happened that in the last probably 10 years, especially the last five years, people don't understand that it is a very safe city.

It's very family oriented and that we, the growth that we are having, the businesses that we are having are, we're built, we are built for it as far as going forward with families and the education system.

And Frankie can talk more about that, but really, people just don't realize what a great community it is because of the bad reputation in the past.

And now with the new leadership and the leadership before we got here has started planning.

And so, like I said, we are built for it as far as the preparation for growth down the future.

And I'm just excited and so many people in the community are contacting me about the excitement and asking, "What's going on in Millington?"

- Yeah, yeah.

Let me bring in Bill.

- One of the other factors too is that Millington is probably more than a little different demographically and otherwise from the other five suburban towns and cities.

Talk a little bit about that and the town's background, because you also have a mix of bedroom community and a mix of small town business or smaller town business and retail.

- Sure, so we have over a 100-year history with the United States military.

So less than a decade after first flight, we were training pilots for World War I. And so Millington, because of that history and legacy with the military, our proximity to the wonderful city of Memphis and then the convergence of rural West Tennessee really looks a lot like America.

And that diversity is our strength.

And so what you've seen is, you've seen really leaders across the board that look different, that look like the community that they represent.

And that's been a really strong part of our growth and our good leadership over the time period that, you know, Chris is, you know, discussing.

- Chris, I know you know you as an elected official, but often retail or business or commercial development and residential development, that's not always an easy mix, is it?

- Well, no, and one thing just, the city's doing a great job about handling controlled growth.

I think that's something Frankie and I have talked about and he can talk to more though, is people do talk about not wanting to grow too fast.

And that's something I dealt with in Lakeland, being a smaller community and they started to grow, but now Millington is growing so much, but no, it's not.

But we are growing and we are getting good feedback from our residents of the thing, the businesses that are coming into there, such as the Target, Academy Sports and so many other things.

But no, it's not an easy thing, but if you explain, communication to your residence is key.

And that's why we're both big into social media and getting the word out about what's going on in our community.

And people are actually, the majority of the people are excited about that.

And so I think that, man, the future's bright for Millington and that's why everything's like, happening now.

People are so excited about it with all the things we got going on.

- Is it a little bit easier to do that mix, to talk about that mix when you have a Highway 51 that runs through your community?

Because I would think people would expect, it's a US highway, there's gonna be commercial development along there.

- Yeah, because I think the number of cars that come through daily is like 31,000.

I mean, and I meet people all the time that are from up north of Millington and those other counties and then they actually come up through from Memphis.

But coming up through that highway, you would expect that.

And one thing that's happening in Millington right now is the growth is up in the north part of 51 and something that I'm doing with the Chamber, is I'm starting a South Millington campaign to where I wanna remind people that all those businesses on Navy Road and South, US 51 South in that area, that were there during the hard times, that they are still there.

We've got a lot of locally owned businesses that are there and I wanna help rejuvenate that.

And going, you mentioned the naval base, and I'll go back to that real quick, is I, we both, he's got a background with the naval base, but I built a relationship with them to where we get a chance to go speak to their orientation classes and talk about what's going on in the city and that the Chamber's there for them to come and go to our website and find out like, what businesses are there.

'Cause so many people that are moving to Millington, they only look for national chains.

And so we wanted to know that we are, we've got a lot of locally owned businesses there, small businesses that are just ready for the people to come.

And it's like I said, there's just a lot of exciting growth now.

- Right, and the Navy Road corridor, if I can call it that, that was, that relied heavily on the naval base when it was an air station.

And we should point out, it's now the Bureau of Personnel for the US Navy.

So a different mission there, but the same flow of people through there, right?

- That's right.

You know, so we want to make it our goal to be the number one place in the country for veterans to retire.

You know, the Bureau of Personnel that you mentioned is essentially the HR function of the United States Navy.

So in addition to the folks that we have coming in, really two profiles, you know, one is they're on their second to last tour and the other is they're on their last tour.

And then there's another group that comes in quite often that is from all around the world.

And so we have an opportunity to put our very best foot forward as a place where veterans would like to retire.

And so we think we're doing a really good job of that.

You know, now we expect we'll probably have veterans from San Diego, Pensacola and so forth coming to look here at Millington, Tennessee because of our low tax environment.

The other thing I'll mention to you, Bill, is that we have the lowest tax rate among cities in Shelby County that actually maintain a police department.

And so, Chris hit on public safety earlier.

We can't stress that enough that our growth and what the success we're seeing in our community, it starts and ends with public safety.

And so by having a local police department that we can layer on top of the efforts of Shelby County Sheriff's Office and all of the other partners that we utilize, we've been able to see crime drop of course.

And we're gonna make sure that we have a safe retail environment for folks to come and shop and, you know, and do business in Millington.

The other thing, we can get really laser focused on issues that matter to our residents.

This past year we started a traffic enforcement division and tickets are up almost, we're writing almost twice as many tickets, which I might hear about that from a constituent or two from time.

But that doesn't matter to me.

In fact, I haven't even taken a look at the revenue from that.

What matters is our crashes are down 50%.

And so, during a period of tremendous growth, because of a really, you know, approach that was narrowly tailored to our community, we saw crashes go down and traffic get better.

- Well, it might, I think the change also probably has changed your housing development, your home building.

- Yes, sir.

- Because when it was training fighter pilots, these were younger military families who were here who were kind of renting a very small house, you know, because they knew they were going in about two years someplace else.

These are folks who are, as you said, near the end of their tour.

- That's right.

And Bill, you really hit the nail on the head.

So that really, the base change sent shockwaves through our economy, that lasted for well over a decade, really.

And how do we respond to that?

You're right.

The housing types, the businesses were all focused on serving 40,000 to 50,000 sailors coming through there every year.

And so that is a shock to go to 6,500 to 7,500 employees at the same time, that means we had the infrastructure to accommodate a population that size.

And what you've seen over the last 10 years, we haven't just been waiting on things to come our way.

We've been systematically updating that infrastructure and now today, we have the utility infrastructure and soon at the completion of our school's master plan over the next three years we'll have the school classroom capacity to more than double in population without any significant new investments.

And I don't think there's a city in the state of Tennessee that can make that claim.

- With 15 minutes here or so left in show.

I wanted to circle back to a bunch of things you just talked about.

And again, as we record this, it's a week, we've held the show for a week.

You mentioned law enforcement, hard not to kind of touch on the Memphis Safe Task Force that includes all kinds of elements, including Tennessee Highway Patrol, including TBI.

Are you all seeing any kind of impact at this point from any of those surge of resources?

- Yeah, so we've made ourselves available to leadership, to our local leadership, Sheriff Bonner and members of this task force to say, how can we help?

And so one thing we've done recently is we've made jail space available at our jail and we have about 18 units, I believe, at our jail.

And what it allowed Sheriff Bonner to do is he's gonna be able to move a population of that jail that is taking up currently a 65-bed unit from Jail East into an 18-unit.

And we offered that space for the high price of $100 a year.

And so what we're trying to do is support that effort and support our law enforcement partners in that and all of our locally elected leaders.

In terms of effect, we had lots of conversations with neighboring jurisdictions and so forth outside of Washington, DC and, you know, and the rest.

And we haven't seen any crime bleed over or anything like that.

I think that was some concern, but we are in part, in conversation with partners that have dealt with that.

- And any of those law enforcement members, be it state or or federal doing actions or interventions or looking for people in Millington, any of that kind of stuff that you're aware of?

- No, no, no.

And you know, but that doesn't mean that there won't be an action of the Memphis Safe Task Force in our community.

If there's a bad guy on the street and we want these federal agencies to get that bad guy off the street.

What we see is our role is making sure that as Shelby County residents, we have the infrastructure to support.

And everybody would agree, 201 Poplar was out in the brink of a human rights disaster before this, now I think it's fair to say we are in a human rights disaster.

- And you know what you speak, talk about the last time you were on the show and your role, I believe prior to this was with county government and you worked among other things in that sort of space, correct?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

- Talk about what you did.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And so, I really focused a lot on our mental health reform work.

And so I think last time I was on this program we were talking about a whole host of what things that our community is doing to divert people with severe mental health issues away from the justice system.

And so these are people with nonviolent misdemeanors that fill up our jail, that should not be in a jail environment.

And so, I, as a Shelby County resident am very nervous about what that looks like as we continue, if this operation is successful and we want them to be successful in getting bad guys off the street, what that will look like for nonviolent misdemeanors in that environment.

- You mentioned, and I'm with apologies to Chris 'cause we'll come back to Chris here in a second.

You mentioned $100 rent, which brings up a feud, a fight, an argument.

I'm not sure what disagreement with the county clerk, Wanda Halbert.

There is, and let me see if I understand this.

And I've read all our stories and I'm not sure I totally understand.

That there is an Office of the County Clerk in Millington that does the work of, you know, tags, I assume licenses, marriage licenses, the stuff, you know, it's one of the satellite offices.

Millington said, "Hey, we haven't been paid, "we're owed around $40,000.

"There was an agreement that County Commission agreed to "that the clerk would have a satellite office here "and would pay us money.

None of that money has been paid."

Wanda Halbert has said, "We never had a lease."

- Yes.

I think you hit the nail on the head, Eric.

I think it is a simple issue.

I think a lot of issues people and you know, and folks in the media and we appreciate it, try to cover both sides of an issue.

However, I think your watchers and your listeners and your readers would agree, that when you're in a space and rent has been requested and everybody agrees that rent should be paid, that you should pay rent to be in that space.

And so, while Clerk Halbert has tried to dangle shiny objects in front of people, the Commission unanimously passed a lease and she has ignored that lease.

- And it's a signed lease?

- So yes, we signed it back in 2023 I believe.

So prior to this issue, prior to the Commission taking an extreme action in approving a lease, you know, for her, because she refused to negotiate, the City of Millington, before I was there, tried to get a lease for a long time.

And one shiny object she constantly dangles out there is that the City of Millington provided that space for free for many years.

That is true.

I think your viewers can agree that things changed in the early 2020's when in terms of operations of that Clerk's Office.

The operation of that Clerk's Office has put additional stress and strain on our building where it is located.

And all we've asked is a very reasonable rent, a rent that Clerk Halbert's office would not be able to get off- - Couple thousand a month.

- Yeah, it's $1,600 a month.

I believe there's a premium now because they are over their lease.

And so we're now on a month to month basis.

- Alright.

Is this going to litigation?

Is that where we're headed?

- Hopefully not, hopefully not.

You know, and I know this is a week later and anything's possible, but I doubt we're gonna get the check in the mail.

- Okay.

- But Commissioner Wright's trying to work on a legislative solution.

- Let me get Chris back in here.

Thank you.

Yeah, let me get Chris back in here and we'll be writing about this in The Daily Memphian, and getting responses from Clark Halbert.

So just to give everybody a fair hearing here, but let's get back to development.

You talked about controlled growth, you talked about, I mean what, without naming names or pointing fingers at any community, what kind of growth is bad?

What would you want to avoid?

- Well, definitely won't name a community because- - Yeah, no, no, no.

It's everywhere.

There's no, I mean, no, but you drive around the country, you get to a community that I would, you know, people think, ugh, whoa, that didn't go right.

- If you grow so fast that you don't have the infrastructure there or the police force there, so that's a community that we would not want to have because then you can't take care of the roads, you can't take care of the crime issue.

Because yes, you have a lot more people coming to that area.

So those are two of the big things.

But then also just, you get to where you have so many, you can outgrow your other, your competition.

And that's something that people have, residents have talked about.

They said, "Well if we get all these, you know, restaurants up here, what's gonna happen to these others?"

And I'm like, well I'm for competition, but it's a matter.

And we've got a great planning department with the city that is looking at every, every aspect of growth.

And so I think that basically, we just don't want to go to where our roads can't handle it, our sewer can't handle it.

And I know we talked about we've got the infrastructure, but that would be a bad situation for a city to grow that fast.

- Now this will sound like really wonky stuff, but it is Friday at seven o'clock, so this is, and you're home watching this, but sewers, it is striking to me every time it comes up in development and some of the legacy issues of county growth and annexation, the fight between, you know, some of the suburbs and the city about sewers.

I mean, it's a huge, huge issue.

What is Millington's sewer situation?

Where, do you guys have your own sewer system?

Is it a partnership or a contract with the city?

What is it?

- We've got our own water and sewer departments.

And with lots of capacity to grow.

And so, that's where he's talking about, we already have the utility capacity for growth.

- Yeah.

- And our real focus is how do we leverage that growth to solve the challenges of residents today?

And I believe you can do that with smart controlled growth.

- Okay, your electricity and gas comes from?

- MLGW.

- It is MLGW.

- Yes, yeah, that's right.

That's right.

- Let me bring back Bill back in.

- And yet, more wonkiness.

- Yeah, I love the wonky.

Let's do it.

And I appreciate the viewers that are watching this at seven o'clock on a Friday.

- Let's talk about TIF districts, tax increment financing.

I believe Millington had the first one of those in Shelby County.

How instrumental has that been in the growth you've been able to see?

- And define a TIF, relative to other tax incentives?

- Yeah, yeah.

You know, essentially, you know, a TIF is using the private investment dollars to put in public infrastructure.

Essentially, that is what happens.

And so yes, we were the first and we're very proud of that.

A lot of the development you see on the north side of our town is due to TIFs.

And so, there's a lot of different ways to do TIFs.

Our TIFs have been pretty much on vacant land with an area that has existing utilities.

- A really tight district.

- That's correct.

That's correct.

And so the one TIF I would point you in the direction of is Millington Farms, you know, right now, and so when I talk about solving problems with the residents of the day, this TIF built a road, a road that connects Veterans Parkway to Highway 51, which reduces traffic along a thoroughfare where we have our school and all the rest.

And so that is a good thing.

By growing, we're actually reducing traffic.

And I believe that TIF, you know, is gonna, it's about a hundred million dollars project and others have wrote about it, Memphis Business Journal and others.

I believe our infrastructure from that will be at least $15 million, you know, of public infrastructure that's paid by private dollars through that TIF.

- So Chris, when you're out there talking to prospects, do they say, what's the TIF?

What's the PILOT?

I mean, do you see- - No, I mean, I haven't heard that.

Most of our development or trying to go out and grow our economic development is supposed to be run through our industrial development board.

However, I still am always looking for businesses and trying to talk to people about coming to Millington.

And that's one thing I wanna say right now while I've got a minute here before we end up, is if you're a business looking to grow and you want to grow into a stable, safe community, Millington is built for that.

We are in a great position to help your business grow.

I've been talking to people about that.

They're looking at other locations and so, I don't get asked about the TIF and PILOT.

I know about 'em because of being on the County Commission and like Frankie was talking about the big one up in Millington.

But certainly, any business that wants to have families, we are a younger population, but a lot of people think Millington is the oldest city in the county and we're not.

And that's one thing that I've been noticing as I've been up there more, obviously, I've been in the job since February, is that we're getting more and more younger people and the families and the schools.

That's why we're having to build schools.

And so, it's like I said, it's an exciting time but people are just wondering what is happening?

Why is everybody looking at Millington right now as a place to start their business or move their family, and we're ready for it.

- With a couple minutes left, you both mentioned schools and we mentioned you were on County Commission and was it, which school board were you on?

- I was on Memphis City School in the early '90s.

- Early '90s.

Okay, and so people kind of forget, none of us at the table do, but there was Memphis City Schools and there was one suburban district including, you know, Bartlett, Arlington, Germantown, Collierville, Millington, I'm sure I forgot somebody, I apologize.

It consolidated, there was a forced consolidation with the city schools and then a breakup that really wasn't backed.

At the time, it kind of felt like it was going back to the status quo.

So the city would have its own school system, the suburbs would have its own.

But actually there were the separate school districts.

Ten or more years later, how do each of you look at, and I can't remember when you were in aldermen relative to all this.

- I ran for election the same time they were voting on municipal schools.

- Okay, well I'll start with you.

- Yeah.

- Has it gone the way you wanted or expected just for Millington?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think that what it has allowed and what I would encourage all folks to do is the closer you can get decision making to the people, the better the system is gonna be.

And so that system was way too large and there's arguments that could be made right now that MSCS is way too large and that is one reason why that bureaucracy doesn't function as well as we would like to see it.

In Millington, we shrunk that and our decision making is a lot closer to the people.

That means we can address needs of our residents that are unique, that are not like Collierville needs, Germantown needs, or city of Memphis needs.

A good example of this bill and one issue that hasn't been covered is we opened an early learning academy this year.

So this, I believe is the first freestanding public pre-K in the state of Tennessee.

We support working families, we support military families.

Having a public pre-K and really diving into that means a lot to our community.

And I don't believe we could have landed the first early learning academy, first public pre-K in the state of Tennessee if we were under a system that does not look at our needs.

- Yeah.

Thoughts?

- I'll, real quick, I'll just say, I was on the County Commission when all of this happened and all the process of starting new system and all that and they had the joint system, two superintendents and we didn't know what was going to happen with this.

It was crazy.

Bill was there for that too.

But no, as a commissioner that voted to help create municipal schools, I now look at each municipality and how the population growth, the property tax increase and the property tax values, excuse me.

People were telling me, "Oh my god, my property taxes are gonna be bad and all of this."

I'm like, but their appraisals have grown and it's unfortunate with the leadership, what's going on in Shelby County Schools is what it's called now.

That we can't get a better handle on the education of that school system.

But the municipalities, from what I've seen, especially Millington, doing a great job out there.

- And you all compete with the other suburbs, I think that gets lost.

Because that didn't happen as much when it was one suburban school district.

- You know, I think competition's a strong word.

I think they share resources.

I mean there might be some healthy competition, but one thing that's special about Shelby County is each of our municipalities are different.

And that's important, you know, and that's unique to counties across the state of Tennessee.

So, Lakeland is way different from Millington.

I don't think we're directly competing with Lakeland.

- Right.

Yeah, exactly.

- We wanna support each other.

- Alright, we will leave it there.

Thank you very much for being here.

Again, we taped this a week ago, so there may have been some developments with Wanda Halbert that we didn't get to, but watch Daily Memphian for that.

Thank you Bill.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode online at wkno.org, YouTube or The Daily Memphian.

Recent shows have include folks from Just City and Stand for Children talking about the law enforcement.

We had Mayor Paul Young, we had some county commissioners, and we'll have more shows on the Memphis Safe Task Force federal intervention coming up soon.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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