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- Infrastructure and Public Works in Memphis, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Robert Knecht, Director of Public Works for the City of Memphis.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Let's start with just some basics for folks 'cause I think when you say public works, you say infrastructure, people probably have a bunch of assumptions about what that includes and some of it does, some of it it does not.

So, real quickly, what is under Public Works for the City of Memphis?

- So I have three main departments.

We structure it by organization, by departments.

And so one of them is maintenance department, which covers all of our stormwater infrastructure, all of our roads and bridges, right away maintenance, street sweeping, those functions are kind of under that department.

Then I have neighborhood improvement, which is all the residential commercial code enforcement and environmental enforcement in Memphis City Beautiful.

And then I have all the wastewater, which is all the wastewater collection and treatment, which is actually, we serve more than the city of Memphis.

We serve 850,000 people with wastewater.

- In the suburbs and unincorporated- - And even Horn Lake.

- And Horn Lake, oh.

- Temporarily for another eight years.

- Okay.

And we'll talk through all that stuff.

But what it doesn't include, 'cause I imagine there are things that people will listen to and say, "Well, why didn't you ask 'em about trash collection?"

That's not under public works.

- It was up until about three, it's about four years ago.

I had it under as part of Public Works, yes.

- Doesn't include parks.

- No.

- Doesn't include MLGW, a separate division, a separate entity, really.

- They collect our stormwater fee and our sewer fees for us on the utility bill.

So we pay them for those services.

- Okay.

For the collection.

So people see that on their bill.

So they kind of merge those things together.

Office of Planning and Development, you must work closely with them, but that is actually a separate, Housing and Community Development, separate.

And is general services separate?

- Yes.

- It is?

General services includes, I know it's not under you, but just so, this is super wonky.

- It's facility maintenance and then the fleet, a lot of the fleet maintenance.

City engineering is another division of itself, but that's one of our biggest partner division.

- City engineering.

Okay.

Again, I just wanna lay that out so people understand kind of where you are and what you're doing, your spend, the things you spend comes from, I should say you're funded by what?

It's a mix of taxes, fees, there could be some state money, some federal money.

- All the above.

- Is that, all the above?

Most of my budget is fees based.

And I have two utilities.

I'm a utility director for, you know, a sewer system and a stormwater system.

But the general fund is the smallest piece, actually, of my budget.

My budget's $230 million annually.

And I have a $2 billion capital budget.

I have the biggest capital budget.

- Yeah, that's 2 billion a year?

- No, that's just planned.

- Planned out over a five to plus year horizon.

- Yeah.

It's gonna depend on how much money revenues you have.

- Okay, one more and then I'm gonna go to Bill, we'll get more into the kind of current issues, but one is, we're going into budget season just this week, and we're, I should note that we're holding this a week.

So we recorded this two weeks ago as you watch it, but Paul Young, your new boss, the mayor said there's at least a $30 million budget gap that came after a $10 million budget gap.

So I think it's a total of 40 so far that's been found.

That's the budget gap.

He's talking about a potential property tax increase.

Do you have any sense yet of how a tighter budget could impact the services you provide?

- By tighter, you mean no increase?

- No increase.

Or even, I mean... - Yeah, I mean, it's gonna mean severe reductions in some areas, you know, I mean, there's just, revenues have to meet your expenditures.

So I don't know what it would look like, but you know, if we don't have the $40 million, there's gonna be changes in the way, on operations.

- And would that be, again, given that the sewers and the kinda more utility things are paid for through fees, maybe that's less effective.

But things like paving roads, which your former boss, Jim Strickland, would talk very often about how much when he was out in the public, when he was at a community meeting, things that might seem simple or seem small like potholes and road paving are incredibly important to citizens.

Is that part of what could get impacted if there is not as much money to go around?

- Well, the fees obviously pay for the system.

So those will not be impacted.

It is the general funded items, you know, like street maintenance and code enforcement, which are the ones that would be the most difficult to work through given budget challenges.

And paving and roads and code enforcement, cutting grass, you know, maintaining properties.

Yeah, those are the ones that are funded by that.

- Yeah.

Bill?

- I wanted to also ask you about one of the capital projects, and that is the cobblestones.

And you've been involved in this along with a lot of engineering on Manny Belin, the city engineer's part.

You've both kind of been working together on that.

Where is that project at this point?

Because you had some real problems with the river being at record lows and that caused some damage beneath the stones.

- Yeah, actually the dredging that happened during the, you know, 'cause the Corp had to ensure, you know, river traffic, the capacity for river traffic.

So they got some emergency funding and during the low water they dredged up into the harbor and that caused severe subsidence.

And by subsidence we mean soil loss, erosion.

And so there was large sections of the cobblestones that had been completed, failed.

So what we're working with and this is a state and federal funding.

So TDOT, the State of Tennessee's involved, we recently approached them about doing a partial substantial completion because there are sections of it that are done.

So they want to complete, I guess recognize that's done and then we can then work to finalize and repair the area and the outfall that failed.

And so we got the funding in place.

The contractor is supposed to get started this summer and be done by the first of the year, by January of the next year.

- Right.

Because if you look at the cobblestone, there are some improvements that you can see that have been made.

There are some steps there.

You can kind of see what the plan is for it has started to take shape to some degree there.

And then this happened with the river and the dredging happened because of the low river and it kind of had a chain reaction effect on that.

- Well, the most, I think the most interesting thing that, not just the failure, but what happened that this is one of the unique things about these types of projects that people don't understand is, when we started the project, we found a lot more cobblestone that we didn't know about 'cause the river was low.

And that change in scope was pretty significant because there's all these guidelines that we have to follow, like we call SHIPO and NEPA.

These are just an acronyms for programs, that environmental programs or historic preservation programs, that we have to comply with.

And when you change the scope, you have to go back and get compliance for all that.

And those cause lots of delays to construction timelines, unforeseen challenges like that.

So this subsidence is just another example of a very long project and a very complicated project that's, people are gonna say, "It takes forever.

Why does it take so long?"

And that's some of the reasons, you know, you unforeseen issues pop up all the time.

- Right.

So people will see crews working on it sometime this summer, too.

- Yes.

- All right.

- We had to get approval from the state and get everybody on to agree.

We just couldn't start.

And once we change the scope, and as I mentioned, all that has to be signed off on.

So that's the bureaucratic process that takes on.

- Right.

Tonight as we record this show, I'm going to the first public hearing that TDOT is having on the new bridge, or I guess you could call it the replacement bridge for the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.

Is Public Works involved in that?

- We've been involved in the discussions, and because obviously, you know, there's a lot of issues will be in any time you do major construction, traffic, whatever, congestion, you know, any improvements that will affect local infrastructure and you know, they're always good partners with us and make sure, you know, City of Memphis Public Works and engineering are involved.

- Right.

Right.

The thing that I think a lot of people don't think about, but you think about a lot is this whole business of, what happens to wastewater when it goes someplace, a lot of the things that you cover, I think, are things that people may not think about until something goes wrong or something unexpected happens on it.

So where is the city's policy in terms of the decision made by Mayor Strickland to say we're not gonna take the wastewater from unincorporated areas, if we have an evergreen agreement, yes, we'll keep that in place.

Where is that decision at this point?

- So Mayor Young is evaluating the status.

You know, we had discussions about it.

The policy still is there.

We're not accepting any new connections.

Now, one of the confusions that that often come up are, but when we enacted the policy in 2008, there were quite a few properties out in these unincorporated areas, which were our future reserve, right?

That's the only reason why the sewer is out there.

The city was going to annex them.

So we quit annexing and de-annexing.

That changed that whole, you know, paradigm.

But we've connected 80, I think 79 or 80 new properties out there since that time because we had a legal requirement to do so.

So there have been quite a few that have connected.

If everybody thinks that none have, no, we legally have allowed it.

But the city policy still is there in place and the mayor's kind of reviewing it and making a decision for his administration to decide what direction they want to go.

But we are honoring all of our contractual agreements.

You know, we serve Bartlett, we serve, you know, we had served Lakeland, we kind of served too, but you know, Millington, Collierville, Germantown, you know, Collierville and Millington and Lakeland are coming off at some point.

But Germantown and Bartlett are gonna be longtime partners for us.

- Right.

Because this isn't something you can just stop on a dime.

It's, you know, plans have been made and the annexation law changed and now it's annexation by referendum.

But nevertheless, this still continued and in the process the city made some big improvements to the two wastewater treatment plants that you have.

And there's some new technology there that involves the treatment of the water, which affects the quality of what comes out of the plant.

And it's a higher quality now than it has been previously, right?

- Yeah.

We're, some of the biggest investments we're making, we're spending $325 million down at GE Maxim, which is our south wastewater treatment plant to modernize, improve.

And once all that's done, it'll be a huge improvement to our biological treatment capacity and improve the discharge or effluent.

And we did add parasitic acid, so we disinfect the wastewater before it gets discharged to the Mississippi River, both facilities the north and south.

We did that.

And that expense was a huge impact to our operating budget, you know, 'cause the chemical demand is like, went from, you know, five million dollars a year to twenty-two million dollars a year just for the disinfection alone.

So we're doing it, it's a good thing, but it comes at a pretty significant cost as well.

- Right.

Right.

- I was gonna get, stay with water for a second.

And the Biden administration, the federal government, came out with some rules around forever chemicals, you know, identified as chemicals that quote unquote "Never go away," that are dangerous in the water.

Will that be a challenge for you or is that a challenge for MLGW in the mix of entities here?

- Both.

- Both.

- PFAS has been one of the major discussion items.

- PFAS stands for what?

- Oh, it's-- - Sorry.

[Eric laughs] - It's Polyfluorinated, - But it's a forever chemical.

Its dangerous chemicals.

- They're long-chain fluorinated chemicals and they are used in firefighting foam.

They're used in lots of different applications and they are something that's come about that's got raised a lot of concerns for a lot of us, and in the wastewater industry particularly, and in drinking water because they're finding 'em working their way through, you know, agriculture and other ways.

And finally getting into, you know, maybe, they're not in MLGW, they're not in our aquifer, but you know, they're finding 'em throughout in the country and they are worried about the impacts of them.

So will we be impacted?

It's, there's still a lot of EPA, a lot of discussion going on because we're not the generator.

If you look at federal law, most of the responsibility to address chemicals are usually by what we call the generator.

- Which in our case would be MLGW.

- No, no, it'd be the chemical company or whoever makes the product.

- Oh, okay.

- The generator of the actual, of the material that was created, the cradle to grave, they call that, you know, that's the whole, like RICRA, they call that, is under the federal guidelines.

- I wanted to also go back to, I cut Bill off, but I'm gonna switch things up, and Bill might come back to some other things.

So apologies to Bill here, but paving, and I mentioned at the top of the show, it's one of the things we hear about, we see in comments, I hear about it from people.

The paving cycle was under Strickland.

He talked a lot about how he increased the amount of money, pretty dramatically, that was going into paving, shortening the paving cycle from, I think, was over 20 or 30 years or something like that, that a given street would be fully repaved down to...

It's a question, what is the schedule now for city of Memphis streets?

And then let's also talk about potholes, 'cause people have intense feelings about potholes.

But let's start with the paving cycle.

- Sure.

Yeah.

So Mayor Strickland was a very big proponent of paving.

So he, the budget that was allocated by his administration was as much as the prior 20 years.

So it had, you know, had struggled with funding, 'cause the city had a lot of financial challenges.

And that was one of the issues that, you know, how much funding do we have for capital?

And this is a question that people don't understand, you know, paving is a capitalized item.

CIP budget is not operating, potholes are operating.

But when you go to repaving, or resurfacing as we call it, that has to be funded through your CIP budget.

And paving has been the largest item.

Out of the $86 million budget, it was $20 million.

So 25% of the city's capital budget was going to paving.

And that really made a huge improvement to our infrastructure because we were, you know, at a 50-year, 60-year cycle, we got it down to a 25-year cycle, which is the industry standard.

So, - Is 20, 25?

- Twenty-five years, just in aggregate.

Now, not every city street we're talking about, major streets obviously have a heavier traffic would be A shorter cycle, but aggregate, we call it average.

So, I mean [coughs] I mean with those investments, we've made huge improvements in paving.

And I said the city's huge, 320 square miles, this is something people don't know.

We have 6,714 lane miles of roadway in our city.

Think about that.

That's back and forth from New York to California.

That's a lot of roads and that's a difficult amount of inventory to manage.

- And that does not include the state routes?

- No, the state routes are 900 miles.

- So the state routes kind of blow people's mind again, I mean it's wonky, but it's, people see Poplar and they think that's a city road, that's actually still a state road.

- We don't pave or fix potholes on these roads.

- Jackson, Union, you correct me if I'm wrong, Summer, Lamar, South 3rd, Crump, the Parkways.

A lot of downtown, actually some of the main roads downtown are actually state routes.

- Yeah, Danny Thomas.

- Danny Thomas.

So how does that work?

Do you just call TDOT and say, hey, please, please, please repave this street?

Or is it completely separate in terms of the decision making?

Is it all made up in Nashville at the Capitol?

- I mean, there is a good partnership, but they make all the decisions.

They have their own assessment criteria and programming for the county, Shelby County in this case, in which roadways they're gonna budget.

The interstates always get the highest priority because they're federal.

So they're gonna get, you know, special funding attention from the state, The major state routes, Poplar, you know, which is a huge heavily-used corridor, gets it's own fair share, Shelby Drive and others get, but they're not gonna get the same level of service that the state would give to-- - Am I right though that, that in the Strickland administration, some of those state routes, the city had historically done themselves, the city did it and then sent a bill to the state and kind of got back whatever reimbursement they got back.

Is that correct?

There was a change to the way the relationship worked.

- We used to maintain, help maintain the state routes and we were kind of helping the interstate cutting and all that.

We had taken a contract with the state to provide those to cover the state and yeah, we were subsidizing the state's services.

Now that, not paving or potholes, that was still them, but just the cutting and maintenance and litter pickup, we were subsidizing, you know, three hundred thosand dollars a year and the state never would agree to fully fund that, you know, and so we just said, hey, well you do it then because I mean, we have our own infrastructure that needs to be funded at the right level versus funding the state's responsibilities.

- And does it frustrate you if people are mad at city Public Works that, hey, there are these potholes on Poplar, on Lamar.

There's these problems, and your hands are tied.

- Yeah, I understand.

Totally understand that.

Everyone doesn't care, they just want it done.

And they're frustrated by if there's any, you know, more bureaucracy, government bureaucracy and you know, why can't you guys just do it?

You know, I mean it's just that there is, everybody has their own responsibilities and you know, I would prefer to give our citizens and what we own and we're responsible for the highest priority first.

- Yeah.

Bill?

- You've also been working for several years now on a registry for landlords and so the city can more easily identify who owns blighted properties and hold them responsible for repairs and making sure that they're someplace that people can actually live in without worrying about it, you know, coming down around them.

How has that been going?

- We could spend the whole session just talking about this subject because it's such an important one.

So, you know, living in substandard housing is deplorable.

We can all agree, right?

Families and children should not live in substandard housing.

And so, we often encounter it, you know, especially on rental properties, a lot of substandard conditions.

And so the best practice is to have a system in place to understand and know who all the owners of these types of properties are.

So you can interact with them efficiently.

And without the, like a registry-based system, which is the kind of the best practice you'll see all across the country by major cities.

You can't find the owners or their representative without going through extensive research.

And sometimes that research could take months, and all that time the situation is happening.

So the whole purpose of a registry is just, the biggest thing is timely responsiveness between the city and the actual owner.

And that's what we were trying to achieve.

And that's what we've been working on and we've struggled to even get anywhere with it because the state, you know, changed the law, preempted us, saying that we would have to get state approval to enact such legislation.

And we tried recently this last legislative session and weren't able to get it accomplished.

- Because you've encountered considerable resistance from rental property owners who you know, and as I understand it, you can oftentimes find the company that's managing the property, but that's not who is held legally responsible.

And once you get past the property manager, then it really gets difficult to find out who owns it or who owns a piece of it, who owns 32 pieces of it, et cetera, right?

- Well I would actually a little bit to the opposite of that, I think it's easy to find the ownership because under state statute and under the laws, you know, the registered person is usually available on the assessor or registers.

Transactionally, sometimes there's delays, but that's pretty accurate.

It's finding someone who's responsible for maintenance is the problem, 'cause you have these huge LLCs and these LLCs have been buying single-family properties in bulk, right?

They buy a huge transactional, a hundred and fifty at a time just because the portfolio of properties.

And then you know, who's maintaining it?

Because they're gonna be spread out.

So that's where the real trouble is having a local agent to communicate with.

That's where we struggle.

- And is it a, so let's say, you know, House Company, LLC owns these 50 properties.

You identify issues with those properties, you can figure out who the ownership is, but they then say back to you, what?

Like, too bad, we're in New York and we don't care.

I mean, how does that conversation go?

- So, great question.

And so if you, the data shows that rental properties generate three times the number of code violations over owner occupied, right?

So that's one issue.

Ownership LLCs don't necessarily wanna be bad owners.

So once you finally get somebody, they'll fix the issue.

They'll get involved, but it may, it just takes 90 days, 60 to 90 days to get it taken care of.

Someone to cut the grass.

So that whole, the neighbor right next door is looking at that grass growing and growing and why aren't you taking care of it?

Just the time to comply.

- And before we go back to Bill with a few minutes left here, if you do get ahold of 'em and they do refuse, I mean there's gotta be some owners out there that just say, "No, I'm not doing that.

I don't have the money, whatever."

What tools do you have to force their hand?

- There's two different routes depending on whether or not the property is occupied or if it's vacant.

If it's occupied, then we have to cite 'em to environmental court.

That is the only recourse.

If it's a vacant property and we worked to notify them, give 'em their time to comply and they don't do it, then we can cut it, we can assign a contractor to cut it and then bill them.

They don't pay the bill, we place a lien on the property.

- Okay, Bill?

- So what do you hear from legislators?

I mean, are you making a dent in this?

Are people seeing your point?

Where's it at with them?

- Well, I think that they just, no one sees bureaucracy as good in any shape or form.

That's the main pushback.

It's like, you know what, you guys are gonna make it hard.

You're gonna make it hard on the good landlords, we'll call it as good landlords, quote unquote.

And you know, they're gonna be penalized 'cause they're the local guys doing the job and you're gonna make it impossible for them or you're gonna make it more expensive for them or harder for them.

And I can understand that they think that we're inefficient.

We're gonna, we're bureaucratic and it's gonna be complicated.

But I say that it's not, you know, with technology, we have made so many improvements to the complexities and make it efficient so that it's easy.

Relatively, we had so many ways that we're gonna, you know, minimize this and mean make it more, you know, I think acceptable.

But we did so much in stakeholder engagement throughout this.

It wasn't like we just came up with this idea, we're gonna go with it.

I spent two years engaging with local stakeholders 'cause the program that we started with changed dramatically based on their inputs because I understood that they were like, oh my gosh, you're, you know, you're gonna make it impossible for me.

- Right, right.

You also have a blight task force or a strike team I think for several years now you've had that in place, maybe one or two years.

How has that worked out?

And we should point out that the strike team is kind of a more general form of blight than just a rental property that's not in good condition, right?

This is used tires, those kind of things.

- Yeah, illegal dumping is the huge challenge.

It's grown quite a bit.

It really exploded like 300% during the pandemic.

And people were just probably sitting home, didn't know.

They don't have to look at this stuff.

So yeah, I created Environmental Enforcement who is the main group.

We added an illegal dumping component with this last budget to really add more resources so they could handle all of it 'cause it used to be a multi-divisional, multi-agency response.

So we have covert cameras, we have a whole team that do nothing but tackle illegal dumping and used tires are a plague.

I don't even know where they all come from.

It's amazing.

- We will, we're out of time.

We'll leave it on that.

I forgot to ask you about how people report potholes.

We'll talk about that in the podcast on radio-- - 3-1-1.

- Because it's 3-1-1 and they can report potholes, and you guys will go fix them.

Robert Knecht, thanks very much for being here.

We're outta time.

Thank you, Bill.

If you missed any of the show, you can go to WKNO.org or The Daily Memphian site, or search for us on YouTube and get the full episode.

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

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