- (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.

- Mayor Young's administration, Governor Lee's education agenda, and much more tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by a roundtable of journalists talking about some of the biggest stories of the week.

First up is Toby Sells, news editor, the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you for having me, sir.

- Julia Baker covers criminal justice for us at the Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

- Laura Testino is an education reporter at Chalkbeat.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with the Daily Memhpian.

I'll start with you, Bill.

The beginning of the appointments and the shape of the new Paul Young Administration was on full display at City Council this past week with a lot going on.

What is there, some 16 positions that ultimately-- - Seventeen.

- Seventeen, thank you.

Seventeen positions that ultimately have to go through Council and be appointed and approved.

Three were, we can talk about that, but some of the biggest news was really around Chief CJ Davis, the police director, and whether or not she is going to get that job with the Council, Paul Young would like to keep her.

The Council has mixed feelings.

Tell us about that.

- The Council has very mixed feelings on this.

The Council took what amounted to a test vote.

I won't go through the specifics of the committee process, but this is a non-binding vote by the Council in a committee session.

So there I went through some of the detail, [everyone laughs] but at any rate, you had six votes supporting reappointing Davis as the Police Chief.

You had seven votes, seven no votes against reappointing her as the Police Chief.

And this came after I think about an hour of back and forth between Davis and the City Council.

And even those who voted to support her in this test vote were pretty critical of how she conducted herself and came to the Council and explained what she wants to do for the next four years.

And some of that revolves around questions of honesty, whether Davis is telling the Council the truth or not.

Some of it deals with the city's crime problem and deficiencies that the Council sees and how the police have dealt with that.

Parts of it also dealt with a basic difference on what happened after the Council passed this ordinance that requests that the police department not do minor traffic violation stops, Strickland saying he didn't sign it and that the city did not enforce it.

Davis said yes, we enforced it.

- We're gonna walk through that.

But before we go, and I'll get Julia on to talk about pretextual, all that kinda stuff.

But briefly, Tannera Gibson was appointed as the new City Attorney Chief Legal Officer.

Gina Sweat was reappointed as the Fire Director and Eric Keane as Information Services Director.

Those three did get done.

And then they will look at the rest of the appointments two weeks from now?

- Yes, two weeks from now at the January 23rd Council meeting, the rest of them are on the agenda along with Chief Davis's appointment.

The three who were approved despite Council Chairman JB Smiley saying there would be no same night minutes or immediate approval, the Council went ahead and did that.

I think it was some of the give and take that the Council had this galvanizing moment with Chief Davis.

So I think the Council kind of decided we'll give the administration these three because they can get to work immediately.

- Let me bring you in Julia.

Sadly in the past week, the one year anniversary of the death of Tyre Nichols and all the ramifications and you and others at Daily Memphian did a really great series looking at how things have changed, looking back, not just at the tragedy of it, but also the long history of MPD and changes that have come about.

And one that Bill just talked about that is very unclear and very confusing is, I'm gonna see if I can get this right.

In the aftermath of Tyre Nichols, the City Council voted to end pretextual stops by MPD.

That would be, hey, this car has a missing taillight.

But really we're pulling him over because we think something else might be going on.

There might be a gun in there, might be some sort of nefarious behavior.

Other things like that.

That's, broadly speaking, pretextual stops.

And it's how Tyre Nichols was stopped.

They claimed he was driving erratically and so on.

Strickland came out, former Mayor Strickland came out, and I think the letter was first in MLK 50, a local publication here saying yeah, MPD never enforced that.

I never signed it.

Then Chief Davis came out and said no no no, we have been following the ordinances that the city passed.

Others have said those ordinances are non-binding because it's state law that defines when they can pull people over and so on.

What in the world is going on, and can you even make sense of this, and you cover this full time?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

I'm not really sure that anybody knows what's going on other than probably the police department because like you said, there is state law that has a lot of those same mandates that city ordinance does.

Like missing taillights, missing bumpers.

And there's a question as to whether the police department can enforce these city ordinances, the same things with bumpers and missing taillights.

I talked to one officer who said, well, I mean we have state code, so there's not really anything holding us to that.

So it's kind of unclear, but I guess time will tell.

- We'll stay with crime and public safety and criminal justice.

This week, the business leaders in Memphis, from FedEx, from AutoZone, from other big corporations and smaller corporations, sent a letter to leadership at the state legislature.

The legislature has just gone into session.

They sent it to the Speaker of the House, the head of the Senate, and Governor Bill Lee calling for a whole lot of intervention among the part of the state.

Tougher sentencing laws, tougher laws coming down from the state, $50 million for security and a tourism zone, other things.

I don't know if Toby, you want to come in on that with the legislature going into session, that letter coming out, being made public, we'll also get in some education policy with Laura here, but legislature's in session and crime is gonna be heavy on their minds at least as far as Memphis and the Shelby County delegation is concerned.

- And crime in Shelby County has been on the minds of Tennessee legislators even as they were leaving last year.

And there's been other things that they've wanted to do here around DA Steve Mulroy and some of those things that have been promised.

We'll see what happens in this session of the legislature.

But all of that, I think there is a feeling out there that crime is as bad as it's ever been in Memphis.

We just had a big record for homicides.

And people are talking about, it's on people's mind.

Richard Smith talking about it to the Chamber folks, it is top of mind right now.

And I think all of those things, the DOJ investigation came to bear during the Council meeting on Tuesday looking at Chief Davis there.

And Bill, you captured it really well with that interaction between Jerry Green, the councilwoman, and Chief Davis that couldn't even get together on how long they had talked before previously, so there's a lot of mistrust, a lot of doubt there about Davis's performance here.

But a quick question, Bill.

If two weeks from now, if they can't get the votes for Chief Davis and she's not confirmed, what happens?

- If she is voted down, then what happens is the mayor comes up with another nominee for Police Chief.

It's happened before.

It doesn't happen very often because the Council's philosophy tends to be give the mayor who the mayor wants to work with.

That's what makes Davis's, how she fared in this committee session so remarkable.

This does not normally happen with a new administration.

- Let's stay with the legislature.

We're bouncing around a little bit today and bring you and Laura, you cover education for Chalkbeat, which we publish Chalkbeat stories and your stories as well, which we enjoy doing.

But people can also go to chalkbeat.org and get those stories.

The new legislature, education is on the agenda.

We could talk about vouchers, we could talk about maybe the outcomes of the grades that came out recently of schools across the state, but specifically Shelby County and the surrounding area.

And there's this proposal which we don't have to get deeply into, but some senators, Republican senators have talked about rejecting all federal money, some billion dollars a year that comes from the federal money through the state to local schools.

So obviously a lot going on.

- Everyone is very much anxiously awaiting this voucher proposal bill to actually be filed for lawmakers to consider when they are now convened and there's still no bill language.

But as Governor Lee has described the proposal vouchers, which are currently in what was supposed to begin as a pilot proposal that squeaked through the legislature through the House in 2019 specifically.

And what we can all remember is a very controversial vote April 2019 that now has that voucher program existing in Shelby County, Davidson County, and then most recently in Hamilton County.

We know from that program so far, it has space for 5,000 students.

It's under-enrolled with 2,000 students taking advantage of the program now.

But the expansion would be massive.

It would eventually, under the proposal within the next couple of years, open vouchers up to 20,000 different students and families across the state.

So expanding to all counties.

That means that potentially schools in other counties also would be able to accept students on vouchers.

It would expand income eligibility requirements, which up until now are fairly typical of these programs in other states, though not always.

And it also would expand eligibility for the schools that would be able to be accepting students, allowing also then homeschools to accept students.

So you would be able to take a voucher to do homeschooling.

- Let me ask you a couple questions.

The voucher, do we know what the value of the voucher is?

What's been proposed?

- So it would be around $7,000.

But there are several details about this proposal that are so far very unclear still.

The governor came to Memphis and also later visited Chattanooga at the end of the last year to sort of talk about this program, drum up support.

He visited a private school in Frayser that has some students there with ESAs.

- Education savings account.

Is that correct?

- It's fairly interchangeable with voucher, but there's still not a lot of details about how this would specifically work, which is why we're waiting for that bill language.

- And it's an income-based program, right?

Certain thresholds, not everyone can just qualify.

Every family is qualified to get a voucher.

Do we know what that income threshold is?

- Correct for now, it's based off of a poverty and free and reduced lunch qualifications as set by federal guidelines now.

But that's what would expand and change as proposed by the governor in future years and is expected to be included in this bill language.

- We'll come back to some of the other education things I talked about.

I'm gonna go back to you, Toby, with the legislature going in session last year as Laura talked about, there were some controversial votes, there was a lot of drama.

There was the whole special session in the summer.

There was suddenly Justin Pearson from Shelby County becoming a national figure, whether he was vilified or he was celebrated.

We're in session.

It's kind of more the ceremonial part, right?

We're not really in the heart of it yet, but what are your expectations and what is the supermajority Republican House and Senate already doing, if anything as we get underway?

- Pretty much business as usual on the Senate side as far as I can tell, on the house side however, Cameron Sexton, the Speaker of the House over there has issued new rules for this session that really look like the rules from the special session that was in August.

And folks are critical of it saying it's trying to clamp down on public access and also the ability for members to speak.

There's two big proposals there, not proposals.

They're rules that came from his office.

The first one would limit public access to the galleries in the House.

So on the two wings there, there's about room for 240 people.

We know during the gun violence debates there, those were large crowds showed up, sometimes raucous yelling down at the lawmakers as they were doing their business.

He's curtailed that down to 99 people each day that can go there.

And one of the big hiccups or hangups on it is that the 99 people would be selected by the members of the House themselves.

So these tickets would be issued to the members and then they could then issue them to whoever they want to.

And there's inherent problems there of course, who gets the tickets first?

Do the GOP members get them?

Does everyone get them at the same time?

Can the GOP load the galleries with their people to keep things quiet?

Those are the questions as they're going through.

The second one is debate on the floor.

We did see Justin Pearson talk a lot, actually, a report that just came out this week showed that he talked more than anybody in the House or the Senate last year, nearly three hours he spoke, well, nearly four hours actually he spoke on the floor.

- Over time.

- That's right.

- Not all at once.

- That's right.

That would be amazing, exactly.

Republicans know that they've got the votes.

They don't necessarily need the Democrats to do anything to get their agendas passed.

They have the supermajority, not even close, Democrats have used their time on the floor to either filibuster or try to get other votes and things like that.

But the Republicans just believe that this is just slowing up the process.

So they wanna limit time to about five minutes for debate for each person to go along and hopefully get the business done quicker.

But other folks are saying you're trying to stymie voices in democracy.

- Well, I should note that we'll have two local state senators on in coming weeks, London Lamar, Democrat from the Shelby County area and Brent Taylor, who's been on the show before, I think London Lamar's been on the show as well.

That's coming up in the next couple weeks, we'll talk about all these issues we're talking about here.

And one of those things, getting back to this letter that the business leaders put forward, and it's an issue you, Julia had been writing about is the public defender's office.

I mean there's two somewhat interrelated issues.

One is the number of judges, the number of cases that they're hearing, the number which has gotten down to some 30, 40, 50 a year from 200 plus before COVID.

We should note that most overwhelmingly cases are settled without going to trial.

But it's still a barometer and a lot of criticism from people that the judges aren't working rapidly enough.

We just had a bunch of trouble with a local judge who was elected a year and a half ago, and we have the public defender's office and that's what I was trying to get to, is unable to take on first degree murder cases because they don't have enough.

They're understaffed.

You tell me, you've been writing about that.

But it's one of the things that was highlighted by the business leaders where they're going to the state saying hey, we need more help with our public defender's office to move the criminal justice system along faster.

- Yeah, because you're already seeing the criminal justice system go really slowly as it is.

And the public defender's office doesn't have the capacity to handle first degree murder cases the way they would like to.

And that's seemingly putting more of a hiccup in the criminal justice system.

I wrote about a defendant named Calvin Mitchell, for a while he was going through hearings on whether the public defender's office would represent him.

And during one of those hearings, Judge Massey questioned public defender Jennifer Case and it came out that they only have 78 attorneys, and in 2019 they had something like 140.

So that's quite a big difference.

I know I've heard some people say a lot of them are going to the district attorney's office.

The pay may not be as competitive as going into private practice.

So some of them are being appointed private attorneys, but a lot of private attorneys don't want to do part-time public defender work.

So it's just kind of a thing that they're figuring out.

And you mentioned Brent Taylor by the way with the legislature and he's bringing in a lot of criminal justice legislature this session.

Some of it could be kind of controversial.

I know one of them is he's wanting to propose a bill where law enforcement agencies, they can report illegal immigrants to ICE.

He wants to take away bail minimums or he wants to put bail minimums on class A and B felonies, things like that.

So I think he's also-- - I'm sorry to interrupt you also, I think they're gonna try again on blended sentencing changes to the way juveniles are sentenced right now, massively simplifying this, that at 18 and a half, all record goes away.

And what the DA's office is confronted with is you either try a juvenile as an adult and then you have the full force in all the laws you can go after or you they stay a juvenile.

There needs to be many DAs on a broad political spectrum and politicians on a broad spectrum have said there needs to be a middle space where we can do more than what we can do now as an 18-year-old, but less than trying him as an adult.

And that's another big one.

And I think we're either having Steve Mulroy, District Attorney from Shelby County on soon.

I know we have an ask out to him and somebody will clarify that to me.

But that's coming up.

Also on criminal justice, we have US attorney Kevin Ritz coming up in a couple of weeks to talk about some federal initiatives and DOJ somebody mentioned as well.

So we'll talk about all that with Kevin Ritz coming up.

I want to, again, kind of awkward shift today, Bill, health insurance for life for Council members was proposed by former Councilman Martavius Jones, who is termed out.

It would give Council members who've served at least two terms, if I understand this correctly, city-funded healthcare insurance for life, starting with that group.

Or maybe thr just termed out four or five.

It was put up on the same night as all these appointments and the kind of circus of all that that we talked about.

It was delayed for another two weeks.

I have yet to hear, and you can call me, you can text me, you can email me anyone who loves this idea except a couple of City Council members who would get healthcare benefits for life.

- This was a proposal of the old Council, the one that left office at the end of December.

It's an ordinance, so there are three votes on it in order for it to become a part of the city's code of ordinances and take effect.

It was approved on the first two readings by the old Council at the last two meetings of their four year term of office in December.

So the third and final reading comes to the new Council with five new members at their very first meeting.

So no surprise that the Council punted it into February to figure out what it is.

This basically would extend these benefits that full-time city employees get, health insurance benefits, to four of the departing Council members who just left office in December who voted on the first and second readings of this ordinance.

The rule is you have to serve two full terms.

Each term is four years, a total of eight years.

You have to serve that full.

And then you're eligible to get these health insurance benefits for a position that is a part-time position.

- Are they consecutive terms or it doesn't matter?

- The wording of the ordinance says two terms.

So it does not have to be consecutive, consecutive terms is the term limit that Council members are under.

- As journalists of various tenures, we all have health insurance for life.

We're used to that.

It's a great profession.

You get health insurance for life, right?

Not really.

Toby, thoughts?

It seems we don't know exactly what the cost is, I don't think yet.

But you've gotta assume that it would be a minimum of $10,000 a year for each person.

That sounds okay, that's $10,000, then that's $50,000 for those.

And then it's just gonna compound and compound.

It gets to be a lot of money, but it's also the principle of it.

- And there would also be a split which you have that the employee pays a certain percentage, and the city pays another.

- Just to announce my intention to run for Memphis City Council.

[Eric laughs] I've watched government a long time.

These things are never, ever popular.

You know, you say, hey, I'm gonna give myself this thing.

Give myself a pay raise.

We just gave Mayor Young a pay raise, I think, or the mayor's position a pay raise.

And probably some of that's merited.

But yeah, when you see Council members, legislators giving themselves a raise, giving themselves some other sweet benefit like that, it's never, ever popular.

But I do think that state legislators get this for life too-- - Do they?

- I think they do.

- Part of it is the eight years too.

I mean, there was a guy who spoke I think at at Council who said, look, I was in the Navy, I was in the military for 15 years.

I don't have health insurance for life.

Health insurance for life is uncommon, but I mean, it's more something of 20 years of service, twenty-five years of service.

- It is part of a trend.

As Toby mentioned, the old Council raised the mayor's pay.

There's a ballot question coming to city voters in August that would allow the City Council to set its own pay if it's approved by voters.

- I wanna come back to Laura and education.

Two things, one, Memphis Shelby County schools is still looking for a superintendent.

So I hear.

What is the status of that?

- So we ended 2023 by moving from five finalists down to three.

Those are people from Atlanta Public Schools, Portland Public Schools, and Detroit's public school system.

None of those are from Memphis, which will be a big deal for Memphis-Shelby County schools.

This is the first search that the merged district has done since the merger a decade ago.

The first search that Memphis school officials have taken on since Kriner Cash was found in a search in 2007, 2008, who was also from out of town.

So potentially big changes, big leadership transition for the district on the way.

The next set of interviews are expected to take place at some point next week.

Those candidates are supposed to come back into town and this time would be expected to be a bit more comprehensive with talking to students, parents, teachers, additional community members.

And the school board is expected to make the decision potentially as early as February for this person to start by July 1 start of next fiscal year.

- We're a year and a half from the resignation, the forced resignation of Joris Ray, who was hired internally, it was not a search, correct me if I get anything wrong here.

They started to search, they had some candidates, a pool of candidates for replacement, but they ultimately just said, no, we don't like any of this pool.

And they had the interim continue to be superintendent.

So there is the possibility, correct me if I'm wrong, that the board rejects the three candidates you just talked about.

- The board could reject all three of these people.

Yes, I don't anticipate that happening because of the amount of community pushback that would happen just based off of what we saw this past time.

- And that always stops them.

- And I'll say too, it wasn't as much the candidate pool the last time.

We did see, so the top three people, the three finalists from the first round, Brenda Castellius, who had been of Boston, ended up getting a different job just I think within a couple of weeks of being named a finalist here.

And then we had Carlton Jenkins who was among the first five but didn't make it to the top three.

And then we had Tony Williams, who has since written into her next contract that she's not seeking the role.

- And she's the interim, right?

She's the interim internal-- - And the board has since expanded the qualifications that would make her technically qualified by their board policies to be the permanent superintendent, but at that time she was not qualified under the board policy to be the finalist.

- We are out of time.

We touched on a lot of stuff.

Thank you all.

Thank you Laura for being here.

We appreciate it.

We hope to get you back.

Thank you all for being here, and thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode at wkno.org or look for "Behind the Headlines" on YouTube or download the podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks very much.

We'll see you next week.

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