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- Tax incentives, school safety and what's allowed on a license plate.

Tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] -I'm Eric Barnes with the Daily Memphian and thanks for joining us.

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

Starting with Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you, sir.

- Daja Henry from the Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

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

We'll start, Bill, with you and tax incentives, not surprisingly often in the news and being reviewed at a couple different levels and some proposals and maybe we start with City Council's looking at some changes to PILOT.

EDGE President Reid Dulberger is leaving after 11 years and the DMC, Downtown Memphis Commission, its related entities, are initiating a review.

Much, not all, of this is against the backdrop of the massive Ford plant and associated manufacturing, all that stuff, outside Shelby County.

But you know could may well generate even more economic development within Shelby County.

So, walk us through what's on the table.

- This is an issue that never really goes away.

It is sometimes, it's not as apparent, but it's always there.

So, it doesn't take much to bring it up.

Basically, Martavius Jones on the City Council has been kicking around this idea that the minimum wage that a company or economic development project has to pay in order to qualify for one of the EDGE incentives is too low.

It's now at $13 an hour plus health benefits paid by the employer, and he says that given what that $13 an hour gets you, that amounts to incentivizing poverty.

So, his proposal is to raise it to $21 an hour.

He had what amounted to a test vote in Council committee and he was the only one of the eight Council members present who voted for it.

So, there's still some discussion there and the discussion is really heightened because of Reid Dulberger announcing his exit from EDGE.

and in June, the city and county will start reviewing the incentives that EDGE offers as part of the regular schedule of reviewing what that organization does.

So, some Council members said they saw his, Jones's, point on a higher minimum wage not, maybe not necessarily for $21 an hour, but that they wanted to wait until June.

So, we'll see if he tries to bring it to a vote.

Meanwhile the Downtown Memphis Commission, on its own, has started a review of the incentive similar incentives tax breaks offered by the Center City Revenue Finance Corporation, which comes under their umbrella.

- The EDGE board president Reid, outgoing, Reid Dulberger, the new one will be appointed by county mayor Lee Harris and city mayor Jim Strickland.

Toby, Mayor Harris has been a critic of the incentive sort of complex or situation.

Talk about that.

- For a long time, he has been, over the summer he did a panel discussion on tax incentives with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, which is a free market think tank based in Nashville.

On there Harris really railed against incentives just in general saying they kind of pick economic winners and losers.

He didn't feel like these tax incentives were deal makers or deal breakers really for any of these, but consultants can go to these companies and say if you're thinking of building in Shelby County, how can you leave this money on the table, of which they feel obligated to take the money.

He also said that as incentives now the kind of the horse is out of the barn right.

Like it's kind of hard to rein them back in.

And on the flip side of some of that though talking of Dulberger, I've heard him say before that you know all these other entities out there, all these governments are offering tax incentives.

if we don't, we're kind of losing the arms race as it were.

And to him he said that, you know, given these tax incentives is kind of like you know spending a little bit of money on a lottery ticket and then winning the lottery right.

So that's kind of the two sides of the coin.

- I think we had, I don't know gosh it was a year and a half, almost two years ago now, when we had former Downtown Memphis head Jennifer Oswalt and Reid Dulberger on, and one of the things they told us, Bill, was, you know, in the end they feel like they use these PILOTs to compete against other cities to lower what is comparatively a much higher tax rate, you know, because there's city/county taxes in Memphis.

that the answer they're not necessarily huge fans of them as a tool, that they're a blunt tool I think is what they talked about.

That if the city, county wanted to make themselves more competitive with other cities, they'd lower taxes.

They have since then lowered taxes somewhat with reappraisal, but I still think that most of the commercial real estate and economic development people you talk to, their perspective is we're still not competitive without tax incentives.

- Yeah, and some of the pushback in Jones's proposal for raising the minimum wage to get these incentives came from the Greater Memphis Chamber who said look, the timing on this is really bad because we just had the Ford plant announcement in Haywood County, which is not in Memphis.

It's over one county over from Memphis in effect, but they said we're looking at some supply chain companies that might supply this plant and this sends the wrong message to them.

It's a chicken and egg argument because at some point you have to look at the incentives and say okay, if we're doing better, if these are working theoretically, at least at some point you would look at the incentives and say we don't need them.

And to the point that that toby made, I've talked to people who have gone before these boards for the incentives who have said we really don't like going in public with the details of our project and what we're going to do because we have competitors, but we feel like everyone else is going to apply for them so we should.

So, it's not strictly a matter of this project needs it, and it won't succeed and we won't get the benefits.

It's a matter of it's money on the table and these companies feel like they have to at least apply for it.

- Well, I think they'll also, again I'm just, what I hear from people in the business, you know, the construction costs are skyrocketing, materials costs are skyrocketing, labor costs are skyrocketing, and land prices are skyrocketing.

And so, they're looking for, at this point, maybe there was a time when it was really cheap and easy to build in Memphis compared to other places.

That time isn't really, it's not quite as cheap and easy as it used to be.

I think also some of the people looking at 12, excuse me, $13 minimum wage requirements would say, and I mean this sort of flippantly, or they would say flippantly, I'd love to be able to pay somebody $12 right now in this labor market.

People are paying 15, 16, 20 an hour.

I mean, Memphis Police Department has $15,000 signing bonuses.

We had Sheriff Bonner on, they're doing 5,000-plus signing bonuses to get deputies.

So, it's the market kind of sometimes is not totally in sync with what's going on with these incentives.

Last thing I'll say is that we'll have people from the Memphis Chamber on in a couple of weeks to talk about the Ford plant and the potential halo effect on the whole region, Memphis included.

As well as other economic development folks from the suburbs in the coming month or two, to just talk more about this massive, massive project.

I want to switch now to schools though, and Daja, there was a tragic, really awful shooting some couple weeks ago.

A couple of 13-year-olds in an argument which is just you know astoundingly sad.

It's all sad, but it was astoundingly sad.

Thankfully the boy who was shot is recovering, or is recovered, but it triggered and brought up again a conversation about school safety and how school security happens.

What's under discussion?

- Yes Eric.

So, this conversation was kind of ongoing especially within the past couple school board meetings there have been, or in the past one, that there was public comment available, there was a majority of the time was taken was spent talking about police officers and getting them out of schools by different activist groups and students who had seen or had negative experiences with police officers.

So, it's an ongoing conversation, and the issue at hand before this, before this shooting took place, was getting, the people wanting to get the sheriff's deputies out of the schools.

- And it's technically the Shelby County sheriff's deputies, not MPD right?

Are there some MPDs?

- There are MPD.

So, the school district has a contract with both MPD and the sheriff's office, and they provide officers who are trained, but there are officers who are trained and employed by Shelby County Schools as well.

- Yeah, and the notion of what Dr. Joris Ray, the superintendent Shelby County Schools has talked about a "peace force".

So, hiring their own staff works first directly for Shelby County Schools and is trained in a different approach.

- So, this approach would basically be about building relationships with students and moving away from the focus on arrests and interactions with the court systems within schools.

So Superintendent Ray kind of, once this shooting happened, there was a school resource officer on the premises, and they were the one who called the police.

So, he kind of doubled down on the fact that he said there is a place for officers in these schools, and so now this idea that they are introducing, or reintroducing because it has been introduced before, is about having their own what they're calling peace force.

They won't call it an internal police department.

- Yeah, and there's an emphasis on psychology or discussion about, you know, more psychologists, more social workers, more de-escalation training.

- I think one of the activists you quoted in those stories said that called and this is their opinion that Shelby County sheriff's department by being in the schools is solidifying a school-to-prison pipeline.

So, I mean, I'm not saying that's true, but there's a lot of frustration at least among some parents I think there's also a lot of fear among some parents, and the shooting obviously you know reinforced that.

You also talked about, what was it, Denver that made a big shift, a similar shift.

- Denver ended their contract with their local police department and opted for somewhat something like what Shelby County schools is suggesting.

Yeah, and it's a conversation that's going on all over the country.

Just earlier this year in Knoxville when there was a student who was shot and killed by a police, school resource officer, there was conversation about removing the officers from the schools.

- Yeah, and Frayser Community Schools, which are charter schools with Bobby White, Dr. Bobby White, who's been on the show a number of times, talking about schools and charter schools, which are separate independent, still public schools, but have more independence from the Shelby County School district.

They've removed all their-- - They've removed officers and moved away from exclusionary discipline.

So, things like expulsions that would remove students from a learning environment.

- Right okay.

More to come on that.

We'll come back to some education issues.

I wanted to touch though, Toby, go to you, Mississippi has a water lawsuit against Tennessee.

This gets to the aquifer, and you know we in Memphis talk a lot about the Memphis aquifer.

The aquifer is actually, it actually doesn't know the borders of Memphis or Tennessee or Mississippi.

It goes across a massive swath of underground.

Touches, I think, all the states in the region and many cities.

Talk about what's going on with this lawsuit.

- Mississippi brought their 16-year-old lawsuit against the state of Tennessee to the US Supreme Court last week, and they had a kind of a different argument this time.

They said that Tennessee is kind of violating Mississippi's sovereign borders, as they're trying to pump water from Tennessee it's coming over from the Mississippi side.

They argue the state shouldn't do that.

They want payments of $600 million from the state going forward if they're going to continue to pump the water.

As you said this is the Middle Claiborne Aquifer.

It's huge.

We talk about the Memphis Sand all the time, but this one is an enormous aquifer that runs under many, many states.

And so that's what a lot of the justices were talking about.

Chief Justice John Roberts liking it kind of to wild horses in different places that don't understand, or, you know, they go across borders all the time and they don't have.

They just kind of flow freely.

That the water here in the aquifer did the same thing right, and it doesn't know state lines.

Stephen Breyer, Justice Breyer said, he likened it to the fog in San Francisco.

He said what if somebody can go and get the fog over San Francisco and teleport it over somehow to Massachusetts you know.

It's kind of the same thing, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she wondered to Mississippi when is enough enough is what she said.

You know you've been doing this for 16 years.

If we tell you no again this time, will you bring it back?

The lawyer from Mississippi said we will bring it back.

- And their argument, Bill you've covered this as well.

The argument is Mississippi wants to be able to pull more water or I now I've sort of lost track of what we're, well this isn't your fault, Toby.

It's just mine.

It sounds like it's shifted to become a revenue thing for Mississippi.

- And the interesting thing is that the comments from the justices seem to suggest that they're not open to this idea that you got Mississippi's water, and in effect, but what they, but that doesn't mean that there won't be changes as a result of this or couldn't be changes as a result of this because in their questioning and comments the justices also seemed more much more friendly to the idea of apportionment and that is that there is a recognition that the aquifer is under eight or nine different states.

And that there should be some kind of pact among those states for how water is withdrawn, which could leave Mississippi with some share of that water, just not as much as it wants, and certainly not payments from Tennessee for accessing that water.

- Right and all this against, again I've used the word backdrop too much today, but I'm gonna do it again, it's against the backdrop, you look out west, you look in the Midwest, there are massive water shortages.

The Colorado River is at, you know, the lowest level in at least, in historic or in recorded history.

We have this incredible water.

I mean, I remember a time five, six, seven, eight years ago where the Memphis Chamber began to really promote our water, our clean water, our plentiful water as a reason for businesses to relocate here.

They kind of, sort of slowed down on that thought.

Well maybe we don't want everybody coming in and drilling and advertising, you know, doing what you're doing, what they want with the water, but that's the other part of this.

And of course, Protect Our Aquifer and the recent oil pipeline fight right.

We have this incredibly valuable resource that I think we used to just take for granted, but now we realize it's precious and it's in many ways unique.

- And Memphis and Shelby County is so lucky to have this vital resource.

As you said looking out west, where all of these different government entities are fighting each other, and how do we get water to these different places, and that was one of the arguments was for the attorney for Memphis Light, Gas and Water, he said that the Middle Claiborne Aquifer, we've pumped out of it for a hundred years.

He said it's full.

Mississippi wants to pump more water out of there, the water is going to be available to them, and you know, and there's no need for further litigation on it.

- I want to come back to schools and talk about two.

We'll start with sick leave and COVID is not over, although we, you know, I want so desperately for it to be so.

But the schools obviously have been trying, managing testing, managing masking, managing, and vaccines are not required.

They're not even allowed for the younger kids although they may be soon.

They also have a whole staff, right, of teachers and employees.

They're the school system announced retroactive sick leave, what was that about?

For some reason that caught my eye.

- So, before this school year, or during the school year rather, Shelby County Schools employees, teachers, staff, all had to use their regular sick leave that they're granted building up over time, and many were kind of upset about that because with COVID, you know, you have to quarantine.

- You may not be sick, you may not be, but you're out.

- Right exactly.

So you may be out from school, and that's taking up all your sick days.

So, this retroactive sick leave goes back to this summer and people who have used their sick leave will be granted that, like credit, for that time, but it is only for if you actually did have COVID, not if you had to quarantine.

- Not if you have to quarantine.

And it's an extra 10 days?

- Yes.

- That people would get.

I'll stay with schools and we'll, Bill, this is that point in the show or the year when I ask you to explain what is BEP, because I can never remember what it stands for.

But it is basically that in this case Governor Lee and Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn are talking about changes, possible big changes to the funding formula known as BEP of how districts and around the state get their state money for education.

- Basic Education Program, that's what BEP stands for.

You were close weren't you?

- I was this close.

- Yeah, it's a formula that really took on its current structure during the McWherter administration starting in the late 1980s.

And Governor Lee has said we want to go into that.

This is the state formula that determines how much state funding a given school district gets, and it's very complex.

So, Governor Lee wants to go back into that and take a look at it, review it, see how it works, make it more efficient.

There have been two lawsuits over this in the last almost 40 years.

One for small rural school systems in the district who felt like they were not being treated fairly, and then a lawsuit by large urban school systems, including what was then Memphis City Schools, who said well as a result of those changes, we feel like we're not being treated fairly in the share of state funding that we get.

So, this has been litigated.

There's been a lot of debate about it.

Lee, as I understand it, wants to put this on the table and examine it completely without regard to a court argument for a certain party and making a settlement with them.

He said that he wants to be more student-centered versus district-centered.

Some democrats, according to Ian Round, who covers the legislature for us, think that means that there's going to be a shift to even more school vouchers, and Ian had some interesting, you know, stats on over the last, what is this, 20 years.

Spending on education in Tennessee has increased by about three percent a year.

We're still very low, very low on 44th, I believe 45th in the country in spending.

So, we'll see where all that goes.

Lee did clarify though that none of this shift in funding or changes in funding involves an increase of taxes.

- Anything else on funding on that?

- I would just add that there are the, there are 18 committees that the state just announced that would be working on this issue, and people can apply to be on on those committees, but- - 18 around the state?

- Around the state.

So, there are things, but they're like topic-based.

So, one of them is about urban school.

There's like a rural school district committee, urban school district.

- Okay.

Good to know.

With five, six minutes left.

Here parks are in the news.

There's a rebranding of the Parks Commission.

There's a bunch of spending.

The Greensward argument seemed to flare up sort of, kind of.

I, as always, have to disclose I was a former board member of the Overton Park Conservancy, and was board chair when in fact the agreement was signed between the city the zoo and OPC for the plan that now seems to be going forward.

And part of the confusion, I think there's some confusion.

Even I was confused and I'm pretty close to this, although I haven't been on the board in a few years, that the, help me out here Bill.

There was a plan agreed to by the parties that would involve getting parking off the Greensward forever, but about an acre of the Greensward, a kind of low portion between the zoo parking lot and kind of out of sight was going to be used for parking, for an expanded zoo parking lot.

The city, a couple years ago said wait, hold on, we might be able to build a parking deck.

Let's review that.

That was a couple years ago and then they recently came out and said what?

- They recently said the parking deck that we thought would cost $3 million, which was the money raised by the Overton Park Conservancy and the Zoo, at $1.5 million each, it's more than that.

It's actually not 3 million, it's more than $5 million.

So, the city and the zoo announced we're going back to the original plan, which was to take part of the western edge of the Greensward, part of the northern edge of the Greensward, and increase the reconfigured zoo parking by a total of 415 net additional spaces there, - Along with the reconfiguration of the Prentiss Place parking lot, which I think has already mostly been done.

Yeah, Toby, you've covered this over the eternity that this fight went on.

I mean it's like 30 or 40 years.

- I can't believe we're still talking about the Greensward.

But on the activist side and all those folks that would go out and protest against what the zoo was up to, you can just imagine how they feel right.

I mean, and they've been railing against this plan online, whatever material protests they may do in the future hasn't been known just yet, but you know to say, you know what, we're going to leave it intact.

We're going to leave the Greensward as it is now 100%.

We're going to do this other thing, and it's a great solution for everybody, and then for it to go dormant for a couple of years.

You don't hear about it, and then all of a sudden they say, you know what, actually we are going to do that.

We're going to pave this portion over here, and it just kind of throws them into, you know, this kind of crazy loop right.

Like what you know I can't believe we're going back to this old plan again.

So, you kind of see some of the old apparatus, the protest apparatus of these folks getting dusted off and getting ready for a fight.

- And also, there's a lot of discussion about okay so it's over $5 million, - The parking deck?

- Yeah, couldn't we find the extra two to three million from some other place.

- Well and that segues into Accelerate Memphis which is this big reset of or refinancing of city debt.

It created about a $200 million windfall, much of it going to parks and green spaces and open spaces, other to neighborhoods, and so on, who wants to take.

I mean, I mentioned the rebranding of the Parks Commission.

It's more than a rebranding though.

It's an attempt to sort of refocus, and again with this big pool of money coming towards parks and open spaces.

- The emphasis is on programming for the parks, and longtime Memphians will remember when that was the case when parks under the Parks Commission, which was done away with at the start of the 21st century that the Parks Commission oversaw a massive set of, for instance, softball leagues, sometimes referred to as beer leagues, that played-- - Softball and beer?

- Softball and beer, who would have thought, but that was a massive organizational structure that a lot of people were involved in, involving maybe 30 to 40 beer league games on a given Saturday.

This is kind of a start of a return to that-- - And some of the beer.

Yeah, because a lot of it's like kid soccer.

-Well Yeah, it's shifted, over that time, from softball to probably soccer and things like that.

Yeah, and the $200 million in Accelerate Memphis, seventy five million of that is for new parks like Gaston Community Center being redone, a new clubhouse at Pine Hill Golf Course, that sort of thing.

- We in the great stuff happened with green space is the over park golf course, 800,000 announced for Tom Lee Park, a million into Hinton Park in Collierville.

But let's, with just a minute or so left, Toby you did a really, really good, really interesting story about a first amendment fight about what can go on vanity personalized license plates.

Let's talk about that, with the caveat that this is public television and there's a lot we can't talk about, interpreting some of the things that have been questionable.

They are all in your story at Memphis Flyer.

- Which made it a great Flyer story.

Yeah, but a decade ago, a Nashville woman applied for and received a vanity license plate and she drove it around on two cars and never had a complaint.

And then all of a sudden someone saw it on the road.

They complained directly to the chief of staff of the Department of Revenue, and then 30 days later she gets a letter in the mail that says you give us your, that license plate has been deemed offensive.

You can't have it.

If you don't turn it over, you face fines and jail time.

She decided to fight the decision.

She hired an attorney in Nashville, and you know, it's a Memphis story because it's a Tennessee story about what you can and can't say on these personalized plates.

So far there's been two federal decisions, in that one says it's government property, you can't just say whatever you want.

The other said it's a first amendment issue, you can say whatever you want.

There's been no Supreme Court ruling on this before.

We're going to get some more clarity in December on what you might not be able to say.

- All right go to Memphisflyer.com to kind of decipher some of these.

We can't really do them here.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

Remember if you missed any of the show you can get it at WKNO.org or on YouTube or download the podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks, and we'll see you next week.

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