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- Pipelines, COVID, bail reform, and much more tonight on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

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

Daja Henry is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

Toby Sells, news editor with the Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

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

Well, let's start, Bill, with the pipeline 'cause there was actual news this week and some movement on this sort of reform and regulation I guess of pipelines.

And we'll talk a bit with Toby about some of the history of this, but what did the City Council pass and what might be up next in terms of more regulation of gas, oil type pipelines?

- Well, there have been three ordinances that have been out there for several months now that amount to basically more local control, or an attempt at more local control, at crude oil pipelines.

The City Council gave final approval this past week to a wellhead protection overlay plan.

And I think some of those words are out of order.

- The gist of it is... - The gist of it is that in order to have a pipeline that is near the water wellheads that are part of the Memphis Light, Gas, and Water division system, his ordinance requires a special use permit from the city and the final word on that special use permit process for anything is the Memphis City Council.

So if you want to have a crude oil pipeline, or if you want to build a gas station or one of about more than a dozen different uses, including those, not limited to pipelines, but different uses, then you have to apply, and there is a wellhead administrator who's an expert in how this kind of development would affect or not affect the water wells.

And he advises the Land Use Control Board and the City Council, and then the City Council votes on it.

- And this, and you may have said that, but just to clarify, basically this would cover about 25% of the city that is near enough a wellhead that anyone who wants to do a pipeline would have to apply.

And that wellhead, of course, gets to the aquifer and the water source for all of Memphis.

And Toby, before we go to you back Bill to you, with some of the other things that the county has passed, and that are still more regulation that may come, remind everyone how this came about, this whole pipeline and the aquifer and the fight really against it.

- Well, we're going to be left with a story of activism.

We've got two major groups, MCAP, which is Memphis Citizens Against the Pipeline, which is a grassroots community organization that organized against this thing and Protect Our Aquifer.

MCAP really brought the people and the passion against this.

They said, you know, this pipeline is going to run through Boxtown.

Some other African-American, primarily African American neighborhoods.

They said, we don't want this thing.

"No soil in our oil," is what they would say.

Protect Our Aquifer really brought the science, they kind of underpinned a lot of what these folks were saying.

- "No oil in our soil."

- "No oil in our soil."

What did I say?

- "No soil in our oil."

- So [laughing] these groups got together after a company, it was a joint venture, Byhalia Connection pipeline said in 2020 that they want to build a brand new pipeline that would run through about 35 miles of Memphis to connect another one that would bring, what the group said would bring very little benefit to Memphis, but a lot of revenue to the company, they saw this as an injustice, especially on the route that they were going to run this thing.

Those groups rallied, really changed the minds of a lot of people with the City Council and the County Commission.

That's where we get this ordinance from is listening to the people in their communities.

And eventually the group gave up, they said kind of quietly in a SEC document that we're going to abandon this pipeline idea in Memphis and move on to other things, they blamed COVID.

But I think they really got stuck in the mud thanks to these groups.

- If anyone corrected me every time I screwed up, we would never get a show done, so I apologize.

Daja, anything to add or I'll go back to Bill here.

Bill, so the county has passed two other ordinances in addition to the wellhead protection type regulation the city just approved.

One is the banning of crude oil pipelines within 1,500 feet of parks, schools, churches, and family.

The City Council hasn't voted on that.

It's going to take it up.

The other that the county has approved establish the permitting process requiring I guess, Council approval pipelines, but appeal and appeals process, and so on.

And part of the backdrop against this is Valero oil refiner here is a big employer.

And FedEx is obviously headquartered here and a huge employer and a hugely influential entity.

They have a lot of gas and oil and jet fuel that they are piping around the airport in and out.

They are, I guess maybe we term it as watching this very closely, which weighs heavily on many, if not all City Council members.

- Yes, and in the case of Valero, Valero had a specific interest in Byhalia Connection because one of the ends of the hookup for that pipeline was going to be the Valero refinery in southwest Memphis.

The other two ordinances are specifically about crude oil pipelines.

And that was the problem for the City Council's attorney, Alan Wade, who basically picked the best of the three.

The one that he thought was the most legally defensible.

The other two, Wade doesn't think are defensible, but the Council has not dismissed those, has not rejected them.

They could come back to them, and indeed will come back to one of them, the 1,500 foot setback, which is a joint city/county ordinance at the first meeting in October.

And we'll see if the votes are there.

The vote on the wellhead protection overlay was a unanimous vote.

If there are votes on the other two, I don't think they're going to be unanimous votes.

- Okay, so coming up in, say again, when the next- - The first meeting in October, the Council will take up one of the other two and there'll be more discussion on this.

- We'll shift to COVID, and Daja, we'll start with COVID in school, COVID as it relates to schools.

And the federal judge shared, I believe it was Judge Lippmann, ruled that the K through 12 mask mandate in Shelby County is lawful in the schools.

What more do you know, and where are we going with mask mandates and masking, and just COVID generally in the schools?

- I mean, as far as the court, the court case is pretty much settled unless the governor decides to appeal, which I have seen no indication that he will do, but just to give some context on that, so the mask, the governor, the governor issued an executive order last month, basically saying that parents had the choice to opt out and that parents were the people who needed to make the choices for their kids.

And in SCS, in Shelby County Schools, the administration basically said that we will continue with our mask mandate and push back.

And there was a lawsuit from parents who had students in Shelby County, not in Shelby County Schools, but in the county and had some disabilities and basically said that it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and gave a sort of separate but equal logic against wearing masks in schools.

- And we had Dr. Joris Ray, the Superintendent of Shelby County Schools on last week, as well as Angela Whitelaw, Deputy Superintendent.

We talked a bunch about COVID and they clearly are very strong advocates for kids masking up.

And I asked them, or we both asked them, would you like to see a vaccine mandate?

And Dr. Ray sort of smiled and laughed and said, look, I don't want to get into the politics of this.

It was very clear that they would more than welcome a vaccine mandate for staff and students, it seemed to me.

Other things you're seeing you did in terms of how COVID is impacting the schools.

The schools are, you know, the case rates are not terrible.

I think, I mean, we hate to see any cases, but given what is the size, 110,000 students and 13, 14,000 employees just in Shelby County Schools, they've had pretty modest case rates.

So they're doing a pretty good job on that, but they are quarantining students when they've been exposed or when they test positive.

That brings up the whole issue of a huge percentage of SCS students are on free lunch programs.

Sometimes 1, 2, 3 meals a day.

Talk a little bit of a story you did on that.

- Yes.

So Shelby County Schools is basically providing meals for students who are in quarantine.

So parents can drive up to the school.

It's a contactless sort of drive-through method of picking up meals and they get a free, or they get a breakfast and a lunch, both cold lunches, and parents can go and do that between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning.

- Yeah.

We'll stay with COVID, Toby, and talk a bit about the numbers overall.

We've obviously been living through this Delta variant and the spiking cases.

Where do you see us?

Because you do spend quite a bit of time with the numbers.

- I do and have since March 2020, unfortunately, Delta got me back into the numbers.

I've recently did a story on COVID overall.

I spoke with a lot of infectious disease experts at St. Jude who told me that, you know, we're probably close to the peak of this Delta variant.

Things will start to taper off here in the fall, may see a small spike in the winter, but then it might turn endemic as we hit spring 2022, but I have seen the numbers.

If you'll go with me just a minute, we had beginning of July, our seven day rolling average was in the 20s.

Then Delta took off and then a month later we had a pandemic record high of about more than a thousand cases on that rolling average.

They have since come down.

And then the last two weeks we have seen them come down in the hundreds everyday.

So one was 600 and the next day the rolling average was just more than 500.

Now it's about 450 on that rolling average.

So we're really starting to see us kind of step back from that precipice of where we were.

Where we go from here, I have no idea.

This Delta variant, this pandemic, this virus has surprised everybody.

So I'm not going to make a projection, but we are starting to see us kind of step back from the ledge a little bit.

- Yeah, and we're taping this on Wednesday this week.

And I think I heard driving in on NPR that nationally, the numbers are really starting to fall.

That's an average of very highly vaccinated states and less vaccinated states like as in here.

- It's a mix, right?

We've got people that have been effected and people who've been vaccinated.

Those together are kind of bringing us back from the ledge a little bit.

And I heard the same NPR story that you did.

And they said we might not see a winter spike because there have been so many infections and so many vaccines working together.

We might not see it.

This might actually be the end of it.

- Are you, I'm putting you on the spot, are you checking the vaccine numbers?

I mean, they did jump for part of this in reaction to what was going on, but have they fallen back down in terms of vaccines?

- Yes, they have slightly.

And so, you know, about a month ago, we were tracking at about 1600, 1400 vaccines per day.

That number is down around 1300-ish these days.

And I kind of did some for my story, some kind of napkin math and looked at it if we were in the 1500s every day and we kept that up, we would be to our goal of 700,000 people vaccinated by January.

So, you know, that's a great goal and that's a huge goal, but we probably won't get there, but.

- Well, we don't know, but in part, because there's a bunch of mandates that the federal government put out on big employers.

The Biden administration is rolling out these mandates, that either employers over 100 needs to either test or vaccinate, there are obviously some huge employers here, FedEx, we mentioned Valero, IP, AutoZone.

I'm just going through some of the biggest, there are many, many more that are going to be faced here as soon as those mandates go in, do they test and vaccine, or just kind of say, no, we're just going to do vaccinations.

Federal employees, and they aren't a huge number, but there's a big VA hospital here.

And then there are a lot more rules on workers at nursing homes and in healthcare, if they're receiving federal money and many, many, many of them do through Medicaid and Medicare and other programs that they need to start getting vaccinated, no questions, no opt out.

So that could have some sort of impact on the numbers, would be interesting to watch over the next couple of months.

One question I have for you, Bill, if I missed this, I apologize.

What are the city and county governments doing?

Neither of them have mandated or have they mandated local employees, city employees, and county employees to get vaccinated?

- What they're waiting on is what a lot of major employers with over 100 are waiting on.

And that is the federal guidance from OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the City Council this week did get some numbers on how many city employees have been vaccinated, and were not happy with the numbers.

Of the 4,000 city employees, and the method of determination here is really basic and very simple.

And that is those who have said, here is my vaccination card that shows I've gotten the vaccination.

By that standard, 50% of the 4,000 city employees have been vaccinated, breaking it down by division, thirty-seven percent of the solid waste employees have been vaccinated, 48% to 47% for the police and fire departments each.

The executive division, which is the mayor's office and the offices directly under the mayor coming in at 91% of those employees vaccinated.

And this caused a reaction, a pretty visceral reaction, in particular among City Council member Edmond Ford Jr. who's a funeral home operator who sees firsthand the toll of this, who said that he thinks the city ought to require people to get vaccinated and do it now and fire those people if they don't.

And as he put it, if they sue, he thinks the city will win because in his words, "They'll be dead by the time it goes to court."

- Has county released its numbers?

- I haven't seen it.

- But they have not done a mandate either.

- No.

- Yeah.

- They have required testing if you're not vaccinated.

- The county has.

The city's not doing testing for non-vaccinated.

- The city is still waiting on the federal guidance on a vaccine mandate.

- Okay, I want to come back, Daja, to schools 'cause the interview we did last week with, not for anything I did, that's for sure, but was very interesting.

And I learned a lot about where SCS is in a whole lot of things, including things not COVID related, but the test scores, the TCAP scores were released in the last couple of weeks.

I've lost all sense of time, and that's statewide.

And then for all the different school districts, we talked some with Dr. Ray and Dr. Whitelaw.

And again, you can get past episodes of the show on The Daily Memphian site, on WKNO.org, on YouTube.

And it was very interesting.

I mean, SCS is what, a $2 billion budget.

I mean, it is the biggest budget, biggest line item in the county school or the county budget.

So it's worth repeating some of this stuff.

About testing and this law that's coming that will kick in at the end of this year, that will, it's a state law that's requiring kids who aren't proficient will potentially have to be held back if there isn't the kind of plan of that, I think there are some exceptions and so on, but it's a pretty hard law that was passed during the COVID session in 2020.

What is SCS doing about that?

Because right now, I mean, based on the 2021 numbers, reading and math, their third graders are at 14% and 9% of proficiency and that's down 10 and 24%.

They were around 25% in a third of them in 2019, pre-COVID.

COVID had a hit all virtually all school systems.

So I don't want to totally pile on them.

What are they doing about facing this requirement?

- Right.

And that's exactly what I was going to notice that there was a big learning loss nationwide for COVID, but of course, SCS was, their numbers were pretty low before then.

So what SCS is saying is that they are implementing some safeguards and saying that they've said before that third grade is too late.

So nationwide, we see people using third grade as a marker of reading proficiency.

And it indicates a number of things about a child's success.

But SCS is saying that third grade is too late.

So they are marking children's progress and looking at assessments and things like that before the third grade.

And they've implemented a policy looking at the children in second grade, basically because they said that third grade is too late.

- And they may be holding back fairly significant numbers of second-graders and SCS, if they're not hitting these numbers.

- Exactly.

- Yeah, it was also, go ahead.

It was also interesting to look 'cause we had all the school districts are broken out and you know, every school district I'm looking at, Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland, and Millington, all fell off from 1 to 11% in terms of during last year, sort of deep COVID a lot of hybrid and virtual learning, that's in English.

In math, the numbers were more like 15 to 25%.

But the interesting thing, we were talking about this a little bit before the show, even in 2019, that the reading proficiency in Arlington was 58%.

That means there were 40% of the kids who could potentially could get held back in Arlington.

And the best of the suburban schools is Lakeland or Germantown at 63%, still one in three kids.

I mean, I don't, you know, Toby, others put you on the spot, I mean, I think, those numbers are much better than SCS, but as parents, those are really disturbing numbers, sad numbers, kind of tragic numbers.

- Sure.

- And I think it will be shocking if the suburban schools end up having to hold back a quarter to a third of their kids.

- That's the reason so many people moved to Lakeland.

So many people moved to Germantown for these suburban school districts, right?

The good schools.

That's what we want.

Then you look at these numbers, it's shocking to see.

And I know everybody struggled.

I'm not blaming anybody, but you know, if you're a parent in Germantown and you moved there specifically to go to these schools and then you see that they're not doing great, it's gotta make you wonder about your choices.

- Yeah.

It'll be fascinating.

And how that all plays out again, through the end of this year.

I wanted to switch to, stay with you, Toby, and the bail reform you were up in, did you go up to Nashville or were you watching virtually?

They actually have a great setup to watch their stuff going.

And it's a thing they do really well.

Talk about bail reform in Nashville.

- The headline here is very little bail reform is going to come from the bail reform hearings.

There were two days of hearings that was a joint session, House and Senate.

They brought in a lot of law enforcement officers, district attorneys.

They also brought in on the second day, a lot of people in the bail industry to speak about these things, what they really did, this was one of the classic summer sessions, summer study sessions of the legislature to look at our system, see what needs to be changed, if anything needs to be made changed.

So it was a lot of kind of Bail 101 for a lot of these legislators.

The thing that really intrigued me was the second day when they brought in these people from the bail industry and the way that they talked about just people in general, and then also the people that might need bail services or might come in contact with the criminal justice system.

The leader, the executive director of the American Bail Coalition said just offhand, "I am just now back from lovely California where it smells like smoke and homeless people."

A statement to which no one batted an eye in the room or said anything, said that's a crazy statement, please don't say that.

They just went right along with that.

Later in testimony, the West Tennessee leader of the Tennessee Bail Bondsman Association, he said that criminals, he compared them to pests in your garden and said we need to rid these out of our garden, or they're going to spoil the crop.

And he said something that, you know, if we've got these 5% that are making trouble, we need to cull them, his words, we need to cull them, get rid of them because they're giving the 95% of us a bad name.

And just these callous ways that they talk about people in general and especially that the people that they serve.

And again, with no legislator batting an eye, it really gave me pause to how these people are taking this information in, and there certainly was not ever a mention of reforming the money bail system to say, "We know that people with money get out of jail and the people that don't have money stay in jail."

- Over the years, Bill, we've done a lot of shows on criminal justice, criminal justice reform.

And we've had people on, I think, all ends of the spectrum.

I think, you know, Bill Gibbons, former local district attorney, former state department of security- - Safety.

- Safety, thank you.

Josh Spickler who comes out of the public defender's office and advocate for a tremendous amount of criminal justice reform, including bail reform, others.

It is striking that what Toby relays misses the nuance that I feel like we've, I'm not saying things have been perfect here, the debate has been perfect, but in general, at all sides of the spectrum, the people we've had here at this table agree that the small percentage of people who are doing violent repeat offenses, they need to be treated in a certain way, and they need to be not locked away necessarily, but they can't just get out for free.

They all also increasingly agree on is minor offenses.

We don't need to be doing minor fines and racking people up and bogging them down in the criminal justice system.

Amy Weirich, who is by no means, the current Shelby County District Attorney, no means soft on crime, when she put in a rule that said we would no longer, the Shelby County District Attorney's Office would no longer pursue fines on things like expired licenses and so on that were, I can't remember the exact number.

- They were keeping people attached to the system.

- Yeah, who can't get out of it.

And it was a few hundred dollars.

And she said, when they put that rule in and said that the whole DA's Office didn't have to pursue any more, she said it was a breath of fresh air.

People felt like in the DA's Office, we don't have to mess with all that bureaucratic, low offense stuff.

My word, not hers.

We can focus on the true criminals.

And all of them will say, we would like to have better laws from the state that are more reflective of where our problems truly are in Shelby County.

- It's a balance.

It's a balance between violent crime and property type of crimes and the treatment of those two things.

And whether you're keeping someone tethered to this criminal justice system solely because they owe the system money, unfortunately at a certain political level, it becomes either/or, and not how do you balance both of them?

And I think what Toby saw and heard in the Nashville committee room is exhibit A on where that switch is thrown on that.

- Just a couple minutes left.

And again, I keep going back to this interview because I was so struck by it with Superintendent Ray and Dr. Whitelaw that we talked about the huge rise in juvenile violence or juvenile crime, I should say, and including sadly violence nationwide and in Memphis and Shelby County Schools, and a lot of kids who just checked out from virtual school, they weren't logging in, what did you take from that?

It was rushed.

We could have done a whole show with them on this, but we talked a bit at the end of the show, and then after we stopped taping, about SCS has some processes to refer truant and delinquent and problematic kids to the justice system.

But it was murky to me.

I don't know what you thought.

- Basically what I got from what Superintendent Ray was saying, and he is meeting with the Sheriff's Office this week to discuss what is the root cause of these problems with juvenile crime and truancy here in Shelby County.

And we know that we see significant numbers of poverty and different factors, different things that can factor into that.

So what I got from that was that Superintendent Ray is trying to look at different causes and things that would affect the root of this issue, as well as they still have to comply with the law.

And they still have to do- - Do what they're required to do.

- Right.

- Yeah, yeah.

To that end, we have Sheriff Bonner, Sheriff Floyd Bonner on the show next week.

We'll talk to him about how he interacts with Shelby County Schools.

We'll talk about the jail.

We'll talk about, you know, they've got some funding, like a lot of these government entities from the federal government.

In last bit of news, all I know, I have a bullet point that says, "Toby says there's marijuana news, ask him."

And so there's news about marijuana.

- The State Medical Cannabis Commission gets underway has its first meeting next week October, in Nashville.

We've seen these commissions kind of before, one in 2017 studied the heck out of the issue, didn't really get anywhere.

But this commission is going to kind of set up what our cannabis infrastructure would look like here, but we're not going to do anything unless the federal government takes marijuana from the schedule one.

And so that's the basement of this thing.

So probably not gonna see a lot of movement.

- Can Biden just do that or does it have to go through Congress?

- I'm not sure, to be honest with you.

- I put you on the spot there, but okay.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Daja, Bill, thank you all.

And again, thank you for joining us.

You can get past episodes of the show at WKNO.org.

You can search Behind the Headlines on YouTube, or you can get the full podcast of the show at The Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks.

Join us again next week.

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