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- COVID restrictions, city-county consolidation and the failures on the bridge.

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 roundtable of journalists.

First up is Toby Sells, News Editor, Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you for having me.

- Matt Shroud is an investigative reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Thank you for being here.

- Thanks.

- Karanja Ajanaku, editor of the New Tri-State Defender.

Thanks for being here again.

- My pleasure.

- Good to see you in person.

- Absolutely.

- And Bill Dries is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start with COVID and the restrictions and I have to say we're taping this Thursday morning and by Friday I think the Health Department Task Force will have met, so certain changes may be in place.

The CDC, Bill, came down with guidelines this week recommending masks indoors, even for vaccinated individuals.

What are we hearing from local officials, ultimately the County Health Department has to make a call, but one has got to believe that the state's gotta have some say in this, whether formally or informally.

- Yeah, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, who appoints the Health Department director has said that what it looks like will happen is that the county will go by the CDC guidance on this and go for a recommendation that people wear the face masks under certain conditions, which is basically the CDC guidance.

Whether the Health Department chooses to go its own way and exercise its autonomy or try to exercise its autonomy, will be an interesting moment in the relationship with the state on this.

- Shelby County Health Department is one of what, the big city health departments, big city-county health departments that have autonomy from the state, but that was controversial, maybe I'll go to you Karanja, that was controversial throughout COVID.

There was frustration among legislators and state officials that Memphis didn't open up fast enough.

Does this seem like, it all sets up a fight in the legislature next when they go back in session in January that they don't like how we operate and that we operate differently.

- If they did, it won't be a new fight.

I mean, it's an ongoing situation with our relationship with them there, but I think that the main thing here is that people just need to know what to do.

We're just so uncertain here and so we really do need the local people to let us know what they're gonna do.

I mean, I know they've got some procedures in place and he meets with the mayors, I guess, on Thursday and with the task force people on Friday, but I mean if they need to speed up the process, they need to do that because school starts on August 9th.

People need to know what the recommendations are.

- I'll go to you, Toby.

I mean the Flyer obviously covers a lot, restaurants and food workers have been sort of the front lines and the poster child for fits and starts back and forth, coming back into business and I'm not saying business is the most important factor here, but it is an important factor, right?

I mean, it's just hugely important.

What are you all hearing, what are you hearing, if anything, from, you know, restaurant owners, nightclubs, all that sort of stuff about what, what do we do?

- Nothing yet, but if you're a restaurant owner and a nightclub owner, you've got to be worried, right, that mask mandates will come back, you know, limited capacity will come back and I think all of it, that we are on this side of a COVID vaccine that we know that works shows just that Tennessee didn't really take it as seriously as we should have.

I mean, we never had a statewide mask mandate, right?

You know, and then as the vaccine was coming available, a lot of leaders in the state were throwing themselves down to say you know we're never gonna do a passport, we're never gonna do mandate vaccines, we're never gonna do all these things and that's so mistrust and confusion and kind of undermine the public health situation that we're really in, you know.

And so if you look at the seven day rolling average that we're in right now, it was 294 Thursday morning, that's 300 average cases a day over the last seven days and that's pre-vaccine numbers for Shelby County and we know that more than half of people in Shelby County have been vaccinated and for that number to be that high really shows you the force of the Delta variant and vaccine hesitancy here.

So, you know, again, nobody wants to see us go back down into lockdown, but as we all know, you know, masks are being talked about and coming back, so I think if you're in business right now, you want leaders to start taking this serious and Republicans came out, Senate Republicans came out this week with a letter that urged everybody to get the vaccine, that was kind of the first time that they had on a major front said the vaccine is safe, go get the vaccine, we urge you to do it, but that was after some kind of political grandstanding they did.

- And it was also not all of the state senators in the Republican caucus.

- That's right.

- I think 16 of them wound up signing it and within the Shelby County delegation, the two Republicans, state senators in our delegation, Paul Rose signed the letter, Brian Kelsey did not.

- And to clarify, we're talking about the state legislature here.

And we should say the CDC guidelines were very clear, get vaccinated.

I think every epidemiologist locally, nationally, I mean, 99.9% of them are saying the best answer right now is to get vaccinated.

I'm curious, Matt, I'm putting you on the spot here, you are new to Memphis, new to The Daily Memphian and welcome.

You've been in Memphis for less than a month now I think.

- Yeah, a few weeks.

- And we'll talk about the big bridge story you did in a little bit, but you spent most of the pandemic in Pittsburgh?

- Yeah.

- Briefly, just for perspective, what was that like and I don't know off the cuff what the vaccination rates were like, but was there a fight?

Here's the fundamental thing that's very interesting to me about this and Karanja alluded to it.

Memphis and the state legislature, some people like this, some people don't, are often at odds about how Memphis should operate and how the country should operate.

Was there a city state kind of rift in terms of how Pittsburgh wanted to handle things versus the Pennsylvania legislature?

- Pennsylvania has 67 counties.

Each of them operate in large part on their own.

But they did have a state mandate in Pennsylvania and the state mandate was calling for masks and so when that guidance came down, counties went for it, but you did have counties throughout the state, a lot of them are not very well populated, where they would enforce them less stringently.

Allegheny County happens to be- - Which is where Pittsburgh is.

- That's where Pittsburgh is.

They enforced mandates pretty strongly and would report it regularly, so you'd have restaurants.

You had restaurants that actively decided that they were not going to require their employees to wear masks, not going to require people to go inside wearing masks and they would get shut down and there would be large announcements about it and so the county and the city worked hand in hand, so there was some agreement there and so this, the situation with Shelby and Memphis is unique from my perspective.

- Yeah, this came down, the CDC guidelines came down right, the same day as the new health director got hired after some controversy that I didn't, not that I didn't read the stories or not that the stories were bad.

I just didn't totally follow exactly what happened.

Michelle Taylor was unanimously approved by the Shelby County Commission this week.

She is the new Health Department director.

But there was a committee that had recommended she not be offered the job, Mayor Harris was adamant that he disagreed with that committee and in the end that Commission agreed.

And then you talk about that and welcome to the job, Ms. Taylor.

- Right.

You know, Dr. Taylor, White Station grad, you know, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, worked in the aerospace division with the National Air Guard, has worked previously with the Health Department.

I mean, just all of these qualifications and, you know, this panel got together and recommended that we add more money to the budget for the salary for this position and try to find better candidates.

And that didn't come out.

I think y'all reported on that.

The memo that kind of came out from Commissioner Mark Billingsly and so there was kind of a tussle between the two and then it came out that Mark Billingsly actually had a beef with Mayor Harris and so that was what that was all about and then the Commission came back and voted unanimously to approve Dr. Taylor with Billingsly's vote.

It was a unanimous vote, so.

- And I'll run through real quickly, as of Thursday morning, I mean the various school systems are all, you know, have been putting out guidances.

They move towards reopening here in just a just a couple of weeks.

SCS, the largest district obviously in the area, but also in the state, said he would continue to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics guidance that everyone in school should wear masks.

Collierville is recommending masks.

I think Germantown and Millington would make them optional, but recommend them.

Arlington I think that's gonna be the same and it looks like Bartlett, as well.

I mean, again, not necessarily surprisingly Bill that the suburban schools kind of have their own path, I mean pretty dramatically in terms of being open or hybrid options versus SCS being closed until really towards the end of the year.

- Yeah, and a lot has changed since the main part of the pandemic up to this.

During the last school year, a lot of the school systems, in fact, I think all six of the suburban school systems were able to operate on a hybrid schedule.

You can't do that now because the state legislature changed the law to say that you specifically cannot have a hybrid of some days when students are in class and some days when they're not.

If you want to do online learning, you're school system has to actually have what is called a virtual school that you set up separately from all of the other schools.

- And we had a conversation last week, I think it was last week with three heads of charter schools who talked about their point of view is a very good, very interesting, very opening conversation, not for anything I did, just because these three leaders were very frustrated that they were not able to offer hybrid, that they were being so dictated as you alluded to Karanja, the state sort of telling Shelby County and Memphis area what to do again in the school systems particularly.

And they voiced that it was a huge, for them, it was the inequity of it was profound, these were charter school systems, as is most of SCS that are 90 plus percent people of color.

Last thoughts on COVID in the schools.

- Yeah, I think that thing that comes to my mind is that we're so focused on COVID and it's really important, it's always important to keep in mind that we were struggling anyway with the school system in terms of just trying to make sure that people got what they needed in dealing with the different inequities and then you pile this on top of it, so we really are looking for leadership to step up and provide a way to guide people forward, but also be able to hear what's happening on the community level and what do people need, what are the parents saying, what are they saying that they need.

- And as I mentioned, we tried to have Joris Ray, Dr. Joris Ray, the superintendent of SCS schools on a couple weeks ago.

Our offer still stands and we hope to get Joris Ray and some of his folks on the show soon.

I'm gonna switch to your first story since you've gotten here.

Matt, you started working on before I think actually you'd gotten into Memphis, which is the bridge.

The Hernando de Soto Bridge, which has been shut for, I think as we taped this 80 something days.

- (Bill) Since May 11th.

- Since May 11th.

You had a very deep dive story where you talked to the inspector who was fired.

We all remember when it came out, the inspector had been fired and as I sort of remember that and I'm gonna turn this over to you to talk about what you wrote about, it was like hey, we found the person who screwed up, we fired him, we're focused on doing inspections of all the bridges in Arkansas and this one that spans Arkansas and Tennessee and the general message is he's gone, we're moving on.

Everything's fine.

Your story was startling and I will say this, the working title, which is sort of in the story and it ended up with a different title but I got to see the working draft, the title was I thought a really, really apt one, which was "The Scapegoat."

- Yeah [laughs].

Yeah, that was kind of our placeholder title for the story.

We never actually intended to call it that.

But, yeah, I think it gives some window into our interviews with the bridge inspector, so his name is Monty Frazier.

He's been a bridge inspector for the better part of the last decade and he works on these teams and he's specifically a bridge inspector that works on heavy bridges.

So the Hernando de Soto Bridge, you're talking about 50,000 cars that go across that bridge every single day and so there's a special team of heavy bridge inspectors that look at every single one of those bridges and part of their role is to look at every single one of those bridges and see every part of it within arm's length.

One of the startling things as I, you know, came in Memphis and starting following that story was that through the reporting that was already out there, the crack was identified in 2021 and then a contractor, Michael Baker Corporation went back into their drone footage and they found the photograph from 2019 and then there was a Shelby County employee who happened to be kayaking on the Mississippi River right at the spot and took a photograph in 2016, posted it on the internet and there was the crack up there, as well.

And when we were doing our research for the story, we went onto Flickr and saw a photograph from a photo journalist, a French photo, not a photo journalist, a French photographer who was here touring the city and the area, was on the Mississippi River in 2014, took a photograph and the crack is there.

And so the narrative from the Arkansas Department of Transportation was, as you pointed out, there's this one guy, he was lead inspector on these bridges, he's gone, everything's fine.

Our inspection process works and this won't happen again.

But when you look at that, you realize yes, he lead the heavy bridge inspection in 2019, he led the heavy bridge inspection process in 2021, but he didn't in 2018, '17, '16, '15 and '14 and there were multiple teams that were looking at the bridge and they all looked at it as well, and so one of the big things that the story tries to figure out is what went wrong, why is the inspection process, why did the inspection process fail so badly and I think we got some answers, but we still don't have all of them.

- And it is, what it means is a portrait of a systemic failure.

You got to talk to Monty Ellis.

- Frazier.

- Frazier, sorry.

- Monty Frazier.

He takes responsibility that I screwed up and it's a very, it's heartening to hear someone say I screwed up.

In defense, I don't know if he had a lawyer involved, but he didn't seem to be talking through a lawyer.

I mean, he said, "I screwed up."

But there was a systemic failure.

So, what has Arkansas Department of Transportation said since the story's come out?

Have they talked any more about owning up to potential systemic failures?

- They have not that I've seen.

Bill, you covered this as well.

I don't know if you've seen anything from ARDOT that addresses this.

It's still under investigation, so there are two reports that are gonna come out in the next month or so.

One of them is actually looking at trying to identify when the bridge actually, where the crack actually originated from.

- I love, by the way, that we call it a crack.

What is the right name for this, 'cause it's not a crack, it's a giant gap.

This huge, you know, I'm not making fun of you, but you know we call it a crack.

Everybody writes it.

It ain't a crack.

I mean, it's not some little thing, but.

- They say fracture, but it's actually, so this is part of the investigation and I've been looking through emails over the last few days to see what they're calling it and what experts call this, as well, because it's a big question.

Is it a crack, is it a fracture, is it a break, what is it?

And the experts that I've been speaking to actually say that it's a problem with the welding.

So the bridge is made with, it's a brand name steel called T1 from US Steel, which is super high-strength steel and when that steel is welded together for these tie girders that are at the bottom of the bridge, welders often have trouble welding steel that's that strong together.

And so the problem is actually with the welding between those two tie girders.

And the bridge is what's called fracture critical, which means that if any one of those tie girders fails, the whole bridge comes down and so the experts that I've spoken to have talked about the fact that that is, it's not the nicest sounding title for that kind of bridge, fracture critical makes it sound really severe.

But it's true, and that's why the inspection process is so important on these bridges, because if they miss something like that, that whole bridge can go down.

- And where are we Bill in terms of since they've been down there repairing, they've found other problems.

They're still putting plates on, this limited reopening they're gonna be monitoring what happens as they continue to replate certain parts of the underside of the bridge.

How many plates and places, I don't know how to quantify it, but it's more than, they're not gonna go down and just fix this one problem.

They found a whole bunch of other problems.

- Well, they actually have, are done with the repairs on the crack, the fracture, whatever you want to call it.

They finished with that over a week ago.

What they did was during that, they went and looked at all of the welds on the bridge and what they found was damage in 17 other areas that involves new plates that had to be fabricated and put in place and so 17 other spots on the bridge that were at least concerning enough that they had new plates fabricated and bolted into place and all of the work that goes into transferring the load of the bridge temporarily while those plates are made and then put in place and bolted in place.

It's a very complex procedure and they will probably finish with the vast majority of that work coming up if you're watching this on Friday, coming up Monday morning at 6 AM is when eastbound traffic into Memphis resumes on the bridge.

The westbound traffic out of Memphis will resume about a week later.

- Assuming all goes well under their monitoring and so on and so forth.

- But, as you're going back and forth on the bridge, you will still see work crews who will be working on the bridge.

- They can stay there as long as they want to as far as I'm concerned.

I should note that we'll have, Clay Bright is scheduled to come on.

He is the head of the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

They are doing the repairs.

Arkansas, if you don't follow this closely, has been doing the inspections and obviously a question for Clay Bright will be is Arkansas going to continue to exclusively do the inspections on bridges like this.

There's also, I don't know, anybody else want to add on bridge?

There's more talk now of a third bridge.

I mean, that's coming up.

As we, I think this morning, the Senate bipartisan group or maybe it was last night signed off on a plan for federal infrastructure spending.

Pete Buttigieg was here, the head of the US Department of Transportation.

It's a timely story nationally.

- Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation.

- I just don't know if y'all are seeing it or hearing it out there, but bridge hesitancy right now is a thing.

I don't know if you're seeing it on social media and I've heard a few people at the local taverns talking about it, but, yeah, I'll never take that bridge again, right, you know, and they're super worried about it, which, of course, we know that everybody will continue to go back across the bridge, but Commissioner Bright said in the statement that went out about the reopening that the repairs that we made are good for years to come, so we'll see how that affects bridge hesitancy.

Oh, and TDOT posted that video of those two big dump trucks racing across the bridge.

I don't know if that's to quell some of that bridge hesitancy or not, but there it is.

- That was the load testing.

- Okay.

- Of the bridge.

- Okay.

- I prefer Toby's story.

Bill has to be rational.

I'm gonna move on to Sam Hardeman, who covers City Hall for the Commercial Appeal had a story I think it was Wednesday night on a new proposal to start yet again, city-county consolidation discussions, so Chase Carlisle, the city councilman, Reginald Milton from Shelby County Commission want to put a charter commission together to make a proposal that would be before voters in 2022 to look again at city county consolidation.

Bill, you've covered numerous of these efforts over the years.

I mean, is any sense of this having more or less momentum behind it and where have the others gone in the past because this has come up many times that I can think of.

- The discussion has come up many times.

It rarely gets to the part where an actual commission is appointed to draft a consolidation charter, drafting city and county government and we should point out that it gets said over and over whenever these things are on the track that this consolidates city and county government, it does not affect the six suburban cities and towns within Shelby County.

The last one of these we had was in 2010.

- Nor does it affect schools, which is a hot one that gets people kind of- - It does not affect schools, which had been seen as a major point in this.

I don't know how much of a point it is at this point.

The last proposed consolidation charter was in 2010.

It went to voters in the city and county.

What happens is you have two separate votes.

You have one vote within the City of Memphis.

You have one vote in the county outside of the city and the charter has to be approved by voters in each one of those.

In 2010, the consolidation charter was basically crushed, defeated in the county outside of the city and it very narrowly won within the city of Memphis.

It's a very complex discussion.

We'll see where this goes.

Chase Carlisle has been an advocate of government consolidation basically when he was running for the Council in the 2019 elections.

- You've covered this in the past as well, I mean thoughts on where this goes.

Does it seem like a different time than 2010?

- Well, I think the keyword that you mentioned several times in putting the question to Bill was again.

It is again and I'm not picking up any kind of grassroots kind of sentiment that people are pushing for this right now and I understand the argument that some sort of way this puts us in a better position, you know, from an economic standpoint to be able to deal with the rest of the state, but, you know, there are some real economic issues in Memphis.

I mean, there are a number of trend lines that suggest that we need to be doing something, but I'm not hearing the consolidation is like a groundsful answer for that.

- I mean, one of the things that people always point to is Nashville, which had massive economic growth.

They consolidated government back in late '60s, early '70s.

But the one, and so, it's something hopefully we can get to reporting wise, not necessarily on the show, of other areas that have consolidated because you can also look at Chattanooga.

Chattanooga has had tremendous growth.

They're not consolidated government and there's a lot, there are real differences of opinion to say the least between Hamilton County government and the City of Chattanooga.

So, I don't know.

I'm curious where it goes and it always feels like it comes out of nowhere, but they, I mean, Chase is a serious politician, as is Reginald Milton, so we'll see what happens.

- Yeah, I think that part of this will be gauging what support there is for it and I think what is inevitable is there will be some pushback on this from political leaders who feel like this dilutes political strength of various voting blocks for our own city.

That's a traditional part of the consolidation discussion.

- With the legislature, again, back to the legislature, would they be able, can they interfere with this at all?

'Cause it's the kind of thing that at least a certain number of legislators will want to interfere with.

I'm putting you on the spot.

- They could to some degree.

There are certain ways to interfere with it, but the challenge of having the two separate referenda was actually taken to court in the 2010 matter after, it actually delayed the certification of the vote in 2010 and the courts ruled without any hesitation that yes, this is legal and that is a state law.

- And we had our first sort of semi-official Worth Morgan might run for county mayor.

He appointed a treasurer for a potential campaign.

We've got more of that coming as we go forward, but with just a minute left, we're gonna get a marijuana update from Toby.

- Earlier this summer, Representative Bruce Griffey, he's a Republican from Paris, he filed a bill that if it were passed, it would put a question to Tennessee voters in 2022.

It's not a ballot initiative, it's a poll basically asking voters, you know, what do you think about marijuana legislation in Tennessee and, you know, recreational, medicinal, all those things and the move was kind of criticized because it's non-binding, it's just a poll and if 100% of Tennesseans said yes, we absolutely want marijuana in the state of Tennessee, nothing happens.

The poll results go to the legislature and that's where it ends, so if they decide to move, the earliest that we could see any kind of marijuana movement in Tennessee is 2023.

- All right, that is the update, thank you.

And thank all of you for being here.

Matt, thanks for being here.

And thank you for joining us.

Join us again next week for a conversation with Rory Thomas and the Memphis Medical District transformation.

See you then.

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