(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.

- Candidate for mayor, Paul Young, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, and thanks for joining us.

We are joined tonight by Paul Young, candidate for mayor, also head of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

How are you?

- I'm doing great.

- Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me today.

- Absolutely.

Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Before we get started with Paul, I'll just run through, and people who've been watching have heard me do this, but out of fairness to the other candidates, it's important for me to note that, as we are about two weeks from the beginning of early voting as this airs, we have been having, and are having, all the leading candidates on Behind the Headlines for one-on-one interviews.

We've so far had Karen Camper, JW Gibson, Michelle McKissack, Van Turner, Paul Young, of course, today.

Frank Colvett came on but that later dropped out of the race.

In coming weeks, we'll have Floyd Bonner as well as Willie Herenton, former Mayor Herenton.

There's been no magic to the order 'cause people ask, believe it or not.

It's really just been the schedules and where we've been able to get people lined up, and so, that's really all there is to that.

For those we've already done, if you missed 'em, you can get those full recordings at wkno.org or you can go to dailymemphian.com.

You can also get the audio of those wherever you get your podcasts.

Just search for Behind The Headlines.

This all follows two debates we did.

A criminal justice debate back in, I think it was in April.

Seems like 100 years ago.

That's available on the Daily Memphian site.

And just a couple weeks ago, we did a debate with five of the candidates, including Paul Young, here at WKNO.

Kontji Anthony and I co-moderated that.

That video, an hour-and-a-half conversation about a wide range of issues, is available on WKNO.

You can go to Daily Memphian, or you can even search YouTube and find that.

Election, as I said, September 15th is the beginning of early voting.

The election day is October 5, but you must register to vote, and that's September 5, which is just a couple days away.

So September 5, you've gotta register.

One more update, we've got, I don't always promote Daily Memphian, but in this case, 'cause it's a big election, we have profiles of all the mayor that Bill Dries and Sam Hardiman, and other writers at Daily Memphian have done.

We've got candidate questionnaires for all the mayoral candidates and just, we'll have a lot of coverage on the Daily Memphian as we go through this next busy month.

We will not have City Council members and candidates on Behind the Headlines.

It's just logistically too difficult with so many races.

But we are covering those races extensively on the Daily Memphian, so go to Daily Memphian.

All our election coverage is free during this leading up to Election Day.

So with those logistics out of the way, Paul Young, thanks for being here.

We'll start with a question about crime.

It's heavy on everyone's mind and, specific, and you clarify how you're answering this question 'cause you're here today, as we talked about beforehand, as candidate for mayor, but you're also the head of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

That also includes management of Beale Street.

There was a terrible incident some weeks ago now, right, at late, on Beale Street, but crime, generally, what is your approach, and then specific to your role as Downtown Memphis, head of Downtown Memphis Commission and oversight of Beale Street, what could you have done differently or better to mitigate some of these incidents, including that most recent one?

- Yeah, so I'll answer the last part first.

I wanna clarify that the incident did not take place on Beale Street proper.

The incident took place on the periphery of Beale Street, and that's what tends to happen because of the security protocols that we put in place on Beale Street.

Those individuals that don't wanna abide by the rules, they still wanna carry guns and things of that nature, they tend to gather in certain places outside of Beale Street proper.

And that's why we have worked with MPD over the past couple of weekends to ensure that we don't have those types of street parties taking place on the edges of Beale Street.

And so, I think we'll continue to operate in the fashion where we have, where we've set up various roadblocks to prevent cars from getting to the intersections, doing the donuts and burnouts, which is what led to some of the unfortunate incidents we saw a couple of weeks ago.

And I think that's gonna be the mode of operation moving forward in downtown, particularly on the weekends.

When it comes to the broad overall strategy around crime, I tell people it's a two-fold approach.

One, we gotta hold people accountable.

So the people that are out here terrorizing our neighborhoods and communities, we have to make sure that we're getting them off the streets.

And as mayor, I wanna make sure that I am the chief collaborator, the person that's bringing all of the parties to the table, because you all know that the mayor can't control all of the things that happen in the criminal justice system single-handedly.

It's gonna take the other players.

It's gonna take the district attorneys, the judges, and the whole system coming together to galvanize around the solutions.

It can't just be finger-pointing.

There has to be some collaboration.

So accountability is number one.

And then the second, and equally important part of it, is intervention and prevention.

We know who the young people are that are headed down the wrong road.

They're getting suspended from school or they're in truancy court.

We wanna make sure that we're targeting interventions towards those individuals.

- Let me bring in Bill.

- Which brings up something that I think we see happening, and that is, we see both parts of what you're talking about, long-term and short-term approaches to it, but it's like a pendulum swinging, and so, one of those tends to be the priority, and then something happens, and the other one becomes the priority.

So how, as mayor, do you stop the pendulum from swinging and be able to do both the long term and the short term?

Because they're both important, I think everyone agrees on that.

- Absolutely.

I mean, I think it's just making sure it's a priority.

Certainly, the top priority has to be stopping the bleeding.

We gotta stop what's happening right now, and that means supporting our officers so that they can do the things that they need to do to get the people that are terrorizing our communities off the streets and then supporting the criminal justice system to make sure that those violent offenders stay in jail.

But at the same time, we have to recognize, as a community, that if somebody picks up a gun and says they want to rob somebody, doesn't matter how many police we have, somebody's gonna get robbed.

And so the question is, how do we get to their mind before they make that decision?

And the way we get to their mind is through that targeted intervention and prevention that I was recently, that I just spoke about.

- Whenever there is some kind of effort announced, all of the different players are always there saying, "We're united.

We're going to collaborate on this."

When something goes wrong with that approach, everybody starts saying, "Oh, well, I wasn't handling that.

This agency was handling it."

How do you get around what some people have called silos?

How do you get more cooperation than we've seen currently?

- I think it's a willingness to consistently be at the table, to put ego aside and say, "It's all of our fault," as a community.

It's not one individual's fault that these things are happening.

It's all of our fault.

We are representing local government.

We need the community at the table.

We need our churches at the table.

All of us have a role to play, and I believe that the mayor should be that chief collaborator, should be the one that is bringing the folks to the table, the chief convener that's saying, "Let's do it together.

Let's stay at the table until we figure this out."

And once we figure it out, let's continue to stay at the table to keep things going on the right path.

- If your approach is, as mayor, to, if you're elected mayor, and your approach to crime works, and it's not an everyday concern the way it is right now, how do you keep the momentum behind that other approach to this?

The longer term approach?

- I think, certainly, we have enough challenges in our community that we're gonna be working on multiple things at one time.

And in order to keep the trajectory, keep the momentum, when we establish a program that's having an impact on the lives of young people, people that are dealing with severe poverty, who don't have the mentors and role models that they need, we wanna make sure that the programs that are sustaining them continue to work.

And so, we're gonna continue to put money on those efforts, and we're gonna also work on cleaning up our neighborhoods, investing in jobs, investing in our youth, investing in arts and culture, the other pillars of the campaign, to make sure that we're doing all the things that keep our community whole.

- Do you think that the Department of Justice's pattern and practice investigation, which has just begun holding public hearings, do you think that the timing of that is right?

Do you think that that is a valid exercise of the federal government's authority in this?

- Yeah, it's a valid exercise.

I mean, given what we've seen recently early this year with the Tyre Nichols tragedy, we wanna do all we can to restore faith with the community.

And so, we welcome the investigation as an opportunity to make sure that we are doing all that we can to ensure that our practices with the Memphis Police Department are respectful of the people in our city.

- The investigation of Tyre Nichols raised a lot of questions about Chief Davis, excuse me.

Chief Davis got a lot of praise for how she handled in moving quickly as Steve Mulroy, Jim Strickland, after the tragedy of Tyre Nichols.

But you have said you don't wanna say that you're gonna support a given, Chief Davis, or you've talked about Doug McGowan at MLGW that just, you'll make those determinations if you win, whether or not you're gonna support them.

So two-part question.

What are you looking for, what are your criteria for a good police chief?

And you've also said that you do wanna increase the number of police.

How will you get that done?

- Yeah, so what I'm looking for in the police chief is someone who's committed to being transparent, who's committed to engaging with the community in a real way.

I feel like it's about relationships.

Everything is relational, and the more we can have a chief who's out there, the better we're gonna be in terms of the climate that we've seen with this friction between the community and policing.

And lastly, with regards to the police chief, is I want someone who's going to get buy-in from the staff, from the team, from the officers that are on the ground.

We gotta have a leader who is able to galvanize that group and get their trust.

When it comes to, what was the last part of your question?

- Hiring, which is obviously - Hiring, hiring, hiring.

- One thing, you know, comes in part, from the position.

- So, yes, when it comes to hiring, obviously, we're doing a lot right now.

The city is doing all types of incentives and, you know, I think those are the right steps.

I think what we have to do is, as we are continuing to hire, which I think they are doing a pretty good job with getting people hired, the problem is that the retention is still low.

And so we have to do more around retention.

So we should think of more ways to ensure that those that have been there for a while continue to see a future with Memphis Police Department.

But at the same time, we must find efficiencies with the people that we have so that we can make their jobs more effective.

- Bill may have more questions on public safety, criminal justice; I'm gonna pivot away from that and talk about one of the things that comes up often at this table over the many years we've been doing the show, we've talked to you about in other roles, be it when you're at DMC or prior when you were at Housing and Community Development, and that's the whole role of economic development incentives, broadly, be those PILOTs, be those TIFs, be those cash grants to get businesses or get housing done or get developments started.

There are critics who just say the city and the county, the various government entities, again, DMC and Housing and Community Development included, use them too much.

They are giveaways to developers, and there is not enough accountability.

Does the project get done?

Is the project done in a way it was promised to be done?

Or do properties sit vacant for a decade, you know, with kind of incentives, sort of keeping them alive?

So your take on incentives from the, if you were to win the mayor seat, how would you approach them?

- I think incentives are important.

We have to realize that we are in a global competition for jobs.

Global.

And even if you just look nationally, if we removed all of our incentives, every community around us would continue to have 'em.

We are not competing against, you know, Southaven, Bartlett, Germantown.

We're competing against the Birmingham MSA, the Chicago MSA, and we have to make sure that we can bring jobs to our community, and so we need to have more tools in the toolbox to be able to do that.

- What about, and now I'll go to Bill, what about accountability though?

I mean, there are developers downtown who have gotten incentives of various types from DMC where the projects have not moved in a decade, you know.

I mean people point to Tom Intrator's and those projects or other ones that are still kind of vacant, beat up buildings, and those owners still hold onto the incentives that are, you know, sometimes repeatedly extended, even though there's no movement on the building.

- Well, I think it's important for people to understand how the incentive works.

There is no cash.

We haven't given them anything.

It's just, when they start the development, they will have the ability to have a lower tax rate once the project actually begins.

So we can take the incentive away.

That doesn't make the project get done quicker.

You know, the idea around providing these incentives is to make very, very difficult projects happen.

There are financial gaps on these projects that need to be closed, and if it's not closed, the project doesn't happen.

- One last follow-up on that, and I really will go to Bill.

But when those incentives are, and we're really wonky here, but when those incentives are renewed and renewed, and even though it isn't a cash grant, it isn't cash payment, does that prevent another owner from coming in, taking over that empty, you know, somewhat blighted or very blighted building and moving forward with the project?

- It doesn't prevent another owner because the current owner has to dispose of the property either way, and the property is actually more attractive to be sold with an incentive anyway.

- Right, right.

Ten minutes left, Bill.

- And I have a follow up to that, too.

So, a project is going, the property's being improved, the plans are moving forward, they may change a little bit, but the project's moving forward, so they're getting the incentive, which let's say it's a PILOT, and it's based on property tax revenue.

Does the property tax revenue, that is involved there, is it prevented from going to other public areas?

Other public concerns or duties that the city has?

- Yes, so if the property actually gets executed, and the value of the property increases, they are paying less in taxes than they would be paying without a PILOT.

And so, those are taxes that are foregone, but what we try to figure out is, could this project happen without the incentive?

If not, then you get 100% of 0.

But there are no taxes to be gained if the project doesn't happen.

And so, that's why when we do our analysis on the project, we're trying to determine could it happen without this incentive?

- And the way that this works is, is PILOTs are not the only tool in the toolbox, I'll say, to use the cliche, that there are other methods and some things are being financed by the taxes that a business pays after the PILOT rolls off.

So do extensions complicate the flow of that revenue?

- Yeah, so the PILOT Extension Fund, which is what I think you're referencing, is a different tool.

It's essentially a TIF, and it takes that increase in taxes, and those taxes stay in a pool that can be used to finance infrastructure in downtown.

And so, as a result, you'll see in projects, like the Mobility Center, which just recently came online, you see projects that are in the pipeline, like 100 North Main, and so, the intent is to ensure that it continues to serve the public good with those revenues that are coming in.

- Okay.

As this show airs on September 1st, it's been a year since you announced your campaign.

When you're running this kind of campaign, a city-wide campaign, do the conditions that you are campaigning on, do the issues that you're campaigning on, have they changed since you announced?

- I think the number one issue when I started was crime.

And it's still the number one issue.

It's top of mind for everyone.

And so, the circumstances changed.

The issue-of-the-day changes.

I mean, the topic-of-the-day, but it still revolves around crime, and it is the number one thing that we have to address as a community.

It has had an impact on the psyche of people.

The tone is down; people are just, they're feeling down right now because of what we're seeing, and we wanna bring some brighter days to our community.

So crime is number one.

- All right, and a little bit further into the inside baseball of this, you and every other candidate start the campaign with a strategy.

Does that strategy change?

Has it in your case?

- It hadn't for me.

We've been focused the whole time.

We knew that we were gonna have to build name recognition but firmly believed and still believe right now, that I'm the best person to take Memphis into the next chapter.

And we knew that we were gonna have to work hard to build relationships.

I wanted to spend a lot of time working in communities and neighborhoods, where I have strengths, with people that already know who I am, and use those organic grassroots relationships to help build momentum for the campaign.

And that's exactly what has happened.

- There are 17 candidates running in this race for mayor.

Believe it or not, that's not a record.

We've had more; we've had 25 candidate races for mayor.

I'll ask this question two ways.

Are there too many candidates in this race?

And are there too few voters given the turnout we've seen of around 25 to 30% over the last four mayoral races?

- Yeah, I won't say there's too many.

I mean, I wish there were less, but this is the first time in many, many years that there's been no incumbent.

And so, we knew there would be a lot of people putting their name on the ballot.

Now, to your last question, I definitely think there are too few people that vote.

There are too few people that understand the impact that the mayor and City Council have on their day-to-day lives.

They get riled up for presidential elections, but these local officials actually touch your day-to-day needs on a regular basis.

And so, I wish there were more but, you know, we're gonna do everything we can to inspire and encourage as many people to come out as possible.

- And we should also point out, Eric, that the city, a city election, races for the mayor and City Council, we have not had a majority of the city voters turn out for one of these elections since 1991.

- Right, right, that's a good point.

We'll say with some campaigning and electioning, there is a, in an election season, over the last few months, people come up to me many times.

You've heard this.

It's not a whisper campaign; it's a loud whisper campaign.

Well, you know, Paul Young will say to me, he's a Republican.

- Yeah.

- Are you a Republican?

- No, I'm a Democrat.

- Okay.

Have you voted for Republicans in the past?

- So, I've voted in Republican primaries in the past.

I think the one that gets the most attention is the 2016 election, when I voted in the Republican primary to try to prevent Trump from getting the Republican nomination.

It was unsuccessful, but that was my attempt to try to, you know, make my voice heard on the other side of the ledger.

- It's a nonpartisan race, - It's a nonpartisan race, yes.

- The mayor's race?

As a Democrat, would you not work with Republicans?

- I'm gonna work with everybody.

Quite frankly, I think that partisanship gets in the way of progress.

We've had Republicans, Democrats, all of 'em have been leaders in our community, but the results are still the same.

When I go to the neighborhoods and our communities, they are suffering.

They could care less whether the Republicans or Democrats got the resources they needed to their community, and as mayor, I'm gonna work with everyone to make sure that we get what the people in our community need.

- Speaking of resources, with five minutes left here, I mentioned earlier that, again, you're not saying you will or won't support any current leader of any city departments or officials.

That includes Doug McGowan I mentioned from MLGW, but MLGW has been in the news for the last, you know, for a while now, but especially in the last, with the power outages and the ice storms, the windstorms.

MLGW is owned by the city.

It's not a department of the city, but it kinda sorta is.

What does MLGW need to prevent, need to do?

Does it need more money, does it need more people, does it need new leadership to diminish the number of outages that people in neighborhoods are really upset about?

And it's, you know, it's not just annoying.

It's a health risk, it's dangerous, and so on.

- MLGW needs time to work the plan.

I actually reached out to Doug McGowan, had a great conversation with him about what the future of MLGW looks like and what their plans are.

And he explained to me what process they're undergoing right now to ensure that they're doing things to trim the trees and use the dollars that they have to make the immediate updates to the system.

They're doing some other assessments of the system to identify where are there areas where they can harden and change the wooden poles to steel poles, where are there areas where they could take utilities underground, and then also, how can they switch to a smart grid system, and so, I believe in the plan that they have in place.

It just needs time to be implemented.

- And they have enough money, you think?

- There's likely going to be a point where there's more money necessary, but they're gonna have to get to the next phase of assessment to determine what that is.

- Let me stay with infrastructure and, again, back into neighborhoods is roads, roads and beyond the MLGW stuff, just the state of sidewalks, the state of roads, et cetera.

You know, Mayor Strickland has increased the spending on roads and paving pretty dramatically.

- Dramatically.

- But you can still drive around and see areas that are lacking, and you can see some of the state roads that are essentially the responsibility of the state, within the city limits, that are in terrible shape.

What would you do on those two fronts?

- Yeah, I think the state of the conditions on our roads is a function of how large our community is.

We know we're a very large city.

I think we have to continue to find ways to make more investments.

I think Strickland got it from being about a 25-year paving cycle to down to about twelve to eleven years, which is great.

We wanna try and get it down to eight years, if possible.

We have to find the resources to be able to do that.

We talk a lot about this $50 million that's going to be coming up in the budget as a result of the debt cliff.

I'd like to figure out what portion of that we could apply towards investing in infrastructure.

- All right, a couple of minutes left.

Bill?

- Right, and with the debt cliff, that's a result of the city having continued to pay down its debt.

Do you think that that windfall, so to speak, for the city negates the need for a property tax hike?

- I sure hope so.

I mean, my goal is to make sure that we maximize every dollar that we have.

We know that the $50 million is not gonna be enough to fund all of our needs, but we hope that we can start to see significant progress by applying those resources towards these challenges that we've been talking about: investing in our youth, investing in our infrastructure, investing in transportation.

All of those things are going to be priorities, and we're gonna do all that we can to stretch it as far as we can, such that we don't have to increase taxes.

- Several City Council members at different times over about the last five or six years have said Memphis Light, Gas and Water is a division of the city.

It should be no different than Housing and Community Development, which you were head of, Public Works division, but it is a different because utilities are heavily, heavily regulated on several different levels.

Is there any scenario that you see where Memphis Light, Gas and Water would not have its own board but would be on the level of any other city division?

- I don't envision doing that.

I mean, I think we can continue to work seamlessly with MLGW in its current form.

It's just about the leaders collaborating, and we have to act as grownups and work together, and that's what exactly what we'll do.

- All right, we are out of time.

Paul Young, thanks for being here.

Bill, thanks for being here.

If you missed any of the interview today, it'll be available at wkno.org or the Daily Memphian.

We've also done interviews with other candidates over the past couple of months.

That includes Karen Camper, JW Gibson, Michelle McKissack, Van Turner, obviously, Paul Young today.

We have Floyd Bonner coming up soon, former Mayor Herenton coming up soon.

Those will all be on wkno.org or Daily Memphian.

Register to vote, September 5.

Early voting begins September 15th.

Election day is October 5.

Thanks for being here; we'll see you next week.

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