- (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.

- Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland on his two terms in office tonight on Behind the Headlines.

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

I am joined tonight again by Jim Strickland, Memphis Mayor, thanks for being here again.

- It's always fun.

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

This is part two of two shows that we are doing with Mayor Strickland.

Last week we talked a lot of current issues of the stadium deal, the arena deal.

We talked about a whole lot about crime that's going on right now.

We talked about MLGW, other immediate issues, but Jim Strickland here was nice enough to sit and maybe talk about the last two terms in office and even maybe some of your time as a City Councilperson.

There was a proposal at what was a year ago, I've lost all sense of time, a local referendum that potentially would've allowed you to run for a third term.

Had you run for a third term and won a third term, and you were sitting here today looking at your, starting another four years, what would your priorities have been?

- Crime, obviously, number one, and it will remain number one for a long time.

And we need change in that arena.

I know there are things city government can do better because there's no organization that's perfect, but those are at the edges of the crime issue.

The real challenge we have are the state laws, the federal laws, and the court system that has allowed for a revolving door and inadequate punishment and I would continue to hammer on that until we got changes.

- And we talked a ton about that on last week's show, half the show I think we talked about crime and the criminal justice system and all that.

And so again, we're not skipping over that issue, but you can get that at wkno.org or you can listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Let me ask you, again, looking back at your successes, what are you most proud of?

- I think overall, I think our administration has operated city government to allow people to succeed and have opportunities overall and economic development.

We've worked with all our partners.

We have more people working now than before.

Wages are up 27%.

Property values are up 76%.

We have thousands of available jobs open right now.

The American Dream is alive and well in Memphis.

You can get free workforce development and get a good paying job and a good paying career.

And importantly, poverty has gone down.

It's the lowest point in decades and maybe the lowest ever, and it's been trending down for five years.

Thirty-seven thousand fewer people are living in poverty now.

And then individually, we've done things that are long-term investments like universal needs-based pre-K, that's a great opportunity that will help young people in the future.

Our Boys and Girls Club partnership, doubling things we do in libraries and community centers for young people.

Our summer jobs program, our Opportunity Youth program, giving those disconnected youth something to do, our gang violence interruption.

We had a meeting last night with gang members offering them a road to success.

And some of 'em brought up the fact, "Well, with my record, I can't get a job."

You can get a job.

We had two nonprofits there, including Hope Works, that said, "I placed three people with records just like yours in jobs today."

So the opportunities are there and we've greatly improved the built environment, I think with renovating community centers and building new ones like Ed Rice and redoing Gaston Community Center, which is now a beautiful facility, tennis facility, to the youth sports complex at the Fairgrounds and with tennis facilities and golf and kind of, but I think it all gets down to providing good core services.

And I know I'm going long here, but Ned McWherter was one of my favorite governors and he had a saying that "roads plus schools equal jobs."

And I think what we've done is take that philosophy and expand it.

Roads means all infrastructure.

When St. Jude said they needed to expand, but they needed better sewers, we were right there and said, we'll pay for it.

They've already increased their jobs by 2,000.

They got another 2,000 coming.

Our fiber initiative is part of infrastructure now, on the school side we said universal needs-based pre-K, and then I think afterschool activities are important and we've greatly increased that and I think doing all that has resulted in real jobs.

- We'll dig into all that, but let me bring in Bill Dries.

- So you win the second term in October of 2019, take office for the second term in January, and in mid-March, this thing called the pandemic hits the city and hits the country very hard, an unprecedented situation in our lifetimes.

Talk about the impact of that on the goals that you just talked about pursuing.

- Well, it frankly derailed most everything and it derailed our country.

I remember I was actually down in Dallas for the conference basketball tournament for the University of Memphis.

Drove down there on one day, they canceled the games and I drove back the next and was on the phone the entire way back trying to learn as much as we can.

And that Saturday, Dr. Manoj Jain came in and talked to our senior leadership team and kind of explained what this was all about.

And then we hit the ground running.

We set up the task force on city government, which grew to basically, I was gonna say countywide, but actually grew bigger than that with all parties involved in it, trying to understand the disease and how do we respond.

I mean, we just didn't know how fast it would go.

I remember talking to hotels at the beginning saying, if we have to move police officers and firefighters to keep them away from the virus, can we rent 100 rooms?

I mean, we just didn't.

No, but it derailed everything.

You know, schools shut down, sports shut down, churches shut down, and youth became much more disconnected than they ever were.

I mean, for a year and a half to two years.

I think that's why crime has increased all throughout the country and in Memphis in particular.

Young people disconnected from all good things, but the bad influences didn't disconnect.

Gangs did not social distance.

So the bad influences were pulling, so it derailed.

Crime was going down slightly, but it was going down before the pandemic.

And as we've seen across the country, it went up.

It's just been worse in Memphis.

- So to the degree that you had control over some parts of the economy, you had to make some hard decisions when it came to shutting things down.

And there were also some questions that I don't think probably anyone could have imagined at the outset.

And that is churches.

I mean, this is a city of churches.

It's a known feature of it.

And while you had to say, yes, we're gonna shut down businesses, you took a different tact with churches and said, we're gonna talk to you and tell you we think it's a bad idea, but we're not specifically going to order you to shut down.

- I think that was partly based on legal advice.

We weren't 100% sure that we could forcibly shut them down.

And I was the first in this area to shut things down, but within about four months, my authority was taken away and it was all given to county governments by a gubernatorial order.

But I do remember what you're talking about, there was some discussion about whether people had the constitutional right to worship but I think most churches actually did voluntarily shut down for a while because remember, we didn't have a vaccine and we didn't have medication to treat.

Those two things greatly benefited and put the virus behind us.

- You talked about youth.

Do you think that and the disconnection in COVID and other people obviously have said that, and the whole country experienced this spike in crime, was it more that than, I mean, how much did the George Floyd, the horrific incident, I mean that also had, in some cities it was hugely impactful.

I'm not taking away from the horror of it at all in what I say here.

It didn't seem like it had as much impact on crime here, but maybe I'm wrong.

- No, I don't think protests affected crime.

I think protests may have affected our ability to recruit and retain officers because they were under so much scrutiny.

But I don't think it affected directly crime.

I think it was the shutting everything down, young people being disconnected and the availability of guns that was at an all-time high.

Those two things converging.

- And again, we had Jim Strickland on last week and talked at length about all the criminal justice systems and concerns about guns and so on.

One thing though, when we talk about recruiting, and I think I've asked you this before, in hindsight, were the pension and benefit cuts and reforms that were done, I think when you were on City Council before, 'cause Wharton was mayor then, that the union said, everyone's gonna quit, everyone's gonna go, there were what, 2,500 police officers and there were a lot of lost police.

And there are a lot of people who point to those cuts and benefits.

And now the city as like many, many cities is putting huge signing bonuses and pay increases and increases in benefit.

If you could roll back the clock, would you say, "Hey, you don't do pension reform or don't do it that way."

- That's hard because it did, there's no doubt it had a negative impact on recruitment and retention of police officers and I think crime, but financially we just couldn't afford it.

I do wish...

There's a difference in the amount of information that you get when you're mayor versus Council.

And I wish our team had been in place during that time so that we could have figured out a better way to handle it.

Because when we restored the benefits after the 2019 sales tax passage, restoring didn't cost nearly the amount of money that the experts said in 2014 that it was gonna cost us to continue those benefits.

- But was it a moving target from 2014 to when the referendum came around?

- Yes, I mean, it's hard to compare apples to apples because of the market conditions and so forth, but you know, it had such a bad effect on recruiting and retention.

When I took over in 2016 as mayor, we were hemorrhaging officers and there was little communication with the officers.

There was no plan to recruit.

There was one of those years, maybe 2015, where there was no class whatsoever.

We were hemorrhaging and a drop down.

We'd gone from basically 2,400 officers in 2011 to shortly after I was elected to 1,907, that number stands out to me.

We hit 1,907 and then our aggressive recruiting happened and wage increases and we gotten up to about 2,100 before the pandemic and then the pandemic hit.

You talk about something that derailed us, it definitely derailed us.

Older people just retired early in all kinds of professions.

And then the protests happened, all that stuff happening, it was really hard to recruit and retain officers.

We've done a better job than other cities, New Orleans has the lowest number of police officers they've had since 1948.

Minneapolis has the lowest number in decades, we've actually held on, and now we're going, we're rebuilding like we did in 2006 and 2016, we're in that rebuild again.

- We'll shift to, again, we talked a bunch about crime and those issues last week, and I wanna shift to public spaces.

And you mentioned that, you even mentioned, I don't know if you mentioned here or before we started the show, the idea that libraries were closed on Fridays, which that stood out to me when you said that, and I don't think you said it on the show, I think you said before.

There were all those small things like that that you did, I mean, to give you your due, you invested in and then the big kind of gleaming projects like the youth sports facility like the Leftwich Tennis Center which just reopened, Tom Lee Park, obviously a lot of private money, and all these had some amount of private money I think, many of them did.

Within those, do you feel like those are on sound financial footing?

Those were big investments.

You also did the Accelerate Memphis investment of what, a couple $100 million?

Do you look and say, well, maybe that we spend too much or no?

- No, I think it's investing in the future.

I think you have to do that.

The quality of your public investments has to meet the quality of the people you're trying to serve.

And we have great people, we have great kids and they need that.

The youth sports facility is supposed to get a million visitors and they're on target to do that, Tom Lee Park- - In its first year?

- In its first year, according to media reports I've read.

And Tom Lee Park, I think is gonna be a huge benefit for the city and Ed Rice Community Center, it was never meant to earn money.

I mean, tennis courts aren't meant to earn money and golf course redos, and we've put in probably a couple $100 million in our parks when normally you only get two or three million in deferred maintenance.

All 120 of our parks have been improved to some degree and I'm very proud of the parks division.

And another thing COVID derailed, before the pandemic, we literally had doubled the amount of kids taking part in library and community center programs.

And it dropped obviously.

And even though we still have the capacity, the participation has not matched pre-pandemic levels.

It's going up, but it hadn't reached those levels yet.

- Let's talk about another part of that and that is public transportation, Memphis Area Transit Authority, which has really been a long haul for you over over eight years.

You've increased the city's funding for Memphis Area Transit Authority, and now there is this $30 million fund that is building as you leave office to reach that $30 million goal.

How would you gauge the progress that has been made on that?

Because it seems like we're still talking about a Transit Vision plan and there are setbacks along the way because if the ridership's not there, then MATA scales back some of the stops that they make.

- I think our funding has been significant and steady, the increase, as you said, their budget was basically $30 million.

It needs to be $60 million in today's dollars.

So I'm very proud that for the first time ever, we have a dedicated funding source and the county matched that.

And by 2030 we will implement a slow buildup to Transit Vision.

Now there'll be some loss in inflation, so city and county government could probably have to supplement it somewhat, but we're on the right track for the first time really ever.

And there is a plan out there on how to slowly implement Transit Vision.

And I think we need to hold MATA accountable for implementing those improvements.

In short, it's more buses and more bus drivers on heavily used routes.

And so that it doesn't take you an hour and a half to get from Frayser to Hickory Hill.

- Is there some concern though that public transportation might be moving to things like light rail, even ride sharing services, and rides by appointment, which MATA has had some great success with?

- Absolutely.

And I think Transit Vision can do that.

Light rail I think right now is unrealistic for Memphis actually expanding what we have now because it costs so much to implement it.

And I've learned since being mayor, the feds used to pay 75% of that cost.

Now it's down to 50%.

So I just don't see light rail.

What I hope is more realistic is passenger rail from Memphis to Nashville.

And I think there is some momentum there.

- Also in terms of streets, I mean, it seems as if the more you put into streets the greater need there is.

And I think if you didn't know it when you came in, you learned a lesson or two about funding for maintenance of this stuff once you get it done, right?

- I joke with people, I love the smell of freshly poured asphalt in the morning.

I do.

- We're gonna save that.

- And we have increased paving 72%.

Now, some people don't feel it and there's reasons why, and we can get into that.

But one of the things I think you're getting to is I learned since being mayor that potholes are a problem and we fill potholes that are reported within like two days.

The real bigger challenge is street cuts.

When MLGW or private vendors or even city government cut into the pavement, and we used to have a standard that if this were the size of the street cut, you just pave it, matching the corners of that, that was a problem.

It started sinking and there'd be gaps and it caused a problem.

Now we require you to pave a bigger area.

The old Catholic High, which I've forgotten what is turned into now- - It's a Compass Point.

- Compass Point.

It has a perfect example of the two things side by side.

It has one that under the old standard and you can see gaps and it's sinking and one where it's paved under the new standard.

The new standard will save us.

Nobody cares in the public about this, but I'm thinking YouTube might actually enjoy this.

- If they're watching this on Friday night, they care.

- That's true, that's true.

The people who watch this are.

But to me it's one of those little known things that we did that I think over the long run will really improve the quality of our streets.

- We'll stay with infrastructure and talk about MLGW.

I mean it's been a really hard year.

Doug McGowen, your former COO, who'll be on the show in a month or so, to talk about his first year in the new gig running MLGW, is had a lot of challenges, right?

But one, looking back, and we talked about some of those challenges last week when you were on, but looking back at the whole bidding process and the whole notion of leaving TVA and some people saying that there are hundreds of millions of dollars that could be saved, if MLGW leaves TVA, maybe creates, works with MISO out of a co-op out of Arkansas and across the river.

Do you look back at that process and wish it had been done differently?

You ultimately had to get your own consultant to kind of get to the bottom of what, and it was unbelievably complicated.

I mean, the whole deal and proposal was complicated.

- I don't know if I'd do any differently, but we just got unlucky in the wrong time.

I mean, bottom line is, that's what Elaine Johns, our expert, basically said when she really dug into it, inflation just took off so much that if there were these hundreds of millions dollars of savings, they were kind of eliminated and bottom line, she said, "You might wanna do this later when the market settles down", and that's for the future mayor and Doug.

But it was just, according to her as my understanding, it was just bad timing.

And therefore she couldn't recommend leaving TVA but also strongly don't sign that long-term agreement with TVA because that's a never-ending thing.

- Let me also go, we have about six minutes left here, people say Nashville, when they say Nashville, what they really mean, the legislature, they don't like us, the governor don't like us, they don't care about us in Memphis.

I mean, that's all I've heard that as long as we've been doing the show, pretty much as long as I've lived in Memphis.

What has been your experience working with state government?

- It's vastly improved.

My first session, my first year as mayor was a session that marked the effort to de-annex and I mean, I'd been in office for two months and it was a bill that would allow 20% of Memphis to de-annex themselves within a year and a half, within a year and a half.

And it would've devastated Memphis.

And I was even told by a senator that the train has left the station.

We couldn't stop it.

We went up there full bore with the chamber and business leaders and we stopped it.

So we played defense.

We've built relationships and now we've gotten to the point where we're getting offense.

We are asking for things, truth in sentencing, money for intervention and youth programming to help us with crime.

And the big ask, and what we did was build relationships, three areas.

Shelby County delegation, rural West Tennessee, and then leadership.

One thing I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before, but in December, I usually take two days off and travel rural West Tennessee and visit with senators and representatives and tell the Memphis story and build relationships.

Life, politics, work is mostly relationship-driven and you have to build that relationship.

And we as a team have done a really good job at that.

- Let me bring Bill in.

- Do legislators from other parts of the state regard this as a quote unquote "Blue City"?

I mean, you're a former chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party.

- Absolutely.

But when you have a good relationship with somebody, you can disagree.

I mean, I've disagreed with governors and legislators on guns, on the access to guns.

But what I don't do is leave and then throw 'em under the bus, personally attack them.

I will say publicly I disagree with them, but I won't be so personal in those attacks.

Because you don't do that when you have a relationship with 'em.

So yeah, we have disagreements.

I hate those preemptive laws and they always have 30 or 40 of 'em every session.

And some of them have passed.

- And you've actually set up kind of a philosophy of which ones do we have the best chance of stopping?

- Correct, exactly.

Our team up in Nashville would say, well, this one's not going anywhere, so don't spend any time, but these might pass.

A good example is the Airbnbs, they preempted us, and it's very frustrating when citizens complain about Airbnbs and we can't do anything about it.

- Well, just a couple minutes left here.

I'm gonna guess you're not gonna tell me the specific advice you've given Paul Young, who you've worked with, he was your original housing community development director.

He was at DMC, which you worked closely with, but you've spent quite a bit of time with him.

What sort of advice, what have you been able to share with him that you can share with us?

- A couple things, but my number one piece of advice was already on his radar, which it's great to have two and a half months as a transition.

And the number one thing you have to do is hire good people.

It's the number one thing.

The part of your transition that's issue-oriented, people are gonna come up with policy papers, those help.

But it's the people who execute on those things.

And that's what's so important.

And he was already ahead of me and we went over all the issues.

He's been working side by side with us on the stadium issues.

He's got somebody embedded up on the seventh floor to see how we operate and what's going on.

Transition teams are doing interviews in city hall.

He and I went to Nashville together to introduce him to the governor and other state officials.

And we got another trip planned.

My rural West Tennessee, we're planning to do that together, and it's as smooth, we're trying to make it as smooth as possible.

- There's not enough time for this, but your best day as mayor?

- I don't know, this sounds corny, but I love this job so much that I don't know, it'd be hard to figure out one day.

This is the greatest job in the world.

It's the most stressful job in the world, but I have loved it.

- Worst day.

- Well, there's several of those.

And one of the things about being mayor is I have taken a sense of personal responsibility for every homicide, violent crime, COVID deaths.

I really, truly have felt a level of personal responsibility on that on a daily basis.

And I've known people who've been killed and I've met parents of young people who've been killed.

And those are just heartbreaking meetings.

- Thanks for coming on.

We think you're the most frequent guest going back to time as City Council.

We do really appreciate you being here and asking all these questions and talking things through.

We also know that you're the only guest who ever swore at me, [Jim laughs loudly] but I don't hold that against you.

So again, thanks very much.

Thanks for being here again.

We talked to a bunch more about more current issues, a bunch more about crime last week on wkno.org, you can get that episode or as a podcast.

But thanks very much.

Thank you, Bill.

Join us again next week.

Good night.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]