- (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.

- The business community's perspective on public safety, economic development, and much more, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by three members, prominent members of the local business community.

We'll start with Richard Smith, President and CEO of Airline and International at FedEx.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Chance Carlisle, a CEO of the Carlisle Corporation.

Thank you for being here.

- Thanks, sir.

- And Ted Townsend, President and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you Eric.

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

So I'll start, we'll start with public safety.

It's heavy on everyone's mind right now, but we will not just talk about public safety, but we'll talk about that.

And no small part because the Chamber and what 170 members of the Chairman's Circle, local businesses, wrote a letter to the legislature asking for a bunch of changes.

I don't know, I guess I'll start, since we're starting with the letter, I'll start with you, Ted.

I mean that letter, the impetus behind that letter and what, you were in the session right now, up at the legislature.

Lots of things are happening, being proposed.

Why did the business community come together that way?

Was it a big bunch of disagreement or did everyone kind of agree on the points you wanted to highlight, and what do you want to see from that?

And we'll get their perspectives as well.

- Yeah, so there was consensus.

You know, in my first year as President and CEO, I met with hundreds of business leaders and owners.

And consistently everyone was talking about their concerns over the crime and the impetus of public safety and how important it is to their business operations.

And we tried to find where we would land, we being the Chamber to help advocate on behalf of the business voice.

And where we landed was to apply pressure and support, but also hold everyone accountable, those that are responsible for our public safety.

And we wanted to strike early with the beginning of the legislative session.

And I went to the opening of that and hand delivered the letter that was co-signed by our, not just our Chairman's Circle investors, but also small business leaders to show the importance of public safety to the business community.

And we have to apply that pressure.

Our expectation is that Nashville will become co-investment and policy partners in our public safety here because they understand the importance of Memphis to the state's commerce.

- Chance, let me bring you in real quickly.

People, I think know, they know the businesses you all own and run, but they may not know.

So let's start there with what Carlisle Corporation does specifically in Memphis, and talk a bit about why you got so involved in this issue around public safety.

You got very involved in the last election through the Greater 901 Initiative, and disclosure, and just of note, your brother is on the Memphis City Council.

What does Carlisle Corporation do?

And let's start there.

- Carlisle Corporation, relative to Memphis, we're a predominantly a real estate development firm.

So we're looking at trends, what people are thinking, confidence.

Primarily we're invested in downtown, we've been down there for over 40 years.

So we have an embedded interest now, which is relatively new to our firm of, you know, what do Memphians think about downtown, public safety, tourism, but more importantly, how do people feel?

Confidence is the number one predictor of where people are gonna spend their money and time.

And so if you're looking at real estate investment trends, hotels, restaurants, et cetera, it's a pretty important thing to know, you know, what's around the bend.

- And what do you hear, briefly that, I mean, where are your concerns and what you're hearing from people?

- Well, we just had a mayoral election - I didn't notice, I totally missed that actually.

[laughs] - Mayor Paul Young won.

- I should have wrote it down.

- He's, according to our latest poll, you know, has a job approval rating in the 70s, which is fantastic.

But a year ago we started this conversation talking about whether or not people thought they were gonna move outta Memphis.

And we said one out of two Memphians were considering leaving, which was staggering.

We reran the poll in late February, early March.

Now it's 60%.

That's not good.

The good news is we have a lot of enthusiasm about having an incoming administration and what he can bring.

And I think we're turning the chapter, but the question is why does 10 more percent think that we're heading in the wrong direction?

- And that was through the Greater 901 poll.

Not through Carlisle, just to be clear.

And that was primarily because of crime?

Or was that- - It's crime, and it's not opportunity, it's crime.

- Richard Smith, obviously, so you're President and CEO of one of the big, what is it, three or four divisions of FedEx, which is obviously incredibly important to Memphis.

What do you hear from your many employees?

You hear from business community, you travel all over, not just the country and the world.

I mean, where are your concerns?

And again, this conversation will also go where are the opportunities and some of the good things.

This will not be an overwhelmingly negative conversation, but we did wanna start here.

- No, I think it's an important one.

I mean, my goal in all of this is I try to do, in all things in my day job and my civic engagements is to try to turn challenges into opportunities.

And I think in this, I get, I have a lot of perspective, as you pointed out.

I run the Airline and International Division for FedEx.

What does that mean as we, you know, march towards our transformation journey of becoming One FedEx by June 1st of this year, by the way, it means I'm responsible for all of the ramp and hub operations in the United States and Canada, and all of the business operations everywhere else.

So with operations in every city on the planet, basically, I have a lot of perspective that I can bring to bear here.

We are not the only ones dealing with this post pandemic hangover period where we've seen this big uptick in crime.

And there will be winners and losers and the cities that have the political will to address it, to grab the bull by the horns and make their communities safe for their law-abiding, tax-paying citizens to live, work and play.

They're going to win.

And the cities that don't tackle it are going to lose.

It's that simple.

There will be a premium put on public safety.

So that is my goal, is to come in here, raise the awareness, try to get some involvement from the state, engage them as partners.

We actually did it working with the mayor.

The mayor has, has basically said it's gonna take everybody.

So the mayor was aware of the letter we sent to the state.

We didn't undercut him in any way.

Paul understood that coming from 170 business leaders in Memphis, including the largest employer in the state, largest private employer, FedEx, that this would carry a lot of weight.

And it would be helpful to his efforts to try to get in front of this, and all the things in the letter, I think were very common sense things that we were asking for that everyone could agree on, for the most part.

- Let me say, and I probably should have done this at the top, but we've talked about it on the show, we wrote about it before I go to Bill.

The letter called for, among other things, it expressed concern about the viability of Memphis as a business location.

It asked for $50 million in protection for tourist zones it asked to bring in more public defenders and judges, possession of a stolen firearm would be a felony, car forfeiture after drag racing and reckless driving.

I think there was quite a bit about bail reform in there as well.

Other things that we've talked about on many shows over the last few weeks and months, and that we've written about extensively in Daily Memphian.

So I don't wanna breeze over that, but I also don't wanna recite everything in there.

And let me bring in Bill.

- I'm gonna confess to some confusion here.

Ted we've had you on the show before.

We've asked specifically about this thing of people are gonna leave Memphis because of the crime problem.

And you've said that this is something that's pretty easily dealt with in terms of the prospects that you talk to, that as long as they know we're trying to do something about it, it's really not that big of an issue for a company looking to come here.

We did focus groups at the Daily Memphian and the two folks who did the poll, Bev and Howard Robertson said we talked to the focus groups, we didn't hear anyone say they were thinking about moving outta Memphis because of the crime.

But crime is a concern among the people, but nobody we talked to is ready to throw in the towel and move to another place.

- Well, I'm not sure who they talked to, but to come back to the question Eric answered, which will answer your questions, you asked me about my team members.

We have seen team members who at FedEx who have moved further outside of Memphis and Shelby County.

You know, these are taxpayers, these are people in, you know, high wage jobs in information technology or data analytics, finance, legal, a whole gamut of different fields that have opted to move out.

And they cited crime as one of the reasons why.

So that's what concerns me, right?

And when I come out and make a comment like it's becoming untenable for our community, which I did in your paper, Sam Hardiman asked me for a quote about the letter.

It is for some of those team members, they have expressed a lot of concern and they've basically voted with their taillights because what they feel is when you see a district attorney and judges that are essentially letting bad actors back out, they're letting them in some cases, set their own bail in terms of what they deemed to be affordable.

They're putting them back out on the street.

Those law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, some of our team members, it's a big slap in the face to them.

They basically feel like the DA and these judges that are doing this are saying, we don't care about the safety of you or your family.

And they feel powerless and the only thing they can do 'cause they can afford to do it, is vote with their taillights and leave.

So you don't want those folks that contribute a lot in terms of tax dollars to the community to move out, right?

Those folks are very difficult to replace in this community.

So you have to think about your taxpayers, the way Sam Walton thought about his customers, right?

Where he said there's only one boss, well just let me paraphrase it.

There's only one boss, the taxpayer.

And he or she can fire everyone in the community from the mayor on down simply by moving someplace else.

And I have seen that with some of my team members.

- Talk about that, you know, 'cause you have talked about how the recruitment, this had some influence, but it is not always the overwhelming part of the conversation when you're talking to businesses who may, or have moved here.

- That's true.

We have to address it.

We've got 43 projects in our pipeline right now that represent 16,000 jobs and nearly 10 billion in capital investment.

And many of those, we are in the finalist stages.

So we're trying to win.

But eventually, you know, they come around to talking about the public safety concerns and they've heard, and they've read the headlines.

And I can't go on stats alone because we've seen increases in almost every category of violent and nonviolent crime.

So I can't do that.

But what I can say is that you have a very active business community that's leading from the front and here are the examples of what we're doing.

And that bolsters the confidence.

They say, okay, well that makes sense.

And you know, to what Richard said earlier, this is happening all over.

And we have perspective on that as well.

So we just have to address it.

We have to show them what's happening and that typically addresses it.

- Let me bring in Chance.

- I think, to answer your question, Bill, here's the paradox.

How at the same time can you confront, A, what we've all deemed as a public health crisis when it comes to crime and gun violence on the one hand, and then be overwhelmingly positive Memphians?

No one wants to dog the city.

I think you see this in Bill Dunnavant.

He is on a mission to be positive leading as chairman of the Chairman's Circle.

And Bill Dunnavant and I are friends and we've had some strong conversations 'cause you know, I'm also one of those things that you have to put the facts out about where we are to also incrementally make progress against it.

And if you think about political leaders, and we were joking about this yesterday in a meeting, when the news is good, it gets flooded.

When the news is bad, it gets buried.

And so, you know, who has the right temperament to come out and say, no, this isn't good.

But at the same time, isn't wanting to dog the city.

And I think that's a role that, you know, Richard in particular has been outspoken about.

I've tried to be a little bit, but it can't dominate because then it becomes self-fulfilling.

So there's a balance there.

- That is a great point.

And so I, you know, I know we want to get into the economic development conversation, but just to tie this off, I'm very bullish on Memphis As I said, you know, inherent in every challenge is an opportunity.

We had a meeting yesterday with all the downtown employers, the mayor, Chief Davis, Chandell Ryan, the new head of the Downtown Memphis Commission.

And I'm encouraged that they are, the political will seems to be there to address this challenge that's in front of us.

And while some of my team members have chosen to vote with their taillights and move further out, I will tell you there are a whole heck of a lot of 'em that are still living here that want to see some progress on this issue that are invested Memphians.

They love this community.

My family and I are invested in this community.

I actually, we're migrating into Memphis.

I've got sisters from Los Angeles and Washington DC who are moving back into Memphis, building houses.

One of them gonna be right next door to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, but we are very bullish on Memphis.

So I don't ever want my comments to be construed as a threat that FedEx is gonna leave Memphis.

That's not how a Fortune 50 corporation operates.

If FedEx we're going to leave Memphis, I wouldn't be talking about it publicly.

And it's when I go silent and I'm not out here talking about these issues and our leadership isn't engaged in the community, that's when you gotta worry that you might wake up one day and find FedEx would be gone.

But we're nowhere near that.

We care a lot about this community.

- So what I hear happening here is that this is very much a local discussion in terms of the thing about people exiting Memphis and that the companies that the Chamber is recruiting, they see a national perspective where maybe they have this discussion in every city.

That they're going to consider.

But the discussion for our purposes is really one that's among Memphians.

- And that's a great point.

Memphis is, I call it the biggest small town in America, right?

You know, you've got six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Memphis is one degree from Jack Salmons.

Everybody's kind of one degree from knowing each other, right?

So we sometimes yeah, we air our dirty laundry in public as we're trying to get things moving.

I think that's okay.

We've maybe been too polite for too long and that causes, you know, complacency and things to atrophy.

So I think it's okay.

- You wanted to say something, Chance?

- Well, when, I mean people are moving, if you look at the census data, people are moving with their taillights and the question gets to about who are those people and why?

And a lot of times this comes down to a race or a means issue.

And it's also really not true.

One of the things that I think is great for the city of Memphis is the diversification of it.

I mean, you know, you look at what east Memphis demographically looks like compared to what it did 30 or 40 years ago, and everyone tends to be moving east irregardless.

Now what makes that interesting is that the area of town that has seen the largest sort of reversal has been downtown.

And downtown long has been our melting pot.

And the question is, why particularly has downtown gone from being one of the largest population gainers actually net new growth to now kind of stagnant?

And it is also back to crime.

And so one of the things that we were very clear in our letter, when you look at like economic development, public safety is the health of downtown.

And so when you look at tourism zones and you look at dollars coming in and you look at the number of residents, and I'll make this point very briefly, you know, really there's four or five office areas, but the predominant office area is in east Memphis, kay?

That's where we have the most office.

Downtown isn't really an office market, it's a residential market.

There's four anchors of downtown, I like to say.

There's the government, there's St. Jude, there's residence and there's tourism.

So quality of life there plays an outsized role.

Crime then, and the perception of crime therefore plays an outsized role.

And that's the question really is what's the perception?

- Greater 901 Initiative, was watching the mayor's race closely and there was a candidate named Sheriff Bonner who was like, I'm a law enforcement professional.

We got a crime problem.

You need a law enforcement professional there.

The winner in the race, Paul Young, took a more nuanced, a more specific response to that and said, it's more than just lock 'em up.

What do you think from having watched the race as it formed, what do you think voters were saying in that about what they want the mayor to do?

- So a quick plug, Greater 901, nonpartisan.

So we're neither Republican nor Democrat and we are very much pro the greater 901.

So I say that we did not back a mayoral candidate.

We did enter in the nonpartisan races for the City Council and I think we did well there.

The nuance about crime that I thought resonated for Paul is everyone agrees in all above.

I agree in an all of above, right?

And now we've tacked a lot on the criminal justice system.

We'll continue to emphasize the criminal justice system.

But one of the two, all due respect to Richard, 'cause he heard me say this many times, most overused phrases in Memphis political lexicon is untenable and root causes.

None of it means anything anymore.

So when we're talking about Paul's specific approach, it is the business community will not engage and take up law enforcement activities, nor will we be judges.

I mean, we may be one day jurors, but most of us get excused pretty quickly.

And so when you look at like what we can do in that, it is economic development, but that doesn't mean that we have to be silent on the other.

We can easily say, no, having 34 trials a year is unacceptable for all the reasons that other people agree.

Paul gets that.

And what also means that like when the DA Mulroy comes out and says, we want to have a TBI twenty-four-hour center, we agree with him.

- Crime lab.

- Like we absolutely, and we will go to the state hand in hand with the DA.

When he says that we believe in restorative justice policies and some of these other things, we're gonna say no.

So, you know, it is nuanced, Paul's right.

It's not lock 'em up and leave them.

No one really believes that today.

- Well, and and I think there's an oversimplification of the conversation too.

We're saying, oh, lock 'em up wasn't working well, okay.

But this thing is more nuanced than that.

You know, taking violent people who've done violent things and letting 'em back out.

I am not sure that's given us the result we want either based on the numbers.

- But the discussion in the legislature does appear to be that simple.

- I don't think so.

I mean not that, certainly not the things that we were pushing for.

I mean, again, you commit a crime with a stolen gun, right?

Look, we can't help that Constitutional Carry is now the law of the land here.

You can agree with it, you can disagree with it.

The fact of the matter is 170 business people writing a letter ain't gonna change it.

But I think we can all agree that somebody commits a crime with a stolen gun, that's a bad thing, right?

So what we were trying to do is hone in on things that were common sense.

I can't speak for every legislator up there, but I can speak for the things that we were advocating for.

- Closing the aggravated assault loophole, which is of a simple one.

You fire a gun commission of a crime, okay, that's a crime.

You miss someone 'cause you're a bad shot, that's aggravated assault.

You actually hit them, that's attempted murder.

That also is insane.

So there's some things in there that we think absolutely are loopholes.

I'll give you another one.

Memphis is way out of proportion of rest of state in reckless driving, drag racing, et cetera.

Civil forfeiture, you take the car, needs to pass.

I mean that is a very simple, you do something dangerous with your car where you're endangering other lives.

Let's seize the car.

- With five minutes left.

I want to, no, that's okay.

Yeah, no, it's good conversation.

But with five minutes left, I want to segue to some of the things, and we were talking a bit before the show around economic development and I'll say we've had a bunch of people on the show, I think DA Mulroy, Brent Taylor, London Lamar, folks who are much more in favor of restorative justice, all the things we've talked about, we've had shows over the last month.

You can get those at WNKO.org, or you can download those as a podcast and we've written about 'em, Bill and others on the Daily Memphian staff.

So I don't want to, we could talk about this for two hours, but I want to touch a bit on some of the economic development things that are going on.

Because, not to be positive, but to be positive in part.

You know, as we tape this on Thursday, NCAA tournaments are coming in, 20,000 people coming in from out of town.

You talked about, you know, all these opportunities in the pipeline.

Talk about that.

Talk about those things because I think as Richard and Chance had said that there are people who love Memphis.

The people at the table love Memphis.

You know, so talk about some of those things.

- Yeah, so obviously Chance mentioned this, recently we did a Why Memphis Summit, and Bill Dunnavant led that effort and we wanted to hit all of those highlights of the positives that are here.

I mean a lot of people don't realize that Memphis among its its Brookings peer cities were number one in advanced manufacturing job growth.

That's amazing.

And we actually led the nation in job growth as per gusto.

So you're starting to see these headlines, I mean multiple times national publications are talking about the affordability of Memphis.

Just yesterday, CNBC came out with a ranking and we're third in the nation for someone earning a hundred thousand dollars and the impact and take home pay that they have.

So to us there is a momentum.

- And the young people that are leaving cities that are, you know, becoming increasingly unaffordable like Austin and Nashville.

Sorry Ted to interrupt there, but it's a big thing.

- And you talked about before the show, I think I can say this, that in migration, the cities where people moving to Memphis, it's Dallas and Nashville number one.

- Yeah, Nashville's number one, Dallas is number two.

- Because of those cost issues.

- Absolutely.

- Let's talk a bit about, again, economic development wise.

And I'm cutting you off, and I apologize 'cause just a couple minutes left.

We talked a bit about the stadium.

Your family obviously got very involved in getting the stadium financing done.

The Liberty, I can't do the name right, but what used to be be called the Liberty Bowl Stadium, and the FedExForum deal is still kind of being worked through right now, so we'll sort of skip over that, but talk about some more plans have been released and about what happens next with the stadium.

- Yeah, so first of all, that gift, which is the largest gift in university history, was designed to do two things.

One was help the University of Memphis in this, you know, renovation of the Liberty Bowl, which I think is gonna be tremendous.

Laird Veach just took me through the plans actually via Zoom this morning.

He took my father through 'em about a week ago, I was traveling.

And so I'm very, very excited about that and what it may help us to do in terms of getting into a Power Five conference.

Of course that whole space is in flux and this House case is gonna impact the landscape even further.

But I think longer term it will help us.

It'll be wonderful for the community.

But it was also to separate the Forum project and the Liberty Bowl project, which were tied together with the state funding and make both of those projects viable 'cause if you split the baby, you didn't have enough to cover either of 'em, which was the sad truth.

So it was really, you know, designed to do those two things because I think the FedExForum remodel, which also has FedEx's name on the building there.

So it's important to us in our community, is really vital to downtown development.

That's a big economic development and nothing attracts more development like cranes in your city skyline.

Thank you Chance for putting some cranes up there.

I think you're the only guy doing it right now, but I think it's really, really important to the future.

- Thoughts on this with a minute left?

- So my thoughts are we've done a lot of renovation.

We're gonna continue to do renovation.

We are really close to having a rebirth.

And I look at just our company and what we have in our pipeline.

It's 1.4 billion of private development.

Now, we haven't come out and announced exactly what in the projects.

Most of that's to give oxygen and make sure the FedExForum gets done.

But I see a skyline in downtown Memphis in particular, where we go from renovating to new, where we're building things like the Grand Hyatt and then moving not just in downtown, but midtown, east Memphis, and eventually Memphis will start to attract the national international capital that's necessary to go into.

We already are attracting tens of millions of dollars of philanthropy.

What we don't have is the local economy recirculating that money.

And I think private development can do that.

- All right, we'll leave it there.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you, Bill.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to WKNO.org and get the full episode.

Or you can go to wherever you get your podcasts and get the full episode as well.

But that is all the time we have this week.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

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