- (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.

- County Mayor Lee Harris, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, thanks for being here again.

- Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

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

We'll talk a lot tonight all the issues we can get to from the task force, the lawsuit against Bill Lee and the State over the Guard deployment, Regional One, the budget, whatever else we can get to.

But let's start with an issue you've been fighting and working on, and it's been a big a point of difficulty, is the youth detention center and who's going to manage that, and that transferring from the Sheriff's Office to the county's office.

I've summarized that poorly, but talk about what's going on there.

- Sure, so the youth detention center in Shelby County is the Youth Justice and Education Center.

We refer to it as YJEC.

And for years and years, youth detention has been managed by the sheriff's operation in collaboration with the Juvenile Court judge.

Recently, the sheriff decided he couldn't do that work anymore and wanted to be out of that business.

And so our administration wanted to be in the business, right?

We wanna put more kids on the path to rehabilitation.

Kids that are locked up in our juvenile facility right now can't be thrown away.

They're gonna get out, and we have to remind them that they still have a bright future ahead of them.

And so we were eager to take on that role, and have been working on taking over the facility from the sheriff, for the last six or seven months.

So that became effective October 1st.

So that's the short of it.

So our administration, the Division of Corrections, which is under the Mayor's Office, has been there administering and leading the facility for the last 60 days in collaboration with the Juvenile Court judges.

And so, you know, the results have been great so far.

I mean obviously this is a very complex kind of transition, but the results have been great, and we're just really pleased to be able to play a real role in the lives of those kids that are in the facility.

- Let's walk through the various, for those not as familiar, we're not talking, which facility or facilities are we talking about?

There's the downtown, what people think of as Juvenile Court.

There's some space out at what?

At Shelby Farms, the penal farm.

This is where, and is your scope going to expand, do you think going forward, perhaps beyond the time that you're in office?

- It's definitely going to expand, and this is gonna be permanently in the portfolio of the Mayor's Office.

So the short of it is youth detention in Shelby County used to be downtown at the Juvenile Court campus.

So the Juvenile Court campus could be thought about as just like 201 Poplar with a lot of operations, including court system, offices, and juvenile detention.

We moved the detention piece out of the downtown campus and moved it out east.

It's now off Old Getwell.

So we took a building, renovated it, it was about a $30 million project.

And we, you know, cut the ribbon on that building some time ago.

So the, again, the, so the Sheriff's Office has always been managing youth, youth detention, and now he's pulled up stakes.

And so we had to take that over to make sure that those youth are taken care of.

So your point is this has been an opportunity for a lot of good news to be delivered to the youth and those families.

Among that good news is, you know, now they're out of prison gray uniforms, right?

We ended solitary confinement.

A lot of the youth were complaining about solitary confinement.

There were media reports about solitary confinement with respect to youth.

Obviously, that's illegal.

So we ended solitary confinement for youth.

At the same time, we have resumed transportation.

The Sheriff's Office had decided to curtail transportation to court for juveniles.

And so we resumed that transportation because obviously juveniles have, you know, constitutional rights to due process, and to be present during their court hearings.

But transportation has resumed.

We've completely gotten rid of Aramark, which was doing the food service at that facility.

And now we do first food service on our own.

The kids are, you know, very pleased to have different food there.

So there's been achievement after achievement there.

We still have a long road to go, but, you know, the staff couldn't be more pleased with the transition and the opportunity to really invest in rehabilitation for those youth.

- Let me bring in Bill.

- And, Mayor, you have corrections officers who are doing this, who, normally in the past, have worked at the corrections center.

And it's not as simple as just putting them with children.

There's training involved.

Right?

- A hundred percent.

So this has been a six months of, well, I guess 10 months, about 10 months of intensive process.

We have a, you know, we have an ad hoc committee obviously devoted to this work, plus additional working groups that, like you say, do parts of the work.

But the start of it is, is retraining our corrections professionals.

And so we have done that, and now we have the ability to also train additional folks as part of the staff.

But as you say, the youth have to be treated in a certain way, and the ratios are different.

A lot of the rules and a lot of the context are different.

As I say, solitary confinement is illegal for youth in detention.

And so we've done all that.

We've also added about 148 positions, to the mayor's compliment, in order to administer this.

And obviously this costs millions and millions of dollars.

The sheriff, of course, didn't relinquish a significant amount of resources in order to make this transition happen.

And so we had to go to the Commission to get the resources to pay for the personnel to make the transition a reality.

- You talked about transporting the children who are here to court hearings.

Is it possible to have the hearings there at that facility?

- So there are a lot of operational improvements that we are making.

And so one of them is, like you say, to make sure that lawyers and some of the judicial officers are able to conduct hearings out there.

We've already done some renovations to make sure that there is space for lawyers and their clients, the children, to actually meet at the facility.

And so that's been an immediate improvement.

We have some more work to do, like you say, to make sure that some of the courtroom, you know, process can take place at the facility, but it's never gonna be sufficient.

And it doesn't matter if the hearing is downtown or at Old Getwell in one of our swing spaces, we've got to make sure that kids are present for their hearings.

And so we've resumed transportation.

And that's fine, and we think we can do that.

So, you know, just a lot of work there done.

And by the way, hat tip to the corrections professionals because they just got their inspection of their kitchen, because we cook meals ourselves.

And they got their inspection of their kitchen from the Health Department recently.

They got a perfect score.

Not many restaurants in the city of Memphis get a perfect score, but we got a perfect score at our youth detention facility and we're pretty, pretty proud of that.

- And at the old, under the old arrangement, there were some concerns because parents were not able to visit their children in custody.

Has that been cleared up?

- So absolutely.

So we've resumed visitation.

That's very important.

And so we take visitation very seriously.

And, you know, so we have more opportunities for visitation at the adult facility, which is usually known as the penal farm, which is at Shelby Farms.

And we've expanded opportunity for visitation at the youth detention facility as well.

- Quick couple, just how about how many kids are we talking about?

- Well, right now, it's actually gone down.

We're usually considered a mega facility across the country.

And so it is not uncommon over the last year or two for us to see more than 100 kids in a facility.

That is a huge amount of kids.

And there are not many facilities around the country with that level of count.

Right now, we probably have like 75 or so, under 75.

- Does this at all impact, directly or indirectly, you know, the notion of kids being transferred for the adult court because the crime some people say are so severe that there aren't the penalties, there aren't the accountability, all that, in Juvenile Court.

Is that part of this?

Does this impact that policy in any way?

- I don't think it impacts that in any way.

Sometimes you see some laws passed out of the state that could grow the youth detention population.

- Yeah.

- And so there's been, obviously there was a blended sentencing law passed, and there are other kinds of things that are passed that could grow the population.

But most of those changes are the, are kind of the, are for the courts to decide.

The courts decide some of that stuff.

- You've answered my, which it's not really the Mayor's Office's decision on that.

That's between the DA - Yeah.

- And the Juvenile Court judge.

Okay.

- Absolutely.

- Let's stay with law enforcement.

Obviously, the Guard and federal task force, Memphis Safe Task Force, however you wanna refer to it, has been in town now for a couple of months.

I have no sense of time.

You, as county mayor, have sued Bill Lee, Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee.

There's a court fight about, you know, calling the National Guard deployment illegal.

One, give me the quick, where does that stand?

And, but more importantly, what is your overall take?

We've had a lot of elected officials on since the the task force arrived.

What is your take on the various parts and pieces of the task force, which is not just the Guard, it's many other different initiatives.

So, big question, answer that.

- Well, so I support, I've always supported increased law enforcement presence in Memphis and Shelby County.

And so we protested vigorously when Governor Lee decided to pull the TBI lab, which was a vital asset here, out of Memphis and move it elsewhere in Tennessee.

We fought hard when Joe Biden moved the FBI Field Office out of Memphis and moved it elsewhere across the state.

You know, we protested when funds were cut by the Trump administration with respect to our gun violence intervention program.

So we want more investment, and have vigorously advocated for such.

However, and with respect to the National Guard, just to put it shortly, that's the military.

And this is a free state, right?

This is a Southern state, this is a conservative state.

This is a free state and it has a real history of freedom.

And part of the history here is that we don't allow any governor to send the military against Tennesseans.

And so that's prohibited in the Tennessee constitution, very obviously so, if you put the words on the screen, anybody that reads those words knows the governor does not have any power to send the military against Tennesseans under these contexts.

State law, at the same time, again, prohibits the governor from sending the military against Tennesseans in this context.

So we believe based on state law, based on the constitution, based on Tennessee's history, that the military should only be used for foreign adversaries or in the case of rebellion.

That hasn't happened here.

And so it's, you know, I'm a law professor, I'm a lawyer.

There is, I cannot countenance a governor, any governor, Republican or Democratic, flagrantly violating the rule of law in front of us.

And so, the court, the lower court, the local court has already determined that the governor does not have the authority to use the military against Tennesseans.

And now the case is on appeal.

- Let's switch, and then we'll go back to Bill, to, you talked about welcoming a lot of different parts of law enforcement.

What is your take on what ICE is doing here?

- Well, the ICE thing is very troubling, and the comments out of the federal administration of the Trump administration are even more troubling still.

I think, this week, he called a lot of immigrant families "garbage".

And he has made it known that he is willing to do whatever it takes, whether legal or not, in order to execute whatever his priority of the day is.

And so ICE's presence is troubling.

We've reached out to some of those representatives to try to see if we can have a conversation about creating some safe zones for operations, including, we think it should be schools, it should be churches, and places like that.

Because I've brought countless voices to the table to talk about the paralysis that the Latino community primarily is under right now with the presence of ICE, and the various anecdotal accounts that racial profiling is probably happening.

- Do you think, before we go to Bill, do you think Mayor Paul Young, City Mayor Paul Young has handled this well?

- I, you know, I'll let him speak for himself.

I mean, I think that, you know, we'll have plenty of time to grade everyone on this when it is all over, if it is all over.

And that depends on how we respond.

- Bill.

- Also, Shelby County is involved in this.

I think a lot of people see the involvement with police, but your administration has some interaction with that task force, correct?

- Oh, lots of interaction, yes.

- So do you have the same problems getting a clear picture of everything that's going on that we in the media do?

- I think all of us probably have about the same information, and so I would like a lot more.

As a lot of folks in the community know, I've called on the leaders of the operation and Governor Bill Lee to give us more information around the demographic information of those that have interacted with the task force personnel because there's been just too many anecdotal accounts that this is racial profiling.

And, you know, as an African American who grew up in Memphis, that concerns me.

I, you know, I've got employees that have told me about instances, Latino employees, that have told me about instances that involve them and the task force, and those instances were troubling.

So, and I've seen the reports, so the media doesn't get the daily reports, and we get the daily reports.

And when you look at the daily reports, at least the ones that I've looked at, and I've not looked at all of them, but when you look at them, they can include mugshots.

And I don't think I have seen a mugshot that is not Latino or African-American.

And so in a city that it is, that has a substantial white population, to not see a mugshot of a white individual is troubling on the face of the matter, and requires more explanation.

We haven't gotten that explanation, I don't think the media gets the daily reports.

And so there's a lot wanting.

But yeah, we get all the information we believe that everyone else gets and all the members of the task force get.

- As you've explained, you welcome the federal presence here.

- Absolutely.

- Given your concerns about the way that ICE has been operating, could there be a legal challenge of that presence here?

- Well, I don't know, and I guess I don't welcome ICE.

I welcome the federal agencies other than ICE.

So I don't know.

But in my view of the policy matter, ICE should be relegated to border security.

I think that should be their mission.

Obviously, I'm not a federal official, but that's what I would prefer their priority be is border security.

I don't know that we stand to gain anything as a community by ICE operating in the middle of the country, and all the anecdotal accounts of the racial profiling that we've heard.

So secure the border.

Right?

I'm for that.

I'm a Democrat.

I'm totally for it.

Let's secure the border.

Let's talk about ways to secure the border, let's send ICE down to the border to do their job.

But, you know, riding shotgun with MPD, possibly knocking heads, giving further fodder to accounts of racial profiling is not something that should be happening in Memphis and Shelby County.

And if there's a legal basis to stop it, I will do my best to try.

- Let's, we're about midway through show, about 10 minutes left here.

The county is in a bit of a budget crunch right now.

It had to do a $43 million loan internal to cover operating costs, including payroll earlier this fall.

The comptroller, the state comptroller, halted effectively borrowing for 2026 based on a new law that was passed a couple years ago with concerns over the budget.

Let's talk about that, but let's also, a big priority you've had, I think for this, I believe the entire second term has been building a new Regional One.

You know, some $1 billion project, a lot of county money, hundreds of millions of dollars.

How does the budget crunch, the commitments you just talked about with youth detention, and the comptroller getting involved in Shelby County finances, does that slow down or make you reconsider the priority of a new Regional One?

- No, absolutely not.

I mean, this community is, you know, one step forward, two steps back.

And I mean, that question obviously signals that.

And it's, and I know why you ask it because obviously - Sure, yeah.

- There are folks out there that constantly say, let's take two steps back.

The point is we've gotta move forward.

You gotta have mega projects in a community.

Regional One is a mega project.

And you've gotta have, if you're gonna be a first-rate city, you've gotta have big projects like this that are gonna last many years, and that come in with an investment worth hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, I mean, Little Rock has an academic medical center.

I mean we are, as we speak, falling behind Little Rock, falling behind Birmingham.

I mean cities that we don't even wanna contemplate that we're in the league with, we are absolutely falling behind.

So that project is moving forward without much concern based on the things that you said.

In terms of the financial picture for Shelby County, our payroll, as far as I can tell, has never been in jeopardy.

Obviously, media reports were in error.

There's certainly no evidence of that, no testimony of that from anyone in the administration that has ever been a concern.

In terms of us bringing forward an opportunity to finance our operations going forward, the financial transaction that you talk about is not unusual.

Lots and lots of counties do it.

The thing that is unusual is that we brought it to the Commission.

So our county was not set up to do it without Commission approval, but going forward, the comptroller has recommended that we change some of our policies and procedures such that transactions like this, which are considered routine, can be done without the Commission approval.

And so bringing a transaction forward to the Commission does kind of make it look like we're more vulnerable than we are, but we had to do it because of how we're set up.

I will say this though, Eric, there's way too much spending, right?

There's way too much spending in county government.

I've got several months left, and I'm gonna try to do what we can to bring down the spending.

A lot of it is external and grant making.

I know, you know, some of the grants are very helpful, but we have, at this point, tens and tens of millions of dollars.

I mean, it is gargantuan, the level of spending that we do in favor of grants and in favor of external organizations.

And so we've gotta rein that in, or we will not be able to manage our position.

- But so with Regional One, I mean, and, you know, I guess Councilman Warren has talked about, hey, there's empty space, unutilized space at Methodist.

There's almost too much capacity.

And here we're gonna build a whole new facility and add to the county budget, I assume operating budget, not just the expense of the building, going forward.

I mean how, do you worry that that, how is that all gonna be paid for, this new facility, if, you know, the county's stretched, the state has not been super eager to fund the construction, and who knows about operating, they haven't done Medicaid expansion.

And at least right now, a lot of of federal funding that would go to people without insurance is very much at risk or has been cut.

And so just the landscape of funding on an operating basis, Regional One looks a little unclear.

- Well, perhaps to you, but the- - But yeah, I could be wrong, but I mean that's, I'm just saying, how does Regional One get, new Regional One, expanded Regional One get funded on an ongoing basis?

- Well, I mean, again, this is a project that almost everyone agrees has to be done except for one individual in our community, right?

Everyone agrees that we have to have access to healthcare.

We've got to have a place where a firefighter, if he gets injured, a police officer, if he gets shot, any of you, if you get into a car accident, or God forbid, are a victim of crime, are able to get urgent and specialized care immediately.

The only place around where that's possible is our trauma one, our trauma one medical center, which is Regional One.

And either we invest in it so that it's around for the next hundred years, or it dies.

Whether or not Methodist is in a financially precarious position or not, whether or not they have access capacity, whether or not they're going out of business, I can't read the tea leaves on that and manage that organization.

I have to manage the asset that Shelby County owns, which is Regional One.

And I wanna see Regional One thrive.

And I know the best way to do that is to invest in it.

And I'll leave Methodist and its troubles, and all the things that are driving this pressure from them to continue.

But it's not gonna stop us.

- And let me say, then we'll let Bill do the end show.

I mean, I have my own story of my father was hit by a car when he was in Memphis.

It was his fault, amazing treatment and just care.

And he was up, and running, and skiing like a year later at 70 years old.

Like everyone, I have not talked to anyone who said, "Oh, Regional One isn't worth investing in."

It's just the finances, I think, are kind of murky.

That is what I kinda poorly said here.

And we've had Reginald Coopwood, the president, the CEO of Regional One, and we'll try to get him back in the new year.

But Bill, go ahead.

- Mayor, what's the latest on the discussions with the state?

'Cause that's a key part of the potential financing of this.

Is the state willing?

- Well, I don't know.

So they'll have to speak for themselves, but we're working really hard to make the case that this is a statewide project and has statewide implications that there are hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants alone that are at stake as this project moves through the pipeline.

At the same time, all the county mayors across the state have written a letter in support of this project.

And so we continue to tell that story and to meet with state officials.

And hopefully, we'll get their support.

But leadership is done in the front, right?

And it's a movement, right?

It's not done by waiting.

And so we don't intend to wait.

As you know, this will become an anchor in the downtown area.

It'll be the gateway, at least in terms of Union Avenue.

And it'll also be an anchor for Beale Street, which is a street that is the heart of our Entertainment District that we want to bring back to life.

It is not alive right now.

If you go down to Beale Street on a Friday night or Saturday night, it is dead and dying.

And one of the reasons it's dead and dying is obviously the task force, but also because we're not bringing enough in terms of assets to that particular area.

Regional One's rebuild represents a game changer for the Entertainment District because it would sit on the backside of Beale Street, and so you'd have another anchor tenant.

And at the same time it would be an incredible mega project that serves as the gateway to downtown.

- So in essence, it's an expansion of what's now the Entertainment District between 2nd and 4th.

- It's certainly an expansion of the activity and the safety that's associated with the Entertainment District in downtown.

Right now, if you think about the folks that care a lot about downtown and have the capacity to do something about it, it's the Grizz.

I mean, the Grizz are the biggest player downtown FedExForum, that's the biggest player downtown with the capacity to do something in terms of what's going on downtown in our Entertainment District.

Regional One would be an additional complementary asset to some of that because it is a mega organization, and it would be, at the end, sure, sure, it'd be, you know, a few blocks up.

But it would have a Beale Street address and own property on Beale Street, and it'd be a 24-hour-a-day presence of professionals and others coming in and out.

And so I think it adds security to what we think about as the downtown.

And security is one of the things that has always stressed people out, and reduced the number of people that go downtown.

So that's what it does.

And we gotta bring downtown back.

We gotta bring Beale Street back.

It is not back right now.

- Okay, back to finances for a second.

Your administration had actually gone to market or had approval for the bonds that you needed before the state comptroller came in.

So did you see that this might be coming, their action?

- No, no, the non-approval of the budget was based on some technical things that we should have done and we've addressed those things.

So there's no reason for us to anticipate anything like this happening again.

- Okay, and the state comptroller endorsed the transfer, the inner fund transfer and all of this.

- The comptroller considers the transaction routine.

And the only thing that's non-routine about the transaction is that we brought it to the Commission.

- I think that's all the time we have.

We could talk about much more, but we'll get you back in the new year.

We appreciate you being here.

- Sure.

- Thank you, Bill.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to wkno.org, The Daily Memphian, YouTube, search for "Behind the Headlines" and you'll get the full video and audio.

Recent shows include Interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond, Justin Pearson, Steve Cohen, and we've got shows coming up on MIFA and county services.

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

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