- (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.
- Elections, public incentives, and who can run for Memphis mayor, 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 a roundtable of journalists, including Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer.
Thanks for being here again.
- Thank you, sir.
- Abigail Warren from The Daily Memphian.
Thank you for being here again.
- Thanks for having me.
- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.
We'll start kind of an election recap.
In some ways it was an uneventful election.
In some ways, and I particularly look at Abigail, who covers the suburbs for us, particularly Germantown and Collierville is very eventful in many different ways.
Where do we want start, Bill?
Let's start with a kind of recap.
I mean, newsflash, Steve Cohen won and David Kustoff won, and Bill Lee won.
I mean, a lot of the bigger profile races, there's not much to them, but there's some new mayors, there's some new city council person, there's a new judge, et cetera.
- There wasn't a whole lot of interest compared to the May primaries and the August county general election.
But on the other hand, the turnout was actually higher than it was for either one of those elections.
We had about 34%, which is still the lowest turnout for this election cycle since 1998 in Shelby County.
But locally on there, Janice Swearengen-Washington, the sister of outgoing former Councilmember Jamita Swearengen, was elected without a runoff, to fill the district for council seat that her sister had held.
So she serves the one year remaining in her sister's term of office leading into the city elections next year, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
And we had... We had several other local races.
The interesting thing here though was to look at Democratic efforts on a night that was nationally was pretty favorable for Democrats, especially with all the predictions of basically a red wave in the congressional elections.
Bill Lee won election as governor very easily.
Jason Martin, the Democratic nominee carried Shelby County, but it really didn't mean that much because it was a pretty lackluster Democratic turnout for the nominee.
- The bigger action, again, was in the suburbs.
You don't cover Bartlett and Arlington for us too much, you can sometimes touch on this, but there's a new mayor of Bartlett, for the first time in 20 something years, Keith McDonald stepped aside and David Parsons won there.
There's a new mayor in, what is it, Lakeland?
- Lakeland.
- Jason Roman?
- Josh Roman.
- Josh Roman, exactly what I said.
But in Germantown, there were some heated races and there were some heated races in the school board there that are, you might say, well, school boards, but school boards right now around the country are the site of a whole lot of kind of cultural conversations about what the appropriate role of a public school is.
And that definitely played itself out in Germantown and Collierville, I think both, right?
- Specifically in Germantown and in Collierville too.
There was discussion about what the role of a school board member is, but the races that were really the most heated were not mayor, like four years ago in Germantown, the mayor race was very heated.
Instead, Mayor Mike Palazzolo in Germantown ran unopposed.
And the heat of the race was more on school board, incumbents won in Germantown and Collierville.
But there is one new school board member in Germantown with Dr. Daniel Chatham, local pediatrician and then also Keri Blair in Collierville, who's a mother and works in pharmaceutical, has a background in pharmaceutical sales.
But it was interesting to watch, there's a group called Moms for Liberty.
They're a national 501(c)(4).
And in recent meetings last six, seven, eight months, they've shown up at these Germantown meetings, telling the board that they want more voice from themselves, feeling that their voices aren't heard.
Which is interesting because Germantown does allow the public to speak at their meetings.
They welcome parent engagement when they're looking at, how to expand Houston High, the Houston Middle expansion.
Now, obviously the last two years it's been a little bit different.
Some of those forums have been virtual with COVID, but it's been interesting to watch kind of the Moms for Liberty.
And Moms for Liberty, the local chapter, supported both Chatham and Blair and Carrie Schween who ran but lost against Chairwoman Angela Griffith in Germantown.
- But some of the issues that they have pursued are around appropriate books.
- Appropriate books-- - Around CRT.
- Around CRT and CRT is outlawed by state law, - Critical race theory.
- And so, yes.
And so part of, one of the complaints they brought was about Wit and Wisdom, which is the English language arts curriculum.
It's widely respected by, like Massachusetts and Louisiana, which have different political views, but it's respected as this, ELA curriculum that really is, does improve literacy.
But there was some questions about whether or not there was critical race theory material in there.
And it's actually in Williamson County, there's a lawsuit right now.
Parents sued the school district saying that Wit and Wisdom pushed critical race theory.
And so we're filming this Wednesday, and it airs Friday, but earlier this week, there's not a ruling yet, but the judge-- - Could be by the time this airs.
- The judge essentially said, this is not critical race theory.
So it looks like Wit and Wisdom will hold in Williamson County.
- Do you, are there expected changes to curriculum?
I mean, from the new, any sense of where things go from here?
- I mean, they have a contract and by state law they can't break that contract, so.
I mean it'll, I'm sure it'll be something that's discussed when they review curriculum in the future, but right now they're under contract.
- Yeah.
- Just the only other thing in the election too, we had those four constitutional amendments on there.
The big three, I suppose, was we enshrined, right to work in the constitution, we outlawed slavery in the Constitution, which is kind of mind blowing that we're doing that in 2022.
And then also what the clergy can serve now in the general assembly.
I can't remember the fourth one, but those are kind of the big three ones there, largely symbolic that we got through there.
But also just things that we can pick and choose here on the ballot.
- Yeah.
- The other one was succession planning.
- Yes, succession planning.
- Okay.
- The house speaker's role in that.
- Yeah.
But, it does seem to build that the real action in terms of, it's not countywide, but it does impact the whole county, which is the Memphis City Mayor's race.
Also the Council will be up next year.
But we've had a whole lot of folks, declaring over the last couple of months, where are we in terms of declared candidates?
And then we get into this really complicated issue, a bizarrely complicated issue about residency.
- Well, we still have some more candidates who could get into the race.
Here's your basic set of contenders.
Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who was on the ballot earlier this year running for reelection for sheriff, he is in the race for mayor.
Former County Commissioner Van Turner is in the race, Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Young is in the race.
The retired criminal court judge who also had a TV Judge Program, Joe Brown, is also on the ballot.
Michelle McKissack, of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board is, I believe, still weighing her entry into the race.
There are some other folks waiting in the wing.
- Karen Camper.
- Yes, Karen Camper.
I'd state-- - Minority leader in the State House.
- Right, she was the latest to declare, basically this all started around September with folks getting into it.
And the key for it was that at that point, it was clear that there was not gonna be a chance that Jim Strickland could seek a third term.
He remains term limited at two terms, and he is in his second term currently.
So that caused a lot of people to say, "Okay, it's a wide open race.
"We need to get out there because we are less than a year, actually, from the October election day next year."
- And then this all then brings up questions that Van Turner does not live in the city of Memphis.
He didn't, certainly hasn't lived for years now, he's bought a house or through a trust, he's bought a house in the city limits.
Floyd Bonner has not lived, lives in Bartlett.
And I think Paul Young, Karen Camper, I think they do clearly live in, there's no question there, but it apparently hasn't been a question in previous cycles because people lived in the city of Memphis.
But I'm gonna punish everyone by having you try to explain how it can possibly be unclear whether or not someone has to live in Memphis for at all, 30 days, or 5 years prior to election day.
- The city charter says in its text that in order to run for mayor, you must have lived in the city of Memphis for five years.
Apparently the five year requirement has been in the charter since the city's charter was restored after the yellow fever epidemics in the 19th century.
The City Attorney's Office, the city's chief legal officer, when we asked this question, I think in late September, said, "No, the five year rule "does not apply to living in the city," because of a 1973 U.S Supreme Court case about the same five year period in registering to vote in Tennessee and being able to vote in Tennessee, the U.S Supreme Court struck that down.
So the city chief legal officer's position was, "Therefore, our opinion for a long time has been, "in order to run for Memphis Mayor, you have to have lived in the city--" - Thirty days.
- Within a month of the election day.
- Right.
- Then you had a federal court ruling here in the case of Thomas Burrell, who was trying to get on the ballot in the November elections this month for Mayor of Mason, Tennessee.
And there was a residency requirement there in order to run for mayor that Burrell did not meet.
And the federal judge here in Memphis, who ruled in that case, said, "There can be a requirement of several years for you to live in the place where you run."
And that ruling said specifically that the requirements on when you can register to vote are separate from the requirements for running for office.
- And then the last thing is we had earlier this week, or it was last week, Allan Wade who is the attorney for the Memphis City Council, came out and gave an opinion that also kind of seconded what the City of Memphis have said that you don't have to, the five years is not required and that you basically, he appointed to 30 days, or... - No, he went a little bit differently on this.
So we have three very, very different views of what it takes, what it means, and how long you have to live in the city of Memphis to run in this race.
His opinion is that you have to be a resident of the city of Memphis when you win the election.
[Toby and Eric laughs] - I'm sorry.
- Which I would take to mean when the results of the election are certified by the Shelby County Election Commission, and those results show that you have won, at that point, you have to be a resident of the city of Memphis, and there is no residency requirement, in essence, to run for the office.
- Wow.
- So, as long as that was, that is about a succinct description of the lack of clarity over this as there exists.
It is, it does seem very strange.
And it is very serious.
I mean, you've got, I've heard people who've said, Look, separate from the legalities and the lack of clarity, why would anyone vote for someone who doesn't live in the city of Memphis to be the mayor of the city of Memphis?
And then you've got questions about how you get this resolved, which seems like it's gonna come down to somebody's gonna sue someone and it's gonna go to federal court.
- Well, but I mean, there was a similar issue in the state senate race with Ruby Powell-Dennis, she didn't live, she lived in the district and then the lines were redrawn and she didn't live in the district.
And so then she moved to the district to run for the seat in the district.
So it's just interesting to watch.
- And she was able to be on the ballot with the premise being that, if she had won, she would then move into the city.
And we have seen that in some other state legislative races.
- But there's no, but this is the chart, what I've heard people say is, look, there's a charter, the city of Memphis charter says five years.
You can opine all you want and you can interpret all you want, but in the end, it seems like some judge is gonna have to rule on this.
- Absolutely, and is that gonna be after the election?
We have no idea, but the whole thing, it reminds me completely of that saga that we went through on police and fire here, residency requirements, should you live in the city, should you not, can we recruit all of those things.
And even then, the kind of the argument was if you're a firefighter and you live outside the city, are you gonna fight as hard for a fire in the city as you would if you live there?
That kind of a thing.
So a lot of those same issues are probably at stake here.
I can't wait to read the very next thing that you do to help me understand what is going on, Bill.
- Well, it still has to be sorted out.
And I think what we're looking at is someone's gonna have to go to court, if for nothing else, just to say we want a declaratory judgment on this, but even after that's resolved, where the candidates live is going to be an issue in this race, regardless of how the courts rule, regardless of whether people move back into the city or not.
- Yeah, I mean, I think you can already see that in some quarters, just raising questions about somebody's commitment to Memphis when they don't, they haven't lived in Memphis and why they wanna run for office.
And it is, I mean, I laugh, but it is very strange.
There's a lot of money, there's a lot riding on this.
It'll be the first mayor in eight years.
There's a lot, I'd say there's a lot of money in the sense that people are raising money, they're getting supporters, they're kind of lining things up and it just seems insane that there isn't clarity sooner.
Will the state have, I mean, what does come next is, before we move on?
It does seem like at some point this is gonna end up in a court.
- Yeah.
- But the State Election Commission has something to say over this instance.
- Yeah, and Alan Wade's opinion, and his letter was to Linda Phillips, who is the Shelby County Elections administrator.
And he in essence told her, didn't ask her, but told her that if someone files a petition to run for mayor, you don't have any grounds to turn them down because of a question about residency.
There may be some other questions that come up, but for residency, you have to accept their qualifying petition if they've got the 25 signatures on there, and you have to put them on the ballot.
Copied also on this legal opinion was Mark Goins, who is the state elections coordinator.
The state elections coordinator tells local election commissions what the law is and how they must follow the law.
Election commissions are not bodies that make those decisions.
So, I think the next player in this, if you will, is going to be the state and specifically the state elections coordinator.
- All right, stay tuned to that.
We'll move on, Toby, you've been doing a number of stories on environmental issues.
Talk about that.
And that's also against the backdrop of MLGW has a new CEO.
The TVA decision is out there, which is big impact on the whole city, the whole county, the suburbs who want more of a say.
But let's start with some of the environmental things you guys have been writing about.
- We have been running a lot of stories from Tennessee Lookout, which is a nonprofit news agency in Tennessee.
And they have been doing a really great job of coming to Memphis and writing these really important stories about environmental justice.
And two big ones that we have, last week we ran a story called "Toxic Air".
Down in south Memphis there is a company called Sterilization Services.
They do sterilization services, and they pollute the air, all over south Memphis.
And you can see this cloud that the EPA put together where your cancer risk, if you live in this area, is far greater than if you lived outside that area.
Residents there have known about it for years and years.
They finally went to the EPA for some help.
EPA came into town earlier this month, late last month, and said, "There's really nothing we can do.
"They have permits for everything.
"This is what it is.
The best thing you can do is move," is what these residents in south Memphis were told.
It was kind of a really eye-opening situation.
It was a great story.
And then this week we had a story, another one about the Velsicol manufacturing plant up in north Memphis.
They made pesticides and things.
They produced this substance called chlordane.
And that's been closed down for a long time.
But the remnants of those toxins still remain in the ground, in the topsoil and some of the water up there.
And they've got wells where they have to still test all of these things.
And it's so bad up there that when people put gardens in their homes, they don't put 'em in the ground, they build these gardens in these raised beds because they know what's in the soil up there.
And the plumes of the toxins underneath the ground at some points have been as big as the Liberty Bowl.
So there was a really eye opening look at what's happening up there, and they say that these pockets of these things are just kind of all over Shelby County.
So I'm really grateful that The Lookout has been interested in West Tennessee and Shelby County and Memphis to really open our eyes to a lot of these things.
And as you mentioned, we're kind of on the cusp, maybe we've been there for a long time of MLGW finally making a decision on whether or not to stay with TVA that we, it's been a saga, we've covered this for a long, long time.
It seemed like we were on the cusp of a decision, but then maybe we pulled back from it.
- Well, what happened was Doug McGowan won appointment confirmation by the City Council, as the new head of Memphis, Light, Gas and Water division.
He expects to take that job in December.
Right after the confirmation, the Light, Gas and Water Board announced that it was going to take a vote on this, a vote on whether to stay with or leave TVA on November 16th.
And so I immediately send an email to the mayor's office saying, hey, what does this, are you aware of this, this is gonna be before Doug McGowan takes office.
And obviously this is gonna be a big topic on his desk when he takes over, what do you think about the early date before he steps in?
And they said, "No, we're not that worried about it because he's going to review it anyway."
Since then, Franklin Haney, Chattanooga developer, who kind of got this whole ball rolling on should Memphis Light, Gas and Water stay with TVA or not, his attorney said that they are going to appeal the conclusions in the RFP process, request for proposal process.
And as a result, the Light, Gas and Water Board may vote by the end of the year, but they will not be voting before Thanksgiving.
- Right.
- Wow.
- Suburbs, we, pre-taped show 'cause of the holidays with some folks from Bartlett, including the head of, Harold Bird, who's the head of the Shelby County Chamber Alliance, all the suburban chambers also had the head of the Bartlett Chamber.
And I'm turned to you, I mean the suburbs are very, very worried about this decision because they are, in most cases clients of, or customers of MLGW for electricity and gas, and they have zero say in what MLGW is about to do.
You're hearing that, I guess I can, would assume continue to hear that in Germantown and Collierville.
- Yeah, that's the biggest concern is that they don't have a say, they don't have, they have a, they previously had a representative on the board, but it was like, ex-officio didn't vote.
So yeah, they are worried.
There was talk, and I don't know what the status of this is, but there was talk of legislation that could give the suburbs more of a voting voice, but at the same time the suburbs are 30%.
So even if they did get a person that represented them on the board, some people say it's kind of a, the mayors wouldn't say this, but others have said it's a weak argument because they're 30%, whereas the city of Memphis is 70%.
But they still do want a voice.
And it's been, they've always wanted a voice.
But with the TVA/MLGW debate, it's been, that argument has been amplified.
- And again, I always say that even though, MLGW is gonna make a, Doug McGowan, I'm sure will have his input.
The board of commissioners will have their input, but in the end it's gonna be a decision of the Memphis City Council and right, Bill, I mean the mayor, I mean they're the owners of MLGW.
- If the Light, Gas and Water Board decides instead to keep going with the rolling agreement, which is in essence kind of an evergreen-type agreement, it's not a long-term 20-year agreement.
If the Light, Gas and Water Board were to approve that, then the City Council would really not have a voice in this.
- Yeah, just three, four minutes left.
We've talked a bit about culture issues in the school boards, but the culture issues as well up at the state about drag shows, about trans rights.
It's a national debate.
The drag shows thing came out in part because MoSH, Pink Palace formally tried to do a fundraiser, just a kind of fun fundraiser with a drag show that was, they said age appropriate.
There'd be kids there, there'd be families there, it was ultimately shut down because there were some proud boy like protestors there being intimidating.
But now the state legislature has stepped in, Toby, and you all have been writing about that.
- That's right on both of those issues so far two bills that we know of have been filed in the state legislature.
One is house bill one, senate bill one.
So that tells you the priority of some of these legislators up there.
Both have sponsorship by Jack Johnson, he's a Republican from Franklin.
The drag legislation, it was already filed.
They don't meet until January, it was already filed.
And it would prohibit drag performances on public property and other public spaces.
So, and that's a huge swath of everything.
You even think about the drag performance that happened up by the gazebo and Cooper Young recently, of course the MoSH show would be out of there.
It even goes farther, they call them adult cabaret performances.
And it goes, and it describes that as, it's pretty interesting.
"Topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, "male or female impersonators "who provide entertainment on and on that have a, for a prurient interest."
Which I had to look up, which y'all go look up, prurient.
It's pretty interesting.
It would allow the performances on public space, but also within public view.
So you couldn't, even if you had it in your private business and there was a window open, you couldn't do it in there.
And so Jack Johnson says that this isn't meant to target the LGBTQ community at all, it's just to protect children.
It's pretty clearly a target for those folks up there.
And like the MoSH show, the drag performers that we've talked to with The Flyer, they say, "Look, we tailor our performances to where we're going."
So, if we're gonna do a drag story time, it doesn't get one notch above Dr. Suess, when we show up, we're just there with the kids.
I mean, you can imagine, if the Rolling Stones were gonna play to kindergartners, they wouldn't be doing "Honky Tonk Women", right?
It'd be a whole different thing.
And that's what these drag performers tell us.
They're like, "We know what we're up to."
They might do it.
- They might.
- But the drag issue is another cultural issue that Republicans are already starting to wage even before they get started up in the General Assembly.
I can go real quick into trans stuff.
- Yeah, do, 30 seconds.
- 30 seconds.
There's another Jack Johnson bill there that would, it would prohibit gender transition treatment for children all over the state.
That again is to "protect the children".
Also a reminder, this weekend, Out Memphis and Memphis Trans Love will host the inaugural Mid-South Trans Resource Fair up at Black Lodge this Saturday from noon to 5.
All kinds of resources for 'em there.
- There's a lot there we could do and probably should do a whole show on those issues.
But I said at the top of the show, we're gonna do something on public incentives.
We've got 45 seconds 'cause it took so long to describe, [all laughs] necessarily long to describe the complexities of residency and the mayor's race, which are important.
But Bill and others at Daily Memphian and elsewhere have been writing about all these incentives around the 1 Beale potential hotel, the Sheraton Convention Hotel, what 684, $700 million in funding potentially for sports, enhancements to FedExForum, AutoZone Park, Liberty Bowl, and a new soccer stadium at the fairgrounds.
Coliseum being torn down.
I was gonna get into all those dynamics, but we don't have enough time.
So, unless you had a 10-second comment, - No, something tells me we'll be coming back, to all of this.
- We'll come back to this.
I have a feeling we'll be coming back to this.
Thank you all for being here.
Appreciate it very much.
Thank you for joining us.
Have a great Thanksgiving, we will be back next week, on Friday after Thanksgiving.
If you missed any of the show today, you can get the full episode at wkno.org or you can go and get the full audio of the show at the Daily Memphian site, the WKNO site, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.
Thanks very much, and we'll see you next week.
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