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- A look back at 2024 and a look forward to the year ahead.

Tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined by a round table of journalists talking about the biggest stories of last year and what to look forward to this year.

Toby Sells from the Memphis Flyer, thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Along with Laura Testino, a reporter with the Daily Memphian.

Thank you for being here again.

- Yeah.

- And Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk about some big things and some specifics, even some news that happened this week as we record this on, what is it, the 2nd of January, I think we start probably with criminal justice and public safety.

It's a thing that obviously gets a lot of traction.

It's been heavy on people's minds.

And I'll start with you, Bill , but I'll just throw a few numbers out as we sit here.

MPD has come out and said that homicides are down 25%, that guns, I think through November, December, early December, guns stolen from cars were down 24%.

Car thefts down almost 40%.

Car break-ins down 19%.

Clearly, MPD wants to get these numbers out and people feel some degree of relief.

I think the homicide number is now at a level around 2019.

So back to pre pandemic levels, which has been kind of the trend around the country.

There's that, then there's the DOJ report.

Then there's this massive pressure on the public safety, criminal justice system where when you look back last year at all these kind of issues and then going into next year, the biggest themes, the biggest stories you see.

- The biggest theme I think is that, yes, the statistics are important, but telling someone that those statistics encapsulate the whole issue to someone who's just had a gun put in their face, doesn't really mean a lot to them.

So it's a complex problem.

I don't think anyone is saying that these numbers mean the problem's licked.

It's been resolved now.

It's much more complex than that.

We're dealing with questions of ongoing leadership in the MPD, - The Chief of Police still interim.

- Yeah, is still an interim.

There is a larger public safety plan still to come from the city's consultant on that.

There's a downtown safety plan still to come.

And there are the very real problems in the DOJ report.

And we recently had a district attorney, Steve Mulroy on the show, I think that was like two weeks ago.

You can get that at wkno.org or go to YouTube.

And we also had Brent Taylor, the state senator, and London Lamar, also State Senator.

Brent Taylor has made a lot of noise about going after DA Mulroy, wants to get DA Mulroy removed if possible by the legislature.

I don't know, Toby, I mean, those, that is gonna play out as the session starts, the legislative session starts, and it's hard to see where that's gonna go.

- It is, but of course it wouldn't be the first time that the legislatures try to take over what we're doing here in Memphis.

We can go on and on about all the times that we've said we're gonna do something, elect somebody and they try to remove 'em.

A lot of folks are disappointed in that, but man, I just gotta say that Bill is so right.

It's like the feels like temperature you see on the weather, it's like, man, you can tell me that, you know, we're heading in the right direction.

But boy, a lot of folks don't feel like that out there.

When they see even like, car break-ins and things like that on Nextdoor and Facebook.

There's still a level there, you know.

But what I would like to see going into the new year, maybe something I'll look into is what moved the needle on these statistics, right?

Was it, was it more cops?

Was it better cops?

Was it the national trend of things falling and those kind of things.

And see how we can move ahead, if we figure out what moves the needle on it.

- Yeah, Laura, I mean, thoughts generally on criminal justice?

Also, this week you had news, a story that the juvenile court judge, juvenile court office is suing the sheriff for who's gonna, who's gonna staff the Juvenile Detention Center, which also brings up issues around the jail.

I know you weren't covering the jail, but there's also this kind of dysfunction and lack of clarity in the criminal justice system about the future of the DA, the chief of police being an interim, and now who is staffing the juvenile jail.

Is it gonna be the sheriff on an ongoing basis or is the juvenile court gonna have to pick that up?

All these things are hard to reconcile.

- Yeah, well, and we've seen that publicly play out over the last year, especially starting in April, trading letters back and forth between Judge Sugarmon, sheriff Bonner.

But, we see in court documents and, and reported at the time at the Daily Memphian in December, when Sheriff Bonner brings this up, he talks a lot about, I have staff that I need to have at the adult jail.

The adult jail has been a question and a problem that his plagued part of his tenure as sheriff.

And discussing those issues of staffing and having to also staff the Juvenile detention center seems to be a main point in this for the Sheriff's office of trying to solve both of those problems.

And when this goes to court later this month, I think we'll see some of that play out.

But the issue is asked before the court to resolve this by the end of the fiscal year to keep the status quo through the end of this fiscal year, which I think means, Bill, you'll be seeing a very active county commission during the budget season on where this eventually lies based off of where the funding goes.

- And we should also point out that there were several county commissioners who wanted to get in the middle of this dispute between the court and the sheriff and try to mediate it and didn't have seven votes to really do that.

Because the other side of this is these are independent elected officials.

- Yeah.

And the fiscal year to be clear will be July 1st.

- July 1st.

- Yeah.

Okay.

The other thing that's gonna come up, I mean, there's been a lot of talk of the new jail.

I mean, Laura mentioned the sheriff saying they need to staff the jail.

There was a point in time this, I think it was this past year, where there many of the locks on the jail doors didn't work.

And so they had to have staff standing at the jail, you know, cells to keep people in.

There have been lots of criticism of the condition within the jail.

And lots of people, I think on both sides of criminal justice, public safety, saying, well, we need a new facility.

It's many decades old.

But what it is, the prospect of that happening anytime soon seems... - Well, it's at least a $1 billion undertaking.

And if you look at how we got the jail at 201 Poplar from having the old lockup in the old police building, that was a decade long process.

And that's what Lee Harris, the county mayor has basically said about this.

- Go ahead.

- The other thing is... the sheriff is the keeper of the jail.

That is his or her primary duty.

And you have to wonder, how did the jail get this bad this quickly when basically when Mark Luttrell was sheriff, it was okay.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Another big question, and we'll shift maybe away from criminal justice, public safety and so on though.

But we were talking before the show is, Toby, is MPD and the consent decree, the DOJ report and wanting a consent decree seems unlikely.

We've talked about that with a change in administration at the federal level.

But the, Paul Young, the chief of police, they've been talking about, we're gonna do some internal monitoring.

We're gonna bring in some outside people to help monitor MPD.

And you've also got the prospect, a lot of this DOJ consent, all this stuff started with the killing of Tyre Nichols, what now, two years ago, which is kind of remarkable, coming up on two years now.

All those things are gonna play out the civil trial with the Nichols family, give your take on that.

- It's gonna be a huge thing to watch, especially when it comes to the city budget.

I mean, they're asking $500 million, half a billion dollars, and if the family is awarded that money, you take $10 million out of the city budget for the next 50 years to pay that off.

You know, I'm sure that'll be, maybe that's not the number, but it's gonna, some huge number that we're gonna have to deal with to fix that gap in the city budget.

And then right around, they're saying, we don't need a consent decree 'cause we can do this ourselves.

You know, and it costs too much.

And again, I've said on here before, but it's just, that seems callous when you're looking at it to say, well, can we afford another civil case like the one that we're, that is before us right now?

And that's kinda the argument that a lot of criminal justice reform advocates are saying right now too.

It's like, we want this consent decree, we need outside folks to come in and help us with this to not have to deal with that problem in the future.

- And just before we shift to Laura, I mean, you talk about the city budget.

This was a year when Paul Young, the new mayor's one year in office found some surprises in the budget where there weren't, there were positions that weren't funded then some other gaps as the covid money expired and a big property tax.

So increase that went in last year.

So about which, a lot of people were not happy.

But let me shift to you, Laura, and as big as criminal justice and all these things we've been talking about, have been the school system got a new superintendent last year after a multi-year search.

And the prior superintendent Joris Ray left, resigned.

But in the midst of a whole lot of accusations and problematic documented behavior, it hasn't gone great with the new superintendent.

I mean, and you've been covering that very closely.

- Yeah, I mean we're amid leadership turmoil again.

I think I was looking back and pretty much almost exactly to the day that the special meeting happened where board members considered terminating Superintendent Feagins was about to the day that she interviewed for the first time in Memphis.

And we will see here in the coming weeks, if not maybe the coming days, what her kind of more formal response to these set of allegations have been.

Her attorney, Alan Crone, has said that they're very weak.

When we spoke before Christmas, there was still no additional documentation to support what these allegations are.

- Can you walk through real quickly?

I actually went back in, I was reading your story this morning as we're getting ready for the show.

And this special meeting was called about a month ago now, three weeks a month ago, something like that.

- Less than a month ago.

- Less than a month.

Three allegations that there isn't a lot of support and it's not real clear.

I'm still not clear what those allegations are.

They're so walk people through them.

- Yeah, sure.

So there are three different ones.

General allegations that she has not communicated well with board members and has been dishonest in the way that she has spoken to them.

No specific examples there.

There are three specific examples that all have to do with the way that she communicated about and handled finances.

One of those is about the way she explained and later supported with documents, or didn't, $1 million in overtime payments that she said that had been paid out and alleged it was not earned money by the people who received it, employees of the district.

A second one is about a check donation.

- Was $45,000.

- $45,000.

- From an individual or a foundation?

- From School Seed Foundation, which is was e established as a nonprofit to hand out the Gates Grant 10 years ago.

Still supports the district.

But the allegation is she accepted the money before the board approved it.

The board routinely approves donations.

And so having a donation come in and then be put to a board vote happens all the time.

And then the third allegation here is that there was a grant award that she missed a deadline for, her administration missed a deadline for, and it's gonna cost the district money.

We've heard at the Daily Memphian and our reporting will show very soon that the district still has access to that money.

- And how much money give or take is that?

- $304,000.

And so basically though, what all these allegations really kind of are adding up to is her contract requires just cause to have termination with no pay.

Just cause has to be things like breaking board policy, breaking the law, breaching her own contract.

If that can't be proved, she is owed per her contract, the equivalent of an 18 month payout, which is $487,000 plus associated benefits.

And so that's gonna really be the crux that we're arguing over here because it seems like most board members since the termination meeting have not changed their tune.

It appears that there are still five votes available to terminate her.

Whether there's merit to these allegations is more of the question here.

- And it's worth noting on the payout, Joris Ray, who left, who resigned, who was under investigation, who we had documentation about, there was affairs with staff that will work for him.

He got a payment in the 400,000 range.

I mean, they settled, but it would seem, it's very hard to prove it would seem.

And the MSCS does not have a big history of fighting that successfully, at least in recent times.

The other thing I think people have brought up is, you know, it took, was it two years that the?

- It was an 18 month search.

So we would essentially, if she's terminated, she will have worked for half of the amount of time that it took to find her.

- Yeah.

And doesn't it raise questions?

People have said, I mean, you may not know, but you talked to lots of people in this space about the ability to find a qualified candidate, let's say that, that the board votes out Marie Feagins.

And I think it's also murky.

I'm not judging whether the acquisitions are true or not.

You've done great reporting on it, it's just so murky.

Regardless of that, having gone through two superintendents in a couple of years doesn't really, they were already having trouble getting qualified candidates because they had to do the search.

They had to stop the search and restart the search.

All that's at play in this too, right?

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, there is national attention on this.

People are watching what's happened in Memphis because of how long the search process took, because it restarted.

And so I think, that that's not a small piece of that here as to who it would be and whether a search would happen again.

Leadership turmoil and the superintendency is, has been paired with four new board members, right?

Like there's also a lot of people, most of the elected board has not held elected positions before.

And so there's the newness of learning that role as well in play here.

- And you and I, it was you and I right, interviewed three of those four board members back in September, I have no sense of time anymore.

People can go back to wkno.org and look at that.

I mean, Bill , you've covered a lot of superintendents.

You and I have interviewed many superintendents since the beginning of this show.

Your thoughts on where we are with Marie Feagins and will she be removed?

I mean, it's a guess and what happens if she is removed?

- I kind of wonder if the board is not gonna go a middle step and authorize an investigation of the allegations.

There's a lot of heat on the board.

I would argue there's probably more political heat on the school board than there is on Feagins at this point.

- Political heat to remove her or to not remove her, or both sides?

- Political heat as a form of criticism.

- Okay.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

I mean the immediate response to a lot of this from the advocacy space was how do we get to recall these people who were just elected in August?

And that's been something that we've said or people have said locally that they will take up.

- Yeah.

Thoughts Toby?

- Just word on the street when you're talking to people out there is that Feagins is coming in, shaken a lot of things up.

The board does not like that.

They've come up with these allegations and it's pretty weak sauce.

And so I think the heat is definitely on the board, instead of Feagins.

- Well, and I think to Toby's point, this feeds into a long held perception that, and this was going on when Joris Ray was superintendent, that the school system was more interested in the people that worked for it and their jobs than it is the students and the families.

- Yeah.

Let, with what, nine, eight minutes left here, let's go to school vouchers.

We're talking about this a little bit before, again, we talked about the legislative session coming up.

There's a pilot, kind of a limited, somewhat limited school voucher program in Shelby County and some other areas of the state right now, Bill Lee, the governor seems very intent on expanding that pretty massively.

I'll start with you, you pointed out as we were talking about this before, I mean a lot of people concerned locally about who don't want vouchers concerned that this will take more kids outta the school system.

The suburban school systems will now be families in there, will be eligible for these vouchers.

But you made a really good point before the show, which is that even on the pilot program, the limited program, there's more vouchers available than there is interest.

- Yes, that's been historically true for the last couple of years.

And, so expanding this, certainly that could change if you up the income limit that a family would be eligible for.

And certainly if you expand across the state, as you said, makes the suburbs available.

There's also earlier, earlier this year, the first testing data came out from this pilot project to show, are these kids doing better?

Not essentially than they did last year.

But if you compare, how students do on the TCAP test in Memphis, Shelby County schools compared to students who have vouchers in private schools, the the data was only meaningful for students who had been in the Achievement School District.

So those students who had taken vouchers and ended up elsewhere, those data were better, but for elsewhere it was not meaningfully different.

- Toby, bring you in and you can segue into other priorities that the legislature as the session starts, but your thoughts about school vouchers and then other legislative issues.

- The, as we were talking before the show, I mean this, the school vouchers that's senate Bill one, house Bill one, I mean this, that kind of shows that this is priority number one for the House and Senate, the GOP controlled house and Senate here, and led by, governor Lee for all these years, they couldn't get it together in the past.

He kind of got together in the off season and compared notes put together a plan.

Lee says he likes the plan that's up there.

It's got juice just because it's so important to the Republican super majority up there.

So we're gonna get it.

Does it work?

Does it, is it expanded here?

Do we know what's gonna happen?

I don't know.

But an interesting thing, talking to some, some family in Florida where they already have an expanded school voucher program.

They said that kids in private schools down there, they were eligible for these vouchers.

There wasn't any kind of money restriction on that or income restriction.

And they said their private schools just raise their tuition by whatever the voucher was and said, consider it a donation to it.

So that was kind of an interesting look around the corner on that.

But a lot gonna happen at the legislature, we know, but school vouchers gonna be number one priority this year.

- Well, and I would argue it's not a done deal, that there's a lot of money spent in Republican primaries, Republican races where this will be an issue for rural republican areas where you may have a majority of the town working for the rural school district.

You have a private school come in, that really changes your economy.

- Well you've got one school district, a couple of schools in a rural area, big part of their budget.

And now you're gonna see a bunch of students go out and the self-interest of that.

And I think people in Memphis might cynically say, yeah, I mean it's all, it's do whatever you, we'll do whatever we want to Memphis but don't do it to us.

- That's right.

- Some of that dynamic has played out with people saying, coming out from rural Republican, very red districts saying removing the Shelby County District Attorney is a bad precedent because then you could turn around and do it in our county and Frederick Agee, I think you and I are, we had Frederick Agee who's who come, who is the DA for Gibson and Hardiman and a bunch of rural areas.

He came on and said, look, I mean he is a very Republican guy.

He was very clear about that, but thought it was a really bad idea to go after Steve Mulroy with five minutes left.

Bill, as we look into either look back or look forward, other things that come to mind that we haven't touched on here.

- I think in 2025 we're gonna see the second year of Paul Young's tenure, which arguably could be more critical than the first year because he's laid out parts of his plan, but not some other parts that are still developing.

So I'm anxious to see what's in his budget plan.

- He's got, oh, and he was on the show recently talking about some of these issues people can go back and listen to.

He's been on few times this year, but he is got, he's gotta get the extension with the Grizzlies done and FedExForum, he's gotta get hundreds of millions of dollars for this downtown safety plan and other things he's got going on.

Some of that goes to FedExForum renovations and the whole Grizzlies deal.

And he's got a new administration at the federal level, which could be making changes around tariffs, could impact the economy and big businesses like FedEx and AutoZone and the logistics industry and also immigration and deportation and what sort of local expectations are from the new administration.

So a lot going on there.

- And meanwhile politically, even though we have no elections regularly scheduled in 2025... - What?

That's impossible.

We always have like five elections every year.

Well, yeah, I mean this is a, this is company average.

- We could have a special election if there's some kind of vacancy, but as of now we don't.

But you are already starting to see people lining up for the 2026 races for governor, for the other Senate seat, and for Shelby County Mayor.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And to Bill Lee, who is term limited, Lee Harris- - who is also term limited.

- Looking back to stories we've missed that you've covered or you've seen Laura that just come to mind or again, whatcha gonna be looking forward to in the coming year?

- Yeah, I think in education space, Head Start, the grant, the federal grant that supports preschool for low income students is not a done deal with Memphis Shelby County schools.

They're having to re-compete for that bid, and Porter-Leath has said that they're interested too.

I believe that that closes in next week.

And so we'll be looking to see kind of how, or whether that changes how preschool operations are here.

Some legislation that's being pursued at the state level is more universal funding for preschool.

And so I expect to see a little bit more from that.

- Just some big dollar items out there.

We know that this year with 2024 rather xAI brought its big supercomputer grok here.

That continues to be kind of a controversial story.

As we're going on, as they're trying to figure out their power situation.

We'll see how that goes in the new year.

Also, we know electric vehicle sales have kind of softened, what's the future of Blue Oval City and all of that.

They announced a new plan to replace the I-55 bridge out there.

That's this mega million dollar plan that they're gonna do there.

And also the airport announced that they're gonna modernize their terminal out there and other big hundreds of millions of dollar plans.

So a lot of kind of big ticket items were announced last year.

- The only ones I'll add in that people haven't talked about, it's one of the most read stuff that people will read at Daily Memphian is restaurants and restaurants as a bellwether for are we good or are we bad?

Are we doing well?

We lose the Houstons but we gain a local restaurant.

And Jennifer Chandler, who is the food and dining writer for us, had seven stories to seven restaurants to watch that she just wrote for us.

And because again, the sky restaurants are one of those things where it feels like the sky is falling.

I mean, at least if you read the comments or you get the emails that I get when we write about at the Daily Memphian.

But then there's always another person who will go into that restaurant that recently closed.

- Even during the pandemic.

- Even during the pandemic.

- Yeah, well, and speaking of closures, school closures will be something to pay attention to next year as well.

- Yes, and the facilities and which is also an interesting one with Marie Feagins when she was on the show and we talked to her about looking at the 200 plus facilities, clearly some of these are not in great shape, it's more something's gotta be done.

But it's also a really hot button issue when a neighborhood school, that's a huge one that could get totally waylaid by her departure and put into limbo for, you know, another period of time.

I think that's all the time we have right now.

Oh, and the other one to watch next year is Wanda Halbert.

I mean Bill, the Wanda Halbert watch and whatever happens there.

So Bill will be all over that one.

But that is all the time we have this week.

We appreciate, thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to wkno.org, YouTube or the Daily Memphian and get the full video, including past shows that we talked about in reference today.

And you can also get the full podcast of the show at iTunes, Spotify, Daily Memphian, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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