- (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.

- Regional One, population loss, xAI, and much more tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

I am joined tonight by a roundtable journalists, talking about some of the biggest stories of the last few weeks.

Start with Sam Hardiman from The Daily Memphian, thanks for being here again.

Sophia Surrett, also from The Daily Memphian, thanks for being here.

And Bill Dries is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Let's start with you, Sam, and a story, because it feeds into a lot of the other things we're gonna talk about tonight.

The story you did about population loss and the mayor, Paul Young, talking about it, and the concerns that there's a state law could impact how sales tax revenue is distributed across the state.

And just generally, it's been a topic for politicians and business leaders for some time now, that that population loss in Memphis hurts the tax base and so on.

Talk about what you heard and where this goes.

- Yeah, so to start as a baseline for people, Memphis, at the turn of the 21st century, which now was kind of a while ago now, if you think about it, had about 650,000 people.

By some estimates, the city has 615,000 people now.

Other estimates would say 608,000, others would say 610,000, but all in all, population loss.

And so for the most part, that obviously matters in the city budget.

People's lives change when they move.

They're not spending money in the same places, the city coffers are getting affected.

But what's really happening now is the House bill, House Bill 780 that passed last year, is now going to, instead of the census from 2020 dictating how much sales tax the City of Memphis gets from the state every year, the state's gonna have a special census every year and going to, and so essentially, as the city were to lose population and has lost population over the first half of this decade, that's not gonna catch up in appropriations from the State of Tennessee.

So potentially as you lose population, that population loss, rather than being anchored to the past where you had maybe a rosier figure is now going to catch up and compound sooner.

- When I read that, I have to admit, I was confused because I think I always assumed that every sales tax dollar that people spend within the boundaries of Shelby County goes and stays into Shelby County, and then the state takes maybe some part of it.

But what are the dynamics?

If I'm buying stuff at the grocery store and I'm paying sales tax, how does it work now and how would it work down the road?

- Yeah, so how it works now is a per capita allotment that happens.

So the sales tax may be collected here in Shelby County.

It goes to the state of Tennessee, and then it comes back to the municipality based on your per capita, the amount of people you have essentially.

How this is going to change and how it's gonna catch up is A, the population figure, the per capita is gonna change every year.

But also, you're going to be evaluated based on the proportion of the state's population that you have every year.

So that means if you're a municipality and you're in Memphis and you're losing population, not only are you gonna be judged on that, but if you are now gonna make up a less of a percent of the state's total population, you know, in Memphis be around 9, 10% of the state's population, seven million people, probably eight or nine, that's also gonna go down.

And so that's how the allotment is gonna work going forward.

- Bill, thoughts on that?

I mean, I'll quote from Sam's story, Mary Young said, "There's a lot in our city that can't be solved without more people and more money."

- Right.

The sales tax and its allotment is historically a flashpoint for state government and local governments across the state.

How much goes to the state?

How much is the state sending out to local governments?

The population growth issue really returned to prominence during Jim Strickland's tenure as mayor.

He campaigned on it in 2015, and so it's also a political perennial.

- Yeah, and he argued back in the day that actually Memphis was being undercounted for all kinds of reasons and fought the, I think nationally because there was some federal money that was dependent on that.

Fought locally that we should be getting more.

I guess Paul Young doesn't sound like he's fighting that fight.

- Yeah, I think there's some difference in semantics between the two of them.

Mayor Strickland was always, I think, worried about population loss, but while he was mayor, at least when I was covering him, which was for most of the time, he never really was willing to concede that Memphis was losing population.

He did run on it when he was not the incumbent, but he was never willing to concede it.

And the city actually did see some small gains maybe in the late 2010s in terms of population.

But yeah, when the census came out in 2020, the city challenged it for federal funding, for other reasons.

And it was really about, in a lot of ways, fighting the narrative that Memphis was in decline.

It's a lot easier to say your city's not in decline if the population is not declining.

- I looked up some stats just for perspective.

I mean, nationally from 2020 to 2024, not, I mean, that's just a period of time, that includes COVID, some of the biggest drops in population across the country were, what was it, Jackson, Mississippi was 8%, St.

Louis was 7%, Shreveport was 5%, San Francisco was 5%, New Orleans was 5%, Memphis was 3%.

I mean, this does happen to cities.

This is, we are by some metrics, at the high end of it.

By others, it's part of, I mean New York City has years where it loses big percentages of, or single-digit percentage of its population.

Again, I'm not saying that it's a great thing, but there are some other like bright points on this of sort of growth and some of the problems.

One is this in part is the mayor wants to build, what, 10,000, he wants to build more houses.

There's a housing shortage in Memphis.

We've talked about it on the show.

We have a show coming up in the next couple weeks about housing and affordable housing and just needs in housing.

But also, that's part of the calculation, right?

So you gotta build some houses to make the numbers work for the city.

- Yeah, and so what happens under this new law is the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, The Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research, is now responsible for a count of every city every year.

And that's not a count like the census is, which is very formal, they send things to your house, you fill it out.

This is an estimate, this is based on a formula.

And a big part of the formula, they explained in a webinar last year, which I watched, maybe the driest thing I've watched and I watched a lot of dry stuff.

- I was gonna say that's a- - There's a high bar.

- There's a bar right there.

- New housing is a big part of that.

And so what I'm curious about, and maybe bears further reporting, is if you're a growing county and you're growing a lot of houses, you're building them, is anyone checking to see these things are occupied first?

But if the part of the City of Memphis is building 10,000 new homes, the city in this almost the same breath, the mayor in this, he said this in the state of the city speech, he is talking about building 10,000 new homes.

The city sort of sees this as, okay, if we build new homes, A, people could live in them, which is the real point.

But if you're getting counted on new housing for population, that's a key thing.

- This also feeds into, and there's a bit of a leap here, but Paul Young arguing for xAI and the two facilities that have been built here, the Shelby County assessor came out, the trustee or both came out and said that the expected tax from xAI will be about $28 million just to Shelby County.

Probably and a somewhat equivalent amount to the Memphis coffers, that's a huge increase in tax revenue.

I mean, that, I mean, so there's, that was part of his argument, right?

And part of, one of the facilities is now being built in Mississippi, that tax revenue will go to Mississippi.

Again, I know that other people, and we've had them on the show were opposed to these being done and being built, and the permits and the whole kind of thing.

But let's talk about another bright spot and maybe a series of bright spots from you, Sophia, you cover a bunch of things for us, but one is small businesses and just run through briefly some of the small business openings and expansions you've talked about.

Because I started the show about population loss, meanwhile, there are people, the former Houston's site is being rebuilt.

There are new the Palladio, which closed is gonna reopen, like talk about some of those.

- Yeah, so for Palladio, that has been obviously a hot topic since it closed in on Halloween.

And so it kind of went through, I feel like it was kind of a under like, kind of word of mouth that there was something going on.

And so part of the former Palladio's complex will be Memphis Water Gardens, which is the former longtime owner's son, Frank C. Roberts versus G. Frank Roberts, so that was kind of confusing at first.

But, so that's been, I went there the other day and it was really cool to see the garden showroom and that expansion, it looks great in there.

And then the adjacent showroom that used to like house the cafe, it's gonna be Market Central and that's kind of been under the radar, they still haven't announced much yet.

It's really only on social media, but I think they're trying to kind of recreate with a little bit of a twist what Palladio had.

And so that's been really cool to see that growth.

- Let's stay with some of the things you've been covering.

The other BlueOval, the big Ford plant that was originally gonna be built as a pickup truck plant, electric vehicles and a partnership with the South Korean company where the batteries were all gonna be made there.

Ford is changing its whole direction overall.

We've written about it in The Daily Memphian, people can read that, but they are not gonna go as deep into electric trucks.

They're gonna build, but they are still planning to build trucks at BlueOval, but they'll be traditional gas-powered trucks, correct?

- Yes, yes, it'll be gas powered.

I think a lot of people were not surprised based on the charges that they have accrued or the losses, which is about $16 billion since '22.

And so I think Ford had to reevaluate that they were just keeping, they kept losing money.

And so I like to call it the divorce between SK On and Ford.

- SK On is the South Korean company that's gonna be doing the battery.

- Yes, battery manufacturer.

- And they're still there.

They're still gonna be building batteries.

- Yes, so they got the Tennessee plant in this.

Ford still owns the campus, it's just this way, SK On was basically owning the building, they can manufacture batteries for other companies.

And then Ford got the ones in Kentucky, which they're gonna use for battery and energy storage.

But to your point, yes, they're doing gas powered, it's supposed to be affordable gas-powered trucks.

And so I think that will hopefully start some revenue for them in Stanton, which has kind of been part of this whole journey.

- Yeah, Stanton, Tennessee right near where BlueOval is.

I'm again sort of bouncing around on this theme though, but again, the story about population loss that Sam did, it got me thinking about it and you, Bill wrote a really lovely, really interesting piece about Frayser, where you grew up.

People can read it at The Daily Memphian.

Talk about what, I mean, it was just talk about the premise and why you wrote it.

- The reason I wrote it is because someone said to me one too many times that, oh, I grew up there, I remember when it used to be great, we never had to lock our doors at night.

You know the kind of comment.

- Yeah, the good ol' days.

- They just kind of said it one too many times to me.

And I grew up there and I knew that the truth was much more complicated than that.

Basically what I was trying to tell people was that these communities continue to move even when you think they're dying.

And the people who came after you to the community that is so beloved in your memory love that community just as much as you ever did.

- Yeah.

- So that's what prompted it.

Plus, kind of the thing that lit the fuse was Skateland, which was a big landmark in Frayser of the '60s and '70s, and being a kid there.

Burned down this past January.

So I'm thinking about, do I want to do anything?

Should I do anything?

And I went to the luncheon at the Frayser Exchange Club to see something totally off that topic.

And as soon as I walked through the door, someone who had lived in the community since 1987 when it was really changing from an all white community to a predominantly black community, said, "Man, that's horrible, Skateland burned down."

People forget that Frayser used to be a suburb.

- Yeah.

- So it kind of went from there.

- Yeah, it's a great piece, people should read it.

And it's really both things going on now and your memories of and perspectives on Frayser past.

I want to switch again talking about, the tax base.

Jody Callahan on our staff did a two-part series on the proposed Regional One basically move and expansion, a near $1 billion project to just not even just renovate the facilities, build a whole new facility.

The existing Regional One facilities were built in the '40s, the '50s, '60s, '70s, the trauma center was modified in '83, but it's a controversial, maybe I'll go to you Bill 'cause we've covered it, you've touched on this before, anybody else can chime in.

And we had Reginald Coopwood, the head of Regional One on the show, I think a year ago.

We're gonna try to get him back to talk about it.

We talked with County Mayor Lee Harris, who's been a real advocate for this.

The county has put forward, committed $350 million.

Although that could be changed, it's not- - It could go up to $500 million.

- Yeah, they- - But it's $350 million.

- Yeah, it could go down.

- As we speak, yeah.

- Yeah, right.

- They need, again, $900 million, could be a billion.

The state has put no money.

- Just for the hospital.

- Just for the hospital.

- If you're talking about the whole campus, it's closer to a $2 billion project.

But because of the headwinds that we've seen on this project, the hospital has said we're gonna focus on just the hospital building for now, which is about $900 million.

- Yeah, and they bought the old, what the former CA, Commercial Appeal site that was gonna maybe be a hospital during COVID and so on.

That was bought for a very, what some critics have said, a very high price.

It's an interesting story.

Jody worked on it for a long time and it's one of those stories, and y'all have had this happen when very few people wanted to talk on the record.

I mean, and I mean, Lee Harris didn't wanna talk to Jody about it.

He did talk on the show, but I have heard from so many people pro and con about Regional One, and it's the same experience as Jody, they do not want to talk on the record.

They don't want to come to talk on the show about their concerns about it.

And then the other backdrop, and it was very clear in Jody's reporting is everyone loves Regional One, formerly The Med, right?

- Yeah, who wants to be against it?

- Right, right.

And there's no doubt there's a huge need for a public hospital in the city, but you've got people bringing up the, a lot of capacity in Methodist and unused space there.

They talk about, who's gonna have a relationship with UTHSC, the med school.

It's a very good story, we're gonna be doing more on it here, you should read it and dig into that.

But let's go into, do you want to add anything on that one, Sam?

No, okay.

- I mean, no, I don't.

- Okay.

- I think it was very creative how many ways he was able to say people wouldn't comment.

- Yeah, well, I mean, I experienced that too.

People do not wanna be critical of The Med, or I still call it The Med.

They don't wanna be critical of Regional One.

There's clearly a tremendous amount of tension behind the scenes about what's gonna happen on that project.

But let's go to the Sheraton Hotel.

You've been covering that.

Give us an update on what's going on.

This is the Sheraton, the City's buying it, they've kind of begun to roll out plans for its renovation.

Talk about that.

- Yeah, for sure.

So it's now called The Memphis Riverline Hotel.

So it is an independent flag that is still associated with Marriott.

So it's not a white flag, it's still associated with the brand.

However, the brand will not, there will be no by Marriott associated with it until it meets brand standards when the renovation's complete, which is now been told it could be January 2029 and construction could start April, like I think April 2027.

They're in the design phase now and which will be about 200, $250 million renovation.

But that was just recently announced.

- And the Carlisle group, so this is Chase and Chance Carlisle will be managing it.

They're paid by the City or are they paid through DMC to manage it?

Do you know?

- They're getting developer fees.

- Developer fees.

- The City it, who is paying that I think is right now, I believe it's City bond dollars that's paying it.

The City of Memphis issued 30 billion, not 30 billion, my God.

The City and the county don't have that close.

Thirty million in debt for that project, and about $22 million is the purchase price.

The leftover right now is paying the costs up to, we get to another fork in the road.

Where the money's gonna come from after that fork in the road, who knows?

- Yeah.

Let's go to education real quick.

We don't have Laura Testino who covers education for us and other things for us at The Daily Memphian, but we had some board members on, they're waiting basically for this takeover, right, Bill?

I mean, what's gonna happen at the State?

The State has not reconciled, the legislature has not passed a takeover bill, it's not a hundred percent clear it's gonna happen.

My sense is it will, but it may not.

And so that seems to be really causing, as Laura reported, and you track this stuff as well, the board, the Memphis Shelby County School Board to kind of, they're in a waiting mode.

They gotta get this audit that the State put forward.

It could come out today, we're recording this on Thursday, it could come out tomorrow on Friday.

It's apparently done, at least the interim report is done.

People wanna see what sort of waste, fraud, and abuse there is or isn't in that report.

So they didn't wanna go forward with a long-term contract for Roderick Richmond, the now still interim superintendent.

Your take on where this goes.

- It's watching Nashville and trying to figure out which way this is gonna go.

It's not so much will they or won't they pass the bill?

It's, what is the bill going to look like when they pass it?

It's, what are the terms gonna be?

Is it gonna be a takeover?

Is it gonna be something short of a takeover?

That's what's being weighted in.

And in the process, the school board reacted to it and said, okay, we're gonna take permanent status for Roderick Richmond off the table for now until we see where this is going and what is in writing in the bill.

- Okay.

Other things we've highlighted lately, the legislature is in session, they're trying very quickly to get out of there, they're trying to have a very short session this year, which we'll see if that's possible.

But there are House bills on immigration that are moving forward.

One tracks K through 12 students immigration status and makes it a criminal offense to stay in Tennessee for more than 90 days after a criminal, excuse me, a deportation order.

The Senate is considering a state amendment that would change the Tennessee Constitution to state that the only US citizens can vote in local and federal elections, which is already the law, I think by almost everyone's account.

And William Lamberth, who's a ranking Republican member of the House said, "Tennessee is welcome "to all legal immigrants that come into the state, but illegal immigrants are not welcome here."

It seems, I don't know, it seems like most of those are gonna pass through, there's a lot of momentum for those.

- Yeah, I mean.

- And the real impact is in some cases, not totally clear.

- Yeah.

Meanwhile, in the background of all of that, you have the still forming race to who's gonna be the lieutenant governor?

Because Randy McNally is stepping down from that post.

In our state here in Tennessee, the speaker of the Senate is the lieutenant governor.

So we're talking about the leadership of one of the chambers.

And you could see some Memphis Republicans rise in the leadership ranks as a result of that.

- Let's do one fun one and then we're gonna come back and do an election update, which is hockey.

And Sophia did a hockey story this past week, and I know that Sam has some strong feelings about it, but go ahead and tell us what's happening.

- Yeah, so I think it was a surprise to everyone that I did the hockey story, but I was at a tourism event, so it was really cool to also be like, oh my gosh, major sports news.

So there's gonna be Minor League Hockey again.

And they didn't say the specific league they were gonna be in, but there's teams in Biloxi that Joel Cruz, the chief operating officer there at Landers Center said that we would be a part of.

- It'll be a minor league hockey.

There was the River Kings were here for, what, 30 years?

They left some years ago.

- Six, yeah.

- So it's a minor league hockey team that would be at the Landers Center in DeSoto County.

- Yes.

- In Southaven.

- Yeah.

- And Sam, you are a big hockey fan, you grew up in Rhode Island.

Are you gonna be there, are you gonna be season ticket holder for Minor League Hockey?

- No.

No, I don't like, respectfully to Minor League Hockey, which like to be a Minor League Hockey player, you have to be an incredible hockey player.

Like, you're a violinist in a symphony, that's how good you are.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But I'm sorry, I'm not driving, I haven't gone for the G League at the Landers Center.

I don't have anything against Southaven, Mississippi, I spent a lot of time in Southaven, Mississippi for reporting reasons, but I'm just, no.

Resident Yankee is not gonna just say, yeah!

- You love hockey.

You won't even go to one game?

- I mean, maybe one game.

- Okay.

- Are you buying me tickets?

- No.

- All right, then we'll see.

- I don't know, maybe we'll have you write a story.

- Are you planning on attending?

- No, I'm not a hockey fan.

Sorry, nothing against hockey, I just am not a hockey fan, so I'm sorry.

We'll talk, we'll argue about that later.

Let's do an election update.

Bill, we had a filing deadline, some things happened, walk us through all that.

- Yeah, we had a filing deadline for the August ballot on March 10th.

The big headline out of that is that we thought all 13 of our House members, all of the incumbents would run for reelection.

All of them wanted to run for reelection.

One of them was one signature short on his qualifying petition.

And as we speak today, there's no one in that race.

This is G. A. Hardaway's-- - Oh, so he was gonna be running unopposed?

- State house seat, yes.

- What happened?

- Well, from what we've heard, he had some kind of medical mishap.

So what happened is nothing serious from what we've heard, but he turned over getting signatures on his petition to someone else.

That someone else gathered 25 signatures, the minimum required.

You don't do that, you always get more for the very reason that cropped up here.

One of them was kicked out because of some kind of snafu with the address, the address was not in the district of that person.

So now this is in kind of unknown territory.

- I'm sorry, it's just so weird.

- Does Hardaway appeal this with the Election Commission?

If he doesn't, does he mount a write-in campaign for the seat, or do the two local parties have their executive committees pick the nominees?

So definitely more to come on that.

- Maybe we go back to you, Sam, this is a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago or longer.

You did a story, I believe on Paul Young raising money.

His financial disclosures, it's a ways away, what are we, two years from him?

- At the time, it was pretty much close to two years.

- Yeah, two years.

- Yeah.

What did you see in that?

He's gotten a pretty healthy... - Yeah, I mean, I've slept and traveled the world since then, so I don't actually have the hard number on the top of my head.

- It was 300 and something thousand dollars.

- It was 300 plus thousand dollars.

And what it was interesting was, it was a lot of, business establishment figures, a lot of business figures, a lot of people who work with the City.

And it was the mayor sort of, I think it was a challenge.

He's been very open that he's been running for reelection.

Like he was probably two days into the job when he said he was running for reelection or earlier.

So it's gonna be tough for anyone to challenge an incumbent.

But if he's sit throughout the rest of '26, building a giant war chest just like Jim Strickland in 2019, it's gonna be hard.

- And a lot of the people who supported other candidates in the last race, clearly maxing out their contributions to him.

That is all the time we have this week.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full episode online at wkno.org or the Daily Memphian on YouTube.

Next week, we've got a show on juvenile justice with Tarik Sugarmon, the juvenile court judge.

We've got Paul Young coming up in the next few weeks, a housing show coming up.

All that and more, we'll see you soon.

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