- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The Voting Rights Act, the school takeover, and much more 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, talking about some of the biggest stories of the week, starting with Katherine Burgess from MLK50.

Thank you for being here.

- Yeah, thank you so much.

- Mary Cashiola is editorial director for The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

- Toby Sells, news editor with The Memphis Flyer.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me, sir.

- And Bill Dries is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll start with you, Bill.

And as we record this Thursday morning, the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court came down with a decision yesterday.

Sometimes these Supreme Court decisions that we get at the US level are maybe kind of some future maybe, kind of, sort of impact on us locally.

This one almost certainly is gonna have major impact on Memphis.

It's really just a matter of when.

- Right.

The Supreme Court ruling in this case out of Louisiana was also highly anticipated for at least the last year.

And that's because it dealt with majority/minority districts, is the way it's phrased in the lawsuit.

Majority black congressional districts and how they're built under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It's a major provision in civil rights law.

And the court ruled that in the case of Louisiana and a district shaped along those guidelines that that was, in fact, unconstitutional.

Now, the implications here in Memphis are pretty direct on this because the 9th Congressional District that takes in most of the city of Memphis and parts of Shelby County is right in the crosshairs of the reaction to this.

- Yeah, we had Steve Cohen on, I think, in the fall.

I think it was that you and I interviewed him, and he talked about the risk of this and that he's in that seat.

He's been in that seat for a long time.

And that it would be redrawn as either some kind of shape that basically would dilute Democratic voters and create, you know, a Republican district and pointed to the fact, like, that people look at a map... And this isn't about Democrat versus Republican, this is just kind of what is.

Nashville doesn't have its own district.

It's kind of shocking, really.

I mean, if you think about it, if you were to draw up, you know, voting districts from scratch, you would assume big city, capital, booming, it would have its own district, whether that district was Republican or Democrat.

Instead, it's a pinwheel of districts that dilutes it, some would say, I mean, it is, in effect diluted Democratic votes, so it's all Republican US reps around that area.

- And that happened four years ago.

And Cohen and other Democrats immediately said, "This is a model for what could happen to the 9th District."

You know, when District 5 was a Nashville district, the state had two Democratic members of the House delegation.

After that, Jim Cooper, the Democratic incumbent, decided not to run for reelection.

Andy Ogles, an ultraconservative was elected to it.

So, this Supreme Court ruling comes out and within, say, two hours of the ruling, Marsha Blackburn, United States Senator who is running in the Republican primary for governor, posts a map on X and says, "Basically, we want this map."

And it shows the 9th District of Memphis split up among three districts the same way District 5 was.

- Yeah.

And you've got, who was it, the other candidate for governor saying "flip Memphis"?

- Yes, John Rose, who is her rival in the governor's race, and as a congressman posted a regular map with two words, "Flip Memphis."

- It's not unique to Tennessee.

Other states are talking right now, especially Republican-dominated states that would take away, you know, black districts, should they go back into session, should they, you know, call a special session?

I think Marsha Blackburn called for that.

Am I right, Bill?

That the legislature come back and begin to redistrict.

There's some legal questions because, you know, you've got, petitions have been filed, you've got people, you know, can you go back and really do that?

- The ballot is set.

- Yeah, the ballot is set.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

But for 2028 and beyond, it will mean big changes.

Other thoughts from anyone on what's been going on here?

We will, obviously, be following that if they come back in session.

Mary, do you wanna add something?

- Yeah, I mean, I've been wondering, looking at the ruling, you know, I think the ruling says that the districts have to stay compact and you can't intentionally disenfranchise a group.

And it feels to me if you are on Twitter or X, saying, "Here's my map," that looks like this across the state, and we're trying to intentionally flip Memphis, like, does that give the people of Memphis an argument to challenge it in court?

Like, that is what I've been wondering.

- It's a great point.

- Yeah, and it would seem like it does, because the Civil Rights Act talked about creating districts as a remedy to an obviously... strategically drawn district for racial reasons.

- Yeah.

And, again, there's a backdrop.

I mean, we don't do a lot of national politics, but this falls into it, of, you know, the redistricting battles and the gerrymandering battles in, what is it, Texas and then in California and all this kind of Democrats versus Republican.

It does feel like just, I mean, whoever wins, I feel like cities should have districts, their needs are different than rural.

Rural should have their rural areas, and this is national, should have their districts 'cause those needs are different.

Whether it's... I mean, when and when if you're a Republican or a Democrat, I think that's separate from rational sized districts.

Nashville should have its own district, right?

- It feels to me like they should be squares, or rectangles.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I mean just like- - Yeah, yeah.

- And just like make it easy.

[laughs] - Yeah, and a district should represent a group of people with, you know, kind of the same ideas, right?

Instead of... And this is how the GOP is winning.

I mean, they're picking their voters, right?

And they're saying, okay, if we can do this, and then we're gonna win this certain thing, and then all of a sudden we've got this House seat, or whatever it is.

And boy, I've just, gerrymandering, redistricting, whatever you wanna call it, it's a political game.

And whoever wins can really win big.

And we've seen it over and over again.

- And to be fair, Democrats are doing it.

- Sure, absolutely.

- They've done it too.

I mean, it's been an equal opportunity over the many decades of all this.

Katherine, are you gonna add some?

- Yeah, I just wanted to add this idea of turning the district red or changing the district and making it become red.

It's just one step in a long history of Nashville trying to overrule Memphis decisions.

And there's an interesting parallel here where, of course, Justin Pearson was, not too long ago, removed from his position in the state legislature and is now, of course, running against Steve Cohen for this exact seat that could no longer exist.

So it's just this exact same person who previously was elected and removed now could be up for this seat that may no longer exist.

- A good point.

Yeah, Bill.

- What you have is also a political puzzle because for all of the language about communities, natural borders that outline those communities, it's also still a numbers game.

- Yeah.

- To create, in this case, nine districts across the state that have roughly the same population.

And once you get into the numbers, then you start seeing pieces of communities, but not the entire community included in the district.

- Yeah.

Well, more to come on that.

We'll be covering it if the, you know, obviously, the legislature goes back into session.

But whether it's this year or beyond, this is gonna be a big one.

But let me talk, and Katherine set up, when Nashville, the legislature, is making decisions on behalf of Memphis, they made a big one, which I'm sure many people out there welcome, others do not, which is the takeover of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

We've been talking about that.

We've had the legislators, Brent Taylor, Mark White, who've really led that charge over the last couple years, we've had school board members on, and we've talked about it a lot in the paper, as well as on the show.

Mary, you interviewed Laura Testino, who's been on the show many times and has been covering this in depth.

For those who may be are slightly removed, let's do the basics of what this takeover is, and then what it means and where we go from here.

- Right, so, essentially, where we're at is there will be nine new board members that are appointed by the state.

Eight of them will be living in Shelby County, one of them a very specific carve out position, which seems to be written for someone in mind.

Does not have to live in Shelby County.

And those board members... It's unclear exactly how it'll work, but those board members will essentially be given veto power or authority over the other decisions that the school board and the school administration makes in terms of school closures, budgeting, all those things.

All of the decisions, really, yeah.

- The governor will appoint five of those members.

Speakers of the House and Senate will get two each.

They can hire and fire the superintendent.

That's important.

It's about a $2 billion budget.

It is... The law is, am I right about this, Bill or Mary, four years, and then it sunsets.

This is meant to be an intervention of a law, and then it reverts back to the local school board.

Bills can be extended, laws can be extended.

It happens all the time for whatever reason.

Where are we with... There was some talk the County Commission was gonna fund a lawsuit against this, Memphis-Shelby County School Board gonna sue against this.

Do we know where we are as of today in terms of lawsuits and legal action?

- I feel like we're at a place where the people who wanna fight this are trying to figure out how to fight this, right?

Because the state came in and said, "You can't use... The school board cannot use public money."

So the school board cannot sue on its own behalf using public money.

The County Commission tried to sue using public money.

They don't have the votes for that now.

I think Bill can speak on that a little bit more, that maybe they're gonna be trying to.

And I think there's talk now of trying to raise private funding to mount a legal challenge.

- Yeah.

- Right.

- Bill, thoughts on all that?

- Yeah.

Basically, this was gonna be $200,000 from county government's reserves.

And it had not been previously discussed in committee, so this was a procedural motion this past Monday to add it to the agenda.

You needed eight votes to do that.

The Commission had seven votes to do it.

So they were one vote short.

So, they are most certainly going to try this again or run it through committees, because even with one member absent, the seven votes were there this past Monday.

It just got hung up on the procedural.

- Two hundred thousand seems like starting just the entry, the table stakes to get this going, given complexity of this.

- Right, 100%.

- And the state has, you know, a lot of resources to push back on this.

And again, I know there are people out there listening, saying, "This is the best thing ever for Memphis-Shelby County Schools."

It's not about that.

But there is the audit, and maybe I'll touch on that real quick, and somebody fill me in.

So there was an interim... Brent Taylor and Mark White and other legislators got this audit going.

They've been doing a forensic audit of three years, I believe, of Memphis-Shelby County Schools' budgets.

They found $1 million, I believe, in waste so far over that three-year period.

They're not done with the audit, but that was a big kind of trigger of sort of pushing the vote forward.

The interim audit has so far cost about $8 million.

We obviously hope that all of the... Because Brent Taylor was on the show and he said elsewhere some months ago that we would be shocked.

I think, was Laura with me?

Or maybe it was, maybe it was Laura.

I'm gonna paraphrase, Brent Taylor, apologies.

But that "We would be shocked at the scale of the waste, fraud, and abuse that was in there."

I don't think anyone's seen that yet, but that's not to say that other things won't be revealed.

And we certainly will be reporting on that.

Midway through show here.

Let me do this.

I'm gonna do a pivot over to get Katherine involved with some of the immigration reporting you've been doing in around the task force and ICE.

Talk about that at mlk50.com, people can get the reporting, but talk about what you've been finding.

- Yeah, so I know we've talked on the show before about how getting information out of the task force has been tricky.

There's, I think, 31 different agencies, 2,500-plus personnel.

And so it's hard to get information out of them.

So, we really wanted to dig in on what the impact was on immigrants in our community.

At MLK50, we partnered with ProPublica.

We were able to get those arrest reports, which I know y'all have also seen.

And we are able to do a data analysis finding that, of the more than 800 immigrants detained by the task force in a particular time period, only 17 were detained for violent crimes.

So we started with that data.

We really honed in on the neighborhood of Parkway Village, which actually saw the most immigration arrests during that time period.

And we were able to talk to individuals about how they were impacted.

So I think it was some really powerful reporting done by Wendy Thomas and myself at MLK50.com.

But we were really able to kind of push back on that assertion that this task force is just about violent crime when you're talking about about 800 people who were arrested for what is a civil violation, not a criminal violation.

- We had US District Attorney Mike Dunavant on the show last week.

People should go if they're interested.

It was a very fascinating conversation, not for anything I did, about the work of the task force, his involvement.

He's indirectly involved with the immigration part.

He talked about how about 10% of the arrests that have come through the federal system, about 800, have been involved immigrants.

It was very interesting.

And again, you can get that at WKNO.org.

You can get it at Daily Memphian or YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thoughts on that, and maybe even also the legislature.

Toby, the legislature passed a bunch of state-level immigration bills this year as well that kind of plays into some of what's been going on with the surge of resources nationally.

- That's right.

And we also saw an appeals court that, you know, shot down the, you know, we were trying to challenge that Governor Lee had any standing to send the National Guard here in the first place.

We saw that defeated recently here.

But in Nashville, a big package called Immigration 2026.

This came from White House advisor, Stephen Miller.

He worked with House Speaker Cameron Sexton on this, you know, package of bills.

You know, and that was gonna be the GOP's number one, you know, plank everything they're working on this session here.

What we ended up with, I know, you know, state, you know, illegal immigration is now against the state law.

Truck drivers have to be fluent in English and county sheriffs have to now, you know, they have to work with ICE.

And there was a bunch of other ones, you know, a bill that failed though was, you know, they were gonna collect, you know, immigration status of kids in school and stuff.

That failed.

But it was a big package of bills that we saw come through here.

And, you know, it's kind of, you know, state houses are kind of, you know, laboratories for laws here.

So, you know, see what happens in Tennessee, see if next season, you know, we can get that in other state houses.

And then, you know, if that works, you know, Tennessee could be a model for, you know, national legislation on this.

- Let's run through some cities.

I'll start with you, City Council stuff.

It's a bunch of little things that, many of which are important.

One is the whole No Kings protest, which, in part, was, that kind of devolved into some kind of action.

We've talked about it on the show, we've written about it, y'all have written about it.

But Council members this past week, I think, or a week before, I have no sense of time, wanted some questions answered from Chief Davis, from MPD.

There were four officers on administrative leave.

This is where there was a protest that, you know, MPD said, "Well, they didn't have..." And Paul Young on the show said they didn't have permit to go out in the street.

They said they were being peaceful.

It got, you know, intense, to say the least.

What happened at Council this week in terms of the questions being asked by Council members?

- Yeah, I mean... And those protestors, I mean, they were tackled and pepper sprayed, right?

I mean, and it was all on social media, so it wasn't like they were politely, you know, ushered to the side and said, "I'm sorry, you don't have a permit," right?

It got pretty real.

And so Councilmember Jerri Green wanted, you know, wanted CJ Davis, the police chief, to come in and just say, "Hey, what happened here?

"We've got a ton of people asking us what happened, and, you know, we wanna hear it from you."

And so it was on the agenda for the Council on Tuesday in committee.

And came time, and, you know, Chief Davis was there, but the No Kings stuff had been pulled.

And nobody really knew why, there was no answers.

You know, Councilmember Green didn't really get any answers on that.

And even to know if it was pulled because there's upcoming litigation going on, something they couldn't talk about in public, just no information.

And, I don't know, it was really strange, and hopefully we'll get some more answers down the road.

- Mary, you were gonna add something there?

- Oh, I was just gonna say that my theory is, of course, that it's, you know, an ongoing investigation.

That's what they always say.

- Yeah.

- But we had... The protestors who were charged, obviously, their charges have been dropped.

So, now it's really about, for me, those four officers, especially as they were at the end of the march.

- Yeah.

- Like, at the very end.

It makes no sense.

- Katherine, something- - Yeah, I just wanted to add, I think a lot of people, myself included, would like more information, especially on those four officers, who they are.

Personnel files are supposed to be public, but it's a little hard to get those when you don't have the names of the individuals.

But I was not surprised that the discussion was taken behind closed doors at City Council because the ACLU is alleging violations of the Kendrick Consent Decree.

And in alleging that, it certainly indicates they could be moving towards litigation, which I think is the reason they probably took it behind closed doors.

With that said, I would love more information.

- Right.

- Any thoughts?

- Yeah, I think they did talk about it in the attorney-client session they have, which is a regular feature, but is, of course, closed to the public.

But this is kind of a persistent problem the Council has.

We watch the agendas pretty closely, understandably, to figure out what's coming up.

And there are regular cases where something is on there, and then bloop, it disappears.

Sometimes during the day while the committees are underway, one down the road will be taken off the agenda.

In this case, the Council member who wanted them on there said she was surprised.

No one said anything to her about it.

There were... There were some other Council members who tried to talk about it but were told by the Chairman of Public Safety, Ford Canale, that, "We'll talk about this," quote-unquote, "offline."

- Yeah.

Also in Council, I mean, I was kinda struck.

I think Sam Hardiman on our staff did the story, but I know you're tracking too, Bill.

Looks like kind of an uneventful budget season.

I mean, they've got the extra, you know, 25 to 27 million from xAI and property taxes.

They're looking at 2% increases for employees.

No property tax increases.

So far, we're early, but it's not that far away.

They'll try to get this budget done in, what, July.

There were no big, huge changes in the budget?

- There were no big, huge proposals in there to move things around.

But I think what you're gonna see is the Council have some questions and some dialogue with the mayor about his operating philosophy of moving money from line item to line item during the fiscal year.

As one project gets hot, or maybe another multi-year project stalls, you'll see the mayor move the money around to get the one that's moving done quicker.

So, I think there'll be some discussion about that.

But overall, not a real what you would call barn burner.

- Yeah, I'll say... I think it was around that same day that that budget was being presented.

There was a big presentation to Council members and the media of, you know, redevelopments around downtown and $100,000,000 from the state that's going into what John Zeanah, who's the, I keep calling infrastructures czar, whatever he's called.

Sorry, John.

Is... I like calling John the infrastructures czar.

$100,000,000 you know, of improvement, street improvement, safety and so on in that area as part of, it is but, you know, no one will say, but it's, of course, part of the negotiations to get the Grizzlies to sign an extended lease.

But you also, Toby, have coming up, I don't know if it's this week or next week, soon, a look at downtown projects, which people always, like, love it or not, I mean, people are drawn to downtowns, they wanna know what's going on downtown, and they wanna see, you know, what's the update on some of these projects.

Maybe run through what you're gonna be doing.

- Yeah, this year, I'm working on something called The Downtown Project.

I mean, I know it's a great name.

But it's four stories that kind of look at different aspects of downtown, and the last one will be kind of, you know, the Downtown Memphis Commission has a three-year plan, you know, for the next chapter of downtown.

I broke it into... You know, the first one was office and residential kind of live and work.

The next one will be retail and restaurants.

And then the last one will be tourism.

And I started it, really, because there was this kind of a question out there, there's a narrative maybe that downtown wasn't doing so great, right?

You know, is that COVID came in, sent all the employees home, nobody was down there, the downstream effects, you know, were terrible on retail and restaurants and everything else, and then it just didn't come back, you know?

It didn't bounce back in a way.

And there were questions about how it was doing.

So, it was really just curiosity there that I wanted to kind of investigate this for myself.

And what I found... As, you know, compared to our peer cities, I picked Birmingham and Louisville really looking at, you know, what these downtowns look like, and we're doing pretty good.

I mean, it's pretty healthy down there.

You know, office, we're square in the middle of those two as far as, you know, vacancies go.

Memphis has about 16% office vacancy downtown.

Sounds huge, but it's not unlike other downtowns, you know?

- It's better than Chicago, I think.

I mean, it's better than some really big cities.

- Absolutely.

Residential.

You know, there's more than 17,000 residential units downtown, and the big headline out of that is 95% of those are full, you know?

And that puts us ahead of Birmingham and Louisville and, you know, and other peers around the country.

So as far as those go, it's doing pretty good.

And I'll, you know, continue to find more information as we go.

But I think it's a worthwhile series, have a look at it.

- I'm really glad you're doing it.

This is where I always chime in and say, I'm like, you know, the downtown correspondent for America.

'Cause I travel a lot.

It happened everywhere.

That's the kind of thing I always wanna say to people.

And I was just in San Francisco where my son lives, and it's only now starting to really turn a corner from COVID, I mean, dramatically.

And that's San Francisco with more means, more resources, more all that kinda stuff.

It takes a minute.

I mean, it really was a setback to go through.

We wanna do a quick... Today is the end as we record this on Thursday, is that right, Bill?

- Yes.

- End of early voting today.

So if you missed it, you missed your chance.

But Tuesday is voting day.

Give us a quick update on where we are with the election.

- It looks like the turnout is going to be a little bit better than 2022 based on the early voting getting around the 40,000 mark.

And in the last two additions of this election cycle, early voting has been the bulk of the voting.

That will probably continue.

Turnout is high in the Democratic primaries because there's only one contested Republican primary.

All of the winners here advance to the August county general election.

So that's when you get winners and losers.

- Mary did on AM/DM, the podcast you do for Daily Memphian five days a week.

I complain about doing a show once a week.

You do five days a week, but that's different.

[Mary laughs] You did a voting guide with Holly Whitfield.

Talk about a kind of voting guide, an overview of voting.

Things you wanna highlight from that?

- I mean, honestly, what we really talked about was how we have all of our election coverage completely free and open to the public right now, and we will through May 6th.

So, any questions you have.

we have a lot of information.

- Absolutely, look for that.

And I'm sorry to Katherine here 'cause I've run out of time.

I will say, again, county mayor, county clerk, a lot of the criminal court clerks, a lot of, you know, county commissioner, the school board races, all of those, in many cases, they're gonna be decided on May 5th, even though there will be a kind of, you know, next stage just the way our elections work and back to kind of gerrymandering and so on.

But that is all the time we have this week.

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to WKNO.org, The Daily Memphian, YouTube to get the full video.

Or you can download the show as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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