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- Recovering from the storm, dealing with crime, a look at the city budget, 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 Chase Carlisle from Memphis City Council.

Thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Also, Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian, and I should note that we did reach out to other City Council member who couldn't do it 'cause of the storm.

It was very last minute.

We will have other City Council members on, but we're very thankful to have you here and to talk about all these things and more.

Obviously, we're recording this on Thursday morning.

I think the number of customers who don't have power is in the 22, 23,000 range right now.

Seems like they're moving at some thousands an hour it kinda feels like at this point.

From your seat, I mean, MLGW is owned by the city.

The Council has a lot of say, but not total say, over what they do.

What could go better, or was this handled as best as it could have been?

- So I'll step back.

I'll disagree to one point.

I'm not sure that I would ever say that the Council has a lot of say.

We can vote through budget up or down.

Contracts above $50,000 come before us.

Right now, there's a proposal to increase that amount, and they come to us after the Board of Commissioners, which are appointed and confirmed by the Council, but there's really no direct oversight other than that budget, and so, I think a lot of the conversation, and some of that's set by our charter and state law, and I think some of our conversation going forward will be looking at some of those accountability features.

I, for instance, have not confirmed a single board commissioner or a single member of the senior leadership since I've been on.

- The MLGW Board of Commissioners, not the Shelby County Commission.

- MLGW Board of Commissioners.

- Sorry to interrupt, but just to clarify - That's right, and that's a good point.

As far as the response to the storm, I recognize people are frustrated.

I was incredibly frustrated, but we're gonna have MLGW come on the very next meeting and have an after action report, and we're gonna dive into that.

Their focus right now needs to be getting people's power back on as soon as humanly possible.

- To that funding though, I mean, I will have to imagine that part of what they're gonna say is we need more funding to harden and protect and make more secure the whole grid.

I mean, is that on the table from your point of view?

- So, this current City Council actually did approve in the beginning of our term water and gas really in February, I think, of 2020, and then electric in May of 2020 after a report was delivered to increase those rates, and MLGW took that increase and levered, between cash and bonds, about a billion dollars worth of capital to improve those three divisions, in particular the electric division.

The question I think you're really asking is is there more that we should be looking at for strategic moves such as burying certain power lines, transmission points, and transformers, and I think we absolutely have to have that conversation.

- Okay, Bill.

- I talked to one of your colleagues, Patrice Robinson, who lives in Whitehaven who has underground utilities at her house, and her power still went out though, so do people have an idea about what underground utilities will do that might be just a bit unrealistic?

- I agree with JT Young that burying every power line is not a panacea, but what we're talking about is mitigation.

It is anecdotal, but where there's smoke, there's fire.

When the wind blows in Memphis, Tennessee, whether it's spring, summer, winter, or fall, that somebody's power's gonna go out, and obviously, we have a major, major weather event now that's exacerbated that effect, but we need to be having a public conversation and set a direction for MLGW and let the public understand some of those things and make some decisions.

If I were a benevolent dictator, I'd say we are going to look at strategic opportunities to come into the 21st century.

- Yeah, you mentioned JT Young, the President and CEO of MLGW.

- And you know, I think the pandemic and the isolation from it has probably heightened some of the anxiety about this the people are feeling.

I think after what we've all been through the last two years, it's very easy to have your house be without power for going on a week now, and to realistically feel like you you've been forgotten, but from the Council, being a Council member in your viewpoint of what has happened citywide, do you think that there is any truth to the perception that favorites were played here in terms of power restoration and which neighborhoods got online first?

- Sure.

So I represent Super District 9 which is comprised predominantly of East Memphis, District 5, District 2 in it's entirety, parts of District 1, which is Raleigh.

So Raleigh, Cordova, East Memphis, parts of Midtown down into Hickory Hill.

Today, right now, the most significant area of outages are District 5 and East Memphis.

I don't know if there's somebody saying that there's favorites out there.

I would tell you that if there are, my district would be at the bottom of that, and Councilmaen Morgan Colvett in particular.

And as far as if people were saying elected leaders, my power was out for six days, and we were just fortunate enough to get it back on, so I can understand people's frustration and looking to lay blame or favoritism, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.

However, one of the things in this after action report that we're gonna talk about is walk us through the process that you guys went in.

As crisis intervention and management went on, how many crews did you bring in, when did you bring them in, when did you start sending crews home, how did you manage them, how were they deployed?

I mean, those are the things that the public and the Council deserves to know and understand.

- I actually break in here for a second Bill and ask you a question.

You and Julia Baker, also from Daily Memphian, did a story that kinda looked back at the speed of this recovery from the storm compared to '94, the huge ice storm, Hurricane Elvis, and others.

Talk to people just for a second about what you all found in terms of- Are they apples to apples?

Not necessarily, but it was very good perspective, I thought, on how long it takes to recover.

- Yeah, in those instances, it actually was about a two-week recovery period on average.

We're coming up on one week as of today as we record this show.

So that bit of perspective, I think, has helped because over time, these kinds of statistics become kind of lost in the muddle.

When your power's out, - Yeah, six days is too long, a day is too long.

- You want your power back on.

As we're recording, solid waste division, the city's solid waste division, is also kicking in, and as luck would have it, Monday was the day that solid waste was supposed to be all caught up and ready to move out with a new way of doing things in one of the four areas where solid waste services are done by the city instead of a private vendor.

Is this going to be kind of another blip on the radar screen for solid waste, or is it too early to tell at this point?

- I think it's too early to tell.

One, it's Area B, which is kind of the, again, the central kinda eastern part of the city and using the Rubicon system which is a GPS tracking system that allows for route optimization and some accountability, and that's only within the solid waste.

What we're really talking about right now is we've got some bulk pickup, and we'll have some bulk pickup within the city and the public works, but also, we will contract, typically, we'll contract out when we have significant bulk waste like branches and trees laid out and limbs.

One of the things that I do wanna touch back on about the length of time in recovery is, one, whenever there's a major event, any organization needs to have a SWAT analysis after that.

What did we do right, what did we do wrong, how can we get better?

Twenty-seven years ago, we didn't have the kind of technology that we did to respond to those things, so one would only hope that we would be doing major events faster and faster, and in 1994, the roads were not passable for at least a week.

So, there were a lot of things that should have played into our favor, and it'll be, again, part of the discussion.

The last thing I think we also have to acknowledge with the City of Memphis and MLGW is that we're in the middle of COVID, not only from a health standpoint, but from a transition of the economy.

People are working from home and it's gonna be a permanent solution.

We've had a major paradigm shift in how we do business in the world today, and so we talk about the digital divide, but it doesn't matter if you don't have power.

So, when we talk about the cost of doing these infrastructure improvements, we really should look at the economic impact of what happens when we shut down our economy or a part of our economy four or five times a year for five or six days.

That's a real cost to us, and the question is which outweighs the other?

- You talked about an after action report and getting MLGW to Council, but City Public Works.

I mean obviously, they have a huge role in cleanup and clearing roads, the reconnection of stoplights and traffic lights and so on, which obviously was hugely disruptive in the small parts of the city I was at when it was still really bad, but even as right now, I think there are still some traffic lights that haven't been reconnected.

There are creating some amount of danger at intersections.

Will other, I assume, other parts of city government, not just MLGW, will be in to kind of talk about what went right, what went wrong, and what can be done faster and better?

- Absolutely, and for the public, most of these efforts when we go into this mode, it's coordinated through the Office of Emergency Management, and it's an incredible facility.

It's a joint agency.

It's located over Avery by the Liberty Bowl where the new fire headquarters are, and so a lot of that coordination happens from that base, and we'll certainly be having a conversation with them and their handling of the situation.

- Stay for a second with MLGW, but another conversation that has been going on, a huge decision that's got to be made about whether MLGW will continue its longtime relationship with TVA.

Tennessee Valley Authority provides electricity to Memphis.

They actually own the plant.

It's down on President's Island or near- - Southwest Memphis.

- Southwest Memphis.

I think a lot of people think that's the MLGW power plant.

It's actually TVA owns that.

And there needs to be a decision to extend the contract or opt out of that contract.

There are people arguing for let's go to bid, let's talk to MISO which is the Middle-- It's a intercontinental- - It's Midcontinent Independent Operating System.

- There he is.

[laughs] - Thank you, thank you.

Bill Dries for the win.

Where do you stand on the process that's underway?

Is it fair, is it appropriate, is it transparent enough because this is a massive decision, and it's a long-term decision.

It can't be made lightly.

There's the group 450 Million for Memphis who advocate for switching and think we can save $450 million, I think, a year.

I mean, just these huge numbers that could be saved if we switched from TVA.

You got TVA pouring a lot of money into Memphis to try to get people to hear them and support them.

Where do you stand on the process and the whole decision?

- Sure.

I've said this from day one and I'll be consistent about it.

No good business leader can make a business decision, and ultimately that's what we're making here.

We're making a business decision for the health, welfare, and reliability for the City of Memphis.

How do we deliver the most reliable, cost-effective power to our citizens, and a part of that is running processes, whether it's a compensation study annually for your company or something like this.

So, I have been a huge advocate for running through this process and getting information so that we can make a decision and for trying to protect the integrity of that process.

So for me, it's too soon based on the update that we received from MLGW at our last Council meeting to weigh in on what we should or shouldn't do.

When we get all the information, the pricing, the risk profile of whether we stay or make a switch, I'm happy to weigh into what my thoughts are, but right now, it's following the process.

- Do you think that MLGW leadership is open to changing 'cause there's been a lot of critics who say they don't wanna change, they don't wanna change.

They're just going through the motions.

I'm not saying that's fair, but that criticism- - That's not their decision.

It's their decision to make a recommendation to their Board of Commissioners and their Board of Commissioners to make a recommendation to the Memphis City Council, and certainly, if we get to the end of the process, and there's evidence that a decision was driven, and we can, there's somebody that can second that that occurred, confirm that that's true, we'll deal with that at that time.

- Okay, Bill.

- As you mentioned, the Memphis Light, Gas & Water board has sent a resolution to the Council saying we want the board to be able to make contracts of up to $500,000 without having to come to the City Council for approval.

The current limit at which they have to come to the Council is anything over $50,000.

Is that resolution and the way the Council perceives it, is that going to be affected by what we've been through with this ice storm?

- You never know what's gonna happen with the Memphis City Council and 13 members from 13 different perspectives.

Just so we understand, the charter dictated $2,000 fifty years ago or so.

It's gone up in the past, it's come down.

When MLGW commissioned Baker Tilly to do a review of their operations, one of the recommendations out of the Baker Tilly study on how MLGW could run more efficiently is to raise the contract approval for MLGW.

Even through this, I'm a proponent of raising that because it creates procurement issues which cost rate-payers millions of dollars in inventory holdovers, and I could go on and on of why, but the other reason is I've rarely seen items pulled off of that MLGW consent agenda under the threshold of $500,000.

It's maybe happened three time times or four times since I've been on the body, so it seems more of like a political thing than an actual "How do we get MLGW to run efficiently" thing.

- And for folks who don't keep track of the Council on a regular basis, the Memphis Light, Gas and Water fiscal consent agenda is normally a set of items voted on all at once, and it is usually more than a dozen items, sometimes two dozen items.

- And I'd be willing to bet my bottom dollar very rarely do Council members read those resolutions and dig into what those items are.

They're usually a reference number to the resolution and amount and maybe who the contractor is, and it's well above our pay grade because we're talking about industrial engineering, and so if it helps us run more efficiently, I think we're talking about 5% of their budget, by moving this threshold would be affected.

- Last part, just to clarify to people listening, you talked at the top about how that rate increases were done for MLGW, and they do, they were able to leverage that into something like a billion dollars.

Just to clarify, you're not saying that whole billion has been spent, the storm happened, and this is where we ended up.

That is, I assume, a medium to long-term capital plan.

- Yeah, that's a great point.

So it's a five-year capital plan over three divisions.

So not the entire billion is going to electrical.

HDR, the engineering firm that was commissioned to do the operations side of our infrastructure and report back as a part of the Baker Tilly, which was around for about a year, basically said, "Hey, your number-one issue on the electrical side is vegetation and around."

So we're gonna spend $100 million accelerating our tree trimming issue, and obviously we're behind.

I know there's been some narrative out there about crews being robbed last summer and fall and how we're falling behind due to COVID, but this goes back to the idea of, okay, I'm running an organization.

I'm the CEO.

I've set a mandate that we're gonna do this.

You, my operations team, need to tell me how we're gonna accomplish that goal.

Does it mean getting more contractors in?

What do we need to do to accelerate that timeline versus, we're just gonna throw our hands up and blame COVID.

- We got 10 minutes left.

You mentioned crime.

First of all, I've heard those stories.

Is that or was that a wide-spread phenomenon that crews were experiencing some sort of crime, and that slowed down tree trimming dramatically, or is that one of those things that kind of takes off and takes a life of its own?

- You'd have to talk to MLGW directly.

What I would tell you is that there were incidences of robbery that occurred, but whether or not that's a direct result, again, you had have to deal with the environment you're in.

We've gotta figure out ways to meet the needs.

- Let's stay on crime.

It has obviously been a big topic of conversation, crime.

Violent crime particularly is up pretty dramatically nationally and locally.

We could start in a whole lot of areas.

The funding of police, the hiring of police, but one thing that people talk about quite a bit now is the reckless driving, the drag racing, but really, I think drag racing has become kind of synonymous with reckless driving, and you see it anecdotally.

You see people who, I was driving here today, and somebody who's kind of running a red light just because.

It just seems like they feel like they can, and you see a lot of that and you see a lot of high-speed people on the highway, high speed on the roads within the city, The city police, MPD, like a lot of police forces around the country, has a no-chase policy.

If somebody's driving that fast, they've decided it is not worth the risk because the risk to the police officer, the risk to innocent bystanders, innocent drivers nearby.

Other people have argued that creates a kind of moral hazard, that people know they're not gonna get chased.

I joked, maybe shouldn't have, but I did.

I joked with Amy Weirich, the DA, when she was on in the fall and said, "Look, driving out to WKNO, I thought I'm less apt "to get a ticket if I drive out here at 100 miles an hour than if I drive out here at 70," and she said, "I get it."

Where are you on that and MPD's policy of not chasing reckless and high-speed drivers?

- It's funny you use the word kinda moral hazard.

It feels like we're in a moral hazard now socially.

I mean, when did we each a point where people just gave up on the social contract and construct that allowed people to feel safe in their own neighborhoods and that this kind of behavior is okay?

Ultimately, it's some individual just telling everybody that what they wanna do, the rules just don't apply to them for some reason, and that's a philosophical conversation for another time.

I know that there's a push to relax or allow police officers to give pursuit in instances with these.

Chief Davis has been pretty clear that she's not in agreement with that, and ultimately, you have to rely on your police chief because she or he will set that policy, even if they're allowed to do it.

- And she has said, and then we go to Bill.

She has said, "We need more technology, more cameras."

I talked to Mayor Strickland when he was on in the fall.

We talked to him about, he said, "Yeah, we do need better cameras.

We need more cameras.

We need more technology, but we gotta fund it."

I mean, again, the funding body is the City Council.

Are you game to fund more technology that could help with this what the problem?

- Yeah, so not only am I game to fund it more, but I'm also game to make sure that we give police officers the raises that we need so that we have enough bodies to cover the 350 square miles that are out there just to be a presence.

I mean, when I was growing up, there was a traffic enforcement division.

You couldn't drive down Walnut Grove without seeing Officer Selby, "The Walrus", out there on his motorbike every morning pulling people over, and it makes a difference just to have a presence.

And the last thing I'll say is just on the pursuit.

If we are going to relax or allow officers to pursue when it's a nonviolent offender or in a warrant situation, then we need to make sure that we're doing the appropriate training so that they have the ability to exercise that discretion and judgment.

Has to happen.

- Bill.

- Chief Davis has also come up with a short-term plan to increase the ranks and hold attrition to a certain level as new recruits come out of the academy and as the department makes what are called lateral hires in the department, and the Memphis Police Association has said that has, in their terms, staunched the bleeding in the ranks.

Have you seen that kind of effect, and do you think that there are indications that her specific strategy after six months in the job is working to some degree?

- I think we're starting to blunt some of the attrition through our programs like the 9-9-9 program, which is a retention bonus program.

Having signing bonuses, we may be able to extend that.

Obviously, to the police union and the fire union for working to get benefits restored.

While there was a blip there where people used that to retire, I think it's gonna help us be competitive.

Where we're gonna have to get very serious if we wanna retain or recruit officers is, and you mentioned the term lateral hire, which means we're hiring officers from other police departments.

We will not be able to crank out enough officers in our recruiting classes to hit the goal, so we're gonna have to be able to recruit officers, and so we're gonna have to go to pay officers.

And so when we get into budget season this year, and I know Mayor Strickland has mentioned what he is preparing to do, the Council hasn't seen it, but I'd be willing to bet you my number is gonna be much higher than his on what I believe we should be increasing officer pay to.

- Does increasing pay for police officers increase the pressure on the Council to raise the pay, if not at the same level, to some level for other city employees?

- You know, that's a really good point.

I mean, we need to have a cost of living plan going forward, and especially as inflation is clipping.

Obviously, our budget is raising higher than it normally would, but obviously, that is a result of sales tax, which is a result of businesses taking price, adjusting for the capital markets, which, again, is a whole another topic that we can get into, but I think we're gonna have to find a way to balance all of that, and it is a tight budget, to Mayor Strickland's point.

But we have to find the will and fortitude to wanna do it.

- Is it all about and only about policing?

I mean, we've had a lot of people on talking about the crime problem.

We've written a lot about it in Daily Memphian.

I mean, what else can the City do beyond policing, beyond enabling the police, to try to help bring down the crime rate?

- I am so happy you asked that question.

Nothing has been more of the bane of my time on the Council than being placed in a box of either your pro-police or pro-community investment, conservative and liberal.

It is both-and.

We must triage the issue that is going on now.

We must work with our partners at the county.

We must work with the DA and state, and that doesn't mean not only on, "law and order," but on investment.

We've got to expand mental health services.

We've got to be better about taking care of emergency shelter and affordable housing.

I've spent more of my time on the Memphis City Council behind the scenes figuring out ways to have affordable, sustainable transportation.

One of the key pieces of the ARPA funding and Accelerate Memphis was to put roughly $10 million into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

Those are the things that are gonna have generational change for the City of Memphis.

There was an article yesterday that came out about the safest small towns and cities in America, and it was Brentwood, Collierville, and Germantown were in the top five.

Go figure.

They're the most affluent suburbs other than maybe Williamson County in the state, right?

And so it's not a matter of black, white.

It's a matter of affluency versus poverty, and we know that, and so we've got to start addressing long-term issues with services and education.

- Just two minutes left, or a minute and a half left, Bill.

- The Council also, from my perception of it, has looked at things like the violence intervention effort that the mayor has launched and other work programs to get those back into society.

Am I correct that the Council is looking at those programs, but really wants to make sure that they are scalable and that they work on a larger basis, and so far, you haven't seen data one way or the other?

- So, we've had some anecdotal evidence.

I've spoken with Chief McGowan that really has worked with the violence interrupters.

We've had incidences where there's been a gang incident we know about.

We send in our interrupters, and we move people around, and it starts to work, but you used two really terms that I'm very happy which is yes, we have to pilot things, and we have to make sure that the data suggests that they're scalable and they work before we go just kinda throw everything at the wall, and that's just a prudent way to do things.

The other thing is the Council really needs to find the fortitude and also the same kind of specific direction in its budgeting process so that we're doing things.

One of the things that I'm not a huge fan of in our budget process is the Council gives away two-point-six million dollars a year in a Council grant program, and there's no KPI, no key performance indicator, on how that money affects people.

It's all anecdotal.

- That is all time we have this week.

Thank you for being here.

Appreciate it.

We've run outta time.

Thank you, Bill.

Again, we'll get other folks from City Council on over the course of this spring, but if you missed any today's show, you can get the full video at wkno.org or you can find it on YouTube.

You can also download the podcast of the show from The Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Next week, a look at the fairness and integrity of local elections.

Please join us then.

Thanks, and we'll see you next week.

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