Is Vance Park destruction and redevelopment, right outside Pitt Hyde’s PITTCO-Hyde Foundation Compound a parking project ? Don’t think so. Let’s dig in. 

Some time ago, before Carol Coletta said that every community is entitled to a “glamour project”, I adopted that belief, and for the most part, accepted the Riverfront boondoggle. I did publicly object to a County Commission appropriation of $3M due to the fact that the resolution contained no deliverables. 

At any rate, that has now changed after I have learned more. For starters, the recent reduction of parking, promised in City mediation, is concerning. Memphis Riverfront Parks Partnership (MRPP) claims to have the authority to modify a City mediated parking agreement. But after seeing various entities get access to local funding and then dramatically modify the deliverables, I believe opponents of MRPP on the Riverside parking matter.  

And then there is the extravagant $5M Cut Back Bluff project that was sold by the Downtown Memphis Commission’s Downtown Mobility Authority (DMA) and  JenJen Oswalt, to local legislative bodies, under the heading of a $62M public parking project. The $62M project included the public endorsement of AutoZone’s Bill Rhodes.  

Again, I had not been focused on the Riverfront boondoggle. But from the presentation materials of the $62M DMC PILOT extension fund project, I was always wondering what was going on with the Wagner Place project that added 35 parking spaces for $6M.

That’s $171K per parking space, with above ground parking garage spaces costing $25-30K per space. So I wondered, are they putting all of the Wagner spaces under ground or what? Then I referred back to the DMC Commission presentation materials and this is what I discovered. 

Extravagant Park Project

First, even with $6M in DMA parking funds,  the Cutback Bluff project has nothing to do with  automobile parking. Its an extravagant Vance Park enhancement project bordering Pitt Hyde’s downtown compound. (Refer to the above graphics, when reading the following).

This $6M in local funds, comes in addition to $30M in state and local funds for Riverfront development. Vance Park was a beautiful park before hand, with stairs to the river. But the park is being redeveloped under the name of Cutback Bluff. The project extends Tom Lee Park’s current boundaries by engulfing Vance Park as Cutback Bluff. 

The language used in the  legislation to enable access to $6M of $62M in parking funds was parking “connectors” from Riverside and Tom Lee Park to DMA parking. The connector is an extravagant landscaped switchback sidewalk being built, on the bluff of the once Vance Park, to connect a sidewalk at the top of the bluff to Wagner place parking. Cutback Bluff itself does not generate direct parking revenue for the DMA. 

In fact,  parking is being removed at the bottom of the hill on the east side of Riverside Drive in apparent violation of the City mediation agreement. As far as the top of the bluff, a cost effective connector, could have been, connecting Wagner Place parking to an unimproved Vance Park. But Nooooo,  the elitists have to gig the taxpayer, for another $6M to fund extravagant landscape improvements bordering the PITTCO compound. 

Conclusion 

Given the DMA’s local funding, they have the potential to be a local game changing board by investing in true economic development. The DMA should curtail the mobility center and recover $6M from MRPP for Cutback Bluff. Or if not the former, curtailing the Brooks Museum by $6M for Cutback Bluff. This will result in about $70-80M in taxpayer savings to be redirected to targeted economic development investments. 

Reference

Downtown Memphis Commission DMA Commission Presentation

Memphis Riverfront Parks Partnership’s (MRPP) Carol Coletta recently articulated a new “Paris” standard. And that standard is 15 minutes walking or by bike to meet one’s daily needs. Given that standard, and with a virtually an empty 250 Peabody Place garage, during peak 11am-1pm weekday time,  much of the planned Downtown public parking garage expenditures need to be curtailed.

As evidenced in the Downtown Parking Study, before COVID, Downtown public parking is plentiful. Curtailing the Downtown Mobility Center and Wagner Place projects will save taxpayers $70-80M over 25 years. After all, we already have a mobility center at 250 Peabody Place with bike racks and electric charging stations. 

Additionally, all of the much less expensive than garage to build, promised MRPP curbside parking, per mediation agreement, needs to be built, on both sides of Riverside. This will help maximize public riverfront access, use and investment. 

Recently, the Downtown Memphis Commission released their 2021 year end financials and my observational conclusion of a virtually empty 250 Peabody Place Garage was confirmed, with the garage generating $209K in revenue and a $869K cash loss. 250 Peabody Place has approximately 1,000 available spaces which, at $10 per day, results in annual revenue potential of $3.6M. This means the occupancy rate of 250 Peabody Place sits at about 6%.

The improved financials, that operationally breaks out each garage, were produced by DMC’s Penelope Springer under the new DMC leadership of Paul Young. See page 10 of the financials: 

Significant opportunities exist to improve public economic development return on investment. And per the TN Attorney General’s opinion, that is often locally cited as the authoritative legal source on PILOT Extension Fund use (PEF), the PEF can fund virtually anything related to economic development, to include needed workforce development.  

Given this flexibility, the DMC’s Downtown Mobility Authority and Paul Young have the opportunity to be heroes on the local economic development front with $70-80M, in away from parking garages, targeted economic development investments. But what about walkability and the Paris standard?

Walkability and Empty Garages

What’s weird is everyone is talking about walkability, but no one wants anyone to walk. The former, while spending $100M on public garages, with empty garages and plenty of parking during peak time. If the Carlisles need a garage, they should build it; not the taxpayers after all of the lavish incentives provided to the Hyatt/One Beale Development. 

So given Coletta’s Paris standard, as an old fat white dude, while not jaywalking at all, I clocked my walking time to various locations around Downtown. Keep in mind, the Paris standard is 15 minutes walking or by bike. Here are my pleasant walking times, from the virtually empty 250 Peabody Place garage during peak time:

• AutoZone Headquarters – 6.25 minutes
• Riverfront – 10 minutes
• City Hall / Shelby County Bldg – 15.5 minutes
• National Civil Rights Museum – 12.5 minutes
• Central Train Station – 16 minutes
• FedEx Forum – 3 minutes
• AutoZone Park – 5 minutes 
• Future Union Row / The Walk – 2 minutes
• Peabody Hotel – 4 minutes
• Beale Street – 2 minutes

Given the Paris standard, empty garages and plentiful parking, there is no need to spend $100M on public parking garages. But there is a big need for targeted economic development.

Let’s get started, with the new and improved DMC under Paul Young…. 

Using the PILOT Extension Fund, the Downtown Memphis Commission makes loans, for effectively private parking garage construction, at below market rates. This table attempts to reveal the effective grant amount when the below market loan terms are compared to commercially available terms. 

The conclusion here is that Memphis Shelby taxpayers have granted development groups, involving Orgel, Hyde and Carlisle $17M for private garage construction. As if that were not enough, these loans are coupled with multiyear tax abatements on associated developed property. 

Per a Daily Memphian article, Ted Townsend says, “The days of Memphis letting outsiders dictate its narrative are over. I’m here to tell you that ends today.”

As a taxpayer advocate and frequent critic of the Chamber and local public private complex, I was struct by the use of the word “outsider” in the article. Is taxpayer advocacy viewed as work of “outsider” forces ?

Probably so. After all, the local public private complex freezes up when questions arise centered around taxpayer justice. With that, questions arise after reading the first release of MemMeasures, an inaugural publication of the Chamber’s Center for Economic Competitiveness (CFEC). 

After being unable to validate historic employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) for the chart containing the “BOLD” 50,000 job projection, these are my questions: 1) What is the Greater Memphis Region? 2) What are advanced industries? and 3) What does such a BOLD prediction mean for taxpayers? 

I presume the CFEC wants folks to read the MemMeasures report, but one would not know it based on the inability to download or print the report, from the difficult to read from, issuu platform. In the interim, without clarity on some of the above, we will take a shot at concerns, per the report.

BOLD Concerns

 As far as the local narrative goes, the Chamber gang does control the narrative in the traditional media. Think about it. When is the last time you have seen press reporting or an editorial in opposition to the Chamber? Thought diversity is sorely missing from the local discourse. 

“Outsiders” has to be local public dissent coming from non-traditional channels. Regardless of the Chamber’s “Protest to Prosperity” platform, which would seem to welcome public dissent, the Chamber gang appears to want to squash credible public dissent. After all, they have never experienced such dissent. Its foreign to them and they can’t handle it. But lets’ dig deeper into MemMeasures:

Is it really BOLD ? Based on BLS research, we can assume there will be a new Greater Memphis Region. This is because the employment figures, in the above chart, do not match any of the current BLS Greater Memphis Regions, to include Shelby County or the Memphis MSA. The above chart shows employment at 620k in 2020 in the Greater Memphis Region. That is 20K+ more, than the 2020 employment for the entire Memphis MSA. 

At any rate, employment growth for the Memphis MSA was 59K from 2010-19. So a 50K projection, for a yet to be defined Greater Memphis Region, is not BOLD. 

What does it mean for Memphis/Shelby taxpayers? This is a question that the Chamber runs from. With the Chamber entrenched in favor of current excessive EDGE/DMC tax incentive policy, actually it will likely be more of the same for taxpayers. Currently, Shelby County represents approximately 80% of the employment of the Memphis MSA. So given the 50K Greater Memphis Region projection, 40K would be the Shelby County 10 yr projection. 

Historically, 40K jobs over 10 yrs, would equate to below average percentage growth, for Shelby County, when compared to the new Chamber selected 10 member peer group.  And deficient growth has also been historically compounded in a very high price for Shelby County taxpayers, with community disinvestment from excessive tax incentives, appearing to have manifested itself in lost legislative seats. So, not good for taxpayers. 

Conclusion

The Chamber and the small few that control it, want to continue to control the narrative. That has historically not worked for Memphis and Shelby County taxpayers. After all, the Chamber is a business development and marketing organization and is wholly unsuited to control the narrative around public economic development. 

While a reflective excerpt from MemMeasures acknowledges deficient performance, the Chamber seems to be transitioning to a regional focus. This transition has merit. But given the Chamber’s historic public economic development deficiency as a business development organization and their new regional focus, its more reason to involve new voices in Shelby County public economic development. 

New voices, regularly scheduled and heard in public chambers, builds needed thought diversity and provides the vitality to support pro-business growth and real economic development. Its a bad plan to allow any chamber to hog the discourse on public economic development and even worse, if its the Greater Memphis Chamber.

In the end, taxpayer justice that serves taxpayers today, as advanced through taxpayer advocacy, is the best public economic development. This former is a departure from a Chamber public-private narrative, that serves the small few today, while using an old playbook, that overamplifies the future for a majority Black community in need….. 

The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce (GMC) should just focus on being a good Chamber, which they have not done. Evidence of the Chamber’s historic failure, can be found in deficient small business establishments to power the local economy. Shelby County has 23 business establishments per 1K population, compared to an average of 33 for its newly established 10 member peer group (BLS).

Without public checks and balances, the GMC policy stack has historically favored corporations and real estate developers. For this reason, small business, the primary driver of regional economic growth, throughout the United States, have been been thwarted in Memphis. This thwarting has predictably led to deficient economic development outcomes, as defined by total wage growth.  

Meanwhile, with the launch of yet another GMC initiative in the Center for Economic Competitiveness the GMC appears to be attempting to be something that it’s not,  a public economic development agency. Chambers generally perform the function of business policy and development advocacy, while focusing on marketing data in support of local business investment. This business advocacy is needed in the discourse but should not be confused with or stifle the discussion on economic development. 

Historically, the GMC has aligned with EDGE, Brookings, Memphis Tomorrow and now the University of Memphis in publicly funded and so called “economic development” efforts. Such efforts have resulted in excessive corporate tax incentives, bogus economic projections, fabricated economic project summaries the defunding of needed inner city economic development efforts and predictably, overall deficient economic development outcomes. 

For example, the last 2014 Brookings FOCUS Economic Development plan involved the above parties, yet the publicly funded plan was never measured. And after 2 years, preceded by 4 years from other local entities, the GMC Upskill 901 initiative has failed to produce a connected workforce development plan.

Now, 7 years later,  the GMC and Washington DC based Brookings want to measure economic development outcomes for public consumption. Again, the GMC is not a public economic development agency and publishing connected workforce/economic development plans is just not core to the work of chambers of commerce. 

Public County officials should secure their own publicly funded economic development measurement resources, while engaging the GMC and its data on matters of what Chambers are tasked to do, business policy advocacy. This breeds, what is arguably most lacking in the local discourse to support economic growth, thought diversity and vitality. 

Since small business is the chief driver of economic growth, the GMC should focus mostly on  helping small business thrive, not stifling them. In this way and from the recent past, the GMC would have done the following:

1. Leveraged local expertise and small business to deliver on connected workforce development efforts
2. Spoke out against regulatory authorities bullying AirBnB owner Kareema McCloud
3. Spoke out against INNOVA investing significant amounts of state public funds in startups outside of Shelby County
4. Spoke out against the Memphis City Council and regulatory authorities bullying new local full taxpaying business in Petland. 

All of this to say, there is plenty of work to go around. To best insure regional economic progress, the GMC should, as a community stakeholder, focus on business policy advocacy, while leaving public economic development to others. 

Instead of sponsoring a County administered tax incentive study, Commissioner Michael Whaley is sponsoring attaching such critical public work, to the elitist Memphis public private complex. Under the Whaley proposal, the work is to be done under the public-private umbrella of Seeding Success. 

No one really seems to know much about the expansive mission of Seeding Success. What we do know is that Seeding Success, with an army of people working there, first started promoting Pre-K. Then they expanded from Pre-K thru post-secondary education.

Since that expansion, with no plan, Seeding Success has sat and watched the local botching and sacrificing of the workforce development system to the Nashville based State Cartel on Ripping Education (SCORE Board) in Shelby County. 

To make matters more conflicting, Al Bright, Chairman of the EDGE Board and Blair Taylor, CEO of Memphis Tomorrow both sit on the Seeding Success Board. Memphis Tomorrow is where much of the Memphis agenda for elitist decline has originated. Under the Whaley proposal, Seeding Success would follow The University of Memphis recommendation to have the study conducted by FedEx’s corporate accounting firm, Ernest and Young (E&Y). FedEx is a disgusting pig on the civic stage. 

It’s sad that the public University of Memphis cannot conduct the study, since surrendering their university economic development thought leadership to the Greater Memphis Chamber and disemboweling their School of Economics.

But more sad is that Whaley has chosen to trample on, arguably more locally informed, referenced and participatory research on the matter, while following UofM counsel on the matter. This is a typical elitist move to dismiss the local taxpaying public on the matter, while exporting such work off to New York and celebrating a public private failure in Seeding Success.  

The missed opportunity here is that there are well informed and researched positions on both sides of the tax incentive matter, from which local legislators can make policy decisions. After all, those that might conduct the E&Y research likely have never been to a local legislative or EDGE meeting. Having participated in local meetings, is more than critical, as it provides anecdotal insight to oversight and local procedure. 

Meanwhile, the Chamber and UofM’s Ted Townsend continue to promote the status quo on tax incentives while reporting declining results. 

Not Connecting the Dots: History and Chamber Pipeline

Unfortunately, Whaley either cannot or is unwilling to connect the dots when proposing solutions. One would think that Whaley would be up to speed with local public testimony by Chamber/UofM Ted Townsend before taking an economic development recommendation from the UofM. 

Here is some history, contained in the table above and informed with this legislative package from April, 2021. From 2011 to 2019, prior to Townsend, the average annual wage for job incentives dropped from $78K to $56K.

Based on Townsend City Council testimony on 9/21, the average wage for closed job incentive projects from the 2020 pipeline is $51K. And after stating on Behind the Headlines that the Chamber was working a pipeline with average wages of $64K in February 2021, Townsend reported to Council, a pipeline with average wages of $44K. 

With incented average wage drops from $78K to $44K, this represents a public economic development implosion, with wages projected to crater from incented projects by 43% from 2011. So why would Whaley take a recommendation from the UofM ? Not connecting the dots…….

Meanwhile, as this cratering occurs and before City Council, Townsend waves the flag “of needing business predictability” in objection to incentive reform, as if, at some time in the future, the need for business predictability will go away. That will never happen…. 

It seems  the promise land for every retiring elitist politician is to find an unaccountable nonprofit post. That’s what Bill Frist did, becoming Board Chairman of the State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE).

SCORE behaves much like a vendor lobby as opposed to a leader in educational policy and innovation. As an example, in 2021, the General Assembly obstructed testimony from local educators on SCORE’s Read 360 initiative. This is hard to explain, as these are the very educators that will be required to implement the initiative. 

So with that 2021 backdrop, in 2009, with $500M in Race to The Top funds to follow, Frist wrote SCORE’s Roadmap to Success. The plan goal was to make Tennessee Schools #1 in the Southeast in 5 years. So after 10 years, how are we doin ?

Under Frist, SCORE is a complete failure. Using data from the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS), Tennessee ranks #10 out of 11 Southeast states in post-secondary completion percentage increases since 2010. This is what happens, when an organization like SCORE, effectively teams with elitists and General Assembly members from the State’s largest Shelby County to botch the workforce development system. 

For starters, with such an aspirational Southeast leadership goal, one would think that Frist and General Assembly Education Chairs in Mark White and Brian Kelsey, would not let the high school career technical education (CTE) concentrator rate implode, in the State’s most populous and largest school district in Shelby County. But that is what they did, starting at an already miserable 24% in 2016 and dropping to 12% in 2019, per State Report Card data. 

And further, from 2010-19, Shelby County’s Southwest Community College completions fell by 6% from 1124 to 1057, trailing all State of Tennessee community colleges for the period. At the same time, per a SCORE report, the labor market in Memphis is rewarding 2 yr degrees, with Southwest having 28% median wage increases since 2017, leading all State of Tennessee community colleges for economically disadvantaged students. Regarding wages for economically disadvantaged populations, there is not a better economic development story in the state! 

But with regard to completions and some further context, Pellissippi State increased completions by 158% from 793 in 2010 to 2049 in 2019. The former occurs in a Knox County, 50% the size of Shelby. And if that is not enough,  Northwest Mississippi has increased completions by 94.3% from 942 in 2010 to 1,830 in 2019.

In a nutshell, the above data observations should explain, specific workforce development challenges in Shelby County, Tennessee. What is going on? The botching of high school CTE and community colleges seems to come from the top and intentional in Shelby County !

Intentional because prioritizing high school CTE and community college is just pushed aside by SCORE and locally by the University of Memphis (UofM), with it’s new Governor HackSlam appointed Board of Trustees.

Its a horrific public result in Memphis, with a public UofM hogging public discretionary funding and the discourse from their Chamber perch, all while talking diversity and then bullying the taxpayer, in a majority Black community in need. 

But what about SCORE’s Tennessee Southeastern state leadership goals ?

State Results vs SCORE Goal

While aspiring to be #1, under Frist’s SCORE and Governor HackSlam,  the State of Tennessee has not fared well in the Southeast, as measured by IPEDS data. This occurs as SCORE celebrates the 2021 General Assembly session, with respect to their phonics and ACT WorkKeys advocacy. Phonics and ACT WorkKeys are needed but hardly innovative. 

Since 2010 through pre-COVID 2019, Tennessee ranks #10 out of 11 states in overall percentage post secondary completion increases, #9 in less than 4yr and #10 in 4yr or more completions out of 11 Southeast states.

We will see if Orifice Ingram attempts to take credit for Georgia’s success in the ranking. Georgia was well on its way in Southeastern leadership in 2015 with a 34.9% increase at the time, well before Orifice’s YouScience arrived on the scene in Georgia.

As far as better aligning post secondary completion production to occupational demand, Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina are leading the way, with the greatest percentage increases of less than 4 yr degrees.  

Anyway, here is the data.