Millington Flooding

 

There are times when you just need to give people what they say they want.

In Shelby County Commission Terry Roland’s case, it is a society where government doesn’t address social issues.  These just happen to be the programs that no town outside Memphis needs more than the commissioner’s hometown of Millington.

If Frayser is the area of Memphis that needs the most emergency attention to stabilize it, help its people, and create jobs, in the area of Shelby County outside Memphis, it is unquestionably Millington and North Shelby County, Mr. Roland’s political base.

It is a problem-plagued area and things have not improved in decades.  A few years ago, county government inventoried the services and help, both financial and personnel, that it provided to each of the cities outside Memphis.

It wasn’t even a close call.  Millington, far and away, received the most help from county government and relied on it heavily.

Zoned Out

That’s why Mr. Roland’s comments about government staying out of social issues may have been an opportunistic talking point pandering to his base but it was also glaringly poor leadership considering the deep needs of the people he was elected to represent.

If he’s for county government getting out of the social issues business – much of which is mandated by law and history – we think the Shelby County Board of Commissioners should test his theory.  It should identify Millington as a social services-free zone and eliminate all programs to the area.

It would give Commissioner Roland a chance to prove he’s right.   We think that economic development is also an attempt at social engineering so all tax freezes for prospective companies considering Millington should also be eliminated.

Fair is fair.  Clearly, according to Commissioner Roland, Millington is prepared to stand on its own two feet.

Millington’s Trouble

It’s more than passing strange, since the city’s population growth is stagnant, it has the lowest percentage of college-educated people of any city in all of Shelby County, median home values are low, and it has a poverty rate more than two times higher than any other small city in Shelby County.

Its poverty rate is 13.2%.  That compares to Bartlett’s 3.6%, Arlington’s 5.6%, Lakeland’s 2.3%, Germantown’s 2.1%, and Collierville’s 3.9%.

Its per capita income is $21,552, roughly the same as Memphis.  By comparison, it is about one-third less than the next lowest town, Arlington, whose income is $28,440.  Bartlett’s per capita income is slightly higher than Arlington’s $28,440, and Lakeland, Collierville, and Germantown top out the list, respectively $34,567, $40,618, and $54,104.

As for educational attainment, 16% of Millington residents have college degrees, and no other city in Shelby County, including Memphis, does that poorly.  As for its peers, every one has at least twice as many college graduates as Millington.  Again, Germantown tops the list with 62% of its residents having college degrees, and the towns nearest Millington – Lakeland, Bartlett, and Arlington – outperform it dramatically with respective percentages of 38%, 32%, and 39%.

Warhead Politics

We say all this to make this point: Millington is on the ropes and it needs all the help it can get so that its residents are trained for better jobs that pay better wages, so that the approximately 1,500 people living in poverty there get help to become self-sufficient, and so its faltering economy has a chance to improve.

By now, we should all be used to politicians whose red meat rhetoric has no connection with reality, but no one pushes credulity farther and more regularly than Commissioner Roland.  But that doesn’t mean that people should underestimate what we call his “country caginess.”

It’s tempting to dismiss him because of his corn pone accent and intentionally incendiary rhetoric, but underneath that veneer is a harsh “take no prisoners” approach to politics. It’s an approach that suggests if you can get attention with a blowtorch, why not use a warhead instead?

Those who are dismissive about statements that seem to lack any basis in fact or reason or are snobbish about arguments that seem to vaporize under any serious syllogism ignore him at their own peril.  Beneath that “aw shucks” guise is a Machiavellian thinker who regularly schemes several steps ahead of his opponents.

Tale of the Tape

We were reminded of this again last week as he “innocently” raised a proposal to cut funding to Shelby Farms Park, one of the biggest successes of Shelby County Government in the past 30 years.  At the same time, it is possible that he is thinking ahead to shift funding to Agricenter International, one of the biggest failures of Shelby County Government in the past 30 years.

With no regard for an existing contract between the Conservancy and county government, he suggested that the $579,000 that Shelby County agreed to provide yearly should be cut.  According to the 2008 contract, the funding was to be the amount of that year’s budget for the park and it would stay at that amount for the future.

Mr. Roland cloaks the attack on the 3,200 acre park in rhetoric of budget cuts.  But as usual, his animosity seethed just below the surface, propelled by a distaste for all things Memphis and all people influential, although civic leaders have given $32 million to Shelby County Government’s about $1.8 million since the contract was signed.

That’s an 18:1 return on investment for county government.

A Solution Without a Problem

These days Shelby Farms Park has three times more visitors than it did when county government managed (stretching the definition of the word) the park.   Now, the Conservancy is implementing the boldest master plan in the history of the county, it has elevated the professionalism of the staff, and it has set the standard for public improvements.  It has a playground already voted the best anywhere in Shelby County, and it has added to its responsibilities – at county government’s request – the maintenance of the new 6.5 mile greenline.  This added $120,000 to the budget of the Conservancy, but county government provided no funding to help out.

Greenline

So, in the face of all this success, Commissioner Roland suggests that the park’s funding should be cut, never mind that it could trigger the cancellation of the contract and return the park to the county which would then be faced with either returning it to the dismal levels that existed before the Conservancy existed or coming up with much more in funding for the park.

Commissioner Roland’s action may look like an attack on Shelby Farms Park from the outside, but as usual, we suspect that a broader agenda is afoot, perhaps one that involves Agricenter International.  For an inexplicable reason, many of the people connected to the failed experiment at Agricenter, including Mr. Roland, treat the park as an adversary and the enemy.

We won’t go into it all here, but once upon a time, Agricenter was a risk worth taking. However, it’s just one of those projects that never seemed to get on track, and its present purpose is so far from its original mission that it makes little sense to act as if the use of 1,000 acres of publicly-owned land still makes any sense.

A Bad Harvest

It’s patently peculiar how Agricenter is able to stare down anyone who suggests that it should have a clearer public purpose.  Agricenter justifies its purpose these days for its youth outreach programs, but never was the difference between the operations more stark than Saturday.

Shelby Farms Playground

At Shelby Farms Park, kids were climbing, sliding, and swinging at the $3.2 million playground, people were biking down its trails, families were picnicking and boating, and people were chatting on the edge of the lakes.  Meanwhile, Agricenter International was hosting a flea market, the 1,000 acres were pockmarked with ugly facilities apparently leased to anyone who’ll pay for them, and the overall aesthetic was industrial and uncared for.

Agricenter International

Long AWOL is the Agricenter described at its opening: “a regional resource and technological center for all aspects of agriculture…a showplace for cutting edge technology and equipment…a repository for information in a state-of-the-art data bank…a prominent center for innovative research…the site for permanent and changing exhibits…and the host/sponsor/organizer for significant agricultural conferences, seminars and conventions on emerging themes.”

Oh, well, it was worth a try, but while chasing dollars, it has become a venue for flea markets, a fair, an unsightly RV park, and other non-agricultural related activities.  It also seems that the market is trying to tell it something: it has lost money in recent years.

Same Song, Same Verse

Enter Commissioner Roland.

There are suspicions in county government that the real intent of his attack on Shelby Farms Park is to shift money to cover Agricenter’s yearly deficits.  We hope not, because if the park can conduct itself with a businesslike focus on the bottom line, we see no reason why Agricenter can’t do it too.

Meanwhile, the Shelby Farms Park issue bears other regular characteristics of Mr. Roland’s forays into controversy.  He assures that his proposal is not personal, but when pressed, his comments quickly turn antagonistic and his argument ad hominem; his “facts” are quickly proven erroneous, as in the case of Shelby Farms Park, by the county administration, and the lack of a coherent syllogism becomes glaringly obvious.

If Mr. Roland wants to cut the budget or send money to Agricenter International, we think he should look to the wasted money being spent on social issues in Millington and North Shelby County.