VOL. 133 | NO. 130 | Friday, June 29, 2018
Last Word
Bill Dries
Last Word: Early Voting Guess, V Live Memphis Closed and Grit and Grind Redux
By Bill Dries
The Shelby County Election Commission meets Friday afternoon to talk about early voting locations for the Aug. 2 ballot – the county general election and state and federal primary elections as well as a special Memphis City council race. And if I had to guess, I would say the odds are pretty good that the commission will vote to open all 26 early voting sites on July 13, the start of the 14-day early voting period. That would be a change from the original plan of having just the Agricenter location open for the first four days of the voting period.
Here’s the background going into the meeting for what has been a recurring theme in recent elections. Democrats contend there is an effort to curtail the Democratic turnout in a majority Democratic county. Republicans contend this is a way of Democrats getting their base energized and not a matter of efforts to suppress the vote.
The strip club V Live Memphis closed Thursday in Hickory Hill under a court order based on an investigaton that began 15 months ago when the club first opened.
Some of you may remember it as Night Moves – a few as Flanigans. The strip club at Winchester and Mendenhall now known as V Live Memphis was closed Thursday under terms of an Environmental Court order declaring it a public nuisance under state law. The filing seeking the determination by the District Attorney General and the city attorney’s office cites two homicides near the club in the 15 months it has been open which is when the Multi-agency Gang Unit began the investigation that resulted in the court order. The owners are due in Environmental Court next week.
Scenes from this week's "We Mean Business" symposium by the city of Memphis.
The rendering of Southgate shopping center with a new grocery store anchor.
V Live is a chain of strip clubs in several cities including Memphis. And the Memphis club was the subject of a story in Forbes late last year.
Grizz draft pick Jaren Jackson Jr. could signal the return of Grit and Grind as the team's strategy.
A followup to our story about the city’s “We Mean Business” minority business symposium earlier this week.
A look at the grocer who is preparing to set up shop where the Kroger store was until last February in the Southgate shopping center.
“There is the grit. There is the grind. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ll be moving forward.” – Grizz coach J. B. Bickerstaff on the future of the team after the NBA draft. So it appears grit and grind is not dead after all? Or have we just not come up with a name for its successor?
Here is Don Wade’s profile of Jaren Jackson Jr.
Matador Network on 7 U.S. cities it says are over and where to go instead. Before you embrace the list's declaration about Nashville being over and Memphis being the place to go instead, consider how fickle these lists can be not to mention how much accuracy suffers with this kind of telescoping. Once the list makers decide they’ve put Memphis on too many of these lists we will be declared over in short order. Also you won’t find the same neon or live music here as in Nashville. And the food here isn’t every bit as good as Nashville. It’s better.
The perception of crime and the reality of crime in Memphis is our discussion on “Behind The Headlines” with some specific points on how many cops is enough. Our guests are Bill Gibbons of the Crime Commission, Harold Collins of Operation Safe Community and Shelby County commissioner Van Turner. The show airs on WKNO TV at 7 p.m. Friday and 8:30 a.m. Sunday.
The cover story by Patrick Lantrip in our weekly, The Memphis News, is about tax incentives specifically for multi-family development across Shelby County. The PDF of the new issue is up now on this website. The hard copies go in the racks Friday morning. And the online version of the cover story goes up here Friday afternoon.
“Super” is usually a good term tacked onto the front of something else. Unless it’s the term “super utilizer” used to describe those who are making regular trips to hospitals – in this case 85-195 hospital visits in a year’s time to Regional One Health. Regional One took the top 25 super utilitzers and looked at the root causes for each of the 25 patients over the last year with the idea being that they would be connected with something other than emergency room visits for conditions that would be better treated elsewhere. Among the conclusions is that poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, mental illness and the loss of a job were the factors that brought them to the emergency room, home of the most expensive medical care you can receive, even if it is routine. What is called the ONE Health project is a three-year $4-million effort funded by The Assisi Foundation.